Hung Up

It was a soggy night in the village of Hadstoke. A raw chill was suspended in the air, and the moon was a ghostly white. Chief Inspector Joseph Reynes was sitting at his desk, a flurry of files scattered in front of him. There was a mostly-empty glass of brandy an arm's length away. His reading glasses were gradually sliding down his nose, his head in his hands. It was late. His wife was already in bed. He was beginning to lust for sleep.

The shrill ringing of the telephone brought him out of his haze, and he jolted in his chair. The phone call was from his closest friend, Geoffrey Ambrose. Geoffrey called often, so it was no surprise.

Joseph picked up the phone.

"Geoffrey? How are you?"

"I'm good, Joe. I know it's a little late to be calling you, but I wanted to tell you something. You'll jump out of your chair when you hear this."

"What is it?" Joseph listened closely.

But Geoffrey didn't speak. There was a slight pause. Joseph listened, momentarily confused, and then he heard the sound of breaking glass and the phone dropping onto the wooden floor.

"Geoffrey?"

No answer.

"Geoffrey?"

Not a sound.

"Geoffrey, what the hell is going on?"

The phone hung up.

As a Chief Inspector for the police, Joseph Reynes knew how to leave the house in a hurry. It took him a minute and forty-five seconds to get from his office to his car outside. Wasting no time at all, he fired up the engine of his unmarked black Rover, switched on the headlamps, and peeled out of the driveway.

This late at night, Geoffrey was almost certainly calling from home, so Joseph banked a hard right and accelerated onto the main road towards the village of Winton Fendle. On the empty country roads, the Rover could comfortably speed along at sixty miles per hour. In what felt like no time at all, he had arrived in the village. A few turns of the steering wheel later, and Joseph was in the driveway of the Little Elm Cottage.

He rapped on the door and rang the bell with an aggression typically reserved for vacuum salesmen, but there was no answer. He peered into the windows, but the house was dark. He slinked across the yard and saw nothing at all out of the ordinary. No broken glass, no damage, no footprints. For a moment, Joseph considered calling the police, which he thought would be rather ironic. He was perplexed, but also exhausted, to the point of delusion. He was too tired to be larking around this late at night, and so he got back in his car and headed home. (He had been told that his latest prescription might cause confusion or delirium when tired, so he promptly went to sleep that night, and snored like the dead.)

It was a number of days later, that Saturday, after the whole strange occurrence had slipped from Joseph Reynes' mind, that there came another phone call.

It was from Joseph's assistant at the police department.

"Inspector Reynes?"

"Yes?"

"It's Angela. I've some very unfortunate news for you."

"What is it?"

"Your friend, Geoffrey Ambrose...he was murdered on Tuesday."

"Murdered? That can't be."

Then it began to crystallise in Joseph's mind. The eerie phone call—the broken glass, the phone dropping to the floor, the phone line being hung up abruptly—he hadn't dreamt it. He must have actually heard his best friend being murdered.