CASE 1. The Clumsy Detective (3)
‘She’s completely different from what I imagined.’
As the shadows receded, the person revealed was not the vicious criminal I had expected.
She had a small stature and gentle, downturned eyes. Her forehead was free of wrinkles as if she had spent much of her life smiling, though fine lines were etched around the corners of her mouth.
Her hair was tied back naturally in a single ponytail, with stray hairs left unmanaged. Her outfit was a simple yet neat and comfortable-looking wildflower-patterned dress.
In a word, she looked like a kind and gentle lady you could find anywhere.
‘Is that the same person who was just raising her voice and arguing with me?’
It was hard to believe.
She sat on the floor with a dazed expression, her eyes brimming with tears and her rims reddened.
Her lips were even torn and bleeding at the edges, likely from biting them so hard.
… For some reason, I felt like a jerk.
‘No. Get it together. That side is the criminal, and I am the detective. That side is the perpetrator.’
To steady my heart, I asked her in a cold voice.
“Evelyn. Why did you steal your husband’s money?”
At that moment, focus returned to the woman’s eyes.
“Ha, my husband’s money?”
The woman asked back sharply and let out a mocking laugh.
“How is that his money? It contains my share from a lifetime of hard work alongside him, and the money he thoughtlessly dragged in from the villagers!”
“… What?”
From a distance, the client’s laughter-filled voice drifted over.
[Bwahaha, I’m saved! I’m saved!]
The woman’s face distorted as if she were about to cry.
“I am here weeping, yet that man is cheering. It seems he can see nothing but money now. I really don’t know. Is that man truly the kind husband I once knew? Has money blinded him and stripped away his love for me?”
“That is….”
With the wife revealed as the culprit, the sight of the cheering husband was certainly jarring.
‘N-No, get it together. Don’t fall for the criminal’s sob story.’
I snapped back coldly.
“It is only natural to be happy after recovering stolen money. In the first place, can you even call someone who tried to steal your entire fortune a spouse?”
“Ha! By that logic, he is the one unqualified to be my husband!”
Evelyn shouted in a fit of rage.
“Because he is a fool who intends to hand over our entire fortune to a con artist!”
“What?”
“Honored Detective. I had my reasons. There was an unavoidable reason why I had no choice but to do this.”
With her face buried in both hands, Evelyn’s story began.
Evelyn loved her husband.
Though he was somewhat naive and gullible, he was still a good man. He was always devoted to his family and diligent in his work.
That is to say, until that day.
“Evelyn, look at this! I’ve made a huge amount of money!”
One evening, her husband came home much later than usual. A strange, pungent smell she had never smelled before was coming from his body.
“Dear, have you been drinking? Just who were you drinking with to have consumed this much?”
He was so drunk he couldn’t even steady himself properly. He rolled across the front yard, ruining the flowerbed Evelyn had worked so hard to maintain, and let out a goofy grin.
“That’s not what’s important. Evelyn. I told you I made big money. Look at this.”
He reached out from the crushed flowerbed and handed Evelyn a paper envelope. Inside was a high-end muslin dress that Evelyn had never seen in her life.
“Oh my!”
It was an expensive garment that was difficult for a couple of their means to even look at. That wasn’t all. There was a hat perched on her husband’s head that she hadn’t seen before.
It was a sophisticated flat cap, made of wool dyed a luxurious brown with checkered embroidery—the kind of exquisite item only an aristocrat would wear.
“Dear, where on earth did you get something like this?”
“A benefactor gave it to me. He’s a very great businessman.”
“A businessman?”
“Yes. It’s a very good thing. I’ve become friends with him! We’re going to be rich. Rich….”
With those words, her husband fell fast asleep. Evelyn felt an ominous premonition.
“Why would a wealthy businessman be kind to you for no reason….”
No answer came from her sleeping husband.
A few days later, Evelyn’s anxiety became a reality.
“Honey, where did all this money come from?”
“That is….”
Perhaps he felt some shame, as her husband avoided her gaze while answering.
“I borrowed it from the neighbors. I’ve decided to invest in a business.”
“My goodness! What did you say?”
“You know, that friend I mentioned before. He said he urgently needed business capital, so… I decided to invest a little. Don’t worry. I’ll get it back soon. As soon as I get it back, I’ll pay off the debts, so there won’t be any problems for our family.”
Evelyn loved her husband, of course, but she was capable of seeing reality objectively.
Her husband knew nothing about investing, and that businessman was suspicious no matter how you looked at it. It reeked of a scam from every angle.
“Dear, just tell him you won’t do it. Return this dress immediately, and go tell him you can’t go through with it!”
“N-No. I told you, this is an investment I must make! There won’t be any problems! And that dress is yours! There’s no need to return it!”
No matter how many times she spoke, her husband was unyielding. He didn’t seem to have the slightest intention of canceling that damn investment.
Every time she saw the safe filled with money, Evelyn’s heart felt like it was bursting.
If he loses all that money by trying to invest it, what will happen to our home? It’s not even just our money. What if he loses all the neighbors’ money too?
What if all that’s left is a muslin dress that doesn’t even fit, her husband’s hat, and a mountain of debt while being penniless?
Being kicked out of the village would be a mercy. In this era, where a fist is closer than the law, they might actually be beaten to death. Or perhaps their precious daughter, who was still so young, would be sold off as a second wife to some wealthy old man.
“No! I can’t let that happen!”
To prevent such a terrible thing, Evelyn was willing to do anything. When the day of the investment appointment her husband mentioned finally arrived, Evelyn made up her mind.
If she couldn’t stop him with words, she would stop him physically.
“So I decided to hide the money.”
“Such a thing….”
