‘As you can see,’ said Detective Inspector Jill of Grimmtown PD, ‘the sleigh doesn’t appear to have crashed. From the impact marks on either side, it does look as if it was forced to land by a person or persons unknown, but they seem to have taken care to ensure that the landing was relatively safe. There is no indication as to what happened to any of the occupants afterwards, but we have found no evidence to suggest that they were injured when the craft went down.’
I could see the relief on Mrs C’s face. Now, at least, she had some hope that her husband might still be alive. I walked over to the yellow tape that cordoned off the area around the sleigh and had a good look. It was just as DI Jill had said: the sleigh itself didn’t look in too bad a condition, the tracks in the ground behind indicated a clean landing, but of the reindeer or Santa there was no sign. I called DI Jill over.
‘Did your forensics guys find anything?’
‘C’mon Harry, you know better than that,’ she said. ‘This is police business. I can’t just pass on confidential information to any Tom, Dick or Harry now, can I?’
‘Maybe not,’ I said, ‘but you owe me one. Who gave you the info that let you break the Little Red Hen case? Me. If it hadn’t been for me, she’d still be out there.’
DI Jill looked at me for a second, considered her options and rolled her eyes skywards. ‘OK, Harry, you win. Forensics haven’t found too much. No fingerprints; nothing we might get a DNA sample from; very little trace evidence. Whoever did this went to inordinate lengths to cover up their tracks.’
I immediately picked up ‘very little trace evidence’. ‘But they did find something?’
Jill said nothing. I could understand that, she could only say so much to me without getting into trouble. On the other hand, the techs might be a different story.
‘Mind if I talk to them?’ I asked Jill.
She sighed heavily – a do-I-really-have-a-choice kind of a sigh – and lifted the tape to allow me under. ‘Why not? They’re nearly done, but they were pretty thorough,’ she said as I passed by.
‘Who’s the lead tech?’ I asked.
‘Crane.’
‘As in he of the bright orange head feathers and meaningful silences?’ In fact, Crane was so predictably enigmatic that the cops used to play a game when he was working on a crime scene: try to guess which expression he’ll use next. The scoring was complicated but could be summarised as: sunglasses on or off = one point, meaningful pause = two points, withering stare = three points, and enigmatic quip = four points. All four at once got a bonus of ten points. The current record stood at thirty-four and I was determined to beat it.
‘The same, but you have to admit he knows his stuff,’ said Jill.
I didn’t doubt it. Grimmtown PD’s forensics team was one of the best in the business and Crane was their boss. If they couldn’t find evidence at a crime scene then that evidence didn’t want to be found. Still, it was worth a shot. Maybe my piggy eyes would pick up on something they’d missed.
‘Can I go in now?’ I asked.
‘Sure, it looks like our guys are packing up so there’s no risk of you contaminating the scene.’
I gave Jill an ‘as if I would’ sort of look.
I walked around the sleigh, examining the ground carefully. The kidnappers had certainly been thorough; all footprints, hoof prints or any other kind of print had been very carefully obliterated. The sleigh itself, dents apart, looked like it had been gone over by a professional valeting service after it had landed. It was sparkling. This meant, in effect, that regardless of how hard I looked, I wasn’t going to find anything.
As I examined the sleigh’s interior, there was a clearing of a throat from the far side. It was the kind of polite coughing that suggested that the cougher wasn’t too pleased to see me, that I was interfering with their work and that they’d much rather I was somewhere else. It had to be Crane.
I looked up into a stern-featured face dominated by a long beak and topped by an unruly mass of bright orange feathers, parted to the right. The eyes were masked by a spanking new pair of sunglasses.
‘Dr Crane,’ I said, grinning widely just to annoy him further. ‘DI Jill said I could take a look around.’
Crane took off his sunglasses and stared meaningfully at me. ‘That’s Lieutenant Crane.’ There was a pause – which I presumed he intended to be more meaningful as he continued to gaze at me. ‘What,’ another pause, ‘are you doing here?’ The glasses were put back on. At least now if he continued to stare at me, I wouldn’t have to see it – and I was nine points up already.
Small mercies.
‘Sorry, Lieutenant, I forgot.’ I hadn’t, I just did it to annoy him. He was very particular about his title.
‘Hmph,’ was the indignant response.
‘Anyway,’ I said, being even more cheerful, ‘did you find anything?’
The sunglasses came off again and this time he was giving me a significant stare – which I assumed was one step up the scale from meaningful but still only garnered three points. Now I was up to thirteen and looking good.
‘That, my friend,’ pause for effect, ‘is a good question.’ Fifteen.
‘I know it is. I’m a detective. It’s my job to ask questions, so I’m pretty good at it.’
Another pause and stare (but I couldn’t tell if it was withering, significant or another type of stare entirely). Twenty points; record here I come.
‘And,’ pause, glasses on, ‘to answer your question, all we have found so far,’ long pause (definitely for effect), glasses off again, ‘is tobacco’. Twenty-six; I was on the final stretch, the record was looking good. No, I wasn’t enjoying this but I still needed as much information as I could get so, if it meant I had to listen to Lieutenant Crane, then this was a sacrifice I had to make.
‘Well, one of my techs found traces of tobacco just behind that rock there.’ He waved one of his wings, indicating a large boulder some distance from the sleigh. ‘It’s ordinary pipe tobacco.’ Pause. ‘You can get it in any store so it’s not much of a lead.’ Pause, glasses on. ‘It could have been left there by anyone. Once we analyse it in the lab we may know more because that, my friend, is what we do.’ Thirty-one points.
