Page 91 of Dead Serious Case 4 Professor Prometheus Plume

“It won’t do you any good. I’m still not giving you the code.” The professor narrows his eyes on me.

Ignoring him, I turn and walk back to his body where I lean down and tug the plastic past his face so I can use it to unlock the facial ID on the screen.

“That’s cheating!” Professor Plumes cries in outrage.

“Where did you find it?” I ask Dusty.

“In the study,” she replies. “It had fallen down between the bookcases and the back of the sofa that had been nearest to the body.”

I nod and ignore the splutters of indignation coming from the professor. “He received a call during dinner, didn’t he?” I mumble as I open up the call log. “Here it is—a call just after eighty-thirty, which matches up with the time Ellis and I both saw him leave the dining room,” I tell Danny.

“Does it say who called him?”

“He has the caller saved in his phone as Quincy.”

“That’s his agent,” Ruby says.

“It looks like the call only lasted for about fifty seconds.” Looking up, I see Danny sit a still cuffed Mr Greyson in a nearby chair and move over to stand by me. He leans over my shoulder to see the screen but doesn’t touch it as he doesn’t have any gloves on.

“Try the messages,” Danny suggests. “With the snowstorm, he might’ve lost his phone signal and tried to message instead.”

I open up the text messages and sure enough, there’s a long message from Professor Plume to his agent showing as undelivered.

“Quincy, sorry I lost signal but I heard most of what you said. I’m definitely interested in an audition. The quicker I can leave this stinking company of miscreants and no talents, the better. I’m done with dinner theatre and murder mysteries. I was destined for Shakespeare not Miss Bloody Marple. I’ll slip out and do a quick audition video and forward to you before the murder mystery begins. I doubt it’ll matter if I’m late. This place is a joke. There’s practically no staff and barely any guests to make it worthwhile. It’s only the money and the chance to see Ruby’s face when I serve her with the divorce papers and leave her stranded here that keep me from getting in my car right now and heading to London. I’ll forward the video ASAP for you to submit on my behalf.”

“You son of a bitch!” Ruby hisses at the professor’s ghost. “You were going to leave me here?”

“Please,” he scoffs. “You’ve had Grey’s dick so far down your throat at every available opportunity that I doubt you’d have even noticed I was gone.”

Tuning them out, I focus on Danny.

“Leona said all the answers are on the phone,” Danny says to me quietly. “If Plume did sneak off to the privacy of the study to video an audition, then, if we’re lucky, the phone was recording all of it and may have caught the murder.”

“It would explain why it was behind the sofa in front of the bookcase,” I say as I scroll through to the camera. “If he set it up to record and propped it on one of the shelves, it could have fallen down.”

“Stop,” Danny says, pointing to a video file on the screen. “Open that one.”

I do as he says and a close-up of Professor Plume’s face fills the screen. He sets the camera up, checking behind him to see how much of the room is in the shot, then backs up. To his left is the statue he was found lying in front of and to his right is the desk.

He steps back, clears his throat, and begins. Danny and I stand in silence as we watch the entire video through, and by the end of the clip, my eyes are wide and my mouth hangs open in disbelief.

“Oh. My. God!” I say in utter disbelief into the red face of Professor Prometheus Plume. “You accidentally stabbed yourself?”

22

“He stabbed himself?” Roger barks out a laugh. “Well, it looks like he does belong here with us after all.”

“It was an accident,” Professor Plume says sullenly. “Look, do we have to talk about it? It’s embarrassing enough as it is.”

“Uh, yes, we do,” I say. “I think the least we all deserve is an explanation after the night we’ve had.”

He clamps his lips shut and I restart the video on the phone, turning the volume up to full.

The recording starts with Professor Plume setting up the camera. He seems to adjust it on the shelf of the bookcase so he’s more fully visible. For the second time, I watch as he goes to the desk and picks up the large carving knife which even now is protruding from his ghost’s neck at a grotesque angle. Video-Professor grips the knife in his hands, closing his eyes before testing its weight, and mumbles something that sounds like lines of some sort.

After ten seconds, he opens his eyes and looks around until his gaze seems to stop at the marble statue of a young woman draped in a toga and reaching out her hand. He wedges the dagger into her hand so it points in his direction. Then he steps back and clears his throat. A few moments later, he launches into a really bad, over-the-top version of Macbeth’sIs this a dagger I see before mespeech.

I’ve already seen the rest, so I hold the phone up in front of Professor Plume so he can watch himself on the screen. After some more really bad monologuing, the moment arrives when he turns abruptly, loses his balance, and knocks into the desk. Managing to right himself, he then stumbles backwards and catches his heel on the tasselled edging of the rug. As he attempts to turn himself around, his feet tangle even more, and he pitches forward, towards the statue, and impales himself on the knife. A few horrific moments later, he drops to the floor, the knife embedded far enough that it’s pulled from the statue’s hand by the momentum of his fall.