The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries And Impossible Crimes

I nodded. This was a low-key autopsy. The man had died in furtherance of a crime, but there was nothing suspicious about the death, so instead of senior detectives, SOCOs, forensic scientists and photographers, there was just me to represent law and order.

Cosy.

“I’m supposed to go back with a set of fingerprints.”

“No problem,” said Dr Leggatt. “We’ll start with that. You can help Norman if you like.”

Norman was his assistant.

“I’d rather keep my distance.”

“Fair enough. Shall we go in, then?”

I fixed my gaze on the wall opposite while the fingerprints were taken. Norman brought them over to me and said I could stand closer if I wished.

I nodded and stayed where I was. They were still examining the body for external signs when I started to feel wobbly. I found a chair.

“Can you see from there?” the pathologist called across.

“As much as I want to.”

“Stand on the chair if you wish.”

“Coronary,” said Dr Leggatt when he finally removed his latex gloves.

“Natural causes, then?”

He smiled at the phrase. “Any middle-aged bloke who holds up post offices lays himself open to a fatal adrenaline response and sudden death. I’d call it an occupational hazard.”

Some people call me cussed, others pig-headed. I don’t particularly mind. These are qualities you need in police work. I refused to draw a line under the case.

Everything checked except Zara’s statement. The fingerprints taken at the autopsy matched the prints we had from Soames’s file at the National Identification Service. His mugshot was exactly like the man his wife and girlfriend had identified and the pathologist had dissected.

I tried discussing it with my boss, but Johnny was relentless. “Constable, you’re making a horse’s arse of yourself. Soames is dead. You attended the autopsy. What other proof do you want?”

“If he had a twin, or a double-”

“We’d have heard. Drop it, lad. Zara may be a charmer, but she’s an unreliable witness.”

“I know it sounds impossible-”

“So leave it out.”

I was forced to press on without official back-up. I won’t bore you with all the theories I concocted and dismissed. In the end it came down to whether Zara could be believed. And after hours of wrestling with the problem I thought of a way of checking her statement. She’d told me Soames had said he was going to the Benefits Office after he left her. If they had a record of his visit - after he’d died – Zara would be vindicated.

I called the Benefits people and got a helpful woman who offered to check their records of Monday’s interviews.

She called back within the hour. Zilch.

I was down, down there with the Titanic.

Then something triggered in my brain. I asked the woman, “Do you have security cameras?”

“Sure.”

“Inside the office?”

“Yes.”

I drove down there and started watching videotapes.

“Guv, I’d like you to look at this.”

“What is it?”

“Pretty sensational I’d call it.”

I ran the video. Two sergeants from CID who remembered Soames from before he went to prison came in to look. The screen showed tedious views of people waiting their turn to speak to the staff. I pressed “Fast Forward”, then slowed it to “Play”.

“Look behind the rows of seats.”

A slight man with straight, silver-streaked hair came into shot and hesitated. He stared at one of the desks where a young woman was being interviewed, partially screened from the rest of the room. He took a step to the right, apparently to get a better view of what was going on.

I touched the “Freeze Frame” and held a mugshot of Soames against the screen. “How about that, guys?”

“My God, it could be him.”

“No question,” said one of the sergeants. “The face, the way he moves, everything.”

“And look at the time.”

The digits at the bottom right of the screen were frozen at 10:32.

“All right. Joke over,” said Johnny. “How did you fix it?”

“I didn’t. This is on the level.”

“Run it again.”

White-faced and muttering, my boss continued to stare at the screen until the figure of Soames turned away and walked out of shot.

“That man died at 9.20. It can’t be.”

“It must be.”

We spent the next half-hour debating the matter. Johnny Horgan, desperate to make sense of the impossible, dredged up a theory involving false identification. Zara had lied when she came to view the body: Soames had put her up to it, seeing an opportunity to “die” and get a new name, and maybe plastic surgery, before resuming his criminal career. She, the dumb blonde, had stupidly blown his cover when I called on her.

It was a daft theory. How had he persuaded his wife Felicity, who had shopped him, to join in the deception? And why would he be so foolish as to parade in front of cameras in the Benefits Office?

“Anyroad,” Johnny said when his theory was dead in the water, “we can’t waste time on it. The post office job was the crime. Attempted robbery. There’s no argument that the robber died of a coronary, whether he was Jack Soames or bloody Bill Sikes. The case is closed.”

For me, it was still wide open. While the arguments were being tossed around, my mind was on a different tack. What had Soames been up to in the Benefits Office? He hadn’t been interviewed, so he didn’t collect a payout.

When the others had left the room, I ran the video again and made a stunning discovery. There had been a crime, and it was far more serious than a botched hold-up. Zara hadn’t lied to me; hadn’t even made a mistake. Impossible, it had seemed, because none of us made the connection. I slipped out of the building.

I found Felicity Soames in her place of work – at one of the desks in the Benefits Office. “It took a while for the penny to drop,” I told her. “I was in here this morning to examine the security videos and I didn’t spot you.”

“Were you expecting me to be here?”

“To be honest, no. You told me you were a civil servant, but I didn’t link it with this. You must have had a shock like a million volts when your husband walked in here on Monday.”

She flinched at the memory. “I was terrified. He stood staring at me, putting the fear of God in me.”