Wagner and Sanchez

It’s four am on a windy night in Salcombe and Detective Wagner is fervent with the thrill of

murder.

“And it’s a good one too,” he says to me in the passenger seat as I swung us round the

bends of whimsical pastel houses. His eyes, usually deadpan, glint like two globlets of

frogspawn, which betray his glee; it’s no wonder no one else likes to work with him. “A

stranger’s body in a house with no sign of a break-in: it must be my lucky day.”

“Not his,” I note, slugging down the cannister of cold coffee I keep in the side-door in

case of calls like these. I grimace; it’s gone gummy.

Wagner doesn’t react. He doesn’t find me funny. Sometimes when I’m speaking, his

eyes gloss over, and I know he’s drowning me out with the incessant clunk and whirr of his

mind, and I feel I might be no more interesting to him than the bobble-headed monkey nodding

idiotically on the dashboard. This is, effectively, what I’m acting as; Wagner is assigned

because he’s brilliant, and I am assigned because he can’t be trusted. He doesn’t like it – but he

needs a driver, since his license got revoked. And Captain knows I’m the one sensible and

boring enough not to set him off again.

I swerve down a side-street and the car bumps on the cockle path. Chandler Hall is

ahead of us now: huge and bold between the poplar trees along the pathway. I whistle.

“You forget to mention this body is in a mansion of the richest family in Devonshire.”

I expected to be ignored again; but Wagner goes “Chuff! I don’t ‘forget’. I ignore.

Money is boring. Money is a nuisance. People obsess with and kill over and die over money.

All of them are idiots. I bet this one is an idiot, too.”

I have to appreciate the little slivers of wisdom that sometimes slip through his conceit.

“Was,” I say.

I park outside the mansion. It’s superbly over-the-top, with its gargoyles and parapets

and balcony, and a monumental door with a huge brass knocker. Wagner ducks out in his usual

fashion, hands slung in the pockets, hanging fox-like head moving side to side like he’s sniffing.

He’s chewing gum, flipping it over in his mouth as he works and chews thoughts. And metallic

slugs of sleeplessness characterise those eyes. I doubt he has slept at all. “Who has a brain so

inactive it can shut off with a snap?” he once said to me, when he was really looking. “Sleep is

for utter fools. What a damned waste of time. I abhor sleep. She is my worst nemesis.” He has

a taste for the dramatic. I said something back about the medical importance of sleep, but he

had stopped listening to me.

I follow him to the door, which opens as we approach. A porter in a crisp suit and tie

appears around it. He bows, and addresses us in a voice rich as dark chocolate. “Detective and

detective. Please do come in.” He’s festooned with a thick walrus moustache, like a butler in a

play. Do people really still dress up like that?

Wagner sweeps past him without looking. He’s analysing the interior: its marble floors

glossy like hard caramel, its lardy air smelling of cigars. The porter looks appalled.

“Thank you,” I say, bowing. I have stopped trying to excuse him. “Detectives Sanchez

and Wagner.” I show my ID. “Where is the body?”

“This way, ma’am.” He struggles to look away from my companion, who is so close to

a portrait he could kiss it. But when turns back to me, his alarm dissipates. My simple bun and

my neat uniform pleases him; I come off as sensible. He is relieved to have at least one detective

who is sensible. “I am glad you came,” he says. “It’s a most extraordinary affair.”

“Because there was no sign of a break-in?”

“Oh, no, ma’am,” he says, his head quivering. “That’s not the strangest part.”

“Then what?”

But the porter, with a knowing shake of the stache, wanted to wait for a more dramatic

revelation. When we came into the ballroom where the body lay, and the dark diamond

chandelier speckled the floor with light, he left us. A man who must have been Mister Chandler

stood near the body. He now looked up to us, his face invisible in the gloom.

“Detective Wagner,” says my companion, swinging past me to shake his hand. It was a

compulsory manoeuvre, before his fox-eyes could move to the meatier subject of interest: the

body on the floor. “Ah, here’s the cadaver. Hello!”

Mister Chandler looks confusedly at me. The same expression as his butler.

“Detective Sanchez.” I shake the same hand. Chandler has a thin, old face, unhealthy-

looking, with a drooping moustache and a forehead garnished with a toupee. He’s wrapped in

a gown inscribed with initials. His hand jitters as I shake it, a fact Wagner has already filed.

“Hello, detective.”

His voice is feeble. I expected him to sound like his butler. “This must be a shock, sir.”

“Yes.”

His eyes are terrified. He’s not looking at me at all, but at the body; I turn to it; and my

eyebrows spring high.

“Dead four hours,” Wagner is muttering as he inspects. “Blunt force trauma. No sign of

a weapon or instrument. Healthy gut.” He buzzes on like a cloud of flies, poking and prodding

the expressionless remains. “Old clothes – borrowed. Too small – don’t fit. Wet coat.”

“Wagner,” I say.

“Phone in the pocket. Dead. Smudges of red on the neck – lipstick? Naughty dog.”

“Wagner, you’ve missed something.”

He looks up sharply at the remark: touchy. But then he sees Chandler. Fox-eyes widen.

“Oho.”

