“This is my first assignment as your assistant, and it’s quite intense right from the start.”
Lure looked around restlessly.
“A military academy. I never imagined I’d end up in a place like this.”
“Why not? You’re a student, too.”
“Is a university really the same as a military academy? This is a completely different world.”
“Hmm…”
I surveyed our surroundings.
‘It certainly feels like a different world.’
Massive, majestic marble buildings, plaster statues displayed here and there, and even thick ivy vines. But the most impressive thing was the wall.
As if to separate this lofty school from the vulgar secular world, a high wall stood tall, encircling the entire vast campus.
There was even barbed wire atop the wall, making it look nearly impossible to climb over without leaving a trace.
‘It would definitely be difficult for an outsider to break in.’
Just as the client had said, it was highly likely that the culprit was an insider. That is, if this incident truly was a murder and not an accident.
“Oh, Teacher! That looks like the dormitory building over there.”
Lure pointed toward a building.
Behind the main school building, a three-story red brick structure was visible.
Someone was standing at the entrance of that building, and unexpectedly, he seemed to be waiting for us.
“Are you the detective sent by that chairman? If so, I assume this young lady is your assistant.”
The man spoke bluntly without even introducing himself.
“Yes, that’s correct. I’m Hays. And you are?”
“The detective in charge of this case. Call me Baron.”
‘A policeman…’
With his graying hair and oddly relaxed attitude, he looked like a detective with quite a bit of experience.
I recalled the client’s warning that the police would try to push the case as an accidental death.
“You should be careful.”
Lure whispered softly in my ear, perhaps having thought of the same thing. After a slight nod, I spoke to the detective with a composed face.
“It’s a pleasure, Detective Baron. Since you already seem to know who I am, there’s no need for further explanation. May I know the status of the investigation?”
“It’s better for you to see it for yourself rather than me blabbering until my mouth is sore. Follow me.”
Having said that, the detective headed straight into the building without waiting for my answer.
‘It seems he doesn’t intend to kick me out immediately.’
Feeling relieved, I hurried after him.
“This dormitory has three floors in total, but currently only the first and second floors are in use. I’m told the third floor was closed off after the war ended and the enrollment quota was reduced.”
“Is that so?”
I moved quickly, scanning the surroundings with my peripheral vision.
‘It’s quite a large building.’
Given this size, even using just the first and second floors seemed enough to accommodate a large number of students.
“The first floor is a communal space. It has miscellaneous things like a cafeteria, an infirmary, and a lounge. The students’ rooms are concentrated on the second floor.”
As we climbed the stairs, a hallway with a long line of doors appeared. Detective Baron stopped in front of a door at the very end of the second-floor hallway.
“This is the victim’s room. It’s also where this murder took place.”
Following ‘victim’ with ‘murder.’
It was a bold choice of words.
“Detective, are you ruling out the possibility that this incident was an accidental death?”
I had heard that wasn’t the police’s stance.
“That’s right. This is a murder case.”
Baron asserted firmly.
“Is it because of the dying message the victim left behind?”
“That’s part of it. But that’s not all.”
‘Is there another piece of evidence?’
Before I could even organize my thoughts, Baron swung the door open.
“Wow.”
Lure gasped in admiration.
“I’ve never seen such a nice room before.”
“Don’t say things like that in a place where someone died.”
I said that, but in truth, I was also quite impressed.
‘It looks like a hotel room.’
The furniture was all high-end. Everything was coordinated in white tones, and there was even a small but clean bathroom attached inside the room.
The detective snorted as he watched us looking around like country bumpkins.
“Hmph. You’d probably faint if you saw the other rooms.”
“Are the other rooms even more luxurious than this?”
“They are. This room is only at this level because it was improvised.”
“…An improvised room?”
Baron gestured toward the door with his eyes.
“Didn’t you notice that only this room’s doorknob is different when you walked in?”
I had noticed. While the doorknobs of the other rooms showed the passage of time, only the doorknob of this room was shiny and new.
