I 'Two hundred miles from home and stranded in this winter
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nightmare' "Rods? Lines? That sort of thing?" "I thought I might have dropped my keys there."
"Why didn't you go straight to your car to see if you had left them in the ignition or the door?"
Martin was beginning to fluster. "I don't know. I just thought I had had them before we all went out."
"And did you find them?"
"No. I saw the body and I ran back." "Turn out your pockets."
Martin was reluctant.
"I've got two truck drivers sitting behind me who would gladly turn you and your pockets upside down."
He put his hands in their respective pockets to grab the contents then stopped. I could tell by the look on his face what he had found. A key fob with two silver keys jangled out on the table.
"I never. . . I mean I normally never . . ." He blustered for a few sentences.
"What do you do for a living, Martin?"
"I'm a sales rep. Fishing tackle."
"Do you sell the full range? Everything an angler needs?"
"No live bait, but all the hardware." "Do you carry stocks?"
"Yes. Samples mainly, but being Christmas and with retail outlets running short we tend to carry a bit more than usual." "Of course."
"Knives?"
"Yes." Then he was where I was going. "No . . I didn't kill him."
I didn't think he had, but I had led myself down the right alley. The wound on Alan's neck was not a knife wound but an accumulation of knife wounds to leave a result which didn't look like a knife wound. It sounded like a long way for a short cut but it produced the same reasoning. Make it look like a large, heavy object, the sort a murderer might wield but not the sort a murderess could wield.
I was looking for the wrong man because I was looking for a man. I should have been looking for a woman. A Woman who could go up to this man, perhaps bearing a sprig of mistletoe, and pull down his dufflecoat hood without evoking a second glance or thought. A woman who had no alibi for the time of the murder. A woman who had recently been refused her Christmas break in the sun.
I took the long road through the staff entrance, collecting one of the Christmas decorations, and went behind the service counter to the coffee machine. Below the counter, stacked neatly on the shelves, were sufficient catering packets of coffee to drown the five thousand.
"You've had a busy evening filling these shelves, Susan. I can't imagine how you managed it all, filling shelves and sneaking out to see Alan."
Her eyes widened. "I didn't kill him."
"No? Perhaps you've simply forgotten. Maybe this'll remind you." I took the sprig of mistletoe from my pocket and held it over her head. "Merry Christmas, Susan."
She took the mistletoe from me and turned it over in her fingers. "I looked around for it afterwards but I thought it had been lost in the wind and snow. Where did you find it?"
I could have lied and said it had been wrapped in Alan's fingers but Susan had heard enough lies for one Christmas. LI by James Baxter