The Inspector sits on the couch in Sussex and talks to Mrs. Powers about her son's death.
"He was…yes, visibly upset. Depressed, I guess you could say." Mrs. Powers picks at her hands and looks down at her knees, crossed over one another, before she grabs another tissue and brings it dramatically to her face. Carl Powers had been eleven when he was found floating in a swimming pool in London with no pulse. Any mother would be this upset, this nervous. The Inspector knows; he's read books on this. He knows.
Before he leaves the house, he asks to be shown around, because despite everything, despite the fact that this seems utterly like a run-of-the-mill unfortunate suicide, something is niggling in the back of his mind. The shoes. Because that damn Holmes kid is right, and the boy's damn shoes should have been with the boy's things in the locker room, and they weren't. The Inspector does not have a search warrant, but Mrs. Powers is fine with giving him a tour.
As they go upstairs, Mrs. Powers excuses herself for a moment, and walks down the hall into the bathroom. She looks terrible, eyes scrunched up as if she is willing herself not to cry. The Inspector waits until she is in the bathroom and then continues to the top of the stairs. Just off the hall is a door, upon which hangs a little sign covered with trucks and cars. A little boy's sign. The inspector leans across the hall and opens the door a little, peering into the room. He raises his eyebrows in surprise.
The room is astonishingly tidy. The walls are unadorned, plain white. The bedspread is patterned with cars, but it lays absolutely flat on the sheets, military-style. There is a computer on the desk, surprising in such a young boy's room (this is 1989) , hooked up with cables to the wall. A television sits on an orderly bookshelf. The floor is wooden, and no toys litter it. The closet it partially open and a row of identical white button-down shirts can be seen. The whole effect is one of a temporary sleeping arrangement, a hotel room rather than a living space. It is utterly silent. The Inspector cannot see the shoes.
As he pulls his head out of the boy's room, he sees Mrs. Powers standing at the bottom of the stairs, smiling up at him. She looks much calmer.
"That's not Carl's room," she says, lips curling up at the corners in an entirely unamused fashion. "That's my stepson's room. James. He's nine. He's away at school now."
The Inspector nods and apologizes. Mrs. Powers shows him down the hall, to Carl's room, which has nothing on the door but sticky grey marks where duct tape has been removed. The inside of Carl's room is covered in debris and smells strongly of socks. An aquarium in one corner balances precariously, filled with plants and fish, the filter rattling noisily. The bed is unmade, even though Carl's body was found nearly two weeks ago. Books and papers spill out of a book bag on the bed and litter a desk under the window. There are bowls of half-eaten food on the edge of the desk and peeking from beneath the bed, and old cups of cold tea on the windowsill. The contrast between the two boys' rooms, the Inspector thinks, would be amusing if the situation were not so morbid.
And there are the sneakers. He has heard about these sneakers, these fancy trainers, from Carl's playmates who were interviewed following his death. They were the only shoes he ever wore. Mrs. Powers has not mentioned them, but here they are on the floor, looking new and shiny and as if they have just been removed from Carl's feet.
There is no need to touch them, examine them, record them. That would be making too much fuss over the Holmes girl's blathering. The Inspector doesn't like to think that he's less intelligent than a little bureaucrat's daughter who hangs about crime scenes because her father's in the government. He thanks Mrs. Powers, and he leaves, collecting his bag on the way out. As he walks down the sidewalk outside the house to get to his car, he passes a little boy, about nine years old, with dark hair and dark eyes and a crisp white button-down shirt.
When it started, it was so easy that Jim was surprised. The police were supposed to be competent. Cop shows always ended with the criminals caught. Jim figured that the police would figure out it had been him, or at least, if they couldn't grasp that a nine-year-old had orchestrated the assassination of an eleven-year-old, trace the crime to his parents. It wasn't so hard to make the jump, was it? Boy with eczema, a proficient swimmer, no symptoms of depression, found floating in a pool dead of asphyxiation? Obvious conclusion: someone fiddled with the medicine. Who has access to that? Doctors and family. Jim had even given them a clue, hadn't he? No shoes on Carl. How could an eleven-year-old boy possibly have gotten to London from Sussex without shoes? Inference: someone stole them after he died. Jim had brought them home afterwards himself. Once the police found the shoes in his house, they'd know. Or that had been the idea.
What Jim really wanted was for something exciting to happen. The world was so boring. His teachers were stupid, his parents were stupid. The news was dull. When he set out to have his stepmother kill Carl, he had imagined the end result to be the following: a nine-year-old boy, testifying as the defendant in a criminal court, convicted of murder. Exciting stuff, front-page stuff. Papers would be abuzz. Because surely he, little Jim Powers, could not outrun the sophisticated criminal justice system, not even if the crime was as clever as this.
Jim hated his stepmother. When she'd married his father, she had killed him. She had made Jim's pleasant but dull life into a madhouse. His father , Mr. Powers, was a professor. He was brilliant but lazy, and his new stepmother had encouraged that laziness with affection, telling Mr. Powers to forget this or that project and go out to dinner, go have a drink with the lads, allowing his father to sink into frequent bouts of alcoholism until inevitably the man wound up dead, floating in the water inside the twisted wreck of a car. His blood alcohol level had been thrice the legal limit. Meanwhile, his stepmother's anxiety, which had always been there, increased tenfold. Jim watched her after his father's death, watched her grow increasingly nervous. Carl, Jim's stupid stepbrother, didn't notice at all. Nor did he notice Jim playing on it. Jim acted as normal as possible around Carl. He was a good actor. When it was just him and his stepmother, though, he did things. Broke glasses, spoke in odd voices and threw his voice around the house. Messed with her. She was on the brink anyway. It allowed him to relieve some of the boredom of everyday life, and watching the woman who killed his father break down into madness, knowing he was partially responsible… well, that was downright fun. She started popping pills, and then when the symptoms started to show, when she started getting schizophrenic meltdowns, she was sent to doctors. The Powers became a family of pills. Pills for Carl's eczema, pills for his mother's mental disorders. And that was when Jim had gotten the idea. Jim was the one who replaced her fluphenazine pills with placebos the week before Carl died. A nervous wreck, that is what she was, and she was the one had mixed the clostridium botulinum with Carl's medication, trying to consolidate two half-empty, identical containers.
Bam. Dead stepbrother, presto. Jim needed to do barely anything.
As it turned out, though, the police were stupid. The case closed as a suicide, even though all of the facts were staring the damn investigators in the face. And when Jim heard that, an entirely new idea had popped into his head. He had gone into his room, and he had sat before his computer, the world of possibilities opening before him like an unfolding aurora of potential. Jim had switched the machine on and sat before it as it hummed to life. He had smiled.