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Monday 28th March
The miniature room was dark, cold and somewhat damp; the only light came from a stark 40 watt bulb hanging from the ceiling just above the moth-eaten wooden desk in the centre of the room.
The room was occupied by two people, one, female, about twenty years in age, sat behind the old beaten up desk in a large chair. The un-polished brass plaque on the front of the desk read –
Detective Tilleta J Clark
Assisted by – Joshua A Moore
Joshua, sat opposite Tilleta, was about two years younger, and sat watching her intently as she painted her nails.
Just then, the phone rang, making both jump, for a second or two they looked at each-other, then Joshua answered it.
“Hello?” Someone spoke on the other end
“Yes, I’ll just pass you over to her” he held the phone out towards Tilleta
“Hello?” she took the phone from him
Ten Minutes later she replaced the receiver
“Josh, we got work to do”
“Ooh”
“We got ourselves a case”
“And it is?” He was almost bouncing up and down by now; he was rather excitable for an eighteen year old
“Louise-Marie Moatie, been murdered, no weapons left behind, but she was stabbed in the leg, but a leg wound wouldn’t kill anyone”
“Mmm, sounds….sticky”
“What?”
“Sticky”
“Ffffine” she looked at her watch ’12:10’ Gone midnight as usual –I hate this job- she thought to herself.
“C’mon, we’d better be getting home, get an early start tomorrow” With a sigh she pulled on her coat and headed for the door, Josh followed hastily, pulling on his jacket as he went. He didn’t want to be left alone in the office, it scared him, it was supposed to be haunted, or so they’d been told, it smelt too.
Tuesday 29th March
Next Morning, at 6 O’clock Joshua was standing on the door-step to Tilleta’s house, ankle deep in snow, yelling through her letter box
“Tilleta! Get out here!”
Eventually she opened the door and stepped out into the snow, before locking the door behind her
“OK, Mr. What’s The Big idea?” She turned on him, eyes ablaze
“We have a mystery to try and solve”
“Do we?” She looked at him questioningly, she’d slept since being aware of the mystery “Oh yeah” She Remembered
“I have a theory” Josh announced triumphantly as usual
“Hmm?” They started walking towards the office building where they rented the smallest room possible.
“Yeah” He was amazingly cheery, which wasn’t un-usual, except at just after ^ in the morning on a Tuesday “Yeah, my theory is, she was having an affair with her father, she got pregnant, and committed suicide, but made it look like murder” He was still grinning and bouncing beside her
She rolled her eyes and shook her head
“That’s all impossible Josh you doofus”
“How?”
“I had her file waiting for me when I got home last night, it said her father died when she was 7, she wasn’t pregnant, so, my dear friend, all of what you just said, is just a story you thought up”
“Oh….well it WAS a theory” He’d stopped bouncing and grinning
“I think we should go and see her mother, see if she knows anything”
“Mmm, sounds like a good idea”
An hour later, they still had little more information in the case; all they found out was that Louise-Marie had a steady boy-friend, who they next visit, with a little more success.
“I was supposed to go and see her today, because I’m going on holiday tomorrow you see.
But there was this bloke who seemed to follow us wherever we went if we went out together, scruffy, tramp-like bloke, never knew his name, he was always staring at Louise though”
After gaining that small piece of information they left the house hastily and made their way to the nearest, cheap hotel where they sat up together mulling over all the possible answers until just gone 11:30. Josh fell asleep stretched out on the single bed while Tilleta lay on the sofa staring at the ceiling. At around midnight, she got up and –always being the more curious of the two- crept out to have a ‘look around’.
One door caught her eye, it was the only door in the building with an un-polished plaque on it, the plaque read ‘103’ in the curliest readable script possible.
She glanced around, no body there, she turned the handle, it was un-locked, she slipped in.
Room ‘103’ was actually room ‘100’, but it was never used, which was why the door was always un-locked, from the out-side, from the in-side you just had to pray that someone would come along and open the door from the outside, because there was no way you could open it from the inside.
It was dark inside; there were no lights, not even a light-switch. Tilleta could still see though, but she wished she couldn’t. As she went further into the room the worse things she saw, she finally turned back when she saw a hug spider with blood dripping from its fangs. On the way back she glimpsed a clown with a supercilious grin on its face, a speeding car and a huge fire engulfing the house she’d lived in for several years. She stopped just as she got to where the door should have been, however, there was no door, all there was, was a long-haired scruffy looking male figure leaning over a pretty blonde girl who was staring wide-eyed into his face, mouth open as if screaming. The figure leaning over her had initials embroidered on his jacket sleeve ‘M.S.’. Tilleta tried to get to the door again; she moved on a little further, she stared at what she saw.
By this time Joshua was looking for her, he’d heard a scream and a door close just before it, but didn’t know where, he knew the scream to be Tilleta’s though.
She stared, no longer screaming, slowly she sank to her knees and buried her head in her hands shaking it and trying to forget what she’d seen.
“I’m giving up this bloody job!” she cried.
There was only one thing that could make her want to give up her job –which she loved-, and that was the lifeless body of her best friend, her colleague, the one she loved.
The door opened just as she said she was giving up her job, and the light from the corridor streamed in.
“Hey, what you doin’ down there?”
She looked up and stared at Josh, wide-eyed
“I….I...Thought you’d…you’d….” she trailed off
“You OK?”
“I….yeah” She got to her feet, dusted her knees off and hastily left the room closing the door tightly behind her
“Then what happened?”
“I don’t know….I just…saw stuff…like hallucinations-No, I haven’t been sniffing the nail varnish again- but this stuff, it looked…real”
“Hmm”
“And” she took a breath and looked at him as if to say –please don’t think I’ve totally lost my mind- “I know who killed Louise-Marie”
“WHAT?!”
“Not so loud”
“So, why did you say ‘I’m giving up this bloody job’?”
“Well, I saw….I saw…you, but you were all dead and stuff”
“Eurgh”
“And don’t tell me you’re so blind-“
“Yes, I know, I know, you like me”
She looked surprised
“You….you had noticed”
“Well, you don’t exactly hide it do you?”
“Well…no, you’re right”
By that time they’d reached the door to their own room, where they both promptly fell asleep.
It took a week for that conversation to sink in, Louise-Marie’s murderer had been sentenced to a life-time of misery and Tilleta was just enjoying watching one of her all time favourite films. She sat bolt-upright though when the leading lady said ‘I’m scared of walking out of this room and never feeling the same way I do, when I’m with you!’ Then she spent the next two and a half minutes laughing hysterically.
Before hearing those lines she’d been feeling lost, empty and lonely, but hearing them jogged her memory, it was with a ‘happy finger’ she pressed the ‘play movie’ button on her DVD remote for the second time that evening. Her whole world was finally looking less grim.
Josh on the other hand, had a totally different idea of relaxing, preferring to attack a drum-kit he kept in his garage along to the sound of some of the loudest rock music around. 10 minutes into the longest version of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Moby Dick’ which he was practicing, he stopped and pulled the headphones off his head and stared at the wall opposite him, he’d covered it in various photo’s, magazine and newspaper clippings, old records that he’d played to death but couldn’t bear to get rid of, and other bits of paper. He always tried to concentrate on a single picture, record or other object while playing his drums, and he’d chosen a photo of Tilleta this time. He too was almost instantly as high as a kite, and of course, for the first time in ages, he managed to play the whole of ‘Moby Dick’ without a problem, except for the four sticks parts.
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