A Corpse Called Bob

by Benedict Brown

  “Wait.” Greg put his hand up for clarification. “Are you saying that Bob was gay too?”

  The question whirled around my head. “I’ve thought about Bob a lot over the last few days. I believe that he’s the key to what happened, not our suspects. We know that he’d been living this wild lifestyle ever since he discovered he was dying. I think that he’d got it into his head that he wanted to do everything. He wanted to tick off every thrill and peccadillo. He tried drugs, booze and petty crime, so why not dabble with his sexuality too? At the very least, it would explain why he was only half dressed.”

  My four fellow sleuths were computing this new theory so I kept talking.

  “It always struck me as strange that Bob would write that note on a train ticket when he drove pretty much everywhere. Will on the other hand gets dropped off by his brother or comes in via East Croydon. He wouldn’t have a season ticket because he doesn’t always need one, so a single would suit him fine. He lives near Mitcham but that’s a completely different train line and, looking on the map, I think it would be quicker for him to go from Norbury, where the ticket was purchased.”

  “So, Will met up with Bob that night.” Dad shuffled in his seat. “Does that mean he’s the killer?”

  “Slow down a bit. We’re not there yet. Imagine that Bob confided in Will over his diagnosis and, with their hearts open, Will revealed his own big secret. They spend some time together, one thing leads to another and before you know it, Bob’s invited Will up to the office for champagne. Even if they’d argued after, even if Bob had been his usual cruel self, it’s a big jump from kissing and cuddling to cutting someone’s guts out.”

  “Will was acting weird that day in the office before Bob was killed.” Ramesh pointed at me with the daffodil. “Perhaps Bob was messing with him the same way he messed with everyone else and, when Will realised, he slashed Bob to pieces.”

  “So how did he get rid of the CCTV?” I asked and his felt flower drooped. “I think it’s more likely that Will’s oddly quiet behaviour and the arguments they had that week were because Bob was pressuring him into a relationship and it took a while for him to give in. That’s why he wrote the note when he could just as easily have told Bob in person. Remember, it said, okay, let’s do it, which always sounded kind of reluctant to me. Whatever was going on between them was new, unexpected, unsettling for him.”

  “But if Will didn’t kill Bob, he might still have ordered the hit on you.” Greg was a step ahead as usual. “Perhaps he blamed you for his lover’s death. Or perhaps he was worried that you’d find out about his relationship and reveal his secret.”

  “I was thinking just the same thing.” I turned the suspects pad back to the first page and circled Jack, Wendy and Will’s names. “Whoever called the hit must really not have liked me. Okay, Jack’s a part-time drug dealer and Wendy spouted off when she found me in Bob’s office. But there’s no personal connection between us. It came to me in the restaurant tonight that, with Will, it’s different. He’s never hidden his disdain for me and there’s a side to him that can be full-on savage. It’s still a stretch, I admit, but I think that Will is the most likely suspect to have ordered the hit.”

  The room was silent. I waited in case the others came up with something useful.

  In the end it was Mum who spoke first. “I’m sorry darling, but it doesn’t add up. There are too many what-ifs, too many conclusions we have to leap to.”

  I let out a long, exhausted sigh. The energy that had surged up within me half an hour earlier had dissipated. “It’s all got so complicated. Why couldn’t Bob have been murdered in a nice normal office with nice normal people?”

  “You’re doing really well though, Iz.” Ramesh stood up to put a sympathetic hand on my shoulder. “If you keep at it, you’ll work it out.”

  I felt like lying down and giving up altogether. “I’d love to believe you.” My trusty teddy was still on the sofa by dad, awaiting his call to action. “Sorry, Sir Hugalot. Do you mind if we skip Wendy? This isn’t helping me the way I hoped it would.” He bore the disappointment as well as could be expected.

  “Maybe I’ll be off,” Ramesh said. “If I’m quick, I can skip through the BGT highlights before bed.”

  “We’ll leave you to it as well, darling.” Mum took Greg’s truncheon and moved to leave. “We’re here if you need anything.”

  On command, my stepfather followed his wife out of the room. Even Dad was getting ready to go.

  “Remember what Ramesh said. The answer will be right there in front of you, you just have to look at it the right way.”

  “Thanks, Dad.” I gave him a hug and he squeezed me super tight like when I was a kid. “You’ve been great tonight.”

  Looking up at me, he held my gaze. “The last piece of a jigsaw is always the hardest to fit.”

  We both let go. “That’s a terrible metaphor but thanks for your support.”

  He trundled out after the others, so then it was just me and Huggy and I had no idea what to do next.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Two hours later I was still sitting on the front lounge carpet, surrounded by the large sheets of paper that I’d torn down from the three pads. I’d read them all a hundred times. I’d crossed out clues and added new ones. I’d even tried throwing a marker at the list of suspects with my eyes closed but I kept getting Ramesh, so that wasn’t much help.

  The number of ideas that were running through my head was starting to freak me out. I knew there was a path through the mess of information we’d assembled, but it felt like I needed a map to find it.

  So I gave up trying.