‘And did your team find anything else?’
I caught a hint of evasion on his face that he quickly masked with his usual blank demeanour. ‘No, nothing else.’
There was something, but he wasn’t willing to share. I had to find some way of making him change his mind.
‘You see that lady over there?’ I waved in Mrs C’s direction. Crane nodded.
‘Well, her husband is the owner of this sleigh and he’s missing. Now her style of dress might have given this away already, especially with you being a CSI and all, but the missing man is Santa Claus and, unless we find him in the next twenty-four hours, there are going to be a lot of very disappointed children all over the world. Do you have kids, Dr Crane?’
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Three.’
It was time to lay on the guilt trip. ‘Do you want to be the one to tell them why they have no presents this year? Why they’ll remember this Christmas Day for the rest of their lives for all the wrong reasons? It might even have a traumatic effect on them. Could you live with that? Could you?’ I could see I was getting to him. The mention of his kids had made a small crack in his calm exterior and I was about to open it wide. ‘This woman has hired me to track down the missing Santa and I’m going to do everything in my power to find him, do you understand?’ Dr Crane swallowed once and nodded. ‘Good, because every little thing that can help me might take me one step closer to ensuring your kids have a happy Christmas. I know you have to observe standard police protocol here but if you’ve found something else – no matter how small – it might be the thing that breaks this case.
‘Imagine the satisfaction you’ll get when we find Santa and you’re there helping your kids open their presents, secure in the knowledge that you were the one who gave us that one vital clue.’ My patter was working and I could feel he was about to reveal all – in a manner of speaking.
‘Well, there was one other thing, but I’m not even sure it’s relevant. I won’t know for certain until I get it back to the lab.’ No meaningful silences and the glasses stayed firmly on his face. Still stuck on thirty-one points: come on, Crane, cut me some slack. ‘We found this.’ He reached into an evidence bag and pulled something out. He held it out to me for a closer look. ‘Please don’t touch,’ he said. ‘You could compromise the evidence.’
I looked at what he was holding in his rubber-gloved wing. ‘It looks like a hair,’ I said. From what I could see it was a long cream-coloured hair. It looked too thick and rough to be human, and reindeer didn’t have hair as long as this so it hadn’t come from one of them. Dr Crane ran a feather along the hair. As he did, some particles of fine white dust fell off.
‘Any idea what it is?’ I asked.
‘Not at the moment,’ Dr Crane replied. ‘It’s not human – unless there was a caveman at the crash site. Based on what I know about animal hair – and I am somewhat of an expert – I don’t think it’s reindeer hair.’
‘So what is it and where did it come from?’ I mused. ‘Maybe it’s just coincidence that you found it; after all, it was a national park and I’m sure lots of animals live there.’
‘Yes, perhaps, but animals don’t have a tendency to use white powder. That doesn’t seem like something you’d find in the wild, now does it?’
‘True, but what is it? It just doesn’t make any sense.’ It was reasonable to assume we weren’t dealing with something that applied talcum powder after showering; or maybe we were, this case was weird enough as it was without adding cosmetics to the equation. I really needed the results of the hair (and the powder) analysis as quickly as possible. I had a feeling that this – when combined with the tobacco – was the clue that might just break the case wide open. My heart began to thump just a little bit faster and I could feel the sense of anticipation building up inside me. I was near to a breakthrough; I could feel it. Once more, Harry Pigg was on the case.
‘Doc, I have one more favour,’ I said.
The sunglasses came off once more and I was given a quizzical look. Thirty-five points, we have a winner and a new world record – and without any enigmatic quips either.
‘Can you let me know the results of your tests, just this once?’ I handed him a business card. ‘My number. Call me any time, day or night. I really need this one, and I promise I won’t tell anyone about this little conversation, OK?’
The crane looked at me for a long time and finally gave me a brief nod, which I took to mean yes. Then he turned his back on me and stalked over to his team. Clearly the discussion, such as it was, was ended.
Still, I’d gotten something – not a lot, but something – and in this case any lead, no matter how insignificant, was a break. After one last quick look around, I came back over to where the others were waiting.
‘Anything, Harry?’ asked Jack.
I shook my head. ‘Other than a trace of tobacco and a strand of hair the police found, there’s nothing else here.’ I described the hair to Mrs C and she confirmed that, based on my description, it didn’t sound like a reindeer hair. Other than that, no one could offer any suggestions as to what it was. We were going to have to wait until the Crime Lab did their analysis.
Despite the small break we’d just had, I was becoming as frustrated as the Three Bears during a porridge shortage. Every time I thought we were on to something, the lead fizzled out almost as quickly as we got it. Would this case ever get solved? I sank down on a nearby rock and buried my head in my trotters. This wasn’t good. My reputation as Grimmtown’s foremost detective was at stake but, more importantly, I didn’t fancy getting laughed at by Red Riding Hood and allowing her the opportunity to gloat.
After a few minutes of quality self-pity, I turned to the others. ‘It doesn’t look like we’re going to find anything else here.’ I could sense their disappointment, I think they’d been hoping for a breakthrough – or at least some solid evidence Santa was still alive. ‘Cheer up, folks,’ I continued. ‘There’s no reason to think he came to any harm and whoever brought the sleigh down seems to have gone to a lot of trouble to make sure it got down safely, so there’re reasons to be hopeful.’ I really wanted to get out of there and back to Grimmtown as quickly as possible and wait for Dr Crane to call me. Reluctantly, they followed me back to our sleigh and, after we were all aboard, we made our way back to the city.