“I wasn’t stealing it; I was trying to protect it. Our family’s future, from that wicked con artist! But now it’s all ruined because of you, Detective! I can’t stop my husband. No one will be able to stop that man! Oh, poor Dana! What will become of our family’s future now?”
My mind went blank at the unexpected story.
‘Wait. I was actually the bad guy? I found that money for nothing?’
It was too specific to be dismissed as a story she just made up because she got caught.
Above all, listening to the wife, there were several things that clicked for me as well.
‘That hat certainly did look like it was of high quality.’
I thought it was just a common hat I often saw in the world I originally lived in, but put another way, wasn’t it a high-quality hat that could easily be sold even in my original world? There was no way such a hat wouldn’t be expensive.
He was a man whose circumstances didn’t look that great, so where did that money come from?
‘The lost money too.’
He said it was gold coins. And a safe full of them at that. How could an ordinary man living in a rural house like this in this era have that much money?
‘He was extremely obsessed with recovering the money within the time limit.’
Requesting to find money is a natural demand, but he emphasized the deadline of ‘tonight’ particularly heavily.
What if the appointment he had tonight was that ridiculous investment promise the wife mentioned?
If that were the case, it would also explain why the wife stole the money in a hurry just before her husband returned home.
As the deadline loomed, she had acted impulsively without looking ahead.
And above all else….
[Bwahaha!]
That laughter from the client was the decisive evidence.
His entire fortune was stolen, and then it was revealed his wife was the thief. Normally, a person would show more complex emotions in such a situation, wouldn’t they?
That abnormal reaction of simply being madly joyful seemed to prove the wife’s words—that the client was blinded by his obsession with the investment.
‘Man. It would have been better if I had realized a little sooner.’
I swallowed a sigh inwardly.
Clues were scattered everywhere like this, and yet I didn’t have a clue until I heard the wife’s story. I suppose this is the limit of a fake detective who relies solely on abilities.
‘No, reflection later. Resolution first.’
I had decided to live in this damn world as a detective. The detectives I knew were not beings who accepted such a lingering, unpleasant conclusion.
“Oh, sir!”
When I came out to the yard, the client greeted me with a beaming face. He was covered in filth from head to toe after retrieving the money from the doghouse in the yard, which had turned into a muddy mess due to the rain.
Looking exactly like a pig that had rolled in the mud, the man sat down haphazardly, clutching the sparkling gold coins in his arms.
“Thank you so much. Thanks to you, sir, I was able to find the money!”
He grinned as he rubbed his cheek against the gold coins.
“I’m sorry for doubting you. As expected, you are a great detective.”
‘Hm?’
The moment the client bowed his head, I discovered something. A piece of paper I hadn’t seen before was tucked into his chest.
“What is that paper?”
“Ah, this….”
The client smiled awkwardly and tucked the paper deeper into his clothes.
“It’s nothing much. It’s a business document I had put in the gold pouch together, and luckily, not a single letter was erased by the rain; it’s perfectly fine.”
A strange stench, different from before, emanated from the client as he spoke.
‘I’ve smelled this somewhere before….’
It felt like it was on the tip of my tongue, but in any case, that wasn’t the important issue right now.
“So, what do you plan to do now?”
I asked bluntly.
“Are you going to report your wife to the police or something?”
“Ah….”
Only then did an expression appropriate for the situation settle on the grinning man’s face.
“I have no intention of doing that.”
The husband said so and curled his body even more.
“In fact, if you think about it, this wasn’t even a theft case, was it?”
“Not a theft?”
“Well, I am truly sorry for making a hasty judgment and calling you, Detective. My wife simply changed the location where the money was kept without telling me, and I went and misunderstood that a thief had broken in, didn’t I?”
So that was the answer the client came up with.
“I see. It is as you say.”
I readily agreed. I didn’t want the wife to go to jail either.
“Then, let’s just act as if this matter never happened from the start.”
“Yes. So, about that….”
I thought it was over, but the man trailed off while watching my reaction.
“What is it?”
“The thing is….”
The man hesitated for a long time with his head bowed before finally saying this.
“I won’t be able to pay the commission. I mean, in the end, no incident actually occurred, did it?”
“…….”
My dear client babbled on.
“Nothing happened, so there’s no… need to specifically give you money, is there?”
“…….”
“Ah, well, still, out of moral obligation, I will give you travel expenses. It took you about 10 minutes to walk here from the inn, didn’t it? Including the time we spent chatting, roughly 30 minutes. So, roughly….”
The way his eyes darted around made it clear that he had no intention of paying properly.
‘This one’s a lost cause.’
Since falling into this world, I gained an eye for recognizing criminals. However, long before falling into this world, I possessed an eye for recognizing special people—the so-called Eye for Difficult Customers.
‘Anyone can open it after working a few part-time jobs.’
When viewed through that Eye for Difficult Customers, the person opposite me had already resolved not to pay the proper price even if it killed him.
Conversation with such a person was meaningless.
I took one long sigh and then gave a clean smile.
“No. That’s fine. As you said, it’s not like I caught a thief.”
I adjusted my grip on my cane and gave a light bow.
“I shall be on my way then.”
“Eh? You’re just going like this?”
The man’s voice, pretending to hold me back, was filled with clear relief.
“As expected, you are a true gentleman, sir. I knew it from the moment I saw you carrying that gentleman’s cane. I have a place where I absolutely must spend money today, so… I’m truly sorry. And thank you!”
I set off without answering. There seemed to be no need to correct his misunderstanding.
The fact that I wasn’t particularly a gentleman. And the fact that I didn’t have the slightest intention of being cheated out of my commission.
‘Since the case hasn’t been completely resolved, it’s too early to receive the commission.’
Without looking back even once, I retraced the path I had come.
Tap, tap!
Tapping my cane rhythmically, I moved carefully this time to ensure there were no slips.