A wilting.

My wife believed the world was flat. One day she started walking. She never came back. 

I left my apartment, torch in hand but had no batteries so turned back around. My fizzled out mourns gave way to rapid yawns as I sank into the dent of my reupholstered tent and faced the tv with two mugs of boiling hot tea. The blank screen didn't blink. Neither did my wife. 

As the sun yawned with the world, my phone rang twice. 

"…found at Meadowjack." 

My wife, dead, hadn't even escaped our cul-de-sac. 

Detective Vents. Eyebrows rose and sweaty cheeks flushed as I prowled towards her. My love, my all, lay like a crumpled rose. Her thorns had been plucked. She didn't even smile as if she deemed the very gesture vile. She wasn't embarrassed by her state, as she lay bare with that normally perfect hair now uncombed and windswept, the word modest had never grazed those luscious lips. 

Surprise radiated around the crime scene like the spreading of a sneeze as I stroked those once rosy cheeks. Mrs Whippers head snapped, rocked and locked onto me. She loved my wife, who apparently improved her life. They debated evolution every Thursday. My wife with her Bible, Whippers with Darwin's species of survival. A throat cleared; a wheelchair wheeled. 

Andrew Minter. 

"My rose has wilted," I murmured. 

He nodded, reached for my hand and squeezed like it'd be reassuring. 

"A blunt force trauma." I heard someone whisper. Minter's vice tugged, wheeling me away, leaving me empty, left to the cruelties of today. 

"The head," he spoke clearly, formally, "has been bashed in from behind." 

Bashed in from behind. 

What peculiar words, what unusual lies. 

"You know I have to ask," his stubbly face creased as he looked towards the deceased, "but where were you between three to five this morning?" 

I must have answered because he nodded. 

"Witnesses?" he asked. 

I shook my head. He frowned, suggesting I go back to bed. 

I did. I slept like a new-born. 

The next day I pinned up a photo. It was of the two of us, just me and her. Her and me. What a team we proved to be. Her face was cast in shadow, her frown darker than normal. She looked pretty. Pretty as a rose. 

Minter rolled in at ten sharp. I don't remember what he said, for all I know I could have been dead. 

Then came Ben. My big brother Ben who brought me a loaf of homemade bread. Ben the baker. My big brother Ben the baker. He didn't know what to say, but that didn't stop his monologue of the day, no doubt practised and rehearsed in a mirror. 

"You must feed Marmalade," he said as her skinny cat jumped onto my lap. I stroked it's stripes like she used to. It purred. Loyalty was dead. 

"The funeral needs to be on a Tuesday," I managed. A Tuesday was when the world welcomed her, so it only makes sense that it should also be her day to blur. 

Ben nodded. A sneeze turned our heads. Mrs Whippers, our wonderful neighbour, was cutting dead flowers by my open window. As our eyes met, she bent her head, then waved with the cutters clutched in her pale hands, skeleton-like, dead. 

"A Tuesday would be nice." She smiled, then left. Ben closed the window releasing a deep breath. 

He paced the room, his steps becoming frenzied. He began shouting questions I couldn't answer, his hands twirled like a dancer. A man came to the door. Mr Peters from two streets down. He escaped with a flowering eye, my big brother the baker was quite a guy. 

Janet. My mother's friend and her young daughter, finger glued to nose, brought me a cherry pie. "Nothing beats my homemade pie." I smiled, another lie. 

When a week stretched, pulled taut, then broke into the next I waved at the paperboy as I exited through my white picket fence. Joe just stared through his thick black fringe. He didn't wave back but threw my paper, it hit me with a distinctive whack. I shouted, he shouted, then raced away. 

Curtains wrinkled, then ironed out. 

I breathed. 

In. 

Out. 

Then walked my five-minute walk to work, hands locked into my belt. 

I had been a detective almost half my life. Never having left my small English town, nor my ageing wife. I'd visited every house, saved every cat. Never complained and never looked back. The closest I'd ever seen to crime had been Mrs Manock caught, strangled with her washing line. It had been a windy day her husband had said. He'd chanted that until the world ordered him dead. 

Now, where was she? This rose of mine. She'd lived through many winters only to frail, shrivel and pale in a cool October yet to shine. 

Mildred waited in my office with a handful of lilies. I thanked her. She shyly smiled; another flower released into the wild. 

I threw the lilies into my bin just before Minter rolled in.

He sniffed. "Lilies?" he asked. I nodded. 

"Interesting." He folded his hands like origami, making shapes too fast for my eyes to follow. Then he laughed, shook his head, then made a noise similar to sorrow. 

"A witness came forward." He sniffed again. "Says she saw it." 

It. 

He rubbed his head, hair still messy from bed. A couple passed my window, the Tilters; they openly watched me. A dog barked at their feet, circling them. Maddy the bulldog. Ugly and vicious. It loved me but bit my wife at a Christmas party two years back. 

"A man," Minter said. "5,10. Narrow build. Brown hair, brown eyes." He wouldn't look at me, afraid. "I hate to ask…" But ask he did. 

Next week I'd be in a line-up. A suspect. 

I almost laughed. I plucked the lilies from my bin, lay them gently on my desk, then I sat.

"My wife believed the world was flat." 

A rose wilted. 

Lilies, white and new.