Another Day on the Job

*DING-DING*, the bell rang.

Arnold had just arrived on the doorstep of this old house, after receiving the call for a missing wife late in the same night. He puffed at his bent briar pipe as hard as he could to calm himself.

‘Of course the last call of the night would be mere bloody minutes before I pack up and go home, no one gives a f-.’

Without having enough time to finish his esoteric nagging, the door opened with a resounding creak, showing off the years this building has seen. Still, having survived the Great War and God knows how much more the outside of the structure looks in a better condition than what you would have expected.

‘Yes, yes, yes, Mister Arnold, thank you for coming in such brief notice, my wife, you see she is gone for a day now. No one has seen her, neither the neighbours nor her colleagues in the office. I really need your help.’

His only answer would be that glance, the glance that one gives when he is fed up with everything, when he has given up on humanity’s intelligence and is just wondering how the hell these two people who stand but a meter away from each other, who walk the same streets and eat the same food, who wear similar clothes and speak the same language, how the hell are these people part of the same species?

After this short but uncomfortable stare which seemed like an eternity Arnold entered the house, wiping his wet and muddy boots on the welcome mat, since the last couple hours the sky split in half and poured forth the Atlantic Ocean.

‘Mr. Redwick, was it?’

‘Yes, yes, precisely. Jack Redwick, to be exact. I have to say I’m terribly sorry for the inconvenience, but for her to act like this is most unnatural. I wouldn’t have bothered you this late if I didn’t believe in my heart of hearts that this is a serious matter.’

After asking his question, Arnold started doing what he did best: Thinking and judging. His mind was already at work, trying to find anything here that seemed out of place, the furniture, the colors, the interior of the house itself, anything. While simultaneously listening very carefully to every word this Mr. Redwick uttered, again to find anything out of balance, in his speech, his posture, his dialect, his attire. The house itself is that of a high ceiling, with ostentatious decor. Hanging chandeliers with infinite circles of lamps and sparkly glass beads made to look like gems shining in the light, so huge and heavy that if it were to snap and fall, it would most likely cave in the whole structure. Wallpaper in every corner of the house with patterns of leaves and flowers, and colors of once green and yellow and nowadays sick spittle and vomit, again showing the age of the building. Candelabra protruding from those same walls covered in this awful wallpaper to look more sophisticated. They made everything here to resemble a home of an early to mid-Victorian Era but accommodating the income of a middle to low-class couple. Something you can easily presume by just taking a glance towards the living room from the hall and looking at those cheaply made sofas and armchairs, accompanied by this dreary little tea table which exists in every household for its cost being the equivalent of a loaf of bread, which has on top an equally cheap radio, instead of an expensive vinyl player.

He focused his attention on the hall where he stood since he saw something bizarre, women’s shoes that looked wrong, and not in the sense of fashion but that of the state of being.

‘Traces of trickle on them, plus the wooden floor underneath them is a little wet and muddied which suggests that she wore these shoes in the last few hours.’, he thinks.

The shoes themselves are a ballet flat type, a shoe common nowadays for its comfort and look in the low-class, suggesting that the wife of Mr. Redwick works in an office and not in a serious one at that, or else she would prefer heels to show class and prestige. So the presumptions till now that this family is, at best, middle-class seems to be valid. Yet the problematic question remains, why are these shoes in that state if she did indeed disappear yesterday and not the last few hours?

  Taking a gander around the same hall and whatever sneak peek from the rest of the rooms that were visible from this position, he tries to notice another piece of a puzzle that might be a bit different from the one which is presented before his eyes, for example, that smell; it was a tad bit hard to notice at first, since his nose is still beat red from the cold night outside and the smell of tobacco from his pipe is blocking other ones that might want to make their way inside his nostrils, but there is a faint smell of perfume permeating the room, just enough to make out its existence and presume that a female individual was present in this room fairly recently and couldn’t have been here last yesterday, or else the perfume would have faded out. Still, an interesting smell that is, it has an aroma that reminds you of summer and youth, with a hint of cherry and a base that’s sweet and happy, not a perfume that you would encounter a woman of older age that respects herself wearing.

‘Do you have a daughter, Mr. Redwick?’

‘No, Arnold, it’s just me and my wife’

That is worrying, in but a few seconds of Arnold’s entrance to the house and every bit of information he receives paints the case as not a simple disappearance but maybe something more sinister.

‘The recently worn shoes, the perfume that hangs in this room, it’s impossible for someone to be missing for a day or more, as Mr. Redwick wants me to believe, and the status to be as it is. This points to someone missing for a couple of hours, three or four, maybe, but not a day. Mr. Redwick is surely hiding something, and not very well either. Even a drunk monkey could deduce that this man did something to his wife and wasn’t smart enough to cover it afterwards.’, he thought.

‘Didn’t you say that your wife went missing a day ago?’

Arnold’s strong suit was his ego, that anyone who came across him was made to feel inferior and every time that he had an adversary, his intelligence gave him the upper hand, the ability to find a clue in small things that others would pass as circumstance, and find hidden meanings in words that others would disregard as words of distressed people. What he counted on is that someone else would always be beneath him, that no one could ever hide in a place that Arnold couldn’t find. What he never counted on is that there are people who don’t want to hide, but come and find you themselves; so what would otherwise be his advantage today it was his weakness. He wanted to see a man trying to hide, thus he missed the man trying to come into view. Mr. Redwick didn’t answer, so Arnold turned to face him. Mr. Redwick then calmly closes and locks the door, showing a crooked smile, one that you would believe to be impossible for a human being to achieve.

‘May I offer you a cup of tea?’