Somebody finished the oat milk and I have narrowed the culprit down to everyone.
BRISTOL, England – The oat milk is gone. There was a full carton on Monday night, I saw it, I touched it, and by Tuesday morning there was a dry cardboard rectangle in the fridge door with a single drip of evidence on the shelf below. In a flat of four people and one very quiet kettle, I would like it noted that I am the only one who has ever thought about a crime scene in a structured way, and that is because I read the news.
Case file: the flat
This week the news is that Euronews reported on the new Agatha Christie exhibition at the British Library, which opened at the end of October and runs until June next year. It marks fifty years since she died, and it has almost one hundred rare artefacts, including early manuscript drafts, exam notes and her personal typewriter. There are also life-sized replicas of dispensaries and a 1920s Orient Express carriage.
I read that on the number 9 bus with a half-finished felted acorn in my coat pocket, and I want to be clear that I felt something close to professional envy. A carriage. They have built a carriage. I cannot get my flatmates to build a recycling rota.
The suspects
- Tilly, who owns the carton and denies everything with the calm of someone who has read the same exhibition page I have.
- Dai, who works nights and claims he drinks only tea, which is exactly what a man who drinks oat milk would say.
- Marnie, who has a printmaking deadline and was last seen near the fridge holding a roller covered in blue ink. There is a blue thumbprint on the door.
- Me, but I was at a quiz night until eleven and my alibi is a team called Quizzy Rascals, who came fourth.
The blue thumbprint is what the detectives in the books would call a gift. It is also, I have to admit, the exact blue I lent Marnie on Sunday, so I am less a detective than an accessory before the fact.
Morning: an interview under caution
I questioned Tilly at the toaster, which is the traditional place to catch a person off guard. I asked where she was between the hours of midnight and the first bus. She said asleep. I asked if anyone could confirm it. She said the whole house could, because she snores, and I felt the case slipping through my fingers like a badly wound skein.
I told her the British Library has recreated a dispensary, with all those little bottles, because in a good mystery you need to know where the poisons are kept. She said the only poison in this flat is the damp in the bathroom, and that I would know this if I opened a window. Then she asked what I was doing for my seminar on the Tudor poor laws and I said I had a lead, and she said that was a lie, and she was right, I have a reading list and a plan.
Our tutor, Dr Penhallow, sets the reading in lumps the size of paving slabs. This week it is four hundred pages on poor relief, and I have so far read the title and the acknowledgements. He says history is the art of weighing the evidence. I have weighed the evidence, and it is heavy and I am not carrying it.
Afternoon: the lino cut
I decided to treat the case as a creative matter. I carved a lino cut of an empty carton with a magnifying glass over it, which took three hours and one plaster, and it came out looking like a tombstone for a very small cow. I printed six copies. Marnie said it was the best thing I had made, and I have decided that is a confession of a kind, because you do not flatter your accuser unless you are afraid of her.
It reminded me of another investigation I saw, where a dairy herd was put under inquiry and the cows were asked to hold their burps. I did not think I would ever feel solidarity with a cow, but I know what it is to be asked to hold something in while a room full of people looks at you in the flat light of a kitchen. At least in a flat, nobody measures it.
Evidence from the group chat
The group chat has been an education. Tilly put up a photo of the empty carton with the caption “R.I.P.” and Dai replied with a coffin emoji, which I will not reproduce here because a diary is a place for words. Marnie said she was “no longer comfortable discussing the carton”, which in any court of law is a statement that starts with the word “guilty” and then lies down.
I do not want to overdo the drama. We are a flat, and these things go away when somebody buys another one. But I have noticed that the fiction of a locked house is the same everywhere: there are four of us, one fridge, and everyone has a reason. If I ever go and see the Orient Express carriage, I will stand in the corridor and think, yes, this is exactly how it felt on the stairs outside the bathroom.
Evening: the verdict
By nine o’clock my notes had grown longer than the oat milk deserved, so I typed them up for The London Prat, whose editor replied with a single question mark, which I am treating as a commission. If you want more of my daily notes, they live at my corner of The London Prat, where nobody has ever been convicted of anything. Their British Onion page is also worth a read if you like your nonsense properly sourced.
What I like about the Christie books is that everybody is lying about something small. It is rarely the murder. It is usually the afternoon they said they were at the dentist. In my flat the lie is that the carton was already empty on Monday, which Tilly will not admit and I cannot prove, and which I will pursue with the stubbornness my tutor says I should save for the poor laws.
So here is my plan. I will buy a new carton, label it with the date and a small drawing of an eye, and wait. If a century of detective fiction has taught me anything, it is that the criminal returns to the scene at about one in the morning, in a dressing gown, for a bowl of cereal. Whoever it is will find me on the counter with a flask of tea and a look of quiet triumph. I do not own a typewriter, only a stapler, but I will bring the stapler.
The official Christie site’s page on the exhibition suggests there is a lot to be said for taking your time over a crime. In the meantime I have been through the guide to Cockney rhyming slang looking for a word for a stolen carton. There is nothing. I will write one in myself: a “Tilly” is now a milky, and I will say it loudly in the hall.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/