Murder in the Snows
Mar. 15th, 2006 12:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nineveh_ukIn which Inspector Pjoerot solves the hideous murder of Erik the Skidoo Man by a member of the Waymark skiing party staying at the local hotel. Comprehension may be aided by the information that the Norwegian Air Force really were doing wilderness training in the area, and using the hotel's conference facilities, Bulgarian musicians are a regular feature of Norwegian skiing holidays, and “Erik, the Skidoo Man” can be sung to the tune of Champion the Wonder Horse.
Murder in the Snows
(Names have been changed to protect the innocent.)*
…and now if, ladies and gentlemen, you will join me in the lounge I can reveal, at last, who our murderer is.’
Denouement
The party assembled near the fire in a corner of the main lounge. Across the aisle, two burly Norwegians were propping up the bar, and the strains of Dire Straits drifted up from the dance floor. Inspector Pjoerot twisted the points of his blond moustache, leaned back in his armchair, and surveyed the expectant group before him. He began.
‘We are here, ladies and gentlemen, to investigate the foul murder of Erik Erikssen, the skidoo driver. He was murdered most brutally, pulled from his skidoo, stabbed in the neck with an icicle and left for dead on the løype. The use of the icicle when there were no icicles otherwise formed at the scene indicates that the crime was premeditated, so it is most unlikely that he was murdered by any of the residents of the local hytte, who did not know he would be cutting that track on Wednesday - which would normally be his day off. He was not murdered by any of the hotel staff, who are all accounted for. The other guests are likewise possessed of alibis the most strong. It is one of you who has done this.’
‘When this I understood, first I ask myself, why does any of this Waymark party wish to kill Erik the skidoo man. It does not make sense. There is no reason, no advantage to be gained. So, I conclude, they did not do it.’
‘Well, of course none of us did it,’ interjected Joan Black. ‘The whole idea is quite preposterous.’
‘As you say,’ the Swedish detective answered with a small bow. ‘It is quite preposterous that one of you should murder Erik the skidoo man. But it is very likely that one of you would wish to murder Edward Smith the Swindon Swindler.’
The party let out a collective gasp.
‘I shall not trouble you now with the details of how with the help of undercover agents from the Bulgarian Secret Service I came to discover Mr Smith’s true identity. Suffice to say that after the collapse of his activities in England he fled to Norway with a price upon his head, and took a new identity as Erik Erikssen, and here he lived, driving his skidoo, building a new empire of blackmail and fraud – until the Waymark party came to Synnseter.
‘Oh yes, none of you might wish to murder Erik, but several of you have the strongest of motives to wish the death of Edward Smith.’
‘This is ridiculous!’ protested a man with a white beard. Inspector Pjoerot shrugged.
‘Perhaps. And perhaps you are not the Roger Jameson from whom Mr Smith stole the 2001 World Table-tennis trophy?’ Jameson sat up in shock. ‘But I know at the time of the murder you were watching the curling, so you need only be unregretful he is dead.’ A nervous laugh ran round the lounge.
‘Who else among us would wish this man no more? Perhaps Dr and Mrs St John? For years they ran a highly lucrative manufactory of LSD from the basement of the hospital where Dr St John was employed. For a small cut of the profits, Mr Smith had introduced them to their London contacts. But he grew greedy. He demanded more money. They were relieved when he disappeared. Now the market in Britain is more crowded, and they wish to expand their enterprise abroad. Whilst their daughter on her school skiing trip liases with the French contact, her parents try their hand in Norway. And they are most unhappy to see that Mr Smith is here. What shall they do? They pretend not to notice, but perhaps he has noticed them. Perhaps he threatens blackmail. Was that the conversation overheard by Ingrid the waitress; You have twenty-four hours to decide.’ The St Johns said nothing, but shifted uneasily in their seats. The mobile phone beeped accusingly.
‘Yet,’ the Inspector continued, ‘this theory is not quite satisfactory. Why should an icicle be employed by a couple with so many sophisticated drugs at their command? No, I could not then say conclusively that it was the St Johns.
