Prompt:
Portal:
Words:
We’d been called out in the middle of the hottest day of the year so far, to reports of a man who’d been stabbed, whilst bathing, apparently, alone, in the village’s public hamam.
We’d arrived, hot & sweaty after the car ventilation broke down, (all of us in a foul temper after being woken from a late night’s sleep spent chasing a lead in the city, to no avail) to be shown the latest corpse. It’d taken us 3 hours to get to this forsaken place, so small and run-down looking that we were amazed that it could even justify its own policeman as it couldn’t have held more than 15 or 20 residents, all of whom looked to have vanished as soon as they heard our siren.
The body was a mess; throat cut, defensive wounds on the arms and blood everywhere. Wallet left intact. No other clues. The local cop’s written description taken verbatim from a local was even more baffling “a Turkish man on a push-bike with a wooly hat, heavy overcoat, thick gloves and waterproof boots pedalling frantically off into the countryside”. Really? Dressed like that? The middle of summer, sun beating down on us from a cloudless, clear blue sky.