Ten

Angles

"Hold up a minute. Morse liked puzzles. Michael Blethyn liked puzzles." Lewis was frowning as he spoke, slowly and thoughtfully.

"Yeah, so?" Hathaway mimicked his governor's remarks of a few days earlier.

"How far from the place where the body lay to the window, James?"

"Hmmm. About 7 feet I suppose. I'd have to get the diagrams to be exact. Why-?" The sergeant looked at his inspector with a slight expression of worry.

"James, that's it!"Lewis smacked his hand on the desk top. "Remember? He liked making up puzzles. He enjoyed playing billiards, his mother said. He liked games and puzzles. It's a locked room puzzle, you said."

Suddenly, Hathaway was breathless, starting to feel lightheaded. "I think I see what you're getting at, sir. It's maths. Geometry. Angles. Malik was telling the truth. He didn't kill Michael Blethyn."

Lewis was also on his feet, energized. "I can visualize it, but I couldn't do the calculations or whatever. I was never very good at billiards and that. Can you see how it was done?"

"Yes, sir. We need to go back to the flat. The gun is there, somewhere….. She's a dentist and her office was robbed. Set theory. You see, now it all fits. The stuff stolen makes sense now." The young sergeant grabbed a stack of notepapers from his desk and flung them into the air, whirling around like a dervish among the sheets as they drifted to the floor.

At this last, Lewis frowned in concern. "Do you need to lie down, sergeant?"

"Maybe later. Now we have to find the gun and figure out this guy's last puzzle."

It was a bright sunny day, almost high noon by the time they arrived at the writer's flat. They walked around the building and looked up at the trees.

"Nothing seems to be left on the leaves, James."

"Must have already dissolved. Pretty good trick, sir."

Lewis squinted up at the trees, shading his eyes from the sun. "Wonder how far something like a gun could go."He looked around the wooded park-like area behind Blethyn's building.

Hathaway shrugged."Depends on the size of the gun, wouldn't it? A small weapon would fly pretty far, up to a point."

"Well, Laura said it was a .357 Magnum—that's a pretty big gun."

They searched the grounds, tracking ever larger circles starting from just under the dead man's window. It was Inspector Lewis who spotted it, lodged high in a clump of shrubbery some 50 yards from the house. After securing the area around the hedge, Lewis made the call to get an evidence team.

"Look at how high up it is—no wonder we couldn't find it before," the inspector said, pointing. "We would have had to use a helicopter to see it."

Hathaway clapped his partner on the shoulder. "Congratulations, sir," he said, smiling. "There may be hope for you after all."

Lewis rolled his eyes, but he was elated. The two detectives' had found the proof they needed- and possibly enough evidence to free Malik.

A day later, once again in their superior's office, the rather disheveled-looking investigative team were barely able to contain their excitement as they tried to explain.

"See, the position of the weapon supports our speculation about the mysterious death— it was too far away to have been dropped or even thrown from the barred window." Hathaway looked at Lewis, who continued.

"Our previous searches had missed it because it was too high up—over twelve feet from the ground. And a murderer would have been taking quite a chance, running all the way out to that to that dense hedge behind the flat, and throwing the gun up there. It'd be tricky doing that without being spotted by the police who arrived the night of Blethyns's death."

Innocent looked at them as if they had both sprouted horns.

"So, let me get this straight. You are telling me that the victim shot himself and then threw the gun out of the window after he was dead?"

"Yes ma'am," said Hathaway. "As strange as it seems, he did."

"Uhm hum. I hope this gets better."

Lewis nodded. "It does. Because he was a puzzle expert, and a good billiards player, and understood angles and so on. He took a bit of geometry, added a bit of physics and the finishing touch, dental suture. The dissolving kind, so it would disappear after a few days."

Their boss still looked skeptical, her raised eyebrow saying, "Keep talking, boys."

Lewis took a breath and went on. "The night of the killing, Sergeant Hathaway noticed that the "Secrets and Lies" film had been on the DVD player."

"Ma'am, I don't know if you remember that film, but there's a lot of yelling and fighting in it. The perfect background if you want it to sound like more than one person arguing."

She was beginning to look intrigued. "You're thinking Blethyn wanted to frame Malik?"

