Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 152, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 924 & 925, September/October 2018

Paul Charles had a successful career in the music business before writing his first novel in 1996. The book featured Inspector Christy Kennedy, who starred in nine more novels, the latest 2008’s A Pleasure to Do Death With You. Kennedy’s run continues in short stories such as this locked-room tale. The author’s most recent novel is St. Ernan’s Blues.

1

As mysterious deaths go, this one was unique; unique for three reasons, really.

First off, the resultant investigation was fresh, so fresh, in fact, that the victim’s blood was a darker shade of crimson and still tacky when Detective Inspector Christy Kennedy and Superintendent Thomas Castle arrived at No. 22 Regent’s Park Terrace. The second reason was that the very same superintendent had chosen to accompany Kennedy on this particular investigation. The third reason was the fact that the victim had apparently met his maker in a room locked from the inside.

The deceased, a single, fifty-four-year-old man, occupied the top-floor flat in the address listed above, which rested on the borders of Camden Town and Regent’s Park. He was called Adam Adams — Kennedy liked such names if only because they were immediately very easy names to remember. Names the Ulster detective could put together with a face on a first meeting and remember for the rest of his life.

Mr. Adams, however, would never have the pleasure of meeting Christy Kennedy. A fact quite extraordinary in itself because Mr. Adam Adams would occupy Kennedy’s every thought from this first sorry meeting until the detective and his effective Camden Town CID team had solved the mystery of his very recent demise.

In Kennedy’s book this was quite possibly the perfect case. He already had a witness, be it only a witness to the audio, in the shape of Ms. Judy Siddons. Ms. Siddons, in turn, had very conveniently, albeit unintentionally, handed Kennedy a prime suspect in the shape of Mr. Darren Branson.

But wasn’t it all just a wee bit too cushy, Kennedy thought, to be able to solve the mystery within a matter of minutes of arriving at the scene? On paper, at least, things couldn’t get very much better. Not only that, but if he was so inclined — which he wasn’t — he was also going to enjoy a chance to showcase his expertise in front of his superior. The very same Superintendent Castle had been in Kennedy’s office for their weekly cup of tea and catch-up on various professional matters. That particular week, their main topic of conversation was the increase in street crime, particularly in the Camden Town area. The superintendent laid the blame squarely at the cold, but clean, doorstep of Number 10. “What do the PM and his cronies expect to happen when they force us — with all these cuts — to take our officers off the streets? Sir Robert would turn in his grave. He surely would, Christy.”

Kennedy wasn’t so sure it was quite as simple as that, and he was about to say so when his phone rang with news, potentially, of another of those crimes they’d been discussing. This one, in fact, was almost right on their well-trodden doorstep. Castle didn’t really surprise Kennedy by wanting to accompany him to visit the scene of the reported crime — its close proximity being the single most important factor.

Within a matter of minutes, they were outside 22 Regent’s Park Terrace, the hundred-year-old attached house very close to North Bridge House — the home of Camden Town CID. Kennedy looked at all the For Sale signs in the neighbourhood and wondered how all the police activity and discovery of a dead body might impact the local house prices.

Kennedy and Castle were immediately introduced to the principal witness — Jean Siddons. Ms. Siddons looked like the kind of single, glamorous, mid-fortyish woman you’d meet at a wedding reception and wonder why she was still single. Up close she looked as striking as she would have looked from a distance, blowing wide apart another of Kennedy’s quaint theories.

Not a blond hair of her dated Farrah Fawcett-Majors hairstyle appeared out of place. This was a major feat when you considered the fact that the original concept worked only because you were led to believe that each and every hair was, in fact, out of place.

Ms. Siddons’s makeup expertly transformed (Kennedy imagined) a plain-looking face into quite a stunning one. She had the kind of look and figure that out-of-work actors (and Superintendent Castle) positively drooled over. The secret of such ladies’ success was their ability to compartmentalise their sexual charms and favours. Ms. Siddons was wearing a pair of ice-blue, figure-hugging bell-bottom trousers. Kennedy wondered if people who still wore figure-hugging bell-bottoms these days were trying to hide chunky ankles. The detective also noted that Castle’s stares concentrated on Ms. Siddons’s ample bosom, which was only partially concealed beneath a low-cut, white, sleeveless top.

Kennedy also wondered if his superior was so distracted by this vision that he was unable to concentrate on the witness’s information. “Let’s go back to the beginning, shall we?” he began, proving that at least one of them wanted to spend some time collating all the details available.

“They were always at it, always arguing. Every time Darren met Adam on the stairs, Adam would start mouthing off. With only the three of us living in the house, it was getting pretty unbearable, I can tell you.”

“Let’s try going a wee bit further back than that, shall we? What were they generally arguing over when they met on the stairs?” Kennedy continued, the fingers of his right hand slowly flexing of their own accord.

“Why, me, of course,” she replied simply. “They were always arguing over me.”

Judy Siddons spoke in a voice that exactly matched her demeanour. She spoke perfect Queen’s English with just the slightest hint of a French accent, which made her sound very sensual. Castle had, Kennedy never doubted, picked up on this point at least.

