DCI Cobley Crime File
Sometimes I felt I was living inside an Agatha Christie novel when I assisted DCI Tom Cobley.
Miss Christie would oftentimes set a story in a manor house near a village and such was the setting for this case I am calling The Murdered Body in the Locked Room.
It concerned Lord Watney, who despite the name had no connection with the brewery, whose body was discovered with a single bullet hole to the head one morning in the library. The door was locked as were the windows. There was no key in the door and the local doctor who was called to the scene was quick to conclude suicide.
A local constable who had no business doing so, but who had once met Cobley at a village fete in support of distressed donkeys, told the Great Man of the incident. The DCI equally without good cause, since the occurrence had not happened on his ‘patch’ took me with him on the slow train into the countryside.
He dismissed the case as suicide without delay and before he had even the opportunity to instruct me (as he always would on a job), ‘Get me a cup of tea and a biscuit. Chocolate if they have one,’ he solved it.
It seems the gun was discovered in his Lordship’s right hand when in fact he was a ‘south paw.’
As Miss Christie would have written it, the housekeeper when confronted with the evidence immediately confessed everything. She swings tomorrow at nine.
Words: Richard Rooney
Illustration: A.I.
Flash Fiction 250
Flash Fiction 250 