‘Who else might it have been? Perhaps Jonathan Carey, who knew about Smith’s exploits selling spare parts from the nuclear industry to the Middle East. Or Clarissa Sheffield, whose parents he swindled out of their life savings. Either would have been strong enough wield the murder weapon, and both have no alibi.
‘Or perhaps after all it really was Erik Erikssen who was murdered. Perhaps some of you knew that Erik Erikssen, rather than Edward Smith, was involved in criminal enterprise. Morag McCulloch and Ned Henry would both have recognised his fur hat not as mink, but the pelt of the rare Siberian wolverine. They might have discovered the reason the Bulgarians were watching him; that he smuggled endangered species for fur and the pet trade. Knowing nothing of the Bulgarian surveillance, they assumed the local police were in on the trade, and as members of the radical environmental group CLAW! saw no alternative but to take the law into their own hands. With her short stature, Morag might have hidden round the corner as Erik descended the red løype, and he would not see her until it was too late. Once he had been knocked off the skidoo, it would be an easy matter for the two people to overpower him.
‘But still I think of other possibilities. What of Mr Anderson, who had once hired Edward Smith to forge certain documents to prove his ownership of valuable share certificates? He too has his motive.’
‘Are you quite finished?’ Adam Clark, the Group Two leader, burst out loudly, slapping a Waymark brochure against the table. ‘You have listed motive after motive, but motive doesn’t prove anything. Half of southern England has a motive to harm this man, and by the sound of it half Norway. But that doesn’t mean anything. You have to prove that one us actually did it.’ An angry murmur of agreement ran around the lounge. The Swedish detective nodded.
‘Indeed, that is quite correct,’ said Inspector Pjoerot. ‘And proof most conclusive you shall have. But first you will permit that I tell you of one final possibility.
‘Adam Clark.’ Clark leaned back in his seat.
‘This should be amusing.’ Again the Inspector made a slight bow, and continued.
‘You have heard how Mr Clark was a physical training instructor in the Royal Air Force. What you have not heard is that he was dishonourably discharged after a series of intelligence failings at the base where he was posted. Nothing could be absolutely proved, but there was enough to discharge him. Erik – Edward Smith – knew this, because he too had served in the armed forces and come into contact with Clark.
‘The years pass. Edward Smith’s Swindon activities are discovered, and he flees to Norway. Meanwhile, Adam Clark lives quietly in the Lake District, and some weeks a year he travels abroad as a Waymark leader. And here is an interesting pattern, because the places to which he travels are centres also of military training. Adam Clark is a Russian spy.
‘What happened, then, on Wednesday night, I believe it is this. Adam Clark has already been in Norway for a week and a half. He has met his Norwegian counterpart, and they prepare their information. But the Norwegian is nervous; he will not meet Clark at the hotel. Instead, Clark must ski out to meet him before dinner, Clark does this, and Erik notices. From his memory of Clark’s discharge from the RAF, Erik realizes what is happening. He has no loyalty to his old country – nor the new. He tries to blackmail Clark, it was this conversation that the waitress, Ingrid, overheard; Erik is not prepared to wait any longer for a resolution - and neither is Clark. That evening, with the Waymark guests safely in the hotel, he sets out for his meeting with the Norwegian, as Erik knows he will. But he sets out early, so that when Erik passes down the green circuit, Clark is waiting. Using a way marker that will later be found with traces of the skidoo’s paint upon it, he upsets the vehicle and Erik is thrown off. Erik tries to defend himself, but is stabbed with the icicle that Clark has taken with him, and upon which he leaves no fingerprints. The skidoo he runs into a snowdrift where it is soon covered. Clark returns unobserved to the hotel, and the next morning he is himself in the party that discovers the body. This is how the murder was committed.’
Adam Clark remained seated in an exaggerated posture of relaxation. ‘If you’re waiting for a confession, Inspector, you’ll wait some time. You can’t proved anything against any one of us.’
