Casebook 1: The Open-and-Shut Case - 1.6[index]

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Then I saw it. At the centre of each of the prints were a series of small, raised dots.

I looked at the suspect.

“Braille?” I said. He nodded. I gave him the paper. “What does it say?” He ran his fingers across the surface of the paper.

“It says: ‘This is a blind’. And then: 'regards, Sweetheart Club.'”

By the time we made it back to the bank, it was too late. Everything had been taken from the vault via a tunnel running out to an abandoned building in a nearby street. Near the other end of the tunnel was a remote mechanism which was connected to the bank’s alarm system. Laid out very carefully next to it, was a set of clothes identical to those the blind man had been wearing. It was left for me to guess how he had planted the note in the belly of the fish. I will never know for sure.

I have tried to understand why they went to so much trouble to deceive us when they could have used the tunnel immediately. Maybe they wanted to be sure that we would be otherwise occupied, that we would suspect nothing. Maybe they were doing nothing more than flexing their sadistic intellect. Make of it what you will, but the contents of the vault were never recovered. And so, this was my introduction to the Sweetheart Club.