Proof positive 2

Version A

Version B


Detective Sergeant Stephens chewed morosely on his cheese and pickle sandwich and stared out of the window. The rain was falling steadily into the station courtyard, creating busy rivulets on the grimy panes. Stephens scratched a thick ear ruminatively and then squinted over his chaotic desktop at Detective Constable Hewitt who was sitting at her desk across from him, picking her way through some takeaway sashimi.

“What you got there?” he grunted, “Some kind of home autopsy kit?”

Louise Hewitt ignored him. She picked up a slice of raw tuna with her chopsticks and brought it to her mouth with a practiced hand. Then she paused, “We get the coroner’s report yet?” she asked. “On the Francis case?”

Stephens bit deep into his sandwich and talked through it, “Stabbed with a screwdriver fifteen times to the head, thirty seven times to the abdomen, superficial defence wounds to hands and forearms, and then disembowelled clumsily with a barbecue fork. Far as they can tell the whole process took around twenty minutes to half an hour.”

Hewitt dipped a thick slice of salmon into her little plastic bowl of soy and wasabi, and popped it in her mouth. She pushed a number of large photographic prints about the surface of her pristine desk. “Made a hell of a mess of the lounge” she observed. “They seem to have smeared him up over the walls.”

Stephens rummaged in a large paper bag set in front of him, for his scotch egg. He’d saved that till last. He bit into it with relish, and then remembered, “They’d forced him to eat the family hamster. It was found wedged down his throat.”

“Oooh, don’t,” said Detective Constable Hewitt with a grimace of disgust.

There was still a vestige of compassion left in the C.I.D. room.