Page 35 of Murder Most Haunted

The doctor’s words had aggravated the feeling of displacement Midge had awoken with.

While she embroidered, her mind wandered back to the discovery of Rendell’s body.

Shuffling back over her memory of the bathing room, she had a feeling one of the items catalogued from the murder scene did not fit – and for Midge, that only ever meant one thing.

The scene in the bathing room was staged. Of that she had no doubt.

Midge found herself slipping into her usual routine, thinking about the hows rather than the whys as she drew the cotton through the material. If something was staged, then inevitably, at some point, an object would be out of its natural place. All she needed to do was work out which object.

Leaving the others to bicker over the last sausage, and feeling more purposeful than she had in some time, she made her excuses, packed up her stitching and returned to the bathing room. Taking a deep breath, she opened the wooden door and stepped inside.

Rendell’s eyes were fixed forward, staring directly at her as she entered, the rest of his body blanketed in snow, like some grotesque parody of a snowman.

For a moment, she was overwhelmed with memories of the younger detective and grabbed on to the door to steady herself, feeling comfort in the grain of the wood.

Forcing her eyes to the ground, she moved slowly over to the side of the bath, taking care to avoid the water on the floor.

With a groan, she knelt. On the floor just next to Midge’s protesting knee was the tiny brass door key, as she remembered.

There had been something about it that had jarred with her when they had first found the body.

Now, looking up at the door from where she knelt, her suspicions were confirmed.

The wood was heavily splintered where Rona had broken the lock but the keyhole was still visible.

Midge reached inside her pocket and regretfully pulled out a delicate candlewick-embroidered handkerchief that she had been particularly proud of.

Swivelling on her throbbing knee, she gently picked up the key with the handkerchief, taking care not to touch any part of it with her fingers.

Grunting slightly, she leaned forward and inserted the key into the lock from the bathroom side.

It was almost entirely swallowed by the keyhole.

Midge tried moving it around. The key was so tiny it was unable to trigger any of the locking mechanism.

A thought suddenly occurred to her, and she rummaged through her trouser pocket to find her own bedroom key. Once she had it, she shuffled round to the corridor side of the door and gently placed the bedroom key inside the lock on the outside of the door. It fitted but wouldn’t turn.

Instead of removing it, Midge gritted her teeth against the pain and shuffled over the tiles back round again to push the smaller key from the floor into the other side of the keyhole. She moved her hand away.

They could both fit in at the same time.

Midge carefully pulled out the smaller key with the handkerchief and tucked it into her pocket, satisfied that she had found the object that didn’t belong.

Now Midge had a real problem to sink her teeth into.

Where had this false key come from? And who had put it there?