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Troy’s return from his lunch break was heralded by mild choking noises. Tom thought this was probably to do with the fact that he had the contents of the file that had been hidden under a stack of Troy’s paperwork laid out across his desk, but looked up to check.
“You don’t need to worry about that, sir,” Troy said very quickly. “It’s just -”
“Well I’m sure I don’t need to worry about it, Troy, but the residents of Midsomer have been remarkably kind-feeling towards their fellow man of late, so I don’t have anything better to do. Would you care to explain?”
“Not really,” Troy muttered, starting to flush. It wasn’t an attractive look; Tom really wasn’t sure what Cully had been thinking there, but the ways of women were indeed mysterious.
“Because what this appears to be,” Tom said, putting a hand in the way of Troy’s attempt to gather the papers up, “is a random assortment of statements from various murderers, some sketches of…I suppose these could all be the same person…and a notepad upon which you have written the words ‘French?’ and ‘alcoholic?’.”
“Uh, yes,” said Troy, flopping into a chair. “That’s more or less what it is.”
“The thing is, Troy,” Tom sighed, “the thing is, you would appear to be on the track of a serial killer, except that - and this is an important note - we have solved all these cases. The killers are in jail.”
“Not a serial killer, sir. A serial…” Troy appeared to lose steam. “A…serial victim.”
“A what?”
“A serial victim,” he said more firmly. Tom was taken aback by this sudden rush of assertiveness. “No, sir, don’t look like that, there’s DNA evidence too - I talked to Dr Bullard - from five different scenes! Remember how that last stabbing in Midsomer Newton, there was too much blood? Well, there was someone else there. Not the murderer and not the corpse. And there was this Frenchman renting one of the cottages, and he vanished, and then…”
“You’re losing me, Troy.”
“And this one,” Troy said, tapping on one of the statements. “She said she shot one of her other neighbours!”
“There was a remarkable lack of a body.”
“He just keeps appearing.” Troy tugged at his hair. “And I swear, I swear, we interviewed him in Badger’s Drift. It just doesn’t make sense.”
“You’re right. It doesn’t make sense.” Tom swept the papers back together. “Which is why I will be taking possession of this file, lest it tempt you away from the paperwork your job actually requires.”
Troy gave a very exaggerated sigh, and shot daggers at Tom all afternoon, but he did turn in three forms Tom had been waiting a week on. So it had certainly been the right thing to do.
*
“It’s him,” Troy hissed three weeks later, when they were investigating a drowning in Aspern Tallow.
“Well, you have correctly identified that the gentleman is French,” Tom conceded, “but that can’t be your serial victim; he’s in Joyce’s pottery class. His name’s - Samuel? Sebastian? Something like that.”
Troy flipped his notebook shut with a force that indicated he was intending to go and speak to the object of his fixation. Tom forestalled him. “Do you have reason to believe he’s involved in this drowning?”
“Well - no,” Troy said.
“Anyway, I thought of an explanation for your DNA samples,” Tom added. “It’s probably like that issue the Germans had with their swabs; somebody at the factory sticking their hands where they shouldn't have, or what have you. We should get George to send it up the chain, in case other people are having the same problem.”
Troy made a face. “I’m sure we’re better than the Germans.”
“We are all fallible, Troy,” Tom reminded him. Troy let it go after that, but his driving on the way back to Causton was even worse than usual; he hadn’t given up.
*
Two months after that, when Joyce’s pottery teacher was shot with a longbow over a special strain of hops, Troy and Tom arrived on the scene just too late to save Sebastien (as Joyce had identified him). One of the other students said they thought Sebastien might have seen something, but they’d arrived at his cottage to find him shot through the heart. Very good aim on someone’s part, but very sad. Tom was, embarrassingly, more vexed that the man hadn’t tried to contact them. He was depressingly used to losing good leads because they wouldn’t speak on the phone, but this one hadn’t even called.
“I think that puts paid to your little theory, Troy,” he said as they waited for Dr Bullard to do his work. “He’s not likely to get up from this.”
“We’ll wait and see what the DNA test says, sir,” Troy said stubbornly.
“Alright, alright,” Tom said, humouring him, but it abruptly became much less funny when, three hours later, George called to say that the body had vanished from the tent.
“Someone took it?” That was - well, not new, there weren’t many new things murderers in Midsomer could do after all these years, but certainly unusual.
“The footprints suggest that he got up and ran away,” George returned, in tones suggesting he was very unhappy with this behaviour on the part of one of his corpses.
“That he what?”
“Which obviously he didn’t, with three feet of cedar through his sternum,” George went on, “so the question is, why did someone want you to think he had?”
That question occupied Tom throughout the rest of the investigation. They got their man, or rather woman, the manager of the local brewery; they did not recover their missing corpse. The DNA tests confirmed it did match Troy’s ‘serial victim’. It was all very puzzling.
Then at least part of the mystery was solved when the Met sent along a scientist to give a talk on sample contamination; apparently they were having an issue with the swabs, and forensics were going to have to toss any batches made before the last six months.
“They can call this one the Phantom of Causton, eh, Troy?” Tom suggested. George found it funny, at least; Troy didn’t seem to.
“So how many cases has this been an issue for, here?” the scientist, Dr Sabrina Freyer, asked. She was a black American woman with big horn-rimmed glasses and a lab coat. Tom supposed they had all sorts in the labs these days.
“Six,” Troy told her, with a suspicious look in her eye. “But it’s not just the swabs, I have evidence -”
“That will be quite enough, Troy,” Tom said. “Thank you for your time, Dr Freyer. We don’t get a lot of people willing to drive all the way out here from London.”
“All the - oh, yeah, sure,” said Dr Freyer. “No trouble at all.”
And that was the end of it, with an odd little coda; there was a break-in at the Causton station two nights later, but nothing valuable went missing, and the security cameras didn’t catch anything useful. Kids, Tom thought. Kids daring each other to do something stupid
*
“Troy,” he said a month after that. “Hand it back.”
“Hand what back?” Troy said around a mouthful of sandwich. It was almost as terrible a sight as his tie.
“Your conspiracy theory file. It’s not on my desk anymore.” It had been hidden under a wash of other files; Tom had kept meaning to file it, or maybe burn it (the contents were all copies) and been unable to decide what to do in either case.
Troy swallowed hastily, and exclaimed “That wasn’t me!”
Tom frowned at him, but he seemed sincere. “Well, alright then. Must have been the cleaners, or something.”
Troy sat bolt upright. “No! If it’s been stolen, that means -”
“Nothing, Troy, it means nothing. Have we had any more mysterious missing victims?”
“No,” Troy said, sulkily.
“It’ll turn up,” Tom reassured him, though if it did he was going to burn the thing. “Meanwhile, we’re taking an outing to Luxton Deeping. It’s their gardening contest being announced this afternoon, and you know how that sort of thing tends to go.”
“Right, sir,” Troy said, nodding, and stood. Someone got bashed in the head with a shovel just before they could be announced winner for best roses, so it was providential they’d decided to go. There were, however, no mysterious Frenchmen to be found, and Troy was his usual useful self as they tracked down the outraged man who the victim had stolen a prize hybrid from, five years ago.
All was, Tom thought, as it should be in Midsomer.