Framed by a mysterious glass sphere in a locked study, a disgraced WWII investigator must outsmart his military mentor.
Arthur landed hard on the muddy earth, the impact jarring his teeth. He rolled, scrambling away from the house, the night air a cold shock against his face. Rain plastered his hair to his forehead.
He ran three blocks, his lungs burning, before ducking into an unheated freight depot. The vast space smelled of stale wood and diesel fumes.
He leaned against a stack of burlap sacks, wiping mud from his coat sleeve with a ragged handkerchief. His hands trembled, a familiar tremor that had finally quieted over fourteen months of sobriety. He pressed his palms together, willing the shakes to subside. Not now.
He pulled the small, grease-stained notebook from his inner coat pocket. The pages were damp, but the frantic scrawl was still legible. Helena Krol’s study, 10:14 PM. The knife. The sphere.
His eyes scanned the notes. He remembered the specific angle of Helena’s left arm, stiff and held slightly outward from her body. Rigor mortis. Not a natural position.
He calculated, fingers tracing the words on the page. A medical examiner in basic training had drilled them on post-mortem signs. Full rigor mortis typically set in after two to twelve hours. Partial rigor in the smaller muscles, like the fingers, could appear in an hour.
Her left arm had been fixed, unyielding, when he’d briefly touched her wrist to check for a pulse. It wasn’t the fresh, rubbery stiffness of someone recently deceased.
“Roughly two hours,” he murmured to the empty depot, the words puffing white in the cold air.
His mind raced. Two hours. That placed her death around 8:15 PM.
The telegram had read, “Urgent: Visit Study, 10 PM. Personal. Krol.” A direct command, not a request.
He slammed his fist lightly against his thigh. He had arrived exactly when summoned. The entire scene – the locked room, the projector, the impossible accusation – had been carefully constructed.
“She was already dead,” he whispered. “Two hours.”
His arrival, the sirens, Doyle’s pounding at the door – all of it had been perfectly timed. A meticulously engineered trap.
He pulled the 16mm film spindle from his coat, turning it over in his fingers. The tiny reels spun freely. Someone had set this up. Someone who knew his habits, his schedule, and perhaps, his precise breaking point.
He thought of Colonel Garrick, his former mentor. Garrick, who taught him how to set a trap. Garrick, who taught him how to read the silence in a room.
The cold seeped into his bones, but a different kind of chill settled deeper. The architect of this deception was not a stranger. It was someone who understood him far too well.
He had to get back to the estate. He had missed something crucial in his frantic escape.
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