11. Solving the Mystery

The DS has ideas when it comes to the body in the cellar...

11. Solving the Mystery

“You look sort of excited,” the DI said to her DS as she brought two coffees and a pack of sandwiches each to where he was sitting.

“Now,” she said, “you seemed excited in the car. So what have you concluded?”

“Well,” he said slowly, “if we get to thinking that everything we were told at the outset was basically wrong and try to work out an alternative storyline, understanding what happened becomes easier.”

“I see,” she said quietly, “but then, what you’re telling us that there wasn’t a body in the cellar, that he didn’t have wounds in his chest from two separate attacks and that he wasn’t actually dead? That’s a huge leap of faith for us to be taking…”

“No. I’ve expressed myself badly. Maybe I should have said that the body was in the cellar, and we can be quite sure it was actually there, but it wasn’t meant to be Mr Daniels at all. It’s true that Mr Daniels was in the cellar, of course he was, but nobody wanted to stab him. But stabbed he was.”

“So why was he there?” asked Sheila, “because we can’t do very much before we can answer that question.”

“Daniels was a man who was hoping to make a name for himself in politics, and as far as I could tell he might have fitted into that profession quite easily. His wife was all wrong, of course, but we’ve seen her almost as if she was two different women: a hard drinking harassed housewife and someone very different, tidy, pleasant, you know, you’ve met her. So if she tidies herself up a bit I can see her fitting into the role of a professional politician’s wife fairy easily. And when he was found he was, surprisingly, dressed in a smart suit. The sort of thing his alter-ego as a politician might choose to wear.”

“Right,” murmured Sheila slowly, “so he didn’t always go around dressed as Sir Nobhead, MP? Why did he have a suit like that? After all, his wife, when she went though his jeans, found a key in their pocket and that implies he probably dressed in jeans quite often. I wonder what the key was for?”

“Oh, that doesn’t really matter, but I’d guess it fits the front door to the school because he chose the cellar where he was found as a meeting place for what was probably only a small number of followers, which is why he was wearing his posh togs the evening he was found.”

“So he was having a political meeting at, what time was it, around midnight?” almost sneered Sheila who thought that Dave was over-reaching himself with a far-fetched theory. “Aren’t such meetings usually held at quite a more sociable hour than midnight?”

“Of course they are! But midnight was reported by Doctor Weasel as the probable time of his death. Not the time he was stabbed. That would have been much earlier, say around sixish.”

“But the pathologist said…”

“He couldn’t have give us the time the man was stabbed because he didn’t know. What he told us was that Mr Daniels had a pre-existing health condition and died as the result of that. Our trouble was we allowed our timing of events to be guided by the time of the man’s actual death rather than an unknown time when the wound was inflicted on him. And we can guess the time when he was stabbed for the first time because it would be a time when his would-be killer actually had rather albeit rather weakly stabbed him.”

“You mean, one of the kids?” mocked Sheila.

“Think, ma’am. He was down in the school cellar dressed in all his finery if that’s what his best suit was, and his killer opened the cellar door and saw a figure standing in the shadows. And her first, yes, I said her, her first reaction was to think she saw the one man she seemed to spend most of her life avoiding. She thought the vaguely smartly dressed man was the vicar! The man who spent, it seemed, most of his life stalking her.”

“Miss Scooch? The cleaner?”

“Now you’ve caught up with me, ma’am. Miss Scooch, and she sees, quite dimly looking into an ill-lit underground cellar, the monster she is convinced is intent on examining her underwear, standing right in front of her, and she’s holding a sharp something or other in her hand, maybe a blade used for removing chewing gum or blutack from a school wall. So she lunges at him, sends him tumbling down the cellar steps and banging his head quite seriously as he goes, and she goes outside into the fresh air to take her breath, probably scared he might pull himself together and go for her. I can’t say when this happened, but at some tome while she was outside or maybe even looking out of the window whilst cleaning one of the classrooms, she sees her Nemesis walking along, dog collar off which meant he was probably looking for her, and her heart freezes. But he passes by and out of sight, so she concludes that her clumsy attempt at attacking him came to nothing and eventually carries on with her work.

“So we go to next morning, early, before school begins. She goes to the cellar to fetch something, maybe her mop and bucket, and almost stumbles over the body of the man she stabbed, shiny suit and all, and when she actually sees his face she realises that something has gone very wrong. He’s dead with a knife loosely hanging out of his chest, the very knife she was using yesterday.”

“And the pathologist’s time of death, Dave?”

“Around midnight, the real time he died, but of his weak heart. Anyway, she removes the knife and disposes of it, probably mixed in with other school equipment, and creates all hell as her screams echo far and wide. It must have been a nightmare for her, what with believing initially that the man she’d lunged at hadn’t been actually hurt and then finding that she’d actually killed someone else because wasn’t this suited man never a vicar at all? Anyway, having removed the real knife she replaces it with one of the craftwork tools used by the kids that are lying around, and when the caretaker comes to see what all the fuss is about she managed to hide the first knife under her overall when he’s not looking, and that’s that.”

“Harrumph,” breathed Sheila, and then she smiled at him. “My goodness, sergeant,I do believe you’ve hit the nail on its proverbial head! Before we do anything, though, we need to have a word with Miss Scooch down here and at the same time try to find where she stashed the first blade if you’re right about the sequence of events.

“I’ll do that, ma’am, I have a theory…”

“You have? Astound me, Sergeant.”

“The cellar window looks onto a sort of pit, all littered up with dead leaves and drinks cans. If I was the headmaster I’d have a word with the caretaker about that mess! Maybe she slung it amongst all the debris in the hope that it would be all rusted up with no evidence left on it by he time it was found.”

“Possible. Good thinking Dave. I’ll go and pick Miss Scooch up and together we’ll bring her here to the station and see what she has to say for herself.”

© Peter Rogerson 15.01 25