The Lateral Thinking Detective

CHAPTER ONE: SATURDAY

SATURDAY

1

The tablecloth covering beneath the chessboard was the colour of fire tones. Yellows and golds and oranges – and against the rest of the room, drew the eye like a dancing candle. On it also stood an open bottle of wine, a part-filled glass, a plate bearing a small piece of cheese and a half-eaten, deeply browned apple slice, and two ashtrays, both showing signs of heavy use.

The sun was long down, but the faint red afterglow of the sunset still loomed on the northwest horizon, and it perfectly silhouetted me against it through the living room doorway. The man behind the table probably had his left hand on the rheostat switch read to turn it up and blind me at an instant’s notice.

They paid me to take chances. They paid even me to step, occasionally, into danger. But any potential client had never paid me to act the part of a congenital and suicidal i***t. It was extremely cold in the room, courtesy of a broken window. I had passed a shower of broken glass spread out on the unkempt front garden. It was free of detritus, with only a smattering of litter tossed in during the night by passers-by. This all had contrasted with a recently painted green front door and the well-scrubbed flagstone that served as a doorstep.

The man at the mahogany table didn’t speak or move. He remained completely still. I could see the white blur of teeth now. The gleaming eyes stared unwinkingly at me. The smile, the head tilted to one side, the relaxed, almost negligent way the body slumped, all contributed to a feeling of brooding, sardonic menace in the living room. There was something evil, something frighteningly unnatural and wrong and foreboding in the man’s stillness and silence and cold-blooded cat-and-mouse indifference. Death was waiting to reach out and touch with his icy forefinger in that cabin. Despite a Scottish grandmother, I’m not psychic or fey or second-sighted, as far as extra-sensory perception goes, I’ve about the same degree of receptive sensitivity as a lump of old lead. But I could smell death in the air.

“Mr Black?” The words came with difficulty, a suddenly dry throat and tongue no aid to clarity of elocution, but they sounded all right to me, just as I wanted them to sound, low, calm, and soothing. “You messaged me. You wanted to speak to me.”

The total reaction I got was nil. The white teeth and eyes, the relaxed contempt. I felt my own hands clench into fists and hastily unclenched them again, but I couldn’t do anything about the slow burn of anger that touched me for the first time.

I smiled what I hoped was a friendly and encouraging smile and moved towards him. I faced him all the time, the cordial smile making my face ache.

My client was as motionless as ever.

He hadn’t moved as I moved across the room. His hands still rigidly remaining in their position.

His right hand, cold and smooth like marble, was a chilling reminder of something beyond visual resemblance. Though I’d smelled death all right, the old man hadn’t been hanging around with his scythe at the ready, he’d been gone and left this lifeless shell behind him. I stood up, checked that the curtains were drawn, closed the front door without a sound, locked it quietly and switched on the overhead light.

There’s seldom any doubt about the exact time of an old English country house murder story. After a cursory examination and a lot of pseudo-medical mumbo-jumbo, the doctor drops the corpse’s wrist and says, ‘The decedent deceased at 11.57 last night’ or words to that effect, then, with a thin deprecatory smile magnanimously conceding that he’s a member of the fallible human race, adds, ‘Give or take a minute or two.’ The doctor outside the pages of the detective novel finds it rather more difficult.

Weight, build, ambient temperature, and cause of death all bear so heavily and often unpredictably on the cooling of the body that the estimated time of death may well lie in several hours.

Though I’m not a doctor, it was clear the man behind the desk had passed away some time ago. His body was stiff, yet not completely rigid. He was stiff as a man frozen to death in a Siberian winter. He’d been gone for hours. How many, I’d no idea.

He slumped back in his chair, his head resting against a jacket hanging from a hook on the bookcase and leaning against the wall cabinet. Rigor Mortis kept him in that position, but he should have slipped to the floor or at least slumped forward on to the table before rigor mortis had set in.

There were no outward signs of violence that I could see but on the assumption that it would be stretching the arm of coincidence far to assume that he had succumbed from natural causes. I took a closer look. I tried harder, I heard the sound of cloth ripping, then suddenly he was upright, then fallen over to the left of the table.

I knew now how he had died and why he hadn’t fallen forward before. He’d been killed by a weapon that projected from his spinal column, between maybe the sixth and seventh vertebrae, I still couldn’t be sure, and the handle of this weapon had caught in the pocket of the jacket on the bookcase and held him there.

My job was one that had brought me into contact with a fair number of people who had died from a fair assortment of unnatural causes, but this was the first time I’d ever seen someone killed by a chisel.

A half-inch wood chisel, apparently quite ordinary in every respect except that its wooden handle had been sheathed by a bicycle’s rubber hand-grip, the kind that doesn’t show fingerprints. The blade was embedded to a depth of at least four inches and even for an edge honed to a razor sharpness it had taken someone as powerful as they were violent to strike that blow. I tried to jerk the chisel free, but it wouldn’t come. It often happened that way with a knife: bone or cartilage that has been pierced by a sharp instrument locks solid over the steel when an attempt is made to withdraw it. I didn’t try it again. The chances were that the killer had tried to move it and failed. They wouldn’t have wanted to abandon a handy little sticker like that if he could help it. Maybe the killer had been interrupted. Or maybe they had a large supply of half-inch wood chisels and could afford to leave the odd one lying around carelessly in someone’s back.

It was then I noticed a pocket diary opened face-down on the floor. It was opened on today’s date and there was a diary entry consisting of three names.

Briana Banks, a fellow chess-player of some repute, she had often been quite critical of Roger Black’s eccentricities. In addition to Banks, another well-known chess-player had visited Black, a young man named Tom Walton, who I knew to rather look up to the deceased. Finally, he’d also had a visit from his cousin, Alan Lloyd, a genial chap with a devout love of fishing. Unfortunately, Black had listed the men in alphabetical order, rather than time.