Free Tickled to Death and Other Stories of Crime and Suspense by Simon Brett

C (what he humorously referred to to his Management Trainees as the “tennis shoe question”), there was a significant special factor. Since Janet was at boarding school in Yorkshire, where his presence would be bound to cause comment, the launch had to be during the school holidays.
    Detailed consideration of these and other factors led him to a date of launch during the summer of the following year, some fifteen months away. It seemed a long time to wait, but, as Hector knew, IMPATIENCE BREEDS ERROR .
    4. RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT OF PRODUCT ( A. THEORETICAL )
    He was able, at his desk, to eliminate a number of possible murder methods. Most of them were disqualified because they failed to meet one important specification: that he should not be implicated in any way.
    Simplified, this meant either a) that Janet’s death should look like an accident, b) that her step-father should have a cast-iron alibi for the time of her death, or, preferably, c) both.
    He liked the idea of an accident. Even though he would arrange things so that he had nothing to fear from a murder inquiry, it was better to avoid the whole process. Ideally, he needed an accident which occurred while he was out of the country.
    A wry instinct dissuaded him from any plan involving faulty gas heaters. A new product should always be genuinely original.
    Hector went through a variety of remotely-controlled accidents that could happen to teenage girls, but all seemed to involve faulty machinery and invited uncomfortably close comparisons with gas heaters. He decided he might have to take a more personal role in the project.
    But if he had to be there, he was at an immediate disadvantage. Anyone present at a suspicious death becomes a suspicious person. What he needed was to be both present and absent at the same time.
    But that was impossible. Either he was there or he wasn’t. His own physical presence was immovable. The time of the murder was immovable. And the two had to coincide.
    Or did they?
    It was at this moment that Hector Griffiths had a brainwave. They did sometimes come to him, with varying force, but this one was huge, bigger even, he believed, than his idea for the green tear-off tag on the GLISS TABLE-TOP CLEANER sachets.
    He would murder Janet and then change the time of her murder.
    It would need a lot of research, a lot of reading books of forensic medicine, but, just as Hector had known with the green tag, he knew again that he had the right solution.
    4. RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT OF PRODUCT ( B. PRACTICAL )
    One of Hector’s favourite sentences from his Staff Training lecture was: “The true Genesis of a product is forged by the R and D boys in the white heat of the laboratory.” Previously, he had always spoken it with a degree of wistfulness, aware of the planner’s distance from true creativity, but with his new product he experienced the thrill of being the real creator.
    He gave himself a month, the month that remained before Janet would return for her summer holidays, and at the end of that time he wanted to know his murder method. There would be time for refinement of details, but it was important to get the main outline firm.
    He made many experiments which gave him the pleasure of research, but not the satisfaction of a solution, before he found the right method.
    He found it in Cornwall. Janet had agreed to continue her normal summer practice of spending the month of August at the cottage, and early in July Hector went down for a weekend to see that the place was habitable and to take the motor-boat for its first outing of the season. While Melissa had been alive, the cottage had been used most weekends from Easter onwards and, as he cast off his boat from the mooring in front of his cottage and breathed the tangy air, Hector decided to continue the regular visits.
    He liked it down there. He liked having the boat to play with, he liked the respect that ownership of the cottage brought him. Commander