“You?” Kennedy asked.

“You find it so hard to believe two men would argue over me?” Ms. Siddons offered immediately, as her (and Castle’s) eyebrows rose, respectively, in disbelief and sympathy.

“No. No. Not at all.” Kennedy stuttered, playing for time. “I mean, I was just a little taken aback that you were prepared to be so honest about it.”

Castle started to say something but at the last moment didn’t, pausing only to shoot Kennedy a “Be careful!” stare.

“What is there not to be honest about?” she replied, with a wry smile. “But here, I can tell you the whole thing from the beginning. It’s not even that it’s a big secret or anything — you could have found all this out for yourselves elsewhere.

“I bought this flat about eleven years ago. The market was a bit high at the time, in point of fact — if I’d been as lucky as Adam and managed to buy it five years earlier I’d have made a killing. But right after I bought mine, the property market slowed down a little and then hit the big slump that it hasn’t really fully recovered from. As I say, Adam was already upstairs when I moved in. We pretty much ignored each other for the first four or five years.”

This time it was Castle who shot Ms. Siddons a look of disbelief.

“It can happen, you know,” Ms. Siddons offered, resuming her narrative as she played with a stray curl. “You can move into new accommodation and immediately become the outsider. Apart from which, you already have your own group of friends you’re preoccupied with, so it’s not so much you can’t, it’s more that you don’t even try to make a connection. But before you know it, a considerable period of time has passed. In this case, we’re talking about four years or so.”

Judy Siddons looked at Castle briefly and then back to Kennedy before continuing: “Yes, I agree — why on earth should a man and a woman, after four years of ignoring each other, suddenly proceed to start up a relationship?”

She paused again.

Kennedy wondered if she was expecting a reply to her question. He stole a quick glance around her extremely tidy flat; it was softly decorated and comfortably furnished. Since they first sat down — Kennedy and Castle on armchairs with Judy between them on a matching yellow sofa facing a country-style tiled fireplace — Castle had not taken his eyes off her for a second.

Kennedy hoped Castle wouldn’t try to answer her question.

He didn’t.

“Oh, I suppose we’re all vulnerable at certain times during our lives and during those periods... well, perhaps we all do things we wouldn’t necessarily consider at other times,” Judy eventually offered, flamboyantly ending the silence. “Coincidentally, it just happened that both Adam and I were vulnerable at the same time. I’d just finished a long-term relationship with a married man I was working with. After eight years, the penny finally dropped and I realised, and accepted, that he was never going to leave his wife.”

“What kind of business are you in, Ms. Siddons?” Kennedy asked, as Castle looked extremely irritated by the interruption.

“Well, at that period in my life I was working for EuroTravel, a travel agency. Goodness, I had a sweetheart of a job — I used to travel around the continent checking out locations and hotels for holiday packages my firm was considering putting together. Sadly, though, when I split up with the married man, it was, at least according to him, ‘just too awkward for both of us to continue in the same place of employment.’ So, he said, I had to resign. Why me, indeed? I should have just stayed and shamed him into doing something, but we don’t really need to get into that now. Since then I’ve been working as a PA in a merchandising firm. We grant licences to various firms for well-known cartoon characters. My job is undemanding, it’s strictly nine to five. I never take my work home with me and I get paid well.”

Castle shifted uncomfortably in his seat. In the room above they could hear the muffled sounds of the SOCO diligently going about their work.

“Anyway, when I got my new job,” Judy continued, wide-eyed and without batting her extremely long and dark eyelashes, “I’d a bit more time on my hands and I found myself around here, my flat, a lot more. I kept bumping into Adam. He’d always been courteous — a common trait of the older man, don’t you think? He started to be very friendly towards me and over the course of the following couple of months our conversations seemed to grow and grow and one evening — I seem to remember he’d seemed particularly down — I invited him in for a drink. I prepared a light supper — nothing fancy, mind you — and we’d a couple of bottles of wine. He told me all about the woman he’d just split up with. They’d been dating for twelve years and then, out of the blue, she upped and left him for another man. Within three months of leaving Adam, she’d married this new man. Of course I told him all about my married man. I started telling him about the rat just to make him feel better. You know, taking comfort from the fact that it happens to all of us. I found myself getting something substantial from talking to someone about it for the first time.

“We laughed and joked about the worst things we’d ever done after being dumped. I admitted leaving a message on an old boyfriend’s answer phone, pretending we were still having a relationship, just because I knew his new girlfriend would hear it and he’d (hopefully) get into trouble. Adam then confessed that he sneaked around to his ex-girlfriend’s flat one night and slashed all the tires on her car. He claimed he was so drunk he was also going to put a brick through her windscreen. He admitted the only reason he didn’t was because he was disturbed before he had a chance. Anyway, I found it refreshing to find someone who was so honest about feeling wretched about being dumped.