‘But that is not so,’ said Pjoerot. ‘I can prove it was you. You alone, Mr Clark, knew where Erik would be at that time. We know the murder was premeditated, but only you knew that Erik would drive along the red løype so late, because he was seeking to intercept you. You used the waymarker to toppled the skidoo. Perhaps you hoped that Erik would be pinned underneath it, but you were unlucky and he was thrown clear. From his training in the Commandos he fought most fiercely for his life. Only a man with similar training could have withstood him and you are the only one of the Waymark party who possessed such training. At length, you overpowered him and stabbed him with the icicle. No doubt you intended to dispose of it – it would have been easy to drop it in a stream and the murder weapon would vanish forever. But the fight took far longer than you had anticipated and you had to be back at the hotel for dinner. So you left the body, dumped the skidoo, and when you could not immediately lay your hand upon the icicle, which had fallen under the corpse, you retreated to the hotel. You were not concerned at this minor failure of your plan.
‘Yet you ought to have been concerned, for it is this icicle that allows us to prove absolutely that you were the murderer. You thought it the perfect weapon, but not all icicles are alike and though you left no fingerprints upon it, yet it bore a print of its own.
‘This icicle, Mr Clark, does not come from the side of the summer road, nor the crags you were so careful to lead your group past. Through chemical analysis of the ice and the mineral salts contained, we know that there is only one spring where it could have formed. Moreover, that spring is on the other side of the lake and could not have been reached since the weekend snowfall. Only someone who was here last week, as you were, could have taken it. So we were led to your bedroom and found in the snow outside the window the plastic bag in which you had wrapped the icicle and buried it in the snow – the plastic bag which on the outside was marked with your fingerprints, and on the inside were ice crystals of the same chemical composition as the murder weapon. Mr Clark, you murdered Edward Smith, alias Erik Erikssen the skidoo driver. Officers!’ The burly Norwegians at the bar rose. ‘You will arrest this man.’
‘No!’ With a shout Clark leapt to his feet. ‘You little Swedish busybody. You’ll never get me!’ With a spring like cornered tiger he launched himself over the coffee table as if to take a run for it – but he never had the chance. He had forgotten the cast iron chandeliers that hung low over the couches and has he sprang his head struck hard against the iron frame. As the clang resounded through the lounge he fell to the ground – a dead weight.
THE END
* In the version circulated to the protagonists themselves, only the 'murderer’s' real name was used.
Murder in the Snows
(Names have been changed to protect the innocent.)*
…and now if, ladies and gentlemen, you will join me in the lounge I can reveal, at last, who our murderer is.’
Denouement
The party assembled near the fire in a corner of the main lounge. Across the aisle, two burly Norwegians were propping up the bar, and the strains of Dire Straits drifted up from the dance floor. Inspector Pjoerot twisted the points of his blond moustache, leaned back in his armchair, and surveyed the expectant group before him. He began.
‘We are here, ladies and gentlemen, to investigate the foul murder of Erik Erikssen, the skidoo driver. He was murdered most brutally, pulled from his skidoo, stabbed in the neck with an icicle and left for dead on the løype. The use of the icicle when there were no icicles otherwise formed at the scene indicates that the crime was premeditated, so it is most unlikely that he was murdered by any of the residents of the local hytte, who did not know he would be cutting that track on Wednesday - which would normally be his day off. He was not murdered by any of the hotel staff, who are all accounted for. The other guests are likewise possessed of alibis the most strong. It is one of you who has done this.’
‘When this I understood, first I ask myself, why does any of this Waymark party wish to kill Erik the skidoo man. It does not make sense. There is no reason, no advantage to be gained. So, I conclude, they did not do it.’
‘Well, of course none of us did it,’ interjected Joan Black. ‘The whole idea is quite preposterous.’
‘As you say,’ the Swedish detective answered with a small bow. ‘It is quite preposterous that one of you should murder Erik the skidoo man. But it is very likely that one of you would wish to murder Edward Smith the Swindon Swindler.’
The party let out a collective gasp.
