The Journal of Jonathon Lindey From the main part of the journal - Page 12
On explaining my errand at the precinct station I was immediately ushered in to see a detective. He was sitting at a desk heaped with papers. The desk and two similar ones were crammed into a very small office, but the occupants of the other two desks were not to be seen. Moving a large file off the chair, he invited me to sit down and told me he was glad to see me alive. "We had thought you were buried under the rubble", he explained. He pressed a bell to summon a messenger. The boy was instructed to go to the scene of the explosion and tell the sergeant in charge that the search could be abandoned. "Now then...", he said, looking at me in a very direct fashion. I felt a twinge of guilt. Not that I had done anything wrong, but who doesn't feel guilty when a policeman looks at you in that fashion! "Suppose you tell me your story, and then I'll see what I can add to it from our own investigations." So I told him the whole story, starting from the moment when I noticed the strangeness in the Crystal Falls census data. He listened carefully, making notes and only interrupting once. The interruption was when I reached the part where I spoke with the policeman investigating the attempted grave robbery. "Did you tell this story to the policeman?" he asked. I told him, "No", and explained that I didn't think I would be believed. He looked at me sternly and asked how I thought the police could investigate crime if witnesses withheld crucial information. He pressed a bell, a clerk appeared and was asked to retrieve the file on the attempted grave robbery. I finished my tale and sat waiting while he finished writing up his notes. As he did so the file he had requested arrived. Taking up the file he leafed through it. "Yes", he said, "it is as I thought. The officer investigating decided it was probably medical students from the hospital looking for bodies to practice on." He smiled suddenly, "But we know better, don't we?" "And furthermore, I can add two other pieces of information, of which you are currently unaware. First, your landlady was still alive when I reached the scene of the explosion, and I was able to speak to her before she expired, God rest her soul." He held up his hand as I started to interrupt. "And second, I am convinced it wasn't gas that caused the explosion!" I must have looked like a half-wit as I stared at him thunderstruck. "Not gas?", was all I managed get out. "No", he said, "let me explain." Pulling out his tobacco pouch he proceeded to methodically fill, and then light, a capacious meerschaum. While he did this he recounted his side of the story. |
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