Page 65

64 KATE

NOW

brITISH WOMAN KILLS TWO IN MALDIVES

September 25, 2023

A woman from Richmond Park has been charged with the murder of two men at the Sapphire Island Resort & Spa in the Noonu Atoll of the Maldives on September 12. Darcy Levitt, a mother of three, allegedly murdered Antoni Caballé (59) within several days of arriving at the island to celebrate her divorce. Levitt also killed Robert Marlowe (41) from Stockwell in a separate knife attack.

Police are currently investigating claims that Levitt was responsible for a string of murders in a Dover guesthouse in September 2001, in which six people were killed in a frenzied knife attack. Convicted pedophile Hugh Fraser, then aged 58, was charged with the murders and died in prison in 2001.

Kate’s cottage is small but charming, set aglow by honey-gold September sunlight. There’s red carpet throughout, a woodburning stove, a comfortable velvet sofa, wooden beams exposed in the ceiling. A bookcase that groans under the weight of Kate’s many books arranged haphazardly on the shelves, an eclectic range of ornaments and houseplants. The walls are covered in framed pictures of every genre: modern scribbles, still-life oil paintings, large posters advertising readings by famous writers. A dining table is also covered in books, and the place smells a little of cats.

The Maldives was beautiful, but in weather like this, she craves nothing more than her own back garden, a pot of freshly brewed tea, and a good book. A cat or two stretching lazily in the background.

She has a broken collarbone, a few chipped teeth, and a very strained jaw, but she feels content. The truth always comes out , she thinks. Even if it takes decades and bloodshed and injustice. The truth will always work its way to the surface.

The police in the UK want to speak to them as well, and it may come out that Darcy duped her and Camilla into going to the Maldives to confront Rob, that Darcy utilized her husband’s software to create a bogus private detective, and doctored photographs of herself with Elijah, whom she’d never even met. That she created photographs of Rob—fake mug shots, Photoshopped portraits of him meeting up with Hugh Fraser. It seemed she wanted to make Rob the fall guy for the killings.

Kate is astonished at the lengths Darcy went to, and equally shocked by the tools that made it possible. By the fact that they believed it all so easily.

Darcy’s still alive. She was unconscious for some time, and then unable to move due to what turned out to be a set of broken ribs.

Kate is certain that Darcy is a psychopath.

The day after Kate landed at Sapphire Island, she witnessed something so fleeting that it really should have made little impression. Before the dolphin cruise, she popped into the buffet for a light dinner. She had only just stepped inside when she saw a guest slip on wet floor tiles, about twenty feet from where she was standing. The place was almost empty, but Darcy was standing opposite the woman, holding a food tray. Kate watched as Darcy, instead of rushing to the woman’s aid, stood and looked on as the woman gasped and grabbed her ankle. It must only have been half a minute or so before another guest came and helped the woman to her feet, and then Darcy leaped into action, setting her tray aside and bending to help her up.

At the time, she’d told herself that Darcy must have been distracted, or jet-lagged. That was why she had hesitated. But it stayed with her. The fact that Darcy had simply stared, blankly, as the woman fell to the floor, a slight reversal in her step indicating that she was about to turn away.

She probably was jet-lagged. Too jet-lagged to put her mask into place fast enough.

Not every psychopath is a killer, that much Kate knows. Perhaps there was something traumatic in Darcy’s past that had generated the desire to inflict pain. No one could be that screwed up, that cruel, without something making them that way.

Could they?

Why, she wonders now, did Darcy wait so long to kill again? Or did she wait? Were there other murders throughout the years? Why not kill Jacob, whom she bitterly resented?

She runs her tongue gently along the chips in her front teeth, remembering with a shiver the look in Darcy’s eyes when she had tried to kill her.

It was like looking at an open flame.