Crime Fiction

The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes

The house was desolate and empty. The cold penetrated into every corner. A thin sheet of ice had formed in the bathtub. She had begun to take on a slightly bluish tinge.
He thought she looked like a princess lying there. An ice princess.
The floor he was sitting on was ice cold, but the chill didn't bother him. He reached out his hand and touched her.
The blood on her wrists had congealed long ago.

His love for her had never been stronger. He caressed her arm,as if he were caressing the soul that had now left her body.
He didn't look back when he left. It was not 'good-bye', it was
'until we meet again'.
Eilert Berg was not a happy man. His breathing was strained and his breath came out of his mouth in little white puffs, but his health was not what he considered his biggest problem.

The sides of the rock were six or seven feet apart, and it towered up over thirty feet into the sky, into which the summer sun had just begun to climb. Three huge boulders were solidly wedged in the middle of the cleft, and it was an imposing sight. The place held a magical attraction for a six-year-old. The fact that the King's Cleft was forbidden ground made it all the more tempting.

The name had originated from King Oscar II's visit to Fjallbacka in the late nineteenth century, but that was something he neither knew nor cared about as he slowly crept into the shadows, with his sword ready to attack. His father had told him that the scenes from Hell's Gap in the film Ronj a Rovard otter had been filmed inside the King's Cleft. Continue reading

Some people even dived into the water and plucked the lobsters right out of the pots. Sometimes he wondered where it would all end and whether there was any honour left among lobstermen.

On one occasion there had even been a bottle of cognac in the pot he pulled up, instead of an unknown number of lobsters that had been stolen from it. At least that thief had some honour, or a sense of humour.

Frans Bengtsson sighed deeply as he stood hauling up his lobster-pots, but his face brightened when he saw two marvellous lobsters in the first pot. He had a good eye for where lobsters Iended to congregate, as well as a number of favourite spots where the pots could be placed with the same luck from one year to the next. Continue reading

In the stillness of the room the only sound was from the flies. A constant buzzing from the frantic beating of their wings. The man in the chair didn't move, and he hadn't for a long time. He wasn't actually a man any more. Not if a man was defined as someone who lived, breathed, and felt. By now he'd been reduced to fodder. A haven for insects and maggots.

The flies buzzed in a great swarm around the motionless figure. Sometimes landing, their mandibles moving. Then flying off again in search of a new spot to land. Feeling their way and bumping into one another. The area around the wound in the man's head was of particular interest though the metallic odour of blood had long since vanished, replaced by a different smell that was mustier and sweeter

arm ached because it was the third day in a row she'd carried out this same monotonous, up-and-down motion. But she welcomed the physical pain. The worse it got, the more it muted the ache in her heart, at least for a while. She turned around and looked at Tobias, who was working on the lawn in front of the house, sawing boards. He seemed to sense that she was watching him, because he glanced up and raised a hand in greeting,

as if she were an acquaintance he was meeting on the street.

Ebba felt her own hand respond with the same awkward gesture. More than six months had passed since their life had been shattered, but they still didn't know how to react to each other. Every night they would lie in the double bed with their backs Continue reading

The woman stepped into the circle of light and began to undress. Above her black, calf-length skirt she wore a silver blouse with dozens of little pearl buttons up the front. She tugged it free of the waistband and started undoing the buttons from the bottom very slowly, gazing into space as if she were recalling a distant memory. With a shrug, she slid the blouse off, pulling at the left sleeve, which stuck to her wrist with static, then lowered her head and stretched her arms

behind her back like wings to unclasp her bra, raising one shoulder and then the other as she slipped off the thin straps. Her breasts were large and heavy, with dark, upturned nipples.
She unzipped her skirt down the left side and let it slide to the floor. Stepping out of it and bending from the waist, she picked it up and laid it neatly over the back of a chair. Next she rolled her tights down over her hips, buttocks and thighs, then sat down on the edge of the bed

And the fog seemed at its thickest in the graveyard of St. Mary's Church, where a beautiful woman with long auburn hair wandered barefoot and drunk, a wineglass full of Pinot Noir held precariously in her hand. She weaved her way between the squat, gnarled yews and lichenstained stones. Sometimes she thought she saw ghosts, gray, translucent shapes flitting among the tombs ahead, but they didn't frighten her.

It loomed ahead out of the fog, massive and magnificent: classical lines formed in marble, steps overgrown with weeds leading down to the heavy oak door. But it was the angel she had come to see. She liked the angel. Its eyes were fixed on heaven, as if nothing earthly mattered, and its hands were clasped together in prayer. Though it was solid marble, she often fancied it was so insubstantial she could pass her hand right through it. Continue reading

It wasn't the first time she had been locked in the cage, but this time was different from the others. Before, it had always been because she'd done something wrong or hadn't done what they wanted her to do. This time it was different; it was because of what she had become, and she was really scared.
As soon as they had shut the door at the top of the stairs, the darkness wrapped itself around her like fur. She could feel it rubbing against her skin

the way a cat rubs against your legs. She began to shiver. More than anything she hated the cage, more than the blows, more than the humiliations. But she wouldn't cry. She never cried. She didn't know how.
The smell was terrible; they didn't have a toilet to go to, only the bucket in the corner, which they would only be allowed to empty when they were let out. And who knew when that would be? Continue reading

I was on my third sleeping pill and my second glass of whiskey when he knocked on my door. Why I bothered to answer it, I don't know. I had resigned myself to my fate and arranged matters so that I would leave the world as peacefully and comfortably as possible, and nobody would mourn my passing. Beethoven's Pastorale symphony was playing on the stereo, mostly because I had once seen a film about a futuristic society in

which a man goes to be put to sleep in a hospital, and there are projections of brooks, waterfalls and forests on the walls, and the Pastorale is playing. I can't say it was doing much for me, but it was nice to have something to go along with the incessant tapping of rain on my flimsy roof. I suppose answering the door was an instinctive reaction, like a nervous tic. When the phone rings, you answer it. When someone knocks at your door especially as it was such a

She began to feel nervous as she checked her rearview mirror and saw that the car was still behind her.
She pulled over to the outside lane and slowed down. The car, a dark Mondeo, overtook her. It was too dark to glimpse faces, but she thought there was just one person in the front and another in the back. It didn't have a taxi light on top, so she guessed it was probably a chauffeured car and stopped worrying.
Continue reading

collecting discarded weapons, occasionally bending to extract an object of value from a dead man's pocket. Others appeared to be shoveling soil or quicklime into large open graves.
The light wind carried a whiff of rotting flesh.
And over the whole scene a terrible stillness reigned.
But to Dave Sampson, down on the field, there had been no battle, only a peaceful gathering, and Dave had the worm's-eye view. It

was just after 8:00 a.m., and he had been up half the night along with everyone else listening to Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin. Now, the crowd had gone home, and he was moving among the motionless shapes, litter left behind by the vanished hordes, helping to clean up after the very first Brimleigh Festival.

The boy's body sat propped against the graffiti-scarred wall in a ginnel off Market Street, head lolling forward, chin on chest, hands clutching his stomach. A bib of blood had spilled down the front of his white shirt.
Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks stood in the rain and watched Peter Darby finish photographing the scene, bursts of electronic flash freezing the raindrops in mid-air as they fell. Banks was irritated. By rights, he shouldn't be there.

Not in the rain at half past one on a Saturday night.
As if he didn't have enough problems already.
He had got the call the minute he walked in the door after an evening alone in Leeds at Opera North's The Pearl Fishers. Alone because his wife, Sandra, had realized on Wednesday that the benefit gala she was supposed to host for the Eastvale community center clashed with their season tickets. They had argued - Sandra expecting