12. Going Nowhere

Having reached a dead end, the DI decides to retrace the investigation from the start

WORDS MEAN DEATH

     “As I understand things, sir.” began DI Dorothy Bramble after her Superintendent called her into his office and offered her a tot of whisky, which she declined, “The book the deceased man wrote is just a work of fiction only very loosely based on his occasional neighbour, the Reverend Paul Wolf.”

“If that’s the case and the work is not an actual biography designed to tell tales, why has he made so much fuss? I mean, zooming off to the other end of the country so that you had to break goodness knows how many speed limits by following him?”

“I broke none,” assured Dorothy, knowing that her superintendent would check anyway, “and when we arrived there I discovered that our vicar is actually . He keeps it under his hat, but for decades he’s been arried to a long-term paraplegic lady who spends her life in a wheel chair and that he is actually friends with the author’s agent, the man who discovered the body in the garden.”

“So you weren’t on the right track, pursuing the Reverend?” almost sneered Superintendent Peterson, obviously enjoying himself. “And I need not fear the arrival of the Bishop waving a court order under my nose, slapping a hush notice on your work?” he asked.

Dorothy felt peeved. This officer on a higher pay scale to herself hardly ever seemed to investigate anything and seemed disinterested in much of what she said to him She suspected that it was a relic from the past and that he came from in a dark age when women were considered to be largely incompetent and that he took exception to anyone of her sex being responsible for anything. Her own promotion had been over his head, and he resented that, too. She could almost hear, in her head, the protestations to the DCC he most certainly would have made when that DCC had engineered her promotion.

“So, Inspector,” he continued, “we have a corpse littering up the path lad and are np closer to finding out who reduced a famous author to such a lifeless state?”

He was right. She hadn’t got a clue, but wasn’t going to shard that piece of knowledge with him.

“There are the two girls, sir, Jane Ridgeway and Susan Banks. They may have noticed something…”

“You mean, they may have lied to you?”

Dorothy shook her head. “Of course not,sir. You know as well as I do that everybody sees a lot more than they instantly acknowledge is there,” she said, “small details that they hardly notice but that can come to the surface of their minds if they spend long enough thinking about what they have seen. And in this case the horror of coming face to face with a stabbed man at the bottom of his garden may gave been enough to make sure they didn’t immediately notice much else. But time has passed, the events were yesterday, and maybe given a chance for them to remember the scene more clearly something else might come to mind. But I’ll check with their parents first, sir. They’re not in any way suspected themselves, but a responsible adult ought to be present.”

“Very good, Inspector. Carry on then,” he told her, and he turned back to whatever he had been doing before he had summoned her into his office as if she had gone alerady.

Back with DS Rogers, in an almost deserted office she slumped down into a chair and grimaced at him.

“Do you ever wonder what he does in that office of his, the Super?” she asked.

“The very thought of it only crosses my mind when I’m in the middle of a nightmare,” he smiled.

“I’ll have to ponder over that in bed tonight when I’m frantically trying to work out the whys and wherefores of a murder,” she said with a grin “but until then, a man lay dead with multiple stab wounds and it’s up to us to work out who did it. When we arrived it was Mr Copperley who informed us about the poor man in the compost heap and he insisted there was nobody besides the two girls, Jane and Susan, anywhere near the incident.”

“And the Reverend,” reminded the DS, “he was some little distance away, along the path where the girls were. We’ve not heard of anyone else and by all accounts the pathway behind the garden has very little sue except as a route to the comprehensive school where the two girls went.”

“Well, we’d best go back to the beginning and forget the holy reverend,” decided Dorothy, “and to start with I’ll go and see their parents, if they’re at home, and tell them we want to have a word with their daughters and would they mind sitting in to give support to the girls.”

“It’s been a nightmare for those two,” sighed Ian, “I’m a grown man and I didn’t find it remotely pleasant.”.

“But first, the crime scene,” announced Dorothy

DS Ian Rogers drove them back to the crime scene. The house was taped off as a crime scene but when they went onto the back garden there was little evidence that anything untoward had happened except for a considerable number of footprints and a pile of grass cuttings that looked as if they might have been placed where they were carefully. The scene of crime officers must have looked carefully through them just in case something, a clue maybe, might be lurking unscene amongst them. Clearly, they had been thorough, but had found nothing.

“There’s not a deal here,” muttered Ian.

“It’s still worth looking though,” Dorothy,” told him, reluctantly, “come on, sergeant, let’s get back to the car and see if we can speak to the two girls.”

“Who are probably at school,” sighed Ian, “when I checked on them it seems they both put in very good attendance. Not like me when I was a kid!”

“That’s a thought. We could go to the school and probably interview them there. The headmaster or a teacher could be their appropriate adults.” “Come on, Ian, you’re driving!”

He had only just started the engine when the young woman from yesterday, Sophia Thatcher, rushed across to speak to them.

“Have you caught him yet?” she asked.

“Caught who?” asked Dorothy.

“The bloke who killed him. The Reverend. You know who I mean.”

© Peter Rogerson 20.01.24

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