Castle didn’t seem convinced.
“I’ve just confirmed this fact with Dr. Taylor,” Kennedy said. “He had spotted a few telltale physical signs — hair loss, mouth ulcers, the victim’s clothes too big for him — and then there were the strong painkillers, in his desk, sir. Dr. Taylor was convinced the autopsy would confirm the cancer. He wasn’t exactly sure how advanced the cancer was, but Taylor reckoned Adams had six months max.”
“No?”
“Yes,” Kennedy replied immediately, “and that does make everything else fall into place, doesn’t it?”
Castle said nothing.
So Kennedy offered, “Let me talk you through the entire scenario.”
They crossed the road and Kennedy continued, “Adams had been dumped by his girlfriend, the second girlfriend in a row — that we know of — to dump him. He’d already admitted that he was not above taking revenge on an ex; he slashed his previous girlfriend’s tires, didn’t he? Not just one tire, mind you, but all four of them! He also told Ms. Siddons that he would have smashed his ex’s car window with a brick if he hadn’t been disturbed. With Ms. Judy Siddons he saw a way of taking advantage of — and possibly even cheating — his own horrible fatal disease.”
Castle started to protest, but Kennedy cut him off at the pass.
“Okay, let’s imagine his approach. First off, although he’d been fighting with Darren Branson and Judy Siddons, suddenly he had a change of heart and invited Darren up to his top-floor flat to discuss the sale of the property. While enjoying the wine and cheese, he probably offered Darren the bread knife to cut the freshly baked, very hard-crusted bread. Darren unwittingly left a perfect set of fingerprints on the knife.
“Adam Adams changed his will barely a week ago to include — and incriminate — Judy and, by association, Darren.
“Earlier this evening, after he heard Ms. Siddons returning to her flat, he slid his sofa along to clear some wall space. In doing so, he left incriminating marks on the carpet. He also knocked over the lamp, and indirectly — via his coffee table — marked the side of his desk. Next he started to kick up a bit of a racket — you know, shouting and screaming, faking an argument, to draw Ms. Siddons’s attention. He alternated between his own voice and, in contrast, a bass voice.
“For the next part of his plan, Adams positioned himself, back close to the wall, in the space he had just created, and — by holding the blade of the knife between the thumb and forefinger of his hand, bent up behind his back — he rested the butt of the recently fingerprinted knife against the wall. He leant against the blade and let the weight of his body do the rest.
“The more he leant against the knife, the more it slid into his body. The degree he had to lean against the wall ensured that the knife entered his back at an angle. Dr. Taylor also confirmed that the knife was positioned to do maximum damage to the heart. Deed done, Adams lost consciousness and slid down the wall to the floor. The mark down part of the wall confirmed this. Dr. Taylor reckoned Adams would have died within a matter of minutes. The main flaw in his attempt to stage his murder was that he had to ensure his door was locked, otherwise Ms. Siddons could have run in on him when she heard the commotion.
“But I do think he thought he’d gotten away with it. You know, that in his own way he’d cheated his pending awful, cancer-ridden death. Did you notice the look on his face? It might just be my imagination, but that was a look of satisfaction — I don’t think I’ve ever come across such a con-tented-looking corpse before.”
“Goodness, Kennedy.”
Great, Kennedy thought, happy that they were moving away from the “Detective Inspector” title, at least for the time being.
“But how on earth did you know?” Castle asked.
“Well, there were a few things which tipped me off,” Kennedy started, greatly encouraged that they had now clearly turned a comer. “First off, Judy Siddons didn’t hear any of the doors closing. She’d been quite candid about everything else, so why lie about that? In fact, sir, as you yourself suggested, if she had been involved, it would have made more sense for her to have claimed she’d heard both the door to Adams’s flat, and the downstairs door to the street being slammed.”
“Good point, I hadn’t really considered that.”
“Also, if we go back to the corpse for a moment, there were two important clues there — three really, if we consider the gorge the handle of the knife made on the wall as Adams slid down to the floor. If you think about it, if you stab someone in the back then, logically, you have to be behind him or her before you do it. Adams was found against the wall. There’d have been no room for anyone to have been behind him. Yes, he possibly could have stumbled and fell after being stabbed, but if he’d been stabbed by someone in the centre of the room, gravity would have dictated that he would have fallen into the wall face first.”
“Yes... okay, that makes sense as well,” Castle agreed.
“But the final, and by far the most important, point is the position of the incriminating fingerprints on the handle of the knife,” Kennedy continued, pulling a pen from his breast pocket and grabbing it in his hand as if it were a knife. “For Adams to be stabbed the way he appears to have been stabbed, you’d have had to hold the knife in your fist like this and raise it above your head and stab like so.” Kennedy motioned with his raised hand to emphasise the point. “However, if you did grab the knife just so, then your thumbprint would be found on the other end of the butt — the furthest end from the blade. But our fingerprint chap found a clear thumbprint here,” Kennedy indicated, again on his pen, by pointing to a position on the butt, right by the make-believe blade. He swung his hand in an underarm arc to emphasise the point.
Castle looked on, taking it all in and nodding agreement.
“So, if I’m to grab the knife handle the way the fingerprints confirm it was grabbed, then, as you see, it would be impossible to stab someone from the overhead angle.”
“You’re absolutely correct,” Castle agreed.
“But this is the position one would hold a knife if one were to, say... cut bread or cheese, for instance.”
“Brilliant,” Castle started, “just brilliant. I think you...”
“And then there are a few other more circumstantial things,” Kennedy said, interrupting Castle’s praise. Praise was not something the detective inspector had ever been comfortable with. “Like why would a murderer stab someone and then leave their fingerprints on the knife? And equally, why would Mr. Adams leave his entire worldly, not to mention substantial, possessions to his ex-girlfriend? The same ex-girlfriend who’d recently dumped him and who was about to marry someone else, the same someone else Mr. Adams had openly fought with? Why would Mr. Adams accommodate her with all his wealth a week before his death? That is, of course, if he hadn’t worked out an elegant plan to set her and her husband-to-be up?”
“Revenge! Excellent motive, Christy, excellent. We’ve not been out of the station an hour and you’ve solved a murder,” Castle enthused.
“Don’t you mean suicide, sir?” Kennedy suggested, politely correcting his superior.
“Yes... yes... of course,” Castle agreed, as Kennedy returned pen to jacket pocket. “I enjoyed being out with you on this case. It was invaluable to me. I discovered the secret of your success, Christy.”