“Although I felt we bonded that evening, nothing happened romantically, but about a week or so later he asked me out to dinner and we started a relationship that evening. It wasn’t anything very passionate, I can tell you. I love to be swept off my feet, but Adam was slightly too cosy — you know, slippers and pipe — for me to be consumed the way I like to be.”

As far as Kennedy could ascertain, Castle looked a little disappointed. Had he hoped she was going to give more specific details about how the relationship had started?

“And then?” Kennedy prompted.

“And then,” Judy continued, smiling to herself, “we continued to see each other — a couple of nights a week, at most — for the following three years. I would have to say we were both equally satisfied with the relationship. I certainly was. I had the pleasure of male company when I wanted it. At the same time, I enjoyed the solace of my own space and my own privacy. I can tell you, at that particular point in my life, I was pretty convinced I could never live with a man again. I was much too set in my ways for all that stuff that couples do, seemingly unknowing, to upset each other: you know, permanently opened toothpaste, toilet seat up or toilet seat down, dirty clothes lying around or just dumped on the bedroom floor, you know, all that cliched stuff.

“But then, about a year ago — I don’t really know what it was that sowed the seeds of discontent — Adam seemed to change. He’d get ratty quite quickly, I can tell you. He’d always complain about being down with something. He frequently cried off engagements, claiming he was ill with something or other. I mean, he’d never ever looked the picture of health, so it was difficult to tell the difference. He’d disappear for days on end, always showing up again, claiming he’d been away for some treatment. I must admit that’s when I started to look at him differently. I realised we’d just fallen into the relationship because we’d been hard done by, by our exes, and our relationship had turned into a rut because all we really had in common was how much we hated our exes.

“That’s when I started to get annoyed with him. I started to pick up on his faults and not feel bothered about showing mine. I’d never realised how vain he was — he even took to wearing wigs. Now, I have to admit, that totally threw me! There’s something disquieting about the vanity of a man, don’t you think? I mean, I don’t want to sound unfair, I know women are allowed to spend hours altering their appearance with makeup and wigs and super bras and what have you, but when you observe men doing the same thing — it just seems unnatural. You wouldn’t imagine Paul Newman or Harrison Ford doing anything other than having a long shower and wearing stylish clothes, now, would you?”

Kennedy couldn’t be entirely sure, but he thought Castle grew just the slightest bit uncomfortable at this juncture. “So you and Mr. Adams broke up?” he asked.

“Well, it wasn’t as simple as that, was it?” Judy Siddons replied, stopping again to make her somewhat rhetorical question quite unrhetorical.

Neither Castle nor Kennedy replied, so she continued: “What I mean is, it is extremely difficult when both of you live in the same house — just like it is extremely difficult when you both share the same place of work. You’d think we’d all have learned the basics of this dating malarkey by now, wouldn’t you? But no, what did I do? I ran straight from Adam’s arms into my downstairs neighbour’s arms. Darren Branson is his name and he shares his namesake’s chin beard.”

“How long after finishing with Mr. Adams did you and Mr. Branson start seeing each other?”

“That’s very generous of you, Inspector — you’re giving me the benefit of the doubt as to whether or not there was a gap between the two relationships. Well, what happened was I tried unsuccessfully to break up with Adam a few times — as I say, it’s hard when you’re both under the one roof, especially when one of you is resisting the split. I don’t really know why he was so adamant that we should stay together — there was nothing very strong going on between us. Maybe he’d just grown accustomed to the routine we’d fallen into and there was absolutely no one else in his life, he had no surviving family members or close friends. Couples start to depend on each other, don’t they? I was equally adamant we had to split up, though. I was getting a bit...”

Here Judy Siddons sighed and appeared to grow reflective for a few moments before continuing: “In a way, I suppose I thought it was my last chance. I accepted the fact that I was either going to split with Adam and have a chance at finding a proper lasting relationship in a marriage — perhaps even have a child — or I was going to waste away the rest of my best years with Adam. This realisation gave me the resolve and strength I needed, I can tell you. Eventually I started to say no to Adam. More importantly, I meant no.

“One evening in particular we were having an argument in my flat — I couldn’t get him to leave. He just point blank refused to leave my flat. He was screaming and shouting something about at least I was going to have another chance — but that he wasn’t. We must have been causing quite a ruckus because eventually Darren came upstairs to see what the racket was all about. He banged on my door. Adam yelled at him to eff off. Darren shouted back that he wouldn’t leave until he could physically see that I was okay. Adam was blocking me from the door at this point. It was the first time he had been physical with me. I mean, he wasn’t hitting me or anything, but his face was as red as a beetroot with rage and his eyes were bulging out of their sockets just like Marty Feldman.

“I went to push him to one side so I could open the door, but he pushed me away with such force that I fell back onto the carpet. I must have screamed or something because Darren started banging on the door again, even louder than before. The racket distracted Adam. He moved towards the door and when his back was turned to me I jumped up and rushed past him and managed to open the door before he pushed me away again.