‘I thought the doorknob had just fallen off and been replaced with a new one.’
The detective explained with a snort.
“A few years ago, when the war was in full swing, they significantly increased the school’s enrollment to fill the ranks of reserve officers. They said they hurriedly converted even rooms used as storage into dormitory rooms because they were short on space.”
So they gave such a room to the only commoner student.
‘It doesn’t seem like the best of intentions.’
It could be a coincidence, but it was highly suspicious.
“More importantly, look here. This is the scene of the crime.”
Baron redirected my attention.
“The victim’s body was discovered three days ago at around 7:30 AM, slumped over this desk as if he were asleep.”
“The victim’s last breath is lingering on that ordinary-looking desk.”
Lure said, as if feeling a chill.
“What a poetic expression. Is it because you’re young?”
Baron let out a snort, making it unclear whether he was being sarcastic or sentimental.
Seeing how he kept snorting, maybe he had rhinitis.
“The victim was last seen alive at around 10:00 PM the night before the body was discovered. At that time, the dormitory proctor locked the victim’s door from the outside.”
“Wait a moment. The door was locked from the outside?”
“It seems that’s the school’s policy. They lock all dormitory doors between 10:00 PM and 6:00 AM to prevent students from going out at night and causing trouble.”
Being a military academy, it was quite a rigid rule.
“What is the estimated time of death?”
“It hasn’t been accurately calculated yet, but it’s certain it was before 2:00 AM.”
If that’s the case, the victim died in a locked room.
‘Then isn’t it an accidental death after all?’
As if to make my doubt look foolish, the detective took a step to the side and said.
“And this notebook was placed next to the victim’s body.”
The desk, which had been hidden by Baron’s frame, was revealed.
Immediately, a notebook lying wide open in the center of the desk caught my eye. There, filling the page, a single word was scribbled in a rough handwriting.
[ROSE]
‘A dying message…!’
I could tell the moment I saw it. That was the dying message everyone had been talking about. From the moment I became conscious of those letters, I couldn’t take my eyes off them.
A rough handwriting so twisted and shaky that it was barely recognizable. The size of the letters was large enough to fill an entire page of the notebook. Those short four letters radiated an otherworldly desperation.
There was no way I could think of it as an ordinary memo.
“The victim did not let go of the pen until the very end.”
The detective said so, pointing to the pen.
It was a quill.
A very antique quill that was considered outdated even in this world.
“The coroners had a hard time prying that quill out of the corpse after rigor mortis set in.”
“Then the probability that this memo is a dying message is high.”
But there was a problem.
‘So what on earth does this mean?’
The content of the dying message was too ambiguous. ROSE, all of a sudden?
A dying victim wouldn’t have suddenly tried to leave behind some poetic inspiration. If I think about a realistic message a victim might leave…
“By any chance, is there a student named Rose in this dormitory?”
“There were similar names. But there was no one with that exact name.”
“Hmm…”
Did the victim misspell a similar name?
Since he was on the verge of death, his consciousness might have faded, leading him to write it incorrectly.
Or, this message itself could be unfinished. If he had tried to write something more, but his breath was cut off by the culprit before then—.
‘Wait a minute, how did the victim die in the first place?’
Murder cases where the victim could leave a dying message were rare. That was especially true if it was death by suffocation.
It’s not like one can leave a dying message while being strangled by a culprit, right?
Since there is a dying message, it seems right to assume he was murdered, but… in what way did the culprit kill the victim?
‘Is there a way to suffocate someone to death without leaving any external trauma?’
The method that immediately came to my crude reasoning ability was removing the air from the room. Filling the room with a gas other than air, or something like that.
‘But this room was a locked room that wasn’t really a locked room.’
The door was locked, but it didn’t fit perfectly into the frame. There was a small window in the room, and even a ventilation duct in the attached bathroom.
A way to suffocate a person in a room like this? Is there even such a thing?
“What do you think, Detective? Do you have any ideas?”
Detective Baron sent an expectant look my way.
