A/N: a little fic; i wrote it some time ago but never got around to publishing it. i figure publishing it now is better than allowing it to languish on my computer.
"I don't think just the husband killed her."
"Oh-Kay." Danny said, from his chair. "Weren't you the one who found the smoking gun?" He asked, kicking his feet up on the table. "You and Alice seemed to have this one in the bag."
"We did. But...I've come to think that Doctor Harvey is having trouble seeing the forest through the trees." Danny sighed, looking at Charlie from the other side of the table. He picked up one of the crime scene photos and turned it around so Charlie could see it. Charlie had seen it hundreds of times while he tries to puzzle out the events leading to Mary Radfords tragic death.
"You found this when you sprayed luminol."
"I did."
"Doctor Harvey confirmed, this is more than enough blood to kill someone."
"I know."
"And we have tons of testimony about the husband beating her."
"We do."
"Seems pretty open and shut to me."
Charlie refrains from making a rude comment.
"It doesn't add up."
"What doesn't add up?"
"We have half a dozen witnesses who saw Mary leave her car and go into the restaurant on the night she was last seen alive. No one saw her leave and the staff all say she wasn't there that day."
"Your witness could have just mis-seen?" Danny asked, Charlie noted that he had made up a word and he found that charming.
"Hm."
He sat back in his seat and threaded his fingers together behind his head. Ususally he would avoid flattening his hair like that but it was late at night and Danny had seen him in far more dire straits than 'flat hair'. The large stain visible on the carpet in Teddy Radfords house stared back at him.
"I know that look." Danny said, resting his elbows on the table.
"What look?"
"The look you're giving those papers. It's a 'why will you not tell me what you know?' look."
"Is it really?"
"Hm. You do it frequently."
"I never noticed." He said, turning his eyes away from the picture to look at Danny. He was wearing his green robe, the one he took from Matthew like it was nothing. Under the robe, Charlie was pretty sure he wasn't wearing a shirt.
"Well you kinda wince in one eye. Probably why you're getting crows feet there."
"I am not!" Charlie said, maybe a little too defensively.
"Alright, I was just joking. You look how you've always looked." Danny assured him, holding up one hand in a defensive gesture. "Wanna tell me what's on your mind?"
"I just…Luminol doesn't...Mean anything."
"How so? I thought it made blood glow."
"It does. But do you know how?"
"No. "
"I didn't expect you too, I'm not sure you even know what a book is let alone ever picked one up and read it." Charlie said, with good natured humor. Danny rolled his eyes almost loudly.
"Okay mister I read books how does Luminol make blood glow?"
"It clings to the proteins in blood. But not just blood."
"Okay."
"It also can be used on various mining minerals but in this specific case it can also stick to the proteins in bleach."
"Bleach."
"Yes, bleach. Tell me Danny; if you'd just spilled red wine on your lovely white carpet what would you use to remove it?"
Danny gave him a characteristic blank state of a man who has always had a woman to clean for him. Charlie makes him squirm by waiting for an answer.
"Bleach?"
"Bleach." He confirmed.
"So you think the husband was telling the truth about the wine."
"I do."
"What about the hammer that tested positive for blood? Do you have a fancy shamncy detective school answer for that?"
"It's an academy and no. The cast Doctor Harvey made from the skull is consistent with this make of hammer and the hammer tested positive for A positive blood."
"The only fingerprints on the hammer belonged to Mister Radford."
"That they do." He said, sitting back in his chair and sighing.
"But…?" Danny prompted.
"Say you want to kill your wife."
"Oh...kay."
"Why do you hit her in the back of the head with a hammer?"
"Convenience?" Charlie pointed at him and stood up.
"I have a theory."
"Of course you do." He settled back in his chair and took a sip of whiskey from his glass. "Let's hear it then, since you won't go to bed until you tell some poor sucker."
Charlie rolled his eyes but picked up the picture of the victims skull from the table. Months of languishing in the creek in a bag full of broken china and stones had stripped her of her skin. Identification had come from her wallet, still in the handbag with her in the bag.
"Mr Radford punches a hole in the wall. They have guests coming that night so he gets out his tool box to fix it. Mrs Radford decides to test out the wine that they're going to serve in a glass. One of the missing ones from the set that we found in the attic. "
"Alright. I'm following you."
"Something happens. No idea what. Maybe she says something he doesn't like or maybe shes wearing the colour blue. Whatever happens, he feels compelled to throw the hammer from his tool box at her. It makes contact and she drops her glass of wine on the nice white living room carpet."
"Yeah that all makes sense. So Mrs Radford dies from the hammer to the head."
He pointed at Danny and then picked up a sheet of paper from his spread. It was the witness notes for the last known sightings of the victim before she washed up during Rose's party. He didn't feel bad about sending her guests home early, just as an aside. He hated political gatherings at the best of times. He'd not spoken to Jean for close to six months after she decided to go into politics and the only reason he had come around was receiving several death threats from Danny.