  I lay on my back, with the Hawes Lane Fun Club’s notes beneath me, and waited for inspiration. Instead of searching for the murderer, I thought about what I’d said to Ramesh on my first day at P&P. I’d instantly felt relaxed around him, which was weird because I’d been pant-wettingly nervous all day until then. We chatted about the TV shows we both watched, he told me about his love of Cher, Shania and Celine and then I told him about my friend Agatha. My best friend really and certainly the only one who’d stuck around since high school.

  What Ramesh remembered me saying was true. I’d always been good at working out murder mysteries. It wasn’t because I was some kind of genius. There was certainly no magical-mathematical formula I’d concocted. The reason I could normally identify the guilty party was because I could see through all the red herrings. When I set aside the false leads and focussed on the suspects, it just made sense to me who would have killed to get what they wanted.

  It’s not always the little things that give the game away. Bob’s hands weren’t pointing to anything in particular and the stamp on his desk really was just a second class stamp – nothing to do with Wendy, or the money she was owed. What helped me get closer to the killer was coming to know the victim, spending time with the suspects and trying to put myself in their places.

  The way I see it, except for the odd all-out maniac, murderers normally kill for personal gain or deep-rooted emotion. Love can drive someone to kill just as much as hate will. None of our suspects would gain enough financially from Bob’s death, so who felt so strongly about him that they would contemplate snuffing him out? That was the most important question I could ask, but I’d let myself get distracted by convoluted theories.

  If I wanted to work out what had really happened, I needed to go back to the beginning, use my instincts and believe in my judgement. All of the suspects had lied to protect themselves, but only one had killed Bob. I didn’t have to solve an uncrackable puzzle – that would come later. All I had to do was read a group of people who I’d known for years.

  I wasn’t possessed with Miss Marple’s vast trove of character types to compare my suspects to but I could tell what each one wanted most in life. I didn’t have Poirot’s knack for observation or his phenomenal brain. I didn’t even have the resources that the police could access and yet I had an advantage over all of them. I’d been there to w
atch the fallout of Bob’s death, I’d witnessed things that they never could have.

  I opened my eyes and pulled a now blank flipchart down to me. All of the evidence we had was irrelevant without knowing the motivation behind it. So I lay on the floor and planned out a whole new list for everyone involved. I’d start with the people I knew the most about and finish with Amara whose entry would probably only stretch to a few lines.

  I wrote Desires and Motivations at the top of the page and started off by thinking about my best friend in the world, who I still couldn’t believe for a second had wielded the knife.

  Ramesh

  Wanted to stop Bob’s cruelty

  Needed equality and respect

  Wanted revenge for everything that Bob had put him through?

  I thought about the last two vlogs he’d livestreamed and the contrast in him. In the one a few days before the murder, he was filled with rage but, after he’d sent the e-mails telling Bob exactly what he thought of him, there was calm. He had healed his wounds.

  Wanted closure

  Was searching for peace

  Needed to heal the hurt he had suffered

  – Killing Bob could never have done that.

  I moved on to Bob next. In some ways he was the most distant, the only one I couldn’t question or manipulate to reveal the truth. And yet, in his last months on earth, he’d been painting his motivations on his office door in thick red letters for all to read.

  Bob

  Drink

  Drugs

  Sex

  Adultery

  Theft

  Cruelty

  I read the words over and again. They were a bad bucket list; a last hurrah to cement Bob’s reputation as a total scumbag. But they didn’t tell me everything. They lacked the personal side of Bob’s hatefulness. And so I wrote out the list again.

  Hurt – Ramesh

  Rob – Wendy

  Fight – Jack

  Screw – Will

  Humiliate – Amara

  Torment – David

  Lie – His family

  Bob’s death sentence from cancer, didn’t turn him into a bad person, he’d always been one. He’d already taken advantage of Pippa, a young intern who he should have been looking out for. He’d victimised Ramesh, directing his bullying at the most sensitive person he could find. He’d made working at P&P torturous for everyone who had to deal with him.

  No, Bob’s diagnosis didn’t spark his bad instincts, it magnified them. He knew he could do whatever he wanted and he embraced the hedonistic carnage full on.

  I read the list I’d written in thick black marker and I could tell that it wasn’t the first time it had been compiled. Bob had never done anything by accident. He’d planned it all out. First the elaborate memorial service, to make sure he’d have the last laugh, and then his careful targeting of each one of us.

  It felt like a bomb had detonated inside me as a burst of frantic electricity buzzed through every nerve in my body. Something clicked in my brain and everything finally fitted together.

  I took my phone and wallet from my bag and searched for the card D.I. Irons had given me after my assault. My hands were shaking so much that I could barely type in the number. My heart was going off like a siren in my ears.

  I pressed call but immediately hung up again. The phone fell from my hand and I had to sit back down and think about what I was doing. Nothing seemed real. My mind was filled with doubts, not just about my detective work but whether revealing what I’d discovered was even the right thing to do. I found some resolve despite my fears and dialled again.

  “This is Detective Inspector Victoria Irons speaking, I can’t come to the phone right now but, if you leave a message, I’ll make sure to get back to you.” It was no wonder that she wasn’t answering, it had gone twelve at night. “In an emergency, call nine nine nine or contact your local police station.”

