SUDDENLY SHERLOCK

The interesting thing about our little break-in at work the other day was how suddenly everyone who worked in the building and who was aware that “something” had occurred instantly became a crime scene investigator for the day.

To be honest, I did a little bit of it myself, channeling the methods of Great Uncle Sherlock in a pathetic attempt to make some sort of sense out of the nonsense and chaos and panic that was running around in my mind as the conundrum of a “locked room mystery” trickled into my actual daily life.

You see, I was the one who discovered the crime. If I’d been walking a dog, I would have become the perfect cliché, but instead I opened up the steel shutters, keyed in the codes to enter our unlit corridor, and noticed in the gloom of the early morning, that far too much light seemed to be coming through the office doors, as if they were open. Three more paces were enough to discover the awful truth that the doors had been obliterated and most of our most valuable business assets had vanished overnight.

Because I watch a lot of police procedurals on TV, I touched nothing, didn’t enter the room, but instead got myself outside, rang my manager to ruin his morning and then rang the police.

“Why that way around?”, you might ask. “Surely you should have rung the police first…?”

“Well, m’lud, the thing is…”

No. Let’s not go there. Sub-Jeffrey Archer dialogue is not what we want at this juncture. Suffice it to say that my brain was already a bit mangled by the shock of what I’d discovered and the panic about the work which had been lost. I rang him because I thought he might have access to a phone book to ring the police via means other than using the emergency number. He then told me to ring 999 whilst he rang our boss, and so I did.

Slowly but surely the morning unfolded and other office workers, not least my manager himself, rolled up as people phoned people, and the news got out to the building’s owners, as well as to the other office workers arriving, planning upon starting another ordinary working day.

Many of the more official ones drove up, went inside to explore the scene of the crime, trampled all over it with their great big size nines, and came up with more and more of their own theories as to how such a thing might have happened, displaying varying degrees of knowledge, personal focus and notions of the solidity or otherwise of the door itself. Those whose day had been screwed up by knowing that they now had to organise a maintenance crew were more concerned with practical issues than those whose work had been spirited away to places unknown, shall we say.

A veritable pack of Poirots all finding it very easy to work out how the villains had left the building, but unable to work out just how they’d got in. “Those windows were open when you got here?” “Yes, but then they would have had to kick in that door to get to our offices” “Oh yes…” and so forth. “Well, that door’s been kicked outwards so someone must have been locked inside when we closed up” “But we checked the place and set the alarm when we left…”

How many times I answered their questions that “Yes, the shutters were down. Yes, the front door was locked…” and so on that I really started to feel like they thought that I was somehow involved, especially when dark mutterings about it being an “inside job” started to drift across the morning air.

I even felt like dragging them all around to where my car was parked just to show them I had no stolen goods in it. After all, as Morse once almost put it, it is easy to confuse the last person known to have seen the victim alive with the first person to see them dead, or something…

Later on in that morning, as other facts emerged, fingers were discretely pointed and suggestions made that shifted the blame around a bit. At one point, as me and my colleagues decided that we really needed a coffee as we waited for the real “CSI” to turn up (a bloke with a van and not much hope of lifting a print off anything), I noticed one of the secretaries standing in the corridor thinking it all through and doing her best Miss Marple impression, for which she immediately apologised, but it shows how addictive this idea of “getting to the bottom of things” can be.

We all need to explain the unexplained and fathom the unfathomable.

And whilst it’s difficult to come to terms with the fact that our world-weary version of “CSI” don’t scream up to the crime scene in huge humvees with a “Who” soundtrack blaring out, leap out in designer suits and super slo-mo, waving their pistols and their crime scene tape around and exchanging witty quips with the glamorous young things from the crime lab, I guess that I’ll just have to accept that crime fiction is just so much more interesting than crime fact, especially when the crime itself is a rather mundane one.

Annoying, but still rather mundane, and I promise that this is the last time I’m going to write about it. Probably.

There is, of course, an elementary mistake made by many investigators, not taking the evidence into account, and one thing that all of we amateur investigators failed to take into account was the “cock-up” theory that has also evaded so many conspiracy theorists through the years. Mr “CSI”, without any need to remove his sunglasses and give us a pre-credits quip, worked out that what seemed like a “push” was actually a “pull” and a certain amount of carelessness from some of the other occupants of building had led to us being more vulnerable than usual in a situation that we ourselves could have done very little about.

A crime of opportunity.

Nothing more nothing less, and one unlikely to ever be satisfactorily solved.

All my hard work and data was probably already wiped clean without a thought before I even got to work that morning, so I can put away the deerstalker hat, pack up my magnifying glass and try to get on with my life in the sure knowledge that Great Uncle Sherlock’s reputation as the greatest investigator named Holmes in history remains secure.