The Mystery at Mount St Cluedo

Her eyes were red and wet from the tears. They’d come in a torrent at first. Disbelief at the situation she was in, the injustice of it all.

After several hours the tears began to subside. Disbelief turned to anger. Anger that a person of her standing was suffering the humiliation of her current circumstances.

“What on Earth would the others be thinking?”, she contemplated. Her reputation would be in pieces. No more bridge club, no more sewing circle. The gossips would be relishing her demise.

She gazed across the cold, concrete floor of the cell, nothing to adorn it but for the stripes created by the shadows of the bars in the single, tiny window high above the iron bed. The only other piece of furniture was the cold, stainless steel toilet in the corner. Not so much as a simple screen to shield her from the leering jailers, even in her most private of moments.

It was the lamp that gave her away, the police had said. She’d been standing near it when they arrived, sirens blazing, pistols drawn and quick to accuse.

That her defence had been so readily dismissed only served to highlight the injustice to which she was being subjected.

It had been necessary at the start of the evening to adjust the lamp’s displaced shade, lest her guests conclude that she ran a similarly disheveled household. Hence the fingerprints. And the skerrick of blood at the lamp’s base was the simple result of a nick from a misdirected paring knife, as she’d prepared a selection of the finest hors d’oeuvres prior to the guest’s arrival.

“It’s all poppycock!”, she told herself between fits of tears. Anyone could see that the murderer was Professor Plum, with the candlestick, in the drawing room.