DUKE AND McKENNA

Inspector Duke led his Sergeant down towards the riverbank. The crime scene tape still fluttered gently in the breeze, an incongruous and harsh reminder of the recent brutal scenes witnessed there which seemed almost impossible to imagine now amidst the tranquil scenery as the water gently lapped against the reeds, the peaceful sound mingling with that of the soft buzzing of the insects and the birdsong on such a pleasant summer’s evening.

“I think our timeline might be slightly off”

“Sir…?” The sergeant started to reply, but the Inspector cut him dead with one of his frequent ‘Don’t be such an idiot’ glares, “Tell me, Sergeant, what do you see…?”

“The river… Boats…”

“Boats!” said the Inspector, as if that made everything clear. When the Sergeant failed to say anything else the Inspector continued “We’ve got witnesses who swear blind they saw Furie and his father on the river on the twenty third…”

“So..?”

“Sergeant, your part in this affair is insignificant enough as it is, don’t compound it by appearing to be totally ignorant.”

The Sergeant looked daggers at him and tried to grasp what he meant.

The Inspector paused and gave him one of those familiar looks that always reminded him of his old headmaster, “Look, Sergeant, what’s over there by the bridge…?”

“Well… nothing. Just your car…”

“Exactly! My car!”

“Excuse for one, more like…” the Sergeant muttered to himself.

“…and if you saw my car drive by” said the Inspector, warming to his thesis, “you wouldn’t necessarily notice whether it was me actually driving it, would you?”

“So you’re saying…”

“Yes… come on Sergeant…”

“That the witnesses saw the boat and just… assumed it was Furie driving it…?”

“Precisely!”

“Some of them said he waved…”

“Someone waved, Sergeant… Someone wearing a hooded top…”

“Ah, I see… you think…”

“Precisely! It could have been anyone. The witnesses just presumed…”

“...it was Furie!” The Sergeant paused and frowned, “Well, you might have a point, but…”

“People see what they want to see, and people remember what they think they saw.”

“Well that buggers up any eyewitness testimony, doesn’t it?”

“I’ve never had much time for that anyway, Sergeant…”

“I know. ‘People are idiots…’”

“Well, generally, they are… They tell you what they think you want to hear…”

“Well, that’s as maybe, but they’re all we’ve got and, anyway, there’s the forensics…”

“When they’d been in the water as long as they had, Sergeant, a couple of days here nor there really wouldn’t have made that much difference. No, we’ve got it all wrong. The killer or killers have all got alibis because we assumed that Furie was the one driving the boat, but for all we know, they were both tied up in the bottom of the boat or perhaps they had already been murdered…”

“So… We need to go back and re-interview the witnesses then…?”

“Well, you could do that… or…”

“Sir…?”

“We could just go to the pub.”

“Sir?”

“Look, Sergeant, we’re just bit part players in somebody else’s murder mystery. We’re the ghosts in the machine. Well, we’ve done our bit. The reader now knows what’s going on and the stage is set for the denouement…”

“The what, sir…?”

“The end of the book. Now, we could spend the rest of our week going over all the old evidence, doing paperwork and interviewing all the witnesses again, but I’m in no hurry, quite frankly, to meet any of that wretched bunch again. And so, if you’ve no objections, I suggest we should report forthwith to the nearest hostelry and drink ourselves silly until a decent plot turns up and we get our own book in which to investigate it.”

“But Sir, what I don’t understand is…?”

“Stop building up your part, Sergeant.”