John Wood was a detective from 1852 to 1931 and solved many cases during those years. One of his most complicated was the case known as “The Wrong Murder”, which took place in 1899. I was his sidekick at the time.
On the morning of the 19th of October, we got a call from a person called Mr. Turner. Mr. Wood and I quickly got ready and jumped into our Winton Phaeton (an old British car in 1899) with the top speed of 33 miles an hour and 10 horsepower. We arrived about 20 minutes later.
As soon as we got out of the car, we were welcomed by a man aged about 47.
“Thank god you came so quickly,” said the man. “My name is Mr. Turner.”
“What is your problem, sir?” asked Mr. Wood
“I was just walking past this house, when I looked through the window and saw a man with a knife in his chest,” said Mr. Turner
“Did you touch anything?” I asked
“No, I didn't!" exclaimed Mr. Turner.
“Okay, sir, if you could please go visit a colleague from the police back there,” said Mr. Wood. “Okay, now we should go visit Mrs. Doctor so she can tell us when the man was killed.”
“There you are!" exclaimed Mrs. Doctor.
“What can you tell us about the death of the man?” asked Mr. Wood.
“He was stabbed by this knife, which you can still see in his chest,” said Mrs. Doctor. “He was stabbed between 23 and 25 o'clock, but I can’t give you more information until after the post-mortem.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Doctor,” I said.
We walked through the front garden and thought about who could have committed the murder.
“This is hard, we don’t have any suspects yet,” said Mr. Wood.
We walked onto the street, where Mr. Turner was having his fingerprints taken. We walked over to him. “Did you notice anything strange lately?” asked Mr. Wood
“No, I didn’t,” said Mr. Turner
“Okay, that is it for now. Thank you,” said Mr. Wood.
We walked back to our car and drove back to my office.
“The police found some work which was lying on his desk. It could help our case,” said Mr. Wood. “Perhaps,” I said and started looking through some of his papers. “The name of the man was Timothy Parker, he was 38 years old, and he was a plumber,” I said.
I looked the name up on the computer, but only found a different man.