The Locked Room (Cecilia Peartree)

I've become aware recently that there is a fine line between being an independent, fully functional person and becoming someone who is having serious trouble getting mobile again. I can't even write as much as usual, because I'm using a laptop on my lap instead of at a table or desk. However, despite these challenges I have recently published a new novel which I like to think of as a locked room mystery, and that has reminded me of this silly short story I wrote a while ago.My reasoning is that including this here will prevent this post from becoming just a series of complaints! I hope it will make someone laugh.

The Locked Room

 It must have been after midnight when I got the call. It was all I needed, after a long shift at the beach, warning off members of the public who should have been safely shut up in their own homes. That wasn't real police work. I had alternately longed for and dreaded a different kind of call, and I had even considered switching off my phone. But this caller was distraught, and I was the only one near enough to respond.

As soon as I opened the door, I realised it was a murder scene. I could see the body right in the middle of the floor, partly covered by a rug. I frowned. What was the point of that? It didn't really conceal anything. Unless the killer had been in the middle of trying to cover it up when he had been interrupted. He or she. Either was possible at this point.

I stepped inside the room, closed the door behind me, and stopped in my tracks when I saw the gleam of eyes in the darkness. Where was the light switch? I fumbled for it and the space was suddenly, starkly lit up, illuminating the scene in all its horror. The body on the floor. The suspects, still close by, gloating over their crime.

There were three of them, sitting in a row and staring at me, their eyes glazed - which was probably because they were all coming down from a high, either because of the killing or from the drugs, or both. I stared back, afraid to look away in case they made a move towards me. One of them was already a killer. I knew the first time was the hardest, and that they might be desperate enough to attack me too now they had the taste for it.

I didn't want to turn my back on them but there were things to be done. I took a few photographs with my phone, just for the record, and recorded some cursory notes. After all, I was first on the scene, apart from the woman who had made the call, of course. I wondered where she had got to.

At last I turned back to the three of them. Their silence was starting to bother me.

'Haven't you got anything to say for yourselves?' I decided I could get away without giving them the official warning in this case. I glared at the largest and ugliest of the gang, who bore the scars of quite a few street brawls, if I was any judge of the matter. 'Not even you? Do you expect me to believe you had nothing to do with this?'

He stared back at me, silent and defiant. I had met villains like him before. They pretended to be hard, but in my experience they were the first to begin sobbing and asking for their mothers if you just faced up to them.

I shrugged, took a piece of chalk from my pocket and began to draw round the outline of the victim. We didn't usually do that these days but I thought it might unnerve them to see me doing it.

But that was my big mistake. I was still bending down with the chalk and wondering if my eyes were telling me the true story about what was on the floor, when one of them jumped me. I squealed with pain as his front claws dug into the back of my neck while the back ones scrabbled up and down my spine for purchase, inflicting damage wherever they touched me. I tried to reach round and wrestle him off me while, out of the corner of my eye, I saw another member of the gang batting at the corpse with her paw until she managed to move it out from under the rug and began chasing it across the kitchen floor.

'What's going on in there?' Somebody rattled the kitchen door. 'Are you OK?'

'Of course I'm not OK!' I screeched. 'Get in here and help.'

'Has it gone?'

'Kind of,’ I lied.

'You know I can't help,' she said, sounding almost regretful. 'Why do you think I got you out of bed to deal with it in the first place?'

‘Never mind that! Just get in here.’

Of course the ringleader transformed himself into a floppy bundle of fur as soon as she came into the room. She took him from me and glanced round suspiciously. As I straightened up, she pointed over to the corner of the room with the hand that wasn’t holding on to the master criminal, and said in a quavering voice, ‘It’s over there!’

‘Just stay where you are – I’ll see to it.’

I bravely picked up the thing with my bare hands and took it outside, where I gave it a decent burial under a lilac bush. It was quite a lot of trouble to go to for a catnip mouse, but I couldn’t afford to lose any more sleep that night. 

Daisy - killing machine