“Darren burst into my hallway and I ran straight into his arms. There was a bit of a screaming match between them, you know, all that macho stuff, flaming testosterone at ten paces. Adam was absolutely seething. Oh... if looks could only kill, I can tell you. He screamed in a high-pitched whine, ‘You’ll be sorry, Judy — you just don’t realise how sorry you’re going to be.’ And he went out and that was that.”

“And that was the end of the relationship?” Kennedy asked quietly.

“Yes. That was the end of everything with Adam, I can tell you,” Judy replied, equally quietly. “I cannot abide a man who uses his physical strength against a woman. That can only ever end up in tears. Adam sent me flowers the next day, apologising profusely. In a way, I suppose he’d done me a big favour, you know. Due to his aggressive behaviour, he’d actually made it much easier to draw a line under our relationship.”

“And then... Darren Branson?” Kennedy suggested. He wasn’t altogether sure that Ms. Siddons and Mr. Branson had an actual relationship and he wanted it clear; he needed it to be clear.

“Well,” Ms. Siddons replied, stretching the word out into at least four syllables, “I can tell you Darren behaved like the perfect gentleman he is. I was vulnerable and low and I could very easily have fallen into his arms that night. In fact, I seem to remember I asked him to stay with me. I was still shaking and I didn’t want to be alone. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t looking for anything other than someone being there with me. Darren stayed the night, but he insisted on sleeping on the sofa. We became friends, good friends, and then, just when I thought we were growing further and further away from having a full relationship, we fell rapturously in love. That’s when it started to get a bit awkward around here again.”

“Oh?” was Kennedy’s single syllable reply and question.

“Well, we’d fallen in love the way I’d always dreamed of falling in love. To top it all, Darren asked me to marry him. I didn’t debate with myself for a second. I said yes immediately. I knew it was what I wanted. It’s just like it was so obvious that we were meant to be together. So we started to make our plans. We agreed, reluctantly, that we should either sell both our flats and move on, or try and buy Adam’s flat and have the entire house to ourselves. I must admit, when it came down to discussing the idea with Adam, I chickened out and left Darren to get on with it.”

Here Judy paused for a few moments. Kennedy thought she could have been disturbed again by the noise of the police officers upstairs. She started to play with her wayward curl again. Kennedy was convinced it was the exact same curl she’d being toying with a few minutes previously. Again he found the need to prompt her.

“And Mr. Adams didn’t take it too well?”

“Yes. Well, yes and no, really. This would have been about four or five weeks ago, and on the day in question, Adam literally threw Darren out of his flat. And every time they’d meet in the hallway, as I told you at the beginning of our conversation, there’d be an almighty shouting match. But then, about a week ago, Adam seemed to change his tune somewhat. He invited Darren up to his flat and apparently it was all very civilised, with wine, cheese, and French bread — the same bread Adam loved to bake himself. The only problem was that sometimes the crust was so hard that I swear to you, you’d need a saw to cut it. Anyway, Adam announced that he’d had a change of heart. He said he realised that there was no point in cutting off his nose to spite his face. He said we should all come to an agreement. It was settled that we should either buy his flat, or he should buy both our flats, just as Darren had originally suggested. The conclusion was that we should all get on with our lives.

“The agreement was that we’d get an estate agent in. There was one nearby, McGinley and Associates, and we should get them in to do a valuation. Then, whoever could match the asking price would buy the other out. If we could all make the asking price, and this was Darren’s idea, we’d give him first call on whether he wanted to buy or sell. And that was that until this evening,” Judy continued, dropping to a quieter voice. “I was not back in my flat for very long when I heard noises coming from upstairs. It wasn’t too disruptive at the start — more like stuff being moved around carelessly — a few loud thuds — a little bit of high-pitched shouting and screaming, then a lot of high-pitched shouting and screaming.”

“Could you make out how many people were upstairs and what was being said?” Kennedy asked, happy that they’d now reached the apparent crux of the matter.

“I think there were two people. I couldn’t really make out what was being said. The shouting and screaming I recognised as being Adam’s. The rest was more baritone. Then there was a distinctive, ‘No. No. Don’t!’ Then a loud, eerie shriek, and then nothing,” Judy said, and stole a quick glance at her watch before continuing, “I was scared, I can tell you. Darren wasn’t due back until eight o’clock tonight, so I rang the police and you all were here near enough immediately.”

Judy Siddons stopped talking and averted her eyes towards her ceiling, Adam Adams’s floor.

“Tell me, did you go upstairs at all after the noises?” Kennedy asked.

“Yes, after I rang you, but his door was locked, so I came down and waited for you by the front door.”

“Do you have a key for upstairs, Ms. Siddons?” Kennedy asked.

“No. At one point in our relationship we discussed exchanging keys, but we both agreed that we preferred the extra bit of space and privacy, so we didn’t go through with the key swapping,” she replied immediately.

“Okay. I wonder, did you hear any doors shutting — either Adam’s upstairs or the downstairs front door?” Kennedy asked. Castle seemed equally interested in the answer.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Can you usually hear Mr. Adams or Mr. Branson when either of them closed their door?”