‘I shall not trouble you now with the details of how with the help of undercover agents from the Bulgarian Secret Service I came to discover Mr Smith’s true identity. Suffice to say that after the collapse of his activities in England he fled to Norway with a price upon his head, and took a new identity as Erik Erikssen, and here he lived, driving his skidoo, building a new empire of blackmail and fraud – until the Waymark party came to Synnseter.
‘Oh yes, none of you might wish to murder Erik, but several of you have the strongest of motives to wish the death of Edward Smith.’
‘This is ridiculous!’ protested a man with a white beard. Inspector Pjoerot shrugged.
‘Perhaps. And perhaps you are not the Roger Jameson from whom Mr Smith stole the 2001 World Table-tennis trophy?’ Jameson sat up in shock. ‘But I know at the time of the murder you were watching the curling, so you need only be unregretful he is dead.’ A nervous laugh ran round the lounge.
‘Who else among us would wish this man no more? Perhaps Dr and Mrs St John? For years they ran a highly lucrative manufactory of LSD from the basement of the hospital where Dr St John was employed. For a small cut of the profits, Mr Smith had introduced them to their London contacts. But he grew greedy. He demanded more money. They were relieved when he disappeared. Now the market in Britain is more crowded, and they wish to expand their enterprise abroad. Whilst their daughter on her school skiing trip liases with the French contact, her parents try their hand in Norway. And they are most unhappy to see that Mr Smith is here. What shall they do? They pretend not to notice, but perhaps he has noticed them. Perhaps he threatens blackmail. Was that the conversation overheard by Ingrid the waitress; You have twenty-four hours to decide.’ The St Johns said nothing, but shifted uneasily in their seats. The mobile phone beeped accusingly.
‘Yet,’ the Inspector continued, ‘this theory is not quite satisfactory. Why should an icicle be employed by a couple with so many sophisticated drugs at their command? No, I could not then say conclusively that it was the St Johns.
‘Who else might it have been? Perhaps Jonathan Carey, who knew about Smith’s exploits selling spare parts from the nuclear industry to the Middle East. Or Clarissa Sheffield, whose parents he swindled out of their life savings. Either would have been strong enough wield the murder weapon, and both have no alibi.
‘Or perhaps after all it really was Erik Erikssen who was murdered. Perhaps some of you knew that Erik Erikssen, rather than Edward Smith, was involved in criminal enterprise. Morag McCulloch and Ned Henry would both have recognised his fur hat not as mink, but the pelt of the rare Siberian wolverine. They might have discovered the reason the Bulgarians were watching him; that he smuggled endangered species for fur and the pet trade. Knowing nothing of the Bulgarian surveillance, they assumed the local police were in on the trade, and as members of the radical environmental group CLAW! saw no alternative but to take the law into their own hands. With her short stature, Morag might have hidden round the corner as Erik descended the red løype, and he would not see her until it was too late. Once he had been knocked off the skidoo, it would be an easy matter for the two people to overpower him.
‘But still I think of other possibilities. What of Mr Anderson, who had once hired Edward Smith to forge certain documents to prove his ownership of valuable share certificates? He too has his motive.’
‘Are you quite finished?’ Adam Clark, the Group Two leader, burst out loudly, slapping a Waymark brochure against the table. ‘You have listed motive after motive, but motive doesn’t prove anything. Half of southern England has a motive to harm this man, and by the sound of it half Norway. But that doesn’t mean anything. You have to prove that one us actually did it.’ An angry murmur of agreement ran around the lounge. The Swedish detective nodded.
‘Indeed, that is quite correct,’ said Inspector Pjoerot. ‘And proof most conclusive you shall have. But first you will permit that I tell you of one final possibility.
‘Adam Clark.’ Clark leaned back in his seat.
‘This should be amusing.’ Again the Inspector made a slight bow, and continued.
‘You have heard how Mr Clark was a physical training instructor in the Royal Air Force. What you have not heard is that he was dishonourably discharged after a series of intelligence failings at the base where he was posted. Nothing could be absolutely proved, but there was enough to discharge him. Erik – Edward Smith – knew this, because he too had served in the armed forces and come into contact with Clark.
