Victor Hart Volume #2

Victor Hart: Case #6 Chapter 6

  “How do you know Professor Curry?” the policeman asked Harland as Victor watched from the observation room.

“Who?” Harland seemed genuinely surprised.

“Professor Curry,” the policeman repeated.

“I don't know any professor anythings,” Harland said with an attitude that called the policeman opposite him an idiot.

“Are you sure about that?” the policeman consulted a folder.

Victor could see that when the policeman looked at the papers in front of him he wasn't really reading them. Perhaps they were just a prop or some kind of psychological crutch.

“Do I look like I go around with professors?” Harland grinned disdainfully.

“What about the 20th of last month?”

Victor looked from the men beyond the glass towards the man recording on the brass pincushion machine. Harland's body language was that of someone victorious, a person who had just been dealt a winning hand but those around him were yet to see it. Victor didn't know how, but he knew that Harland had seen a way out for himself.

“What about it?” Harland looked up at the ceiling, relaxing.

“Where were you?” the interviewer clarified.

“The 20th...” Harland addressed the ceiling, “that was the night of the poetry contest.”

“Poetry contest?” the policeman seemed surprised.

He shouldn't have been as Victor happened to know that poetry had resurged amongst the youth of deprived areas as a mode of expression. He knew that the policeman's surprise was due to the idea that poetry was all about flowery words and deep feelings. But the kind of poetry someone like Harland was most likely interested in was virtually a series of vulgarities and insults in a disorganised rhyming structure. Victor did not care for it at all.

“Yeah, I was in a poetry contest,” Harland waved a hand, “all night long.”

“Can anyone vouch for that?” the policeman chewed the inside of his mouth, provoked.

“The other poets, the judges, the audience,” Harland grinned victorious, “just about three hundred people saw me there.”

Next to Victor, Finnegan's fists clench momentarily.

“Damn it,” he swore, “I really thought we had our man.”

He fiddled with a gold cuff link as if trying to control himself.

“Anyone can say he was at a poetry contest,” Caughlin couldn't understand, “it doesn't mean he was.”

“We will verify his alibi as soon as we can,” Finnegan explained, “but it seems unlikely that he'd make such an easily falsifiable claim.”

For a moment they stood in silence and watched Harland being taken out of the room and presumably to be processed for release.

There was something that Victor wanted before discounting Harland as a suspect completely. Although Harland seemed perfectly capable of murdering Nicholas Foster, he did not strike Victor as the sort of person who would commit various murders across the city with no apparent motive then send a letter to the press about it.

“Can I get a sample of Harland's handwriting?” Victor asked.

Finnegan seemed to guess Victor's intentions straight away.

“You mean to compare to the signature on the Sagittarius letter?” Finnegan looked at Victor. “It's a good idea, that's why we thought of it first. An expert graphologist said that the signature was too slowly written to be natural and was most likely disguised. He gave us a forty percent chance that it could have been done by Harland.”