This post was inspired by this month's Scholar and Scribe Invitational writing prompt. You can read all about it HERE.
Enjoy !
Detective Inspector German's wristchip vibrated softly. He was glad he'd turned the ring tone off, it was distracting when he was working. Looking down, he saw the symbol for an urgent incoming text message. Tapping the chip, the holographic screen appeared at his wrist to display the message.
It was from Deputy Commissioner Khan (or as German liked to think of him, "Weasel"). It read; "Unknown body found in Mayor Square after the Party Chairman's annual public address. Investigate urgently."
Pulling on his coat, German headed for the square. He took the tube; it was only a few stops from New New Scotland Yard, and saved him the bureaucracy of booking out a car.
When he arrived there, the whole place was cordoned off. Policemen milled around uselessly, trying to convey a sense of their own self-importance. They waved German through and he headed for the centre of the square. He recalled that once it had been occupied by a column, fountains and lions, but they'd all been cleared away as part of the Year Zero celebrations when the square was renamed and re-sculpted.
There, lying out in the open, was the body. They hadn't even bothered to cover it over. A trio of police stood over it looking thoughtful.
"Well ?" German asked, making it clear he was in charge with just one word.
"We don't know who he was," one of the officers started. "When the crowd cleared away after the chairman's speech, he was just lying there."
Looking down at the body, German saw a middle-aged man, wearing jeans and a dark grey fleece jacket. Totally average.
"So what does his wristchip say about him ?" he asked.
"It was broken," the officer said, a note of frustration in his voice. "Not smashed, just wiped clean. No data."
"What did the cameras and camera-drones get ?"
"Nothing. We've pulled the footage, but the crowd was too densely packed for them to see anything. They think they picked his face up in the crowd, but facial recognition didn't know him."
"And I assume no-one in the crowd saw anything." German tried hard to keep the cynicism out of his voice. Of course no-one would see anything. That was the mantra nowadays. Keep your head down, don't speak out, and whatever you do, never, ever do anything to draw the interest of the authorities.
The three policemen all shook their heads glumly. They knew the score.
The third one of them added that they'd already swept the immediate area and found no evidence of any kind.
"Well," said German, "Best get the poor fellow bagged up and off to forensics, see if they can give us anything."
At the end of the day, German received a text from Doctor Tyvek down in the lab, and rushed down to see him.
The forensics department always smelled of formaldehyde and disinfectant. He was glad of it, German had never liked the smell of death.
Tyvek greeted him warmly. They were, in a way, old friends.
"Well Doc, I hope you can give me something useful."
The doctor nodded, then hastily caught the glasses propped across the top of his head. Baldness was a terrible affliction when it came to sticking anything on one's head, and Tyvek had been bald for as long as German had known him. He sometimes wondered if the man had been born with no hair, or if it had just automatically fallen out as soon as he graduated to give him a kind of ageless old-but-not-ancient intellectual appearance.
"So you say he was just found dead, eh ?"
German nodded. "Yep. Middle of Mayor Square, and no one saw anything. Not a member of the crowd, and none of the cameras. No visible injuries, and no disturbance around him when he died."
Tyvek grinned. "You know what you've got, don't you ? You are familiar, I'm sure, with the locked room mystery, where you have to prove that a body in a locked room didn't commit suicide. Well this looks like the opposite. Call it an unlocked room mystery. Thousands of witnesses, who saw nothing. Any of them could have a motive, but we've got little idea who the victim was, how they died or why."
Nodding again (he started to feel like a nodding dog), German had to agree.
"I can help with one thing. I detected trace amounts of unusual alkaloids in the victim's bloodstream. I believe it to be curare. It was used by South American tribes for hunting big game before they were all integrated or exterminated."
"What does that mean...." German left the question hanging. Tyvek was in lecturer mode now, he'd stop when he'd run through his spiel.
"The effect is one of muscle relaxation. All it would have taken was for someone to jostle him in the crowd and jab him with it. Once it takes effect, he'd have been conscious but unable to move or speak. Totally paralysed. There would have been no fuss. At the dose I detected, his chest muscles would have stopped working. He literally stood there suffocating to death, unable to alert even those standing nearest to him. Only when the crowd thinned out and he was already dead would his muscles have relaxed enough to let him fall over."
"Thank you, Doctor. You've answered how he died. Now for the hard part. Finding out why. For that, I'm going to need to find out who he was."
Three days later, German was no closer to answering those questions. His wristchip was so thoroughly scrubbed that no-one in the Data Recovery Section had been able to find anything useful.
DNA had come up blank. How was that even possible ? Everyone was tested at birth and their DNA data entered in the central registry.
Then he had an idea. He sent a text to Doctor Tyvek.
The answer came back within the hour. An actual voice call, not a text !
It was Tyvek, sounding almost excited. "Your hunch was right ! I cut the wristchip out completely and opened it up. Not one of ours at all ! It looks like one on the outside, but the internals are a Polish model."
A Pole ! What was a Pole doing dead in London ? German made an immediate appointment to visit the Polish Embassy; they were notionally a hostile state nowadays, but he'd always made a point of not letting little matters like geo-politics get in the way of keeping on good terms with old contacts.
At the Polish Embassy he sat down with his old friend Colonel Adamowicz, drinking black coffee and talking about old times for a while before getting down to business.
"Do you know this chap ?" German asked, bringing up a holographic image that had been edited to show the victim as if he was still alive.
Adamowicz raised an eyebrow. "If you've got him, we'd very much like it if you could discreetly drop him into our custody," he said with a slight smile.
"So is he wanted by the Polish authorities, then ?" German asked. He was playing his cards close to his chest.
"Very much so. Pavel Markus. He used to work for PolPharm. Played a key role in developing the Covid-35 vaccine, before it came out that the pandemic was actually a population control programme under the auspices of PharmaGlobal. PolPharm have raised charges against him that he deliberately tried to sabotage the vaccine. The charges are just for corruption, of course. Always follow the money."
Then Adamowicz added, "But we've heard through the grapevine that PharmaGlobal are also looking for him for taking the money and not doing enough to render the vaccine useless."
The pieces all fell into place. German looked at his old friend grimly.
"It seems they may have found him. When we found him, he was dead, poisoned. Still got to prove it was PharmaGlobal, of course, but now you've given me the background, it all ties up with the modus operandi of their Corporate Security."
He shook his head sadly.
"Pavel Markus won't be going into the custody of any Earthly authorities, ever."