“Yes, when they’re closing them against the Yale lock, it does seem to take a little force to ensure they are securely closed.”

“And the front door?”

“Same again.”

“Did you have your radio or television on at the time of the disturbance?” Kennedy continued seamlessly. He obviously had a list of questions he wanted to get through, but his voice was so gentle it appeared everything was conversational rather than an official interview.

“No. As I said, the commotion started shortly after I arrived home. The whole thing lasted no more than five minutes.”

“Thank you, Ms. Siddons,” Kennedy offered, as he rose to his feet. “We’ll send in a WPC to be with you...”

“That won’t be necessary. I’ll be okay. Darren will be home in a half-hour or so,” Judy firmly interrupted. She too rose to her feet. Castle followed suit, although his eyes didn’t once leave Ms. Siddons.

“Well, if you’re sure,” Kennedy replied, as he made his way to the door of her flat. “But I tell you what, we’ll leave a WPC for you just outside your front door — just in case you need her.”

2

A few seconds later, Kennedy and Castle were about to enter Adams’s flat.

“So, she’s obviously protecting the jealous boyfriend, then?” Castle offered confidently.

“What makes you say that, sir?”

“Well,” Castle began, carefully fingering the splintered wood on Adams’s fractured door post, “if you ask me, our boys obviously had to break down the door. That proves that it was locked from the inside, which proves that whoever closed the door would have had to slam it. As she’s already admitted herself, she can hear the door close when it’s pulled against the Yale.”

“Possibly,” Kennedy conceded, but sounding unconvinced.

“But you don’t think so?” Castle replied, quickly pushing the issue.

“It’s too early to tell.”

“But as well as lying about the door-slamming issue, don’t you think if she hadn’t been involved, surely she would have asked us if he was dead?” Castle continued.

Kennedy appeared to be considering this, the fingers of his right hand flexing slowly as he did so. Castle advanced his theory without waiting for Kennedy’s reply.

“Don’t you see, that’s it? She already knew he was dead. I thought those were very clever questions of yours about the doors — she obviously hadn’t considered you’d ask those questions, so she didn’t consider lying. If you ask me, she answered those questions truthfully, didn’t she? She and her boyfriend... Darren...” Castle paused here as if to emphasise how distasteful he considered the name, “went upstairs, murdered what’s his name...”

“Adam Adams.”

“Yes, they murdered Adam Adams. They had to slam the door forcefully and loudly after them in order for it to close properly from the outside. She returned to her flat to ring us and then lover-boy scooted off somewhere to establish an alibi.”

“Interesting, very interesting, and what do you think their motive might have been, then, sir?” Kennedy asked. They’d been hovering around outside Adams’s flat for a few minutes.

Kennedy wondered if Castle was trying to beat him at his own game; delaying, for as long as humanly possible, the examination of the corpse.

This was Kennedy’s least favourite thing in the whole world to do. After the first few minutes, when he got over the drama of loss of life, he was fine. But then, and only then, could he start to consider the corpse as evidence. To get to that point, he still had to crawl through the first few traumatic minutes (always extremely traumatic minutes) of the initial sight of a dead body.

“Well, what do you think this flat is worth, then?” Castle asked, as he confidently crossed the threshold of the apartment, viewing the hallway from floor to ceiling like an eager estate agent. “Five hundred grand? Yes? Maybe even as high as six hundred grand? That’s quite a bit of motivation right there, if you ask me. I’d lay my money that we’ll find Ms. Judy Siddons, even though she has an extremely beautiful body, has been lying to us through those equally beautiful teeth of hers. I’ll bet you she used that beautiful body of hers to charm herself into his will.”

“Hmmm,” was Kennedy’s only reply. He was growing restless and now wanted to get on with the rest of the investigation. He strongly believed that the hotter the trail, the stronger and more obvious were the clues.

“It’s all so sordid, isn’t it?” Castle continued, convinced he’d solved the case. “Why is it always the stunning women with the exquisite bodies who are mixed up in this sort of thing? I mean, it’s such a waste, isn’t it, Christy?”

“Well,” Kennedy replied, following Castle into the hallway of Adams’s flat, “let’s see what other clues we can find in here before we close the file too firmly.”

Adams’s flat was a hive of activity with the SOC officers, under the direction of Kennedy’s favourite bagman, Detective Sergeant James Irvine, professionally going about their business.

Again Castle blended into the background as Kennedy started to examine the room where Adam Adams had met his maker.

Adams was resting on his backside, his back propped up by the only clear (floor to ceiling) part of the wall in the sitting room cum study. You had to be fully in the room to see him, as he was partially hidden behind the door. His knees were bent upwards in an inverted V shape and his head and shoulders were leaning against them. His hands were outstretched on either side of him, palms facing upwards. He looked like a puppet whose operator had gone off on a coffee break.

Protruding from between his shoulder blades was the dark wooden handle of a knife; his blood-soaked white shirt a testimony to the effectiveness of the cold steel buried deep in his back. The angle of the knife in his back immediately suggested that the knife had entered the body from above.