"No. Mrs Radford falls down and then, mad at her husband for throwing the hammer or maybe fearing for her life, she escapes the house. She has no idea that she's dying."
"Of what? You just said that she left the house. Did she have a cancer or something that we didn't know about? Surely Alice would know that."
"Tell me. Do you know about Talk and Die Syndrome?"
"No."
"Well, Talk and Die Syndrome is caused by the breaking of a thinner piece of bone behind the ear. When broken, it compresses an artery and causes bleeding around the brain."
"Did you read about that in one of your fancy books?"
Charlie hesitated.
"No. Personal experience."
"Someone you knew died from this? I'm so s-"
"I almost died from this." He said, cutting Danny off.
"Really? When?!"
"1960." He answered, "During a case involving a dead author I took a serious knock to the head with a tool box."
Danny gave him a sidelong look, before shaking his head and sipping his drink in a 'only you' sort of way.
"I know, I know. I got this head wound and I felt fine. Not like, good, because I had actually sustained a potentially catastrophic brain injury, but fine. Anyway. Lucien let me go for about twenty minutes before he noticed I was apparently speaking with a slur. Turns out that I was actually suffering from bleeding on the brain. If he'd waited just one minute longer I probably would have died."
"But he didn't."
"No. He didn't. He saved my life, that afternoon."
They were both quiet for a moment, but Charlie picked up right where he left off. It was a long time ago and he didn't see any point of dwelling on it now. He liked to believe that if he was meant to die that afternoon then he would be dead. That was all there was too it. Danny looks a lot more shocked then Charlie had anticipated but it would pass.
"I think that yes, she had a skull fracture, but she wasn't dead. She is able to make her way to the restaurant where she works. She makes a cup of tea, or someone makes a cup of tea for her. Probably the latter, my guess is that they think she's drunk. She takes a sip of tea and collapses."
"Your reasoning?"
Charlie held up an evidence bag with tiny shards of China in it.
"These were found in the bag she was dumped in."
"So...The husband did it."
"Yes, he killed her but someone else concealed it. Not him."
"Who?"
Charlie waited for it to come to him. He ran though the list of suspects that he had for the crime. He ran through people who weren't suspects too. He ran through a list that just happened to be people he knew who ate at Radofrds restaurant. Nothing jumped out him as especially suspicious.
He deflated and dropped into the seat at the table he'd just been sitting at.
"I have no idea." He was forced to admit. He reached over the table and took hold of Danny's glass of whisky. Before he could take a sip, Danny gave him a meaningful look.
"Are you sure about that?"
Charlie sighed in response, but relinquished his hold on the glass to Danny who moved it out of his grasp. Damn him.
"I don't get it. I did everything right."
"Did what right?"
"I lay everything out, I made an implausible theory, I moulded the evidence to fit it. Why am I not having an epiphany? An answer should be jumping out at me, preferably one that has no relation to the case or is otherwise a surprise to anyone who happened to be involved in it."
"That's awfully specific."
"That's what the Doc used to do."
A look of understanding crossed Danny's face and he reached over. Charlie expected him to look at the pictures but instead he took a hold of one of Charlie's hands. Charlie pulled it away.
"You're not the Doc."
"Oh, gee, thanks for clearing that up."
"Just listen. You're not Doctor Blake, there was only one of those. So trying to solve a mystery using his methods...It won't work. More than sometimes those methods didn't work for him; either."
That was a perfectly reasonable statement but Charlie was not in the mood to be reasonable.
"Ever since I got back, people think I'm good at this now."
"You are good at this."
"Yeah? Then why I can't I figure this out?"
"Well, even the Doc had Aunty Jean. You're trying to go it alone."
"'Cause no one else thinks there was someone else involved. And even if I'm right then there's no way to prove it. The body was too badly decomposed to assign a proper cause of death. "
To his credit, Danny did not promptly call Charlie a big baby and tell him to go to bed. Despite the fact that that was what he probably should have done. Instead, he picked up some pictures Charlie had Rose develop.
"What are these?"
"Those are pictures of us eating at Peach Pits."
"Okay, so we can see that the pottery you found is consistent with that at the restaurant."
"Yes."
"Did anything stand out to you about this picture?"
"No."
"Did anything stand out to you when we ate there?"
Charlie sat back again. He thought of all the times he'd heard Lucien and Jean having an almost identical discussion about other murders. How those discussions now seemed to be held with Matthew and Alice.
Eating out with them was supposed to be a nice thing. As if he had any way of knowing that they were eating at the place where a woman was later going to go missing from; how could he? Lucien and Jean had done almost identical things plenty of times in the past. Murder followed them and now it seemed like it was following him too.
He glanced down at his hands. A sticking plaster at the top of his pointer finger caught his attention. He'd accidentally sliced it earlier on the big paper guillotine at the station. If it had been any lower he'd probably have lost the whole top off that finger.
Actually, now he thought about it -
"Danny; get the Boss. I have an idea."