it hasn’t gone all the way. The laptop is surrounded on all sides by cheap-looking biros, empty and half-empty coffee mugs, and scattered papers: handwritten notes, ideas jotted down.
Pushed back from the desk is a standard black office-style swivel chair, and lolling in the chair, his head leaning to the left, is a dead man. While alive, he was well known and—though this might well have nothing to do with anything—strikingly attractive in a stubbly, cowboy-without-a-hat kind of way. If I were to include his name in this account, I think most people would have heard of him. Some of you might shudder and say, ‘Oh, not that vile bigot!’ or, more light-heartedly, ‘Not that ridiculous attention-seeker!’ Others would think, ‘Oh, I love him – he says all the things I’m too scared to say.’ Our dead body is (was) somebody who inspired strong feelings, you see. So strong that he got himself murdered.
How was he killed? Well, this is the interesting part. The murder process comprised several stages. First, he was immobilised. His arms were pulled behind the back of his chair and taped together at the wrists. The same was done to his ankles, which were taped together round the pole of the chair’s base, beneath the seat. Then his murderer stood behind him and brought a heavy object down on his head, rendering him unconscious. The police found this object on the floor beside the dead man’s desk: it was a metal kitchen-knife sharpener. It didn’t kill our well-known man (the pathologist told the police after examining the body), though it would have made an excellent murder-by-bludgeoning weapon, being more than heavy enough to do the job. However, it seems that although the killer was happy to use the knife sharpener to knock his victim out, he did not wish to use it to murder him.
There was a knife in the room too, but it had not been used to stab the dead man. Instead, it was stuck to his face with parcel tape. Specifically, it was stuck to his closed mouth, completely covering it. The tape—of which there was plenty—also completely covered the lower part of the murder victim’s face, including his nose, causing him to suffocate to death. The knife’s blade, flat against the dead man’s mouth, was sharp. Forensics found evidence that it had been sharpened in the room, and detectives suspect that this happened after the victim was bound to the chair and unconscious.
Above the fireplace, on the wall between two bookshelf-filled alcoves, someone had written in big red capital letters, ‘HE IS NO LESS DEAD.’ I imagine that the first police to arrive at the scene took one look at that and leaped to a mistaken conclusion: that the red words had been written in the victim’s blood. Then, seconds later, they might have noticed a tin of paint and a red-tipped brush on the floor and made a more informed guess that turned out to be correct: the words on the wall were written in paint. Dulux’s Ruby Fountain 2, for anyone who is interested in the details and doesn’t already know them.
Detectives examined the dead man’s laptop, I assume. They would have found this surprisingly easy because the killer had red-painted, ‘Riddy111111,’ on a blank sheet of white A4 paper that was lying on the desk. This was the well-known man’s password and would have led police straight to his hushmail inbox. There they’d have found a new, unopened message from a correspondent by the name of No Less Dead, with an email address to match. There were no words in the message, only a photograph of someone standing in the room beside the unconscious, not-yet-deceased victim, wearing what looked like a protective suit from a Hollywood film about biological outbreaks—the sort that covers the head and body of the person wearing it. The killer’s eyes would presumably have been visible if he or she hadn’t taken care to turn away from the camera; as it was, the picture showed a completely unidentifiable person with one
Pushed back from the desk is a standard black office-style swivel chair, and lolling in the chair, his head leaning to the left, is a dead man. While alive, he was well known and—though this might well have nothing to do with anything—strikingly attractive in a stubbly, cowboy-without-a-hat kind of way. If I were to include his name in this account, I think most people would have heard of him. Some of you might shudder and say, ‘Oh, not that vile bigot!’ or, more light-heartedly, ‘Not that ridiculous attention-seeker!’ Others would think, ‘Oh, I love him – he says all the things I’m too scared to say.’ Our dead body is (was) somebody who inspired strong feelings, you see. So strong that he got himself murdered.
How was he killed? Well, this is the interesting part. The murder process comprised several stages. First, he was immobilised. His arms were pulled behind the back of his chair and taped together at the wrists. The same was done to his ankles, which were taped together round the pole of the chair’s base, beneath the seat. Then his murderer stood behind him and brought a heavy object down on his head, rendering him unconscious. The police found this object on the floor beside the dead man’s desk: it was a metal kitchen-knife sharpener. It didn’t kill our well-known man (the pathologist told the police after examining the body), though it would have made an excellent murder-by-bludgeoning weapon, being more than heavy enough to do the job. However, it seems that although the killer was happy to use the knife sharpener to knock his victim out, he did not wish to use it to murder him.
There was a knife in the room too, but it had not been used to stab the dead man. Instead, it was stuck to his face with parcel tape. Specifically, it was stuck to his closed mouth, completely covering it. The tape—of which there was plenty—also completely covered the lower part of the murder victim’s face, including his nose, causing him to suffocate to death. The knife’s blade, flat against the dead man’s mouth, was sharp. Forensics found evidence that it had been sharpened in the room, and detectives suspect that this happened after the victim was bound to the chair and unconscious.
Above the fireplace, on the wall between two bookshelf-filled alcoves, someone had written in big red capital letters, ‘HE IS NO LESS DEAD.’ I imagine that the first police to arrive at the scene took one look at that and leaped to a mistaken conclusion: that the red words had been written in the victim’s blood. Then, seconds later, they might have noticed a tin of paint and a red-tipped brush on the floor and made a more informed guess that turned out to be correct: the words on the wall were written in paint. Dulux’s Ruby Fountain 2, for anyone who is interested in the details and doesn’t already know them.
Detectives examined the dead man’s laptop, I assume. They would have found this surprisingly easy because the killer had red-painted, ‘Riddy111111,’ on a blank sheet of white A4 paper that was lying on the desk. This was the well-known man’s password and would have led police straight to his hushmail inbox. There they’d have found a new, unopened message from a correspondent by the name of No Less Dead, with an email address to match. There were no words in the message, only a photograph of someone standing in the room beside the unconscious, not-yet-deceased victim, wearing what looked like a protective suit from a Hollywood film about biological outbreaks—the sort that covers the head and body of the person wearing it. The killer’s eyes would presumably have been visible if he or she hadn’t taken care to turn away from the camera; as it was, the picture showed a completely unidentifiable person with one
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