Kennedy was sure it must just have been a trick of the subdued light, but it looked as if Adams had a gentle smile still visible on his white-grey face.

To the corpse’s left was a large orange-red sofa, heaped generously with matching cushions. Kennedy glanced along the length of the sofa and found betraying indents on the royal-blue carpeted floor, showing that the sofa had recently been moved about two feet farther away from the door and the space where the corpse rested. Next to the sofa was a chunky, square oak coffee table. Resting on the coffee table was a lamp; obviously it had fallen over in the move, the burning bulb proudly showing off the hideous brown-and-green patterned lampshade. The domino theory, triggered by the initial moving of the sofa, had resulted in one of the corners of the coffee table scraping the side of an oak rolltop desk. The desk was at ninety degrees to the sofa wall and positioned by the room’s only window.

Kennedy, hands protected with plastic gloves, examined the contents of the desktop. Centrally on the desk, and probably the last document to demand the attention of Mr. Adam Adams, was a property valuation on McGinley-and-Associates-headed paper.

The letter stated that the ground-floor flat at No. 22 Regent’s Park Terrace was worth £720,000; the first-floor flat was worth £795,000, and Adam Adams’s top-floor flat was worth £750,000. The letter’s author, Miss Catherine McGinley, went to great lengths to explain that the property was worth a lot more should it remain as three separate units. She stated that the combined value of the property, should it be sold as a single house, was around £2,000,000.

So the £750,000 value on Adam Adams’s flat did tend to fit in very neatly with Castle’s theory. The document itself also seemed to prove, at least in part, the contents of Judy Siddons’s statement.

When the photographer had finished shooting the corpse from every conceivable angle, Dr. Taylor sought permission from DS Irvine to move the body. He couldn’t examine it properly in its current position. As the SOC team still had a lot of work to do on the study carpet, it was agreed the corpse would be moved out into the hallway, hands and feet sealed in plastic bags to protect valuable bits of evidence. They placed the body, facedown, on a plastic sheet. The photographer took the opportunity to shoot the knife and the acute angle at which it had entered the body. Photographer’s work completed, the fingerprint chap dusted the handle of the protruding knife with his magic brush.

Kennedy was happy to see the corpse leave the room he was working in. He continued his examination of the desk. Along the left-hand side of the desk were a few bottles of Palladone, an earthenware pot with several pens, pencils, and magic markers. There was no diary, no journal, nor incriminating, or even revealing, notes of any kind, in fact.

At the centre of the desk, on top of the roll-top section, was a silver-framed photograph of Judy Siddons and Adam Adams. Both had wineglasses raised to the camera and both, Kennedy noted from the rosiness of cheeks and noses, were clearly quite inebriated. To the right of the photo was a green-glass-shaded desk lamp, which was still lit and illuminated Kennedy’s examination.

Kennedy went through the desk drawers. In one drawer he found a file full of documents, which obviously related to Adams’s work. Adam Adams worked as an engineer for Rail Track. His papers were mostly reports about steel strengths and endurance. The bulk (forty percent) of the file was expense sheets for his travels; none of these had been filled in.

In another drawer, Kennedy found several Formula One magazines, and in yet another drawer, which Kennedy unlocked with a key he found in the first drawer, he discovered about two dozen vintage Playboy magazines.

In a semisecret compartment, located just under the roll top, Kennedy found a ten-by-eight envelope that contained one piece of very incriminating evidence: a will, dated just five days earlier. In the will, Adams left all his worldly possessions, including the deed to the top-floor flat, to a certain Ms. Judy Siddons!

Strike two for Superintendent Thomas Castle.

In the corner of the room, to the right of the desk, was a Sony television, with an extremely compact DVD player placed underneath. Beneath that was a faux-wooden stand containing about three-dozen DVDs of various popular modem films, all filed neatly and alphabetically.

The room contained neither stereo system nor computer. The wall adjoining the desk wall housed a fireplace under a large countryside painting. Two easy chairs were positioned so the occupants could enjoy the soothing and comforting painting and the heat of a two-bar electric fire, cleverly fitted in the original hearth. The telltale dust shadows of the previous work of art on the wall testified that the painting was clearly a new addition to Adams’s collection. Against the final wall was a rather large, dark-wood antique unit, the location for various bottles of alcoholic liquid refreshments and several matching cut-glass tumblers, all stored behind smoked-glass doors. Either side of the unit was guarded by matching tall, modern floor lamps.

Kennedy, followed closely by Castle, ventured into the hallway to examine the body. The fingerprint chap had just finished his work.

“Any prints?” Kennedy enquired, without moving his eyes from the body.

“Yes sir, a very clean set, in fact,” the young police officer announced confidently, kneeling down again close to the body. “See,” he said, pointing to the end of the wooden butt closest to the blade and the blunt edge of the knife, “there... that’s a perfect thumbprint. And there, just there, to the left of the butt, that’s a perfect, sharp forefinger print... and then down...” he continued, pointing to his gently applied lycopodium powder, which had attached itself to the residue of human oils in the shapes of friction ridges of a fingerprint, “on the butt, the remaining three fingerprints.”

