This excerpt is from the book entitled The Goat Parva Murders an English Murder Mystery book set in the countryside, starring two policemen who have been working together for a few years and get along really well. There’s lots of dialogue and banter with some humour thrown in amongst the murders and suspects.
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“I’ll carry on looking,” replied Barnes half-heartedly.
“Yeh, do that.”
Barnes looked in the kitchen and noted a pile of wood next to an old stove. Having recently watched a Hercule Poirot mystery on TV, he examined all the pieces of wood at the bottom of the pile to see if any of them were false. There weren’t any but it introduced an element of excitement into the otherwise tedious search. He looked in the loose tea leaves for memory sticks and in the biscuit barrel for CDs. With relief he eventually heard Knowles striding downstairs.
“This is strange,” said Knowles, picking up a biscuit from the table, “there’s nothing wrong here at all – yet we know that Davis was watching other people through binoculars and almost certainly taking pictures too, so where are these pictures?”
“All in complete contrast to Clem Shapiro of course.”
“Like chalk and cheese they are.”
“Should we take Davis’ computer for examination?”
“Absolutely, but I doubt there will be anything on the hard drive, it will be on CDs and what are those thin things called?”
“Memory sticks.”
“I need one of those for myself – where would you keep those pervert’s things so that you can access them easily, but other people can’t?”
“How about his police locker at the station?”
“Good place to start, but perhaps slightly too obvious. Still it should be checked so get the duty sergeant to do it or one of his constables.”
“A safety deposit box or a PO Box somewhere – do we still have those in Scoresby’s main Post Office?”
“Good ideas – I’d prefer a PO Box because you can send yourself items through the post and then go and pick them up whenever it suits. Or other people can if you give them the key so that material can be shared and then when you’ve finished with the materials you can send them back again via the post.”
“Especially if you print on labels and don’t use handwriting to avoid identifying yourself. Come to think of it…” said Barnes and then walked back into the living room. He came back clutching some labels he’d found by the printer. “…I knew those labels looked odd on their own without any envelopes or packets.”
“Post Office Box it is then – try Scoresby PO first and see if either Davis, Shapiro, or that Herald woman has a box there – if not you might have to travel further afield. Don’t forget they might have been sharing info, so a combination of their names Davis-Shapiro or something equally silly might have been used to book the box.”
Julian Worker Fiction Writing 