Festival of Murder by Ross Macfarlane KC, Chapter 12: As my old Weegie granny used to say

Wood shook his head: ‘Don’t you start, JD - it’s bad enough that Abbie has started calling me ‘Lothario’.’

JD raised his hand: ‘At last! An Abbie reference that’s not like something out of an 18th Century play…’

‘Um…’

JD laughed: ‘Anyway - what do you call a woman who works in a harem?’

Wood narrowed his eyes: ‘Is this a trick question, like “What is the name of John’s mother’s only son” kind of thing?’

‘No - I’m serious.’

Doc leaned in: ‘A lady does not “work” in a harem, JD. She doesn’t kiss the sultan - or whoever it is - on the cheek in the morning and say: “Right, dear - that’s me away to my work now.” It’s probably one of his wives, or a slave or…what’s the word…“concubine”.’

JD laughed: ‘Oooh - love that. Sounds like a harvester.’

Doc turned to Wood: ‘So - ‘Lothario’ - when are you meeting the ‘harem worker’ who keeps texting you?’

‘She wants to meet somewhere private…’

JD chimed in: ‘Oh, boy…’

‘…because…because, JD - she doesn’t want Bobby McKee to see what’s she’s got.’

JD sat back in his chair: ‘Let it be recorded that the door was wide open and I refused to walk through it…’

Wood frowned: ‘She says that McKee is pushing for the case to be closed - despite the evidence - but she’s discovered something new and she wants my take on it before she does anything.’

JD leaned in: ‘As my old Weegie granny used to say: ‘This one is pure Poirot, so it is…’.

*****

‘Sorry about all the hush-hush here…’

Detective Maddy Price and Wood sat by the window, upstairs in Starbucks in the High Street, across from where the lady had fallen.

Wood looked around at the noisy festival goers hogging every other table. He smiled: ‘I confess that I’m just shocked that you managed to get a seat’

It was Maddy’s turn to smile: ‘I got here early and stood guard for 5 minutes on the off-chance. I had to stand and listen to two grumpy German tourists moaning about Scottish food.’

‘Wait until they try a deep-fried Mars Bar…’

The young detective spluttered: ‘Oh - das ist nicht gut…’

They laughed. Maddy reached down into her bag and produced a slim iPad and placed it on the table, angled up so that they could both see the screen. She flipped through the pictures on the screen to get to the pages she wanted. ‘Here.’

Wood looked at the frozen image. He scrunched up his eyes, then pointed to the buildings across the street: ‘Looks like a capture of the street where Rose Bryant fell.’

Price nodded: ‘Exactly.’ She pointed out of the window. ‘Just across the road there. In fact, there are points - when there’s a gap in the crowd - when you can see the front door to her building.’

‘Where did you get this?’

‘There was an attempted theft at one of the shops across the road from her address. This is footage we recovered from the security camera in that case.’

‘When?

‘The day the lady fell.’

She pressed Play and the pictures in the video started to move. Hard to make much sense of what had been caught. Early morning. Great crowds of festival people streaming across the screen.

Wood sipped from his cup as they watched. Price leaned over and touched the screen. The action stopped. She looked up: ‘Well?’ Wallace Wood - retired prosecutor - felt stupid at that point. He shrugged: ‘I’m sorry, but…’. Madeline Price smiled: ‘It was so easy to miss at that speed. Let’s watch again. I’ll take it frame by frame.’

She re-played the video and freeze-framed it when it got to the images of interest. ‘Now you see this figure here…’ she put her finger on a blurry figure of a man on the screen.

Wood frowned. He took his glasses from his pocket, put them on, then put his face closer to the screen. ‘I see it. But you’ll not get any sort of positive i.d., from this - it’s too…’

Price laughed: ‘Oh, ye of little faith. Watch.’

She pressed Play at the normal speed. The blurred figure disappeared into the crowd. Wood gave Price a sideways glance as if to say ‘so what’. The detective smiled and pointed at the screen again. She expanded the screen with her fingers. It showed a very well-dressed young woman going into the stairwell where the Lady in Red lived.

Wood shook his head: ‘Do we know who she is?’

Price mock-frowned: ‘Isn’t the correct question these days “Do you know who ‘they’ are?”

Wood tried to keep the note of frustration from his voice: ‘Maddy, I assume that there’s a point…’

Detective Maddy Price smiled, re-wound the video backwards, frame by frame and said: ‘What you saw was the butterfly. Now let’s see the grub.’ The frame, played backwards, showed the glamorous woman turning around and it became obvious that the female hair and clothes were on one side of her body only. The other side of her was dressed as a man.

Wood sat back: ‘It’s the son - what’s his name…in that ridiculous he/she costume of his…’

Maddy nodded: ‘Yup - Alex/Alexis Bryant - the same son who said that he hadn’t seen his mother – ‘the old witch’ - for months.’

Wood sat back: ‘And when was this taken?’

‘Look at the time on the screen. That morning - 27 minutes before the Lady in Red came out of the fifth-story window…’.

*****

Festival of Murder continues tomorrow in: ‘I Know My Rights’