The Lateral Thinking Detective

CHAPTER THREE: SUNDAY

By the time I was allowed to leave the temperature had dropped even further and the biting cold meant thickening fog; visibility was down to thirty yards the traffic was playing dodgems. It was the first pea-souper of the year. Last month’s, December’s, those were more like muddy mists, but this one, I could feel it on my skin.

The Detective Inspector arrived at my house tirelessly on the Sunday morning with his quiet watchful eyes and non-committal manner. I opened the front door when he knocked, and he followed me through to the kitchen, which doubled for my office, with a laptop and a note pad on the battered worktop next to a steaming cup of black coffee, with a half-eaten piece of toast on a plate.

The house I lived in, was one of a terrace, an unhappy place of the sort that could be found all over the poorer regions of Suffolk. I cared for the house, but my efforts in those regards were limited by time and money. The job of a private detective, even though I loved it, is time consuming and not the most lucrative.

“Some pieces of information you might care to have,” he said, his voice at its most formal. “Despite out intensive investigation of Roger Black’s house during yesterday and the previous evening, we have found no fingerprints for which we cannot account.”

“Would you expect to?” I asked.

“No. Burglars normally always wear gloves.”

“Yes, I know.”

The Detective Inspector looked at me as if I had just come off the bottom of his shoe.

“Yes, yes, of course you do.” He gave me a perfunctory smile that could easily have been mistaken for a grimace.

“Anything else?” I asked impatiently.

“There’s a possibility that he was dead when he phoned you.”

My eyes narrowed as I felt the Detective Inspector was taunting me.

“What did you say?” I asked. The policeman looked unimpressed.

A cruel sneer formed on his smooth face and he leaned forward, eyes bearing straight into mine. “I said, there’s a possibility that he was dead when he phoned you.”

My hands twitched and I could feel a vein pulsing in my forehead.

“What are you trying to say?”

“I’m saying that Roger Black couldn’t have phoned you because he was almost certainly dead.”

“That’s ridiculous and you know it,” I exclaimed, my anger and hatred getting the better of me. I closed in the distance between the man and myself. My voice lowered, almost to a whisper. “I hope you’re not trying to pin this one on me, just so you can tick all the boxes and move onto the next case.”

The policeman’s eyes widened for a second before narrowing in anger.

“Although the body temperature is a very reliable predictor of time of death,” he sneered. “It assumes that the air temperature is around average. The window was broken, it was a cold night, and the body had been left near the window. The residual temperature would have fallen much faster than normal. In this instance, enough to make time of death almost impossible to ascertain.”

“And?”

“That you could have killed Roger Black and broken the window to affect the discovery of the time of death and then claimed that he was going to hire you.”

I felt there was a ‘but’ coming.

“However, I’ve checked you out and in particular your finances,” he looked at me for a reaction, but I never gave him one. “You’re in the s**t. Somebody who hasn’t got a pot to piss in, is hardly likely to bite the hand that feeds them.”

“Thank you for showing such faith in me, Detective Inspector.”

I did my best to hide the sarcasm in my voice, but I heard it myself, and by the expression on the Detective Inspector’s face, he’d heard it as well.

“Look for a different career,” he said, “there’s no money in it and leave the detective work to the professionals.”

“I am a professional, Detective Inspector.”

“I’m sure you are but don’t get in the way of my investigation.”

“Don’t worry I won’t,” I said, “I’ll be too busy.”

“Doing what?”

I smiled, not because I was feeling happy but mainly to antagonise the Detective Inspector.

“I can’t really afford to waste my time looking, but I will find the killer.”

The Detective Inspector raised a quizzical eyebrow.

“Be careful,” he told me. “Whoever killed Roger Black, meant it. One murder around here is more than enough for me to deal with.”

“Don’t worry about me, Detective Inspector. Some people are scared of clowns, some of heights or falling. I am not scared of any of [those delete that] - not spiders, not snakes, or the dark. What scares me is being forgotten. You always have someone there, whether it’s family, friends, strangers, or professionals. That’s not what I mean. I’m afraid that when I die that time itself will forget me; that I’ll live an unimportant life surrounded by people who will go down in the history books. I am afraid that despite all the good I try and do I’ll still be no one.”

The Detective Inspector observed me with the gaze of a stranger, that aloof judgement with no strings. Making some opinion of me, without talking. I know he must do this, as must we all. Though we walk in a modern age with gadgets our forebearers[delete the-] could never have dreamt of, there is a part of us that is forever the tribal hunter. We must make an observation, a casual assessment. Friend or foe? And how do we make such a judgement? Clues to social class, to stage of life and group affiliations. At the same time we judge attractiveness, fitness being a key part. There’s nothing to be ashamed of should these thoughts “pop up.” But always our logical brain must dominate and know, that while these “first impressions” kept our ancestors alive, they are social poison for us. To rise above such primitive assessments is to win a future without war and prejudice, but then I’m a deep thinker, a dreamer.

“Is there anything else you’d like to add before I go? I mean any thoughts?”

“Mine?”

The Detective Inspector nodded. “Yours.”

“He wasn’t killed in that room.”

He said looking at me as if I was from another planet.

“There was no blood on the floor. If he’d been stabbed outside, and then dragged in, there’d be a trail of blood.”

“After death blood on the body dries, and blood still inside the body settles in the lower extremities. If Roger Black were killed elsewhere and the murderer was patient enough to wait a while before moving him, there would not necessarily be nay obvious blood trail.”

The Detective Inspector nodded in reluctant agreement.

“And I would put the time of death at around about three o’clock, at least,” I said.

“How can you possibly know that?”

“The slice of apple was deeply browned. Although, a cut apple will start to tarnish relatively quickly, it takes some time to turn a deep brown.”

“Then, you know what that means?”

“Yes, I do,” I acknowledged. “The person who phoned me was in fact the killer