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Rooftop Discovery.
As he stood the ladder of the salon in a murder which had been giving him and his team a lot of trouble, holding a pair of bloody scissors - now he had the murder weapon, he had little doubt the mystery was going to be solved shortly - Neville had to admit his knowledge of old Manchester CID cases and his own health concerns sometimes really went in hand and hand, but the moment Madeline confronted him about the rash on his scalp - why did the Caribbean climate have to hate him so much? - but since this case was already confusing; Neville had gone over some of the old case notes of DI Poole, DI Goodman, and DI Mooney over the years, and he knew they'd gone through weird cases over the years before he'd even arrived to get better acquainted with his current posting which was, hopefully, temporary.
No, weird was not the word, startling. Neville had been a DI long enough to know the further you got in an investigation, the further you got to the truth.
This was no different. In his experience, a case took time to properly crack open, and that included the harder cases. Neville was thankful he had been blessed with deductive reasoning and sharper attention to detail which came solely from years of experience.
But this was one particular case that was as challenging as the previous two cases he had been working on since his arrival in Saint Marie. The murder of someone in a local salon in broad daylight, without anyone noticing.
There was no doubt in his mind one of them was behind it; there was simply nobody else, besides Henri Dupree, who struck Neville as quite the womaniser when he'd gone to question him with Madeline and JP. But Henri was not a murderer; he might be reckless, too eager to jump in with a woman, but Neville didn't see him as a killer.
But he knew that left a lot of open territory; Neville knew everyone was capable of murder. You didn't need to have a degree, you didn't need to know a murderer who was already sporting a large kill count.
No, Neville knew to be a killer, you only needed to have the means, the motive, and the opportunity. And, as DI Mooney had pointed out during one of his cases, bravado.
Henri might have been of different character compared to Finn Anderson, with added bravado, but Neville knew the man hadn't been responsible for the actual murder, but he still had a number of questions to ask him. He only hoped the case had not been compromised because of Ruby, even unintentionally when they'd had a brief fling, and he hoped Dupree had been the instigator, not Ruby. Truthfully he was amazed by how careless Ruby had been; surely she had known something like that would happen? While Neville was annoyed by Ruby's little fling with Henri which meant they were down one person working on this case, he knew such things did happen and everyone made mistakes; he was just thankful the Commissioner had been fair enough to suspend Ruby, instead of just firing her completely. He only hoped this was going to be a learning curve for the nice, bubbly young woman.
Anyway, the whole of the salon had been searched inside and out. No sign of the knife, and he was still curious about the towel being thrown into the washing machine, but he hoped they were closer to the answer now. But the missing weapon had caused Neville a lot of trouble, despite all the ideas he had of how the murder of Eleanor Beaumont worked.
It wasn't until he had absently scratched his head - okay, how long would it take before he could admit he had made a mistake about Harry, whom he had wrongly considered to be behind the massive, terrible rash on his head and they would shut up about it? - and babbled absently about arranging yet another appointment with the local GP, and get someone to take a look up there… and then it struck him.
Bert Haffney.
He'd heard the story during the course of his career; of a jewel thief who'd thrown his loot onto the roof of his home, and how the police had sprung a surprise search of his property while they'd been in the middle of their Sunday roast. The police hadn't found anything to tie Haffley in to the robbery, but the SIO had been smart enough to leave someone behind to watch the property. And it worked. Not only had Haffley proven himself to be responsible for the theft but the police had learnt where it was.
But as he held the scissors in his hands - Neville saw the dark stain on the blades of the scissors, proving they were the murder weapon - Neville began putting the puzzle together with what he had; he knew it would take a while, but he felt he was closer to the end now than before.
Thanks to Haffney.