Half Moon Investigations - Eoin Colfer [46]
*
I stood in that room, dizzy with failure. Everything I had learned had brought me to this moment, and now I felt useless. The badge in my pocket was just a lump of metal. It meant nothing if I couldn’t solve this mystery.
I had a bunch of files. Crimes that had been committed against the youth of Lock. The youth. That was the only connection, but it wasn’t enough. There were too many young people in Lock to check them all. Some of the victims were in the same school. St Jerome’s. But not all. Most were teenagers, but now Isobel French came dancing along in her twenties.
What else? There must be something else?
I wasn’t tall. I wasn’t cool. I couldn’t play sports. Being a detective was all I could do. All that made me different.
Something. Some connection. What was it?
I scanned over the files again. Running my fingers under each line. Checking birth dates. Addresses. Star signs. Anything. But I was wasting my time. It was impossible to group all the victims in one bunch. It was useless. I was useless.
Bernstein says: Sometimes you know things that you don’t know you know. Trust your subconscious. Let your instinct guide you.
This had always sounded a bit ‘Use the Force’ for me, but I was desperate. Maybe my subconscious already knew what was happening here. All I had to do was let the knowledge flow through me. Somehow.
Count Albert Renard, the famous French criminologist, used several exercises to free his subconscious. One involved a map and a set of darts. When he couldn’t figure out where his prey was hiding, he would blindfold himself and throw a dart at a map of Paris. Very often the dart led the gendarmes to the correct address. Renard reasoned that his subconscious had already figured out the problem, and he didn’t have the time to wait for the rest of his mind to catch up.
Could this technique work on photographs?
I printed off A4-sized prints of the file photos, tacking them to the wall. The closest thing to a dart in the room was a school compass in my pencil case.
This is ridiculous, I told myself, as I pulled a pillowcase over my head. It can’t possibly work.
I stood two metres from the pictures, peeking out from under the pillowcase until I had my general bearings.
Please don’t let Red come in now. Please.
I dropped the pillowcase over my face. All I could see was a pale disc of light from the bulb and the crisscross pattern of the cotton material.
I stood there for a minute, trying to summon my inner thoughts or my instincts or whatever, then pulled my arm back and fired. The compass bounced off the wall and whizzed past my ear. What was my subconscious trying to tell me? Give it up, you fool, before you lobotomize yourself.
I persevered, throwing the compass half a dozen more times until finally I scored a hit. The compass stuck deep and was still quivering when I pulled off the pillowcase. The point was buried in April’s photo. It had amazingly missed April and May in the photo’s foreground and lodged in the forehead of a small girl by the school door. Another one of the victims. Mercedes Sharp.
‘Ooh,’ I winced, plucking out the missile. Lucky it was only a photograph. ‘Sorry about that.’
I examined the girl with the hole in her forehead. She was smiling, but it wasn’t the typical girl smile. There was something mean in the way those teeth were clenched.
You’re imagining it, I told myself. Seeing what you want to see.
I hurried back to the computer, using Photoshop to crop the picture until only Mercedes remained. She didn’t look so pretty, wearing a sneer. Her hair was jet black and pigtailed and she wore a belted blazer over her uniform.
Was there something about this photo? Or was this a monumental waste of time?
I pored over the picture, looking for some clue. Any clue. Mercedes wore patent shoes and a corduroy book bag slung diagonally across her chest. A single white headphone earpiece trailed from under the book bag’s flap.
Something. Give me something. Maybe I should throw the compass again. Keep throwing until there was more hole than paper.
‘So,