Ruminations

And so it was that all of Odd Eye had returned to the office that evening, Onew observed, as Taemin and Jonghyun put the finishing touches on what appeared to be their reconstruction of the night of the murder. Key was pining the photograph of Sohee to their collection of evidence, and Eugene had left them some food to tide them over before dinner, grumbling about it along the way. Minho had arrived back from the Estate, carrying a strange little cloud of anger and fear about him. Onew wondered what had occurred to make him appear so conflicted. What had Junmyeon told him?

More worryingly, what had Minho, in his naïve trust, told Junmyeon?

“Listen carefully!” Jonghyun began, lifting up what appeared to be a makeshift pointer, as Taemin trundled the blackboard towards them. Puffing up his chest, Jonghyun tapped the board with a show of self-importance. Onew wondered where he’d even managed to piece together the pointer. “Taemin and I have put together a possible timeline of what happened the night Yifan was killed, based on all the different testimonies.”

“Testimonies that are doubtless full of lies,” Key muttered from the sofa.

“Aha – we thought of that!” Jonghyun retorted, waving the pointer at Key as though it were a sword. Key raised an unimpressed eyebrow. “We’ve also made sure to note all the contradictions in statements! Now, the crime began late at night. Say, between ten and half-past ten, the drinks are brought to the room by Baekhyun. That’s also when the revolver is found.”

“Afterwards,” Taemin continued, looking a bit nervous as the eyes of everyone were upon him. “The g-gun is returned to the cabinet. The cabinet is l-likely to have been l-left open. From around eleven to a quarter-past eleven, the following occur: Yixing, Jongin, um… Sehun and Tao all go to bed. Minseok and Luhan play billiard. Minseok goes to bed. Yifan and Junmyeon go to Junmyeon’s office to discuss his career.”

He looked over at Onew, who only nodded slowly with a reassuring smile. Jonghyun took over once more. “It gets more interesting here. At half-past eleven, Yifan leaves Junmyeon’s office and goes to the studio. Luhan says he goes to bed at this time. Baekhyun is collecting the glasses, while Kyungsoo prepared the coffee and is out throwing a broken plate.”

“Says?” Minho asked sharply.

Grinning, Jonghyun tapped the board. “Jongdae had gone into the mansion to use the toilet. A little before 11.35, he bumps into – who else? An angry Luhan in the kitchen. Then, Kyungsoo delivers the coffee at around 11.35, and he also sees Luhan on the stairs. So Luhan was probably only in bed at 11.40 at the earliest. Kyungsoo makes sure the windows are open, and then he goes off to bed. Both Kyungsoo and Jongdae claim to have seen Yifan. If they’re both telling the truth there, that was the last time Yifan was seen alive.”

“So Luhan is blatantly lying,” Key summarised, “What happens next?”

“Now, sometime before midnight, Baekhyun gives Junmyeon his nightcap, and the two go to bed. Here’s where everything gets fuzzy,” Jonghyun said, tapping the last few sections of the board. “A quarter to one at the earliest – Jongdae sees someone by Chanyeol’s cottage –”

“If there was ever anyone by the cottage,” Key interrupted, seizing the pointer from Jonghyun. “Stop that, you’re going to poke someone’s eye out!”  

“What a nasty suspicious mind you’ve got,” Onew complimented brightly, “Yes – question every statement! Did it happen? Can we prove it happened?”

“We can’t seem prove anything in this bloody case,” Minho practically spat.

“Jongdae seems so helpful though,” Jonghyun mumbled, from where he had wrestled back his pointer from a resisting Key. “My pointer! Well, anyways, Jongdae runs back to the estate. At one in the morning, Minseok hears a sound, and he goes outside his room and bumps into Jongdae. There’s the telephone call, everyone wakes up, they find the body – and you know the rest.”   

He beamed at Onew expectantly. Onew nodded thoughtfully. “It is a good reconstruction,” he said slowly, “But there are a few points of interest I have. First, Minho. How long are the groundskeeper’s rounds? How does he go about them?”

Shaken out of his brooding, Minho blinked. “The groundskeeper? Junmyeon’s very exact about it. There was a near theft before. One hour and fifteen minutes for each round. He starts out by circling the mansion – that takes fifteen minutes – and then he covers the estate carefully.”

“But he took a break for the toilet,” Key stated, still nursing his wounds from the scuffle.

“He only begins it proper at midnight,” Minho explained, “When the household’s up, someone is bound to hear something, so he’s usually not precise about it, just ambling around. Why does it matter?”

“It narrows the timeframe significantly,” Onew said, “We have enough evidence to suggest that before midnight, no murder could have occurred. It would have been too risky; someone might still be awake. But also, no murder was likely to have occurred until after a quarter-past midnight, or else Jongdae might have spotted them.”

“So the murder occurred sometime between 12.15 and 1 in the morning,” Taemin concluded.

“That is my feeling. And what if we take Chanyeol at his word that he is being framed? According to Jongdae, it can take as long as three minutes to go from the mansion to the cottage. If we are conservative in our estimates that could mean ten minutes wasted planting a trail. And,” Onew said, raising a finger, “There is still the necessity of wiping the revolver clean of prints and creating the false fingerprints. This, of course, is presuming only one person was involved. An accomplice to the crime would make things slightly easier.”

Jonghyun on his teeth, shaking his head at the blackboard. “Killer’s a brave man. Or insane. And it still went wrong, with Jongdae spotting him.”

“He’d have to be – he killed Baekhyun in the morning, that was just asking for trouble,” Key pointed out.

“Trouble. I wonder,” Onew said, tapping his fingers against his lips and taking Jonghyun’s pointer, which he used to indicate a single name on the blackboard. “Right now, I’m more interested with the lie of the foreign trustee.”

“Luhan?”

“Yes, Luhan. Do you not recall that curious little scene on the day we searched the estate?” Onew recounted the happenings to the group once more. “It is significant. Kim Junmyeon – he wants to read all the papers before signing them. And Luhan makes excuses, attempts to hurry him, and he knows that Junmyeon cannot spend too much time as the detectives are about for some reason or another. And then Jongin makes another significant remark.”

Taemin frowned. “What was that?”

“He says: ‘You never taught us that’ – in relation to the reading fully of documents – ‘I just sign where someone tells me to sign’. Remember also, that Jongin is the elder of the two twins and would, naturally, become head of the household someday. You see the significance now? Luhan did – I saw it in his eyes. Just think for a second. Luhan is in charge of a vast amount of wealth that he could perhaps speculate with. It happens.”

“The discrepancies!” Minho realised.

Onew flourished the pointer. “Exactly! The secretary tells us that Luhan was the one who suggested coming here to deal with these discrepancies that had so concerned Junmyeon. He knows it is only a matter of time before Junmyeon discovers something. A disaster! So he tries to buy time, delay him, in hopes of slipping in some papers casually that might avert his fate. But Kim Junmyeon is not like that – he is a businessman. And then Jongin makes that remark and you can almost see the wheels turning in Luhan’s mind: if only it were Jongin I were dealing with. He would be a child in Luhan’s hands.”

“But,” Taemin pointed out, “Then it would make sense for Junmyeon to die, and not Yifan. Yifan’s death achieves nothing for Luhan.”

“Maybe,” Onew said quietly, handing back the pointer to Jonghyun. “Maybe not.”

“Regardless, we don’t have proof that Luhan was speculating with Junmyeon’s money,” Key said sharply, “But it is still a thought.”

It was Minho who spoke up then, tension still visible upon his face. “Yifan came to the Estate one year and five months ago. I don’t understand why that’s important.”