...Her loss
Not every murder has a reason. Forget whatever you’ve learnt. Let yourself become an empty vessel for what I am trying to pour into those silly little brains of yours without a single word of complaint and /listen/. Do not approach a dead body loaded with knowledge, for information sometimes turns to nothing but noise. On some occasions, rare as they might be, not all can merely be reduced to means, opportunity and motive. Focus on what you can see, but know that the webs some weave are far more intricate than what the naked eye can detect. You see, some spiders are immune to poison.
Her body was lying on the red frayed carpet on supine position, arms and legs outstretched in perfect symmetry, her red hair arranged around her head like a fiery halo, or a crown. Her skin was unnaturally pale – as that of most corpses – giving her the appearance of a wax doll. If dummies could dream peacefully in their wooden sleep, they would look exactly like her: almost human. Whatever turns a mass of flesh and bone into a person had left her not too long ago.
But let’s for once abandon all attempts at poetry and metaphor. These are the facts: a woman in her twenties had been killed. Why was I certain she had been killed, you ask? For starters, symmetry in nature is an illusion. And that is what she was, an illusion. Nobody dies as peaceful, as aesthetically pleasing, as perfectly artificial. Upon a first inspection from the forensic team at Scotland Yard, right after I had observed the scene untouched, it became clear the lady in question – who shall remain unnamed, for her name is unnecessary to this plot and you shall see why in time – had not been bludgeoned, stabbed, shot, or asphyxiated. Her body was intact, except for the fact that she was not breathing. The stiffness on her eyelids and facial muscles suggested she had passed barely two to three hours ago, the initial flaccidness of her body had not left room for the onset of rigor mortis in the rest of her body yet. The discolorations on her left arm and leg spoke of her body being moved an hour after her demise: she had originally been lying on her side. Her skin had been scrubbed clean and smelled of flowers. Dear reader, I shall pose a question to you. What lies on her side and is dead with no visible signs of a certain cause of death?
The answer is, of course, a poison victim. The victim of a toxin that leaves no traces of its presence upon first sight, except for a slight frown of pain the murderer had failed to obscure when he or she presented this red-headed doll as an offering. Should you want to preserve the body as clean as possible for its following quick display, you – the murderer – would take the precaution of turning the victim to her side so that she could vomit and writhe without any danger of pollution. No need to change the muslin dress, only to ready the dancer – for that was what her legs and toes suggested she was – for her final show.
The cause of death revealed itself when they opened her mouth. Folded in quarters, a note in print read “HEMLOCK HER LOSS”. A further test proved cicuta – commonly known as “water hemlock”, a highly poisonous plant in the Apiaceae family – to be the reason for her demise.
Means, opportunity and motive. Truth is the red-headed doll was a prop from beginning to end. An offering. A tribute. Or more accurately, a gift. The dead mouse a cat lays at the feet of its owner once it is done playing. A girl found somewhere, not far, made to eat a poisonous plant and to die a painful death for my eyes only. She did not matter, and should I had been someone else, the reason why would have never been found.
I am the reason. I am the motive. The means were merely a game. The opportunity doesn’t matter, nor the victim, her fire-like hair, her life taken to an end far too soon only to satisfy an ego.
Some webs can be overlooked when the cleaner doesn’t pay attention. Lurking in a corner, the laborious spider weaves and spins its thread of corruption and mayhem. Sometimes, it embroiders my name into the web to remind me of its existence. To lure me out. To try to weave and spin around me as if I was a fly.
H E M L O C K H E R L O S S
S H E R L O C K H O L M E S
