The Progress of Sherlock Holmes

Lead me not into Temptation

Fascinating crime scene. Staged; obscenely baroque. (Could spend days combing through all perfectly-laid out evidence. Exquisite.) Such fine attention to detail. Clearly all ties together as a narrative; unclear precisely what that narrative is (thus far). Will figure it out. Steeple fingers. Stare. Think. (Think, think.)

Phone vibrating against my hip. Ignore it. Think.

Two bodies. One (male, aged fifty-five to fifty-seven) seated in a decrepit lawn chair, wearing a (brand new) rugby helmet, cradling a severed foot coated in varnish (hands clean, post-mortem cut (less than a millimetre) just above the knuckle on the right index finger) wearing wedding rings on both hands, both clearly his own. One on the left hand at least ten but less than fifteen years older than the one on the right). The other body (female, aged thirty-six or thirty-seven) lying on the floor on a towel, wearing a floral bathing suit and sunglasses, her head resting on a plasticised human liver (not her own). She has a paperback book resting (open, pages down) on her stomach (Orlando). Fingers around a plastic cup filled with gin and (flat) tonic. Both bodies: fingernails trimmed after death. French manicure (hers). Hyper feminine. Her hair styled as though it’s 1964. The entire scene set in an industrial freezer.

The narrative: what is it? The murderer’s parents, staged using innocent bodies? A memory of some kind? Are these people players, actors? No. Evidence too closely tied to their lives. This is no play, no lie. Something else. Something true. How delicious.

On closer inspection: the male’s feet (covered in socks and a pair of ornamental wooden clogs) propped up on the last ten years of his own tax returns. (Is he Dutch? Returned from a Dutch holiday?) Legs shaved to three inches above his (right) ankle.

Think. What can this mean? What happened here? A true puzzle. Wonderful. A tease of a crime scene, baring all for its audience, so enticing that it’s hard to know where to look. Intoxicating. Look everywhere. Drink it in. Maddening (in the best way).

“Can we move them out of here now?” Lestrade is rubbing his hands together. Is it cold? Suppose it is. Well, it’s a freezer, what else did he expect?

“No.” Not even close to finished. Been at it for hours now (how many? not sure) and still finding new evidence. Missing something critical. All this evidence planted and staged to hide something else. Hiding in plain sight. Peer inside the woman’s ear. Something there. Tweezers. Careful, careful...a insect encased in amber. Tiny. Latvian. (Why?) A note tucked into her suit, between her breasts, a receipt folded eight times. Receipt for a buckwheat neck pillow. On it a single word, written in pencil: offal. More bewildering the more details I find. Fantastic.

“We can’t keep them here all night, the restaurant owner will have my head.” Lestrade again. Annoying. I don’t care about restaurant owners.

“Let him.”

Files, details. The story of these people’s lives. Gareth Jones, originally from Wales (obviously). Flip though the papers. Inspect the body. A former rugby player, in his teens. Injury to his ankle that required surgery. Married twice, divorced twice. Cheats on his taxes. The evidence is telling his story. No lies. Only truth in the details. The murderer knew him well.

The woman: Chloe Taylor, from London. A chronic alcoholic with tickets to the Bahamas next week; a sunbathing holiday. (Credit card records, impulsive purchase: a form of reward. For what?) The novel: Orlando. Would it be too easy, too obvious, to guess that she was transgender? Secretly, perhaps, almost secretly. Female to male. (Nearly) impossible to deduce otherwise. No records, no true evidence. The contents of people’s deepest wishes and desires hard to always see painted on the body. (Whispered confessions over time, whispered to whom?) Too easy, maybe. Too perfect. Everything else about this crime scene is perfect, why not that?