Kennedy noted the same and rose from the body, returning to the study and the position where the body had originally been discovered. He appeared to be looking closely at the azure paint on the wall just behind where Adams had been found. He located what he’d been looking for — a single shallow groove running down the wall from a height of about four and a half feet and stopping mysteriously eighteen inches from the floor. Kennedy took a step back from the wall and stared at it for a minute or so.

“Okay, sir,” he announced to Castle, “we’re done here; we can head back to North Bridge House now.”

“But...” Castle protested, visibly shocked, “aren’t you going to wait for Branson to return so you can arrest him and Judy Siddons? They’re so cocky about it. If you ask me, I’d bet he’ll turn up again at eight sharp.”

“No need, sir.” Kennedy replied, nodding goodbye to Irvine.

“No need, sir? What’s come over you, Kennedy? Are you going to force me to stay here and finish the case myself by arresting Siddons and Branson for murder?” Castle hissed.

One point in Castle’s favour, Kennedy thought, was that he clearly (and professionally) didn’t intend to show him up in front of Irvine and the rest of the team.

Kennedy returned the gesture by taking hold of Castle’s elbow and guiding him back into the hallway, where he said quietly, “No sir, I wouldn’t bother, if I were you. There’s really no need, no murder has been committed here. Adam Adams clearly committed suicide.”

Castle was about to protest when Kennedy added, “Tell you what, sir. You give me two minutes to confirm something with Dr. Taylor, brief DS Irvine, and then we’ll head back to North Bridge House and I’ll explain everything on the way.”

3

About three minutes later, when Kennedy rejoined Castle, the superintendent’s jaw was still hovering just a couple of inches from the floor.

“Okay, Adam Adams,” Kennedy began, as he led his superior down the grey carpeted stairs. “As I see it, Adams was a bitter and twisted man and he committed suicide. He staged his suicide as a murder to get his own back on a man he felt stole his girlfriend.”

“Oh Christy, please! Have you taken leave of your senses? Yes, yes, of course I can see someone being jealous over losing a girlfriend. But for a man to then go and kill himself just to get revenge on the new boyfriend, well, that’s just preposterous. If you ask me, that’s just stretching the imagination a wee bit too far, even for you, Detective Inspector.”

Oops, Kennedy thought, he must be really annoyed with me; he only refers to me as “Detective Inspector” when he’s extremely pissed off.

“What if Mr. Adams knew he had only a matter of months to live anyway? What would you think then, sir?”

Castle stopped in his tracks. They were just about to cross the road to the Blue Design Building, the home of Camden Town Records. From there they would cross Regent’s Park Road and then into North Bridge House, the headquarters of Camden Town CID. Kennedy looked Castle straight in the eyes and said: “Adam Adams was dying of cancer, sir. Remember Ms. Siddons said Mr. Adams was shying off dates with her claiming he was ill, and he was disappearing for periods for ‘treatment’?”

Castle didn’t seem convinced.

“I’ve just confirmed this fact with Dr. Taylor,” Kennedy said. “He had spotted a few telltale physical signs — hair loss, mouth ulcers, the victim’s clothes too big for him — and then there were the strong painkillers, in his desk, sir. Dr. Taylor was convinced the autopsy would confirm the cancer. He wasn’t exactly sure how advanced the cancer was, but Taylor reckoned Adams had six months max.”

“No?”

“Yes,” Kennedy replied immediately, “and that does make everything else fall into place, doesn’t it?”

Castle said nothing.

So Kennedy offered, “Let me talk you through the entire scenario.”

They crossed the road and Kennedy continued, “Adams had been dumped by his girlfriend, the second girlfriend in a row — that we know of — to dump him. He’d already admitted that he was not above taking revenge on an ex; he slashed his previous girlfriend’s tires, didn’t he? Not just one tire, mind you, but all four of them! He also told Ms. Siddons that he would have smashed his ex’s car window with a brick if he hadn’t been disturbed. With Ms. Judy Siddons he saw a way of taking advantage of — and possibly even cheating — his own horrible fatal disease.”

Castle started to protest, but Kennedy cut him off at the pass.

“Okay, let’s imagine his approach. First off, although he’d been fighting with Darren Branson and Judy Siddons, suddenly he had a change of heart and invited Darren up to his top-floor flat to discuss the sale of the property. While enjoying the wine and cheese, he probably offered Darren the bread knife to cut the freshly baked, very hard-crusted bread. Darren unwittingly left a perfect set of fingerprints on the knife.

“Adam Adams changed his will barely a week ago to include — and incriminate — Judy and, by association, Darren.

“Earlier this evening, after he heard Ms. Siddons returning to her flat, he slid his sofa along to clear some wall space. In doing so, he left incriminating marks on the carpet. He also knocked over the lamp, and indirectly — via his coffee table — marked the side of his desk. Next he started to kick up a bit of a racket — you know, shouting and screaming, faking an argument, to draw Ms. Siddons’s attention. He alternated between his own voice and, in contrast, a bass voice.