‘The years pass. Edward Smith’s Swindon activities are discovered, and he flees to Norway. Meanwhile, Adam Clark lives quietly in the Lake District, and some weeks a year he travels abroad as a Waymark leader. And here is an interesting pattern, because the places to which he travels are centres also of military training. Adam Clark is a Russian spy.
‘What happened, then, on Wednesday night, I believe it is this. Adam Clark has already been in Norway for a week and a half. He has met his Norwegian counterpart, and they prepare their information. But the Norwegian is nervous; he will not meet Clark at the hotel. Instead, Clark must ski out to meet him before dinner, Clark does this, and Erik notices. From his memory of Clark’s discharge from the RAF, Erik realizes what is happening. He has no loyalty to his old country – nor the new. He tries to blackmail Clark, it was this conversation that the waitress, Ingrid, overheard; Erik is not prepared to wait any longer for a resolution - and neither is Clark. That evening, with the Waymark guests safely in the hotel, he sets out for his meeting with the Norwegian, as Erik knows he will. But he sets out early, so that when Erik passes down the green circuit, Clark is waiting. Using a way marker that will later be found with traces of the skidoo’s paint upon it, he upsets the vehicle and Erik is thrown off. Erik tries to defend himself, but is stabbed with the icicle that Clark has taken with him, and upon which he leaves no fingerprints. The skidoo he runs into a snowdrift where it is soon covered. Clark returns unobserved to the hotel, and the next morning he is himself in the party that discovers the body. This is how the murder was committed.’
Adam Clark remained seated in an exaggerated posture of relaxation. ‘If you’re waiting for a confession, Inspector, you’ll wait some time. You can’t proved anything against any one of us.’
‘But that is not so,’ said Pjoerot. ‘I can prove it was you. You alone, Mr Clark, knew where Erik would be at that time. We know the murder was premeditated, but only you knew that Erik would drive along the red løype so late, because he was seeking to intercept you. You used the waymarker to toppled the skidoo. Perhaps you hoped that Erik would be pinned underneath it, but you were unlucky and he was thrown clear. From his training in the Commandos he fought most fiercely for his life. Only a man with similar training could have withstood him and you are the only one of the Waymark party who possessed such training. At length, you overpowered him and stabbed him with the icicle. No doubt you intended to dispose of it – it would have been easy to drop it in a stream and the murder weapon would vanish forever. But the fight took far longer than you had anticipated and you had to be back at the hotel for dinner. So you left the body, dumped the skidoo, and when you could not immediately lay your hand upon the icicle, which had fallen under the corpse, you retreated to the hotel. You were not concerned at this minor failure of your plan.
‘Yet you ought to have been concerned, for it is this icicle that allows us to prove absolutely that you were the murderer. You thought it the perfect weapon, but not all icicles are alike and though you left no fingerprints upon it, yet it bore a print of its own.
‘This icicle, Mr Clark, does not come from the side of the summer road, nor the crags you were so careful to lead your group past. Through chemical analysis of the ice and the mineral salts contained, we know that there is only one spring where it could have formed. Moreover, that spring is on the other side of the lake and could not have been reached since the weekend snowfall. Only someone who was here last week, as you were, could have taken it. So we were led to your bedroom and found in the snow outside the window the plastic bag in which you had wrapped the icicle and buried it in the snow – the plastic bag which on the outside was marked with your fingerprints, and on the inside were ice crystals of the same chemical composition as the murder weapon. Mr Clark, you murdered Edward Smith, alias Erik Erikssen the skidoo driver. Officers!’ The burly Norwegians at the bar rose. ‘You will arrest this man.’
‘No!’ With a shout Clark leapt to his feet. ‘You little Swedish busybody. You’ll never get me!’ With a spring like cornered tiger he launched himself over the coffee table as if to take a run for it – but he never had the chance. He had forgotten the cast iron chandeliers that hung low over the couches and has he sprang his head struck hard against the iron frame. As the clang resounded through the lounge he fell to the ground – a dead weight.
THE END
* In the version circulated to the protagonists themselves, only the 'murderer’s' real name was used.