Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen

There’s always a situation where you know you didn’t do everything you could, you didn’t try hard enough. Remember in sports day at school when you felt so guilty after the teacher said ‘well at least you did your best,’ and you didn’t.

I have these moments a lot, it comes with the half-arsed way I tend to live my life, but there’s one I regret more than others. We didn’t do everything we could for Jacqueline Moreau, and it turns out, she was important.

There was already a media storm surrounding her death, it was reported all over the world, a European tourist dies on holiday and the whole of Europe gets indignant and somehow we seem to care more. The problem was getting close to the investigation and the crime scene. Because of the press coverage, the information was hidden a lot better than any of the other murders, in case journalists got hold of the grizzly details.

We had made a link with the other deaths because, the words were found on her body, but this time we couldn’t find any other link at all, it was so unlike any of the other murders. We should’ve been scratching our heads and missing sleep trying to figure it out, but we were complacent.

Jacqueline Moreau was a pretty blonde haired, blue eyed French girl, only twenty-one, on holiday in the Bahamas. She was staying with four other friends in three different hotel rooms in the same complex. She had been shot three times in the chest and her body had been dumped in the swimming pool, you can imagine the mental trauma of the maids and the early morning swimmers when they saw the red water.

It was shocking and sensationalised, everyone was now familiar with the story. The day before she was found dead Jacqueline had gotten a henna tattoo from a woman selling them on the beach, the words were within an elaborate flower design that covered much of her lower back. Lisa spent a whole evening staring at the photo and looking for them, they appeared like a magic eye picture after a while, an optical illusion. We had found them on a picture she had emailed back home of the tattoo, we hadn’t been able to see any police photos of the death.

It had become somewhat of an international mystery, there were already true crime books being written about it, various ‘tragedy in paradise,’ articles. This was mostly because of the gun shots, several guests with rooms facing the pool, the employees and even the hotel manager had heard three distinct gunshots around three in the morning. Security was sent to investigate and no one was found. They searched the complex for two hours, not leaving any spot overlooked, and they found nothing. They had to conclude that it had been an incident outside the hotel, and they gave up.

The next morning the body was discovered in the pool that one inconsolable guest had described as ‘something out of a horror movie.’ Me and Lisa went to the Bahamas posing as tourists, but the hotel was closed, the whole complex had been shut down and it was crawling with police and reporters. After several failed attempts to get closer we finally gave up and booked a flight home. At the time we were reassuring ourselves that we had tried everything, but the unspoken truth was that we hadn’t.

A young man, a Frenchman who Jacqueline had gotten friendly with on her holiday had been arrested and questioned. We hadn’t thought much about it because, like me, he had been realised without charge. There was no proof at all and they couldn’t hold him, he hadn’t even woken when the gunshots went off, and there were people staying either side of his room who could back this up.

I pointed out the young man’s name, which was Alex. But our conclusion was that there are more than a million people in the world called Alex. It wasn’t even a coincidence; it was just too benign to even make a connection. We hadn’t seen a picture of him because we couldn’t get into details of the report, and we didn’t think it was important.

To me, this murder was just another pin on my map, a connection, it was useful because it told me that the killer had gone across the Atlantic, and it gave us a pathway to Cuba and the next murder.

I would give everything I own to go back and try harder, if we had given Jacqueline Moreau another chance, if I had stared harder into her sparkling blue eyes and cared more, it makes me shiver to think about what I could’ve prevented. I know it hurts Lisa too, though she will never show it. Tony Calister was right when he wrote that pain can be like a twisting knife which won’t let go. That knife twists harder when I think about how much blood has been shed because of our mistake.