“For the next part of his plan, Adams positioned himself, back close to the wall, in the space he had just created, and — by holding the blade of the knife between the thumb and forefinger of his hand, bent up behind his back — he rested the butt of the recently fingerprinted knife against the wall. He leant against the blade and let the weight of his body do the rest.

“The more he leant against the knife, the more it slid into his body. The degree he had to lean against the wall ensured that the knife entered his back at an angle. Dr. Taylor also confirmed that the knife was positioned to do maximum damage to the heart. Deed done, Adams lost consciousness and slid down the wall to the floor. The mark down part of the wall confirmed this. Dr. Taylor reckoned Adams would have died within a matter of minutes. The main flaw in his attempt to stage his murder was that he had to ensure his door was locked, otherwise Ms. Siddons could have run in on him when she heard the commotion.

“But I do think he thought he’d gotten away with it. You know, that in his own way he’d cheated his pending awful, cancer-ridden death. Did you notice the look on his face? It might just be my imagination, but that was a look of satisfaction — I don’t think I’ve ever come across such a con-tented-looking corpse before.”

“Goodness, Kennedy.”

Great, Kennedy thought, happy that they were moving away from the “Detective Inspector” title, at least for the time being.

“But how on earth did you know?” Castle asked.

“Well, there were a few things which tipped me off,” Kennedy started, greatly encouraged that they had now clearly turned a comer. “First off, Judy Siddons didn’t hear any of the doors closing. She’d been quite candid about everything else, so why lie about that? In fact, sir, as you yourself suggested, if she had been involved, it would have made more sense for her to have claimed she’d heard both the door to Adams’s flat, and the downstairs door to the street being slammed.”

“Good point, I hadn’t really considered that.”

“Also, if we go back to the corpse for a moment, there were two important clues there — three really, if we consider the gorge the handle of the knife made on the wall as Adams slid down to the floor. If you think about it, if you stab someone in the back then, logically, you have to be behind him or her before you do it. Adams was found against the wall. There’d have been no room for anyone to have been behind him. Yes, he possibly could have stumbled and fell after being stabbed, but if he’d been stabbed by someone in the centre of the room, gravity would have dictated that he would have fallen into the wall face first.”

“Yes... okay, that makes sense as well,” Castle agreed.

“But the final, and by far the most important, point is the position of the incriminating fingerprints on the handle of the knife,” Kennedy continued, pulling a pen from his breast pocket and grabbing it in his hand as if it were a knife. “For Adams to be stabbed the way he appears to have been stabbed, you’d have had to hold the knife in your fist like this and raise it above your head and stab like so.” Kennedy motioned with his raised hand to emphasise the point. “However, if you did grab the knife just so, then your thumbprint would be found on the other end of the butt — the furthest end from the blade. But our fingerprint chap found a clear thumbprint here,” Kennedy indicated, again on his pen, by pointing to a position on the butt, right by the make-believe blade. He swung his hand in an underarm arc to emphasise the point.

Castle looked on, taking it all in and nodding agreement.

“So, if I’m to grab the knife handle the way the fingerprints confirm it was grabbed, then, as you see, it would be impossible to stab someone from the overhead angle.”

“You’re absolutely correct,” Castle agreed.

“But this is the position one would hold a knife if one were to, say... cut bread or cheese, for instance.”

“Brilliant,” Castle started, “just brilliant. I think you...”

“And then there are a few other more circumstantial things,” Kennedy said, interrupting Castle’s praise. Praise was not something the detective inspector had ever been comfortable with. “Like why would a murderer stab someone and then leave their fingerprints on the knife? And equally, why would Mr. Adams leave his entire worldly, not to mention substantial, possessions to his ex-girlfriend? The same ex-girlfriend who’d recently dumped him and who was about to marry someone else, the same someone else Mr. Adams had openly fought with? Why would Mr. Adams accommodate her with all his wealth a week before his death? That is, of course, if he hadn’t worked out an elegant plan to set her and her husband-to-be up?”

“Revenge! Excellent motive, Christy, excellent. We’ve not been out of the station an hour and you’ve solved a murder,” Castle enthused.

“Don’t you mean suicide, sir?” Kennedy suggested, politely correcting his superior.

“Yes... yes... of course,” Castle agreed, as Kennedy returned pen to jacket pocket. “I enjoyed being out with you on this case. It was invaluable to me. I discovered the secret of your success, Christy.”

“Oh, really?” Kennedy said, in total surprise.

“Yes, during the entire time you were interviewing Ms. Judy Siddons, she didn’t once take her eyes off you — she was totally transfixed by you and your every word. If you asked me, I’d say you could have persuaded her to tell you anything you wanted.”

Kennedy smiled at his superior as he bade him goodbye. He didn’t quite have the heart to tell Superintendent Thomas Castle that less than fifteen minutes ago he had been equally convinced that the very same Ms. Judy Siddons was deeply involved in the death of her ex-boyfriend.