"It was a frame and a suicide, ma'am. Premeditated, for sure. It took time and patience to rig it all up. " Lewis replied.

"Can that really be done? Flinging a gun out of a window with dental suture?"

"Not only with dental suture. You could do it with postal string or dental floss or knitting wool or elastic bands tied together," said Hathaway, with just a touch too much enthusiasm.

"Sergeant Hathaway had us try it with all of them. The elastic bands shot the gun the farthest." At her widened eyes, the inspector hastened to reassure her. "We didn't use a real gun, ma'am. Just a facsimile, something of the approximate size, weight and shape. And we didn't do it in the office."

The Chief Super raised a curious eyebrow. The men spoke as though they had spent quite a bit of time during the past twenty-four hours in some undisclosed location playing, ah, experimenting with the toy gun, ah, facsimile and different types of string. Innocent wondered when and where these experiments had taken place, and then decided that she really did not want to know. She imagined if they had been caught at it, the two of them would have pointed at each other, shouting in unison like a television comedy team, "He made me do it!"

Hathaway was speaking again and Innocent pulled her attention back from her bemused meanderings.

"But the suture worked well, and it is the only thing that would leave virtually no trace. Even before it dissolved, it would be practically invisible, especially at night. It looks almost exactly like a spider's web, hanging from a tree. "

He continued, "We think Blethyn used a strong tree branch to supply the needed tension. He bent it into the window, tied one end of the suture to it and the other to the gun. After he fired the gun and fell, the gun was ripped from his hand and flung out the window into the air. The force might have snapped the suture instantly."

"Or the gun could have fallen into the hedge later once the suture dissolved," Lewis suggested.

Innocent folded her hands on her desk. "Do you mean to tell me that the murder weapon might have been hanging from a tree in plain sight all this time, and the entire police force missed it?"

Lewis shrugged. "You recall, ma'am that at the time we were looking at a murder, not a suicide. We were not expecting to find the gun on the premises at all."

"I suppose that does not really matter now," Innocent said. "What a strange case. So our suspect may have been telling the truth after all. You realize that we still have to take the case to trial, but if this evidence introduces enough uncertainty, I doubt he will be convicted."

"We may never know what really happened that night. The evidence will be laid before the jury and justice will take its course. Our mandate, gentlemen, is to serve and protect the British public. And to uphold the law."

She raised a finger.

"British law. What Mr. Blethyn may or may not have done in a foreign country is not in any way our responsibility. As police officers, our job is done. Until your testimony is asked for at the trial, that is. Is there anything else, gentlemen?"

Lewis shook his head, relieved. "I don't think so, ma'am."

Hathaway's side of the office was cluttered with balls of string, boxes of elastic bands, packets of dental suture and skeins of colorful knitting wool.

"Looks like a jumble sale over here, James."

The sergeant, frowning, ignored the remark. "We may just end up looking incompetent, sir."

"I know. Convincing the Chief Super is only half the problem. If the public takes Malik's side, and we hope they will, we will be opening ourselves up for a lot of pain and hassle. The price we pay for being diligent. No good deed and all that." Lewis picked up several hanks of wool yarn and mounded them up into a pillow-like form on his desk.

"Kind of like whipping yourself to share someone else's suffering?" Hathaway tossed his partner another skein to add to the pile.

"Hmm." Lewis rested his head on the wooly pile and closed his eyes. "Never did get the point of that Ashura thing. Beating yourself bloody for no reason," he slurred.

"I guess that's the point, from a psychological point of view."

"Oh, spare me, James," said a voice muffled by yarn.

"No, really sir. If you can't fix something, if you have to accept a horrible reality that you can't change, you can at least have a public demonstration of how bad the thing was. Isn't that what we do when we revisit the awful details of a crime during a trial?"

Lewis thought about that for a moment, remembering a recent case where his young sergeant had had to testify in court to convict a suspect who had raped and murdered a child. Hathaway had actually found the little girl's body—what was left of it. He reminded himself that Hathaway was not the parent of a daughter, but he still felt the emotional impact of what had happened to Mari, Malik's sister. Lewis raised his head then and meeting the haunted eyes of his young sergeant, nodded slowly, dislodging a few hanks from the hill. "Maybe, James. Maybe it is at that."