The Lateral Thinking Detective

CHAPTER TWO: SATURDAY

The impossible evening lengthened to midnight, and beyond. The police, I suppose were efficient, polite, and sympathetic, but they left a distinct impression that they felt it was their job was to catch criminals, not mine. It also seemed to me that there was also, in many of their questions, a faint hovering doubt about what I was really doing there.

“The victim telephoned you and asked you to come over, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“And you had never met the victim before today?”

“No.”

The house was scattered with busy police, measuring, photographing, dusting for fingerprints. I knew they were there; but I didn’t see them. All I saw was Roger Black sitting in that chair, his face the colour of cream.

The Constable’s voice held polite disbelief, which it was entitled to, no doubt. His gaze wandered briefly over my jeans, padded waterproof jacket and dark trainers, and returned to my face, unimpressed.

“Name?”

I handed him my business card. He looked at it, looked up at me and then handed it back to me, saying nothing.

“Age?”

“Sixty-two.”

The Constable unemotionally wrote these scintillating details in his pocket-sized notebook.

“And your movements today, sir?”

“I was at home when Mr Black contacted me.”

“What time was this?”

“About midday.”

“And about what time did you arrange to meet the victim?”

“Six-thirty.”

“And what time did you get here?”

“About twenty-five minutes past six.”

“How did you get in the house?”

“The front door had been left open.”

“You didn’t break the window to get in then?”

“No, I did not,” I replied. “The glass is scattered out from the broken window. That means it was broken from the inside. If I had broken it from the outside, the glass would have fallen into the room.”

The careful exploratory questions went on and on and achieving nothing except making me feel like I was the killer.

The SOCOs were stamping all over the crime-scene. Their white suits almost blending in with the fog, coalescing one moment and then forming a solid shape, the next. Just when my eyes had adjusted to the whiteness, there came intermittent brilliant flashes from within speaking of photography that flickered and died. There were three police cars outside the victim’s house, and an ambulance with its solitary blue turret revolving swallowed into insignificance of the fog, and people bustling in seriously through the open front door, measuring, photographing, dusting for fingerprints.

Metal stakes had been hammered into the frozen front lawn, to mark off the site, with blue and white crime-scene tape that hummed and twisted, fibrillating in the winter breeze.

A group of men stood at the front door of the house, the fluorescent yellow of ambulance men waiting to take the body away, together with policemen in black waterproofs and chequered hats who thought they had seen it all before. Until now.

At some point during the evening they loaded Roger Black’s body onto the ambulance and drove away. I heard it happen, but I gave no sign of interpreting the sounds. My mind was raising barriers against the unendurable.

Eventually, the Constable finished his questioning, when the pencil broke after he had applied too much pressure to the notepad.

“If you want to take a bit of advice, Grandpa. Leave the detective work to the professionals.”

I took a step forward, my teeth grinding, my eyes narrowing.

“Thank you for your advice, Constable. But if you ever call me Grandpa again, you will have more to worry about than a broken pencil.”

My irritation wasn’t down to the young Constable’s lack of respect, but to the fact that I was a grandfather to three girls. However, due to my lack of responsibility with money in the past, always living life on the edge, roaming from affluence to near poverty, I became estranged from my wife, my two daughters and my three grandchildren and had been now for five years.

All my own fault, with no one else to blame but myself.

I saw uncertainty in the Constable’s eyes, and after a few moments decided it was better to leave me on my own. I watched him walk over to the Inspector handling the case and report his findings. They talked animatedly for a few minutes, and then they separated, with the Constable heading towards the house and the Inspector headed towards me.

He was a short and slender man, well dressed but with a certain cast of the rodent to his features and an unhealthy, yellowish tinge to his skin. He looked furtive and rattish, and the expression of cunning he currently wore did nothing to improve his appearance.

“I’ve just asked the Constable to stop the reporters breaking into the garden,” he told me, “but we won’t be able to get rid of them entirely. They have their editors breathing down their necks. They pester the life out of us at times like these.”

Why he was telling me all this, I had absolutely no idea. Ever since I had called the police, cars had lined the road, which disgorged crowds of reporters, photographers, and plain sensation-seekers every time anyone went out of the front door. Like a hungry pack of wolves they lay in wait, and I supposed that they eventually pounce on me, regardless of my feelings.

“Sometimes the Press arrive at the scene of a crime before we can get there ourselves.”

At any other time I would have laughed, but it wouldn’t have been much fun for me if it had happened in this case.

Due to my lack of response, the Inspector’s whole body straightened, and I realised he had been nice to me to soften me up. While I sat on the bonnet of my car, with the fog swirling around us he began what I can only now describe as some ‘serious digging.’

It was three hours later, when the Inspector had finished with me. I watched his departure. He and his attendant plain-clothes Constable were intercepted immediately by a man with wild hair and a microphone, and before they could dodge round him to reach their car the pack on the road streaming in full cry into the garden and across the grass.

The nearby street transformed] the urban landscape that usually greeted me; like God had had a sudden crisis of perfectionism and decided to start again. But I knew it wasn’t true. Behind that white vapour lay another case for me to solve.

Meanwhile I waited in the impenetrable swirling mist that mirrored the confusion and puzzlement my own mind.

For a moment I raised a hand to my face to check for my spectacles. They were there. This de-focused world was there for everyone and not just reserved for me. It was cold too; billions of icy vaporized drops blew down my neck. It didn’t just slowly drain my body heat; it stole it the second it made contact.