A Very Respectable Forgery of Murder

How it begins

The photograph was genuine.

The murder was not.

At least, not the murder described beneath it.

Eva placed the newspaper clipping beside the enlarged print and adjusted the lamp.

In both images, three men stood outside a narrow doorway. One held a hat. Another looked toward the pavement. The third had turned just enough to blur his face.

The caption called them detectives leaving a murder house.

Eva knew the doorway.

She had etched it twelve years earlier for a shopkeeper who wanted something handsome to mark his retirement.

There had never been a house there.

Only a shop, two storage rooms, and a staircase too narrow for the furniture everyone claimed had been removed after the crime.

She reached for the client's letter.

Please confirm that the image has not been fabricated.

A precise question.

Too precise.

Her telephone rang.

At the newspaper archive, Paul Bell sounded breathless.

"Has your gentleman collected his report?"

"No."

"Don't send it."

"Why?"

"He isn't where he said he'd be."

Eva looked at the appointment card on her desk.

"He gave me an office address."

"That office has been empty since February."

Outside the window, a tram bell sounded at the junction. Eva watched pedestrians move around a man selling the evening edition.

The same murder appeared on its front page.

This time the clipping had acquired a larger headline and the promise of an arrest.

"Paul," she said, "who supplied the caption?"

"That's what I've been asking."

She turned the photograph toward the light.

Someone had worked carefully over the number above the door. Not enough to alter the grain. Enough to make the location harder to recognize.

On the back of the client's letter, visible through the paper, was the faint impression of a name.

It was not the name he had given her.