“…Well, I have some ideas, but it’s hard to speak recklessly yet.”
In times like this, staying quiet is the best policy. I refrained from speaking for now and tried my best to look like I knew something.
“Do you have an idea, Teacher? I have no clue at all.”
Lure said with a sigh.
“Suffocation without trauma… at first, I immediately thought of drowning…”
Drowning. Right, there’s drowning too?
If someone drowned him somewhere else and then moved the body, it wouldn’t be impossible.
Should I have suggested the possibility of drowning too?
“Hmph! Drowning someone is no easy task. The victim would have resisted fiercely, so defense marks would inevitably be left behind. And if he had drowned, his lungs would have been filled with water, so there’s no way I wouldn’t know.”
“You’re right, of course.”
‘Hmm, it’s a good thing I stayed quiet.’
“Nothing else comes to mind. I’m sorry to Mr. Peterson, but for me, I can’t help but say it’s an accidental death. Maybe the so-called dying message was actually just a coincidence where he left a meaningful memo before dying.”
But the detective cut her off sharply.
“No, that’s not it. There’s a clearly suspicious point for it to be an accidental death.”
“A suspicious point?”
“If this case were an accidental death, the victim would have suffocated because something foreign got stuck and blocked his airway. Wouldn’t that be the case?”
That was a given.
Lure and I nodded at the same time.
“However, as a result of the autopsy, there was nothing blocking the corpse’s airway. It was clean. No foreign substances that could have blocked the airway were found around the body either.”
“That… is certainly strange.”
Did someone remove the foreign object after the victim died?
But there’s no idiot who would do such a thing in an accidental death. Even if there were, they would have told the police.
“Could it be that whatever suffocated the victim was ice?”
Lure speculated.
“So, after suffocating the victim, it melted away!”
“But Lure, how on earth would he get ice in a dormitory room like this?”
Ice was not very common in this world. Unless it was midwinter, perhaps it could only be found at a famous shaved ice shop in the capital. Even if one obtained it, it was hard to store for long.
“Then… I really don’t know. How exactly did Mr. Allen die?”
‘I’m wondering the same thing.’
It was strange whether it was an accidental death or a murder.
Death by suffocation, but a suffocation where not a single trace remained.
I’d rather believe a grim reaper from a manga killed him. Maybe he just wrote ‘death by suffocation’ as the victim’s cause of death in some notebook?
Just as I was having such delusions.
Knock, knock—.
Someone knocked on the dormitory door.
“Detective! I’ve brought the witnesses.”
“Ah, good. Is everyone here?”
“No. That is… Lord McDowall is refusing to be interrogated.”
“Hmph! This is why I can’t stand those noble lords. It seems he still hasn’t grasped the situation, so make sure to let him know clearly that being uncooperative won’t solve anything!”
I was listening to the conversation and grasping the situation when I was suddenly startled.
“Did you call the witnesses to the crime scene? You’re planning to interrogate them here?”
The detective seemed nonchalant, as if it weren’t a problem.
“I thought it would be better this way. The results of the interrogations at the police station weren’t very satisfactory. I thought we might discover something if we cross-referenced them with the evidence at the crime scene.”
Is that so? No, but isn’t preserving the crime scene important? Whether I was in a state of confusion or not, the detective didn’t care.
“For now, have the rest of the witnesses come in.”
Soon the door swung wide open, and the witnesses appeared.
“Welcome, everyone. I’d like to express my gratitude to those who, unlike someone else, readily complied with the police investigation.”
“…!”
I reflexively shuddered.
Among the witnesses walking in, I saw someone.
“Not at all. It’s to catch the culprit who killed Allen. Of course I can cooperate. After all, I was Allen’s only friend.”
A person using a sociable tone and moving their arm as if wiping away tears. An existence I couldn’t possibly fail to recognize, whose entire body was covered in a black shadow.
‘It’s that guy.’
The culprit of the case was neither a grim reaper nor any other supernatural being.
A hypocrite posing as a friend.
He was the culprit who murdered Allen Hessington.