  I spoke after the beep. “Sorry to bother you, detective, but I’m pretty sure I’ve worked out who murdered Bob. And I’m absolutely certain I know who paid to have me killed. Come to the office tomorrow morning at nine fifteen and bring two sets of handcuffs. If I’m wrong, you can always arrest me for wasting police time.”

  Not allowing myself time to question my actions again, I called Dean from Bromley next who was still awake, but grumpy that I’d interrupted him while he was playing Fortnite. He demanded yet another favour in return for the answer to the very simple question I had for him, which I should probably have just looked up online.

  Then, finally, I called David. He was asleep but answered the phone anyway when he saw it was me.

  Such a sweetheart.

  I know, right?!

  It took about an hour to explain everything that had happened since Ramesh and I had started investigating. I went through all our theories and even the mistakes we’d made along the way and he helped confirm some of the stuff about Bob I’d only been half sure of. I can only imagine how shocked he was to get a call like that in the middle of the night, but he didn’t let on. He told me he was proud that I’d worked everything out and, at the end of the conversation, he only had one question for me.

  “Are you sure this is this is the best way to go about it, Izzy?”

  I pictured a twelve-year-old girl reading The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by torchlight for the third, fourth, fifth time and I knew that, at the very least, it was what I wanted.

  “Yeah. I think so.”

  “All right then. You can use the conference room and I’ll make sure everyone’s there.” It was his business voice again. Our morning meeting was arranged.

  “Thank you, David.”

  Now that he’d agreed to my plan, I was half relieved, half terrified. The immensity of what lay ahead would take a while to sink in, but I was glad that no one would come between me and my Poirot style finale – not even the hunkiest Welshman since Richard Burton in The Robe.

  I tidied up the pages from the floor, set the pads back on their easels and, with one last swish of the marker, put a circle round the guilty parties.

  It was done and now I could go to bed.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I know what you’re thinking. She’s been bumbling along this whole time, what makes her so sure she’s solved the case now? Well, first, I prefer to regard my bumbling as a choreographed wander and, second, there’s something you may not have realised about me. I’m actually quite good at this detective stuff. Okay, I admit it was a slow start but, as soon as I got my confidence up, it was plain sailing.

  More or less.

  Yeah, more or less.

  When I woke up the next morning, and I’d showered and dressed and brushed my teeth, a numb reality had started to set in. I’d solved Bob’s murder, but that didn’t make what I had to do next any easier. Before I could think about how the morning would play out, I had to deal with an irate police officer complaining that I’d interfered in her investigation.

  “I believe my partner already impressed upon you the importance of leaving us to do our jobs.”

  I felt a bit defensive. “I’m sorry, I really am. I don’t think I’ve done anything very illegal. I just wanted a go at working out who done it.”

  She didn’t sound reassured by my explanation. “It might surprise you to learn that who done it is not a term we often use in the Metropolitan Police.”

  “So you’ll come then?” I was hoping my undying optimism would be too much for her to resist.

  “I should make you go to the station so that we can verify your information and assess any risks.”

  “I knew you’d come!”

  I confirmed the details then rang off before she could change her mind.

  The office was quiet when I arrived. I thought I’d get in early to set things up before it got busy but, in the end, David was already there. We met in the conference room, the site of my future glory. My nerves started firing again as soon as I saw him. This was really happening.

  Despite knowing e
verything I had planned, he spoke in his usual relaxed tone. “Are you still sure about this?”

  It helped me calm down a bit. “Urmm… sixty to seventy per cent. And you?”

  “Not so much. I think we should tell the police everything and let them do their jobs. But, if this is what you want, it’s your choice.”

  “Thank you. I really mean it. Thanks for this.”

  He smiled and tentatively took my hand. “Who am I to disappoint?”

  I’d only ever been in the conference room for staff functions before. It made me feel a bit special to be putting on my own presentation in there. Nine tall windows on the left-hand side of the room gave a clear view of East Croydon Station with its red and white masts and beyond it the Boxpark and the town centre.

  To set the scene perfectly, I organised the room. I pulled chairs to the side of the long, rectangular space so that only six remained. One for me, one for each suspect, but David would have to stand as seven chairs just looked wrong somehow. I put glasses and water out in the middle of the table and then, as I still had time before everyone got there, I went for a wee.

  When the others arrived, David ushered them into the conference room.

  “What the hell is going on?” Will asked as I swung round to face him in the boss’s chair at the end of the immense oval table. “Don’t tell me you’ve given your freak girlfriend a promotion?” He glared at my bossfriend, (okay, last time. I promise.)

  Amara, Wendy, Jack and Ramesh had already gone through these opening scenes – and, yes, I did the dramatic spinny chair thing for them too.

  David pulled out a seat for Will to take his place at the table. “Izzy isn’t getting a promotion. She just wants to talk to us.”

  Will was about to complain, but then spotted Irons, Brabazon and two uniformed officers walking over to us from the entrance. His arms folded across his chest, he sat down with the others.