The bedraggled-dressed corpse on the floor, and the lord in his gown: identical.

Perfectly identical. Wagner leaps up and stares at Mister Chandler, sucking in every detail of

the face he didn’t give a crumb about before. “Mister Chandler, do you have a twin?”

He stares intently at the wild, exhilarated eyes. “None I’ve ever heard of.”

Wagner licks his lips like a dog. “Amazing.”

I expect him to return to the body, but he continues to stare at Chandler. His chilly eyes

drift over. I wish I knew what he was seeing. Chandler looks understandably unnerved, and a

glob of sweat begins to slither on his neck. Wagner grins. A predatorial curve, like shark-fangs.

“Amazing,” he repeats. “That you thought we’d be so blind.”

Then he laughs. He doesn’t laugh, ever, and it hacks out of him like an animal bark,

like he’s forgotten how it’s meant to sound. It’s a cruel noise. Chandler jumps at it.

“It’s classic,” he goes on, shaking his head. “The exchange. You didn’t think to be any

more creative.” He motions the body. “You thought a quick change of clothes and a puzzled

face was enough to cloak the curse of poverty on you. But look, that robe is hanging off you,

and porky over here barely fits in your rag-tag clothes. I’m not surprised. You look like you eat

a steady diet of cigarette-ends and pennies. Do you think I wouldn’t connect the dots?”

“Wagner,” I warned. “Save it for the department.”

But I was ignored. He was rarely like this. He was far too pleased with himself. He

prattled on, happy as a kid with a stick of gum: “and as for that rat of a toupée, well, it’s easy

to be bitter if one twin balds before the other, but that wasn’t why you killed him. What was it,

then? His money? Are you really so cliché? I knew you were an idiot.” He went back to the

body, turned its pallid head to see the neck. “Or was it his wife? Tell me, is that lipstick mark

from a lady, or did you kiss your poor dead brother yourself, to throw us off the mark? Well

done if you did, it would have been the cleverest part of your disguise.” He didn’t see, but

Mister Chandler looked fearsome, his jaw clenched savagely.

“Wagner, stop it,” I said more sturdily. But again, I was ignored. Wagner didn’t even

glance at me. It was like I wasn’t there.

“Forgive me for saying, Mister Chandler, but your accent really is atrocious, and it’s

blitheringly obvious that this corpse has been dead for more than an hour. How long did it take

to patch up that ingenious disguise?” I saw Chandler’s face crumple in concentrated enmity. I

took a hold of my baton. “Did you really have a good look between you? Did you really think

you’d fool anyone?” He yapped another sharp laugh. I saw Chandler reach into his gown.

“Wagner!”

“He’s the one dead on the floor, yet you still look more like a corpse–”

Chandler whipped his hand out his gown to flash forth a silver pistol, aimed at Wagner’s

pleased, ignorant head. But before his knarled finger could curl about the trigger, I leapt and

cracked the weapon out of his hand – I heard the crunch of broken fingers, and a sharp crack

as the gun fired and splintered a pendeloque from the chandelier. Chandler swore and leapt

upon the floor for the fallen pistol, but in a breath of mania I sprang upon him and cracked the

baton with strength I never had against his neck. There was an awful crunching like celery

snapping, and Chandler slumped headlong on the floor: his eyes glazed. His body died.

I stood panting. I had killed a man.

I turned upon Wagner. He looked stunned.

“Sandhurst,” he said ghostily.

He looked at me for the first time since we’d entered. His face was milky-white.

“You killed him.”

“Yes. Nothing to be done about it now.” I slipped the baton back into my belt. “And my

name is Sanchez.”

The butler burst suddenly into the ballroom, in a luxury of hysteria. “I heard gunfire!”

“Get out of here,” I said savagely. “A man’s been killed. Go and call the police.”

He yelped and left. I went to Chandler – whom I killed – and closed his eyes. I felt my

partner looking at me.

He said: “I could have died.”

I replied shortly: “yes.” There was a pause. “You would have, if you kept bragging like

an idiot.”

“Or if you hadn’t been here.”

I was uncomfortable. My companion and I stood in the vast dark ballroom in the

presence of two bodies, and his were full of wonder. And then in this setting he said to me the

most feeling thing I’ve heard from him: “I did not want to die.”

I wondered whether to attempt to be funny. “Then don’t talk so murderably.”

Truly, he smiled. “We’ll say it was self-defence.”

“It was.”

He paused. “I don’t know how I can repay you, Sanchez.”

And then I said something daring. “Maybe buy me dinner.”

On reflection, as I chewed the steak sandwich he ran immediately to buy me from

whatever dive was still open, and he sat next to me on the damp stairs happily chomping his

seventh gum of the night, the ambulance sirens blaring in the background, I thought I ought to

have specified that I would prefer him to eat dinner with me. But the sandwich was delicious,

and Wagner was happy, and one may walk over the highest mountain one step at a time: or

befriend the coldest man – one manslaughter at a time.

I am Elsie Steane and I am studying Creative Writing and English Literature at the University of East Anglia. In my writing I have a particular interest in character, and relationships between characters. I am currently working on a fun fantasy novel with the working title, 'Wren, Pectus and Spike', which has found itself to be a riot to write.