Y ya para terminar este viaje del ego, aquí está el relato con el que contribuí a la antología de relatos policíacos «The Lippincott Dinner», la edición de Novel in a Day de 2025. Es un poco más corto que el anterior, también está en inglés, y la verdad es que me metí en tremendo lío con la premisa, pero dio lugar a uno de los mensajes más amables y cariñosos que he recibido jamás de un editor. Lo podéis encontrar también dentro del libro junto a los otros 33 relatos. Todos ellos fueron escritos, enviados y publicados el 23 de marzo de 2025 y se pueden descargar gratis en ePub, Kindle y PDF.
En esta ocasión Rog nos permitió enviar un haiku además o en vez de un relato, y yo me vine arriba e hice ambas cosas. Bueno, en realidad primero se me ocurrió el haiku y construí el relato a partir de él.
The Last Second
As the blade plunges Coldly my brain starts solving My sudden murder
The knife enters my lung from behind.
«Left-handed,» I think, even before the pain registers and my brain starts sending muddled signals of danger and fighting and fleeing. Someone, evidently not me, tries to scream. The air goes out the wrong way and the sound turns into a strange, hissing gurgle.
I need to think about this.
Professor Accardi is left-handed, I think. So is Troy Gerson. I don’t know about Dr. Hong. Dr. Mencken, who is right-handed, could be smart enough to fake a left-handed stabbing.
But today is Wednesday: Mencken would not murder me on a Wednesday. It would be too complicated to explain why she is not at the Flesher Grant Committee Meeting. The Flesher Grant is her baby.
The motive is obvious and should be to everyone, even the police: I had announced my decision to cut off the money from the Sanderson Trust, which would jeopardise, if not outright kill, many current projects. Mainly Gerson’s, Mencken’s, Accardi’s and Hong’s.
Motive established, good. That leaves means and opportunity. Even as the blood starts pooling inside my chest cavity and I try, vainly, to turn around and see my murderer’s face, I think about means.
The cold from the second stab wound mingles with the pain from the first. My hands become wet with my own blood as I try, instinctively, to fight the arm that keeps me pinned against the murderer. Useless task, I know, but we’re, after all, animals. We fight to survive even if the brain has other priorities.
Why stabbing, I think. Messy, difficult, risky. Much better to try and run me over with a car, or throw me off a window perhaps. This smells of impulse more than cold premeditation. I find it is impossible to deduce the kind of murder weapon from the feeling of it in my back, even if I had more time to think about it. Which I don’t.
First off, Troy Gerson or Elio Accardi are the ones who would have easy access to blades. Gerson works in the Archaeology Department, and I have a very vivid vision of the long, messy aisles in his basement department, chock-full of different iron, bronze and even stone sharp weapons. Hell, if he is quick enough he can lose the weapon again amongst the bric-à-brac and God knows if the police would find it soon enough, or at all.
And Accardi is a sucker for old-fashioned academia aesthetics: he loves mahogany desks, ink blotters, fountain pens, leather bound books, all that shit. And he keeps a beautiful silver and steel letter-opener in his desk, visible for all to see. I have personally seen how sharp it is. Of course, if Accardi was going to kill me, using his own letter-opener would be either supremely stupid or an impulsive move. My current hypothesis is ‘impulse’, so I work with that as the rapid drop in blood pressure makes me dizzy.
If the murder weapon turns out to be Accardi’s letter opener he’d immediately become the prime suspect, as he’s left-handed. How would he try to direct suspicion away from himself? Well, he’s friends with Hong. Maybe he’d say that Hong stole the letter opener from him and stabbed me.
My body is sending clear signals that I have no time to check complementary details like whether the murderer wears gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints. I need another way to disprove my current hypothesis.
Then it suddenly hits me, along with a wave of nausea brought by the pain as I feel my legs give way: Hong is not in campus today. She is at a biochemistry conference in Boston. Her presentation was being streamed. So Accardi can’t pin my murder on her. Good, I thought. We’re getting somewhere. I feel cold now. I also feel there is something I’m missing, apart from pint after pint of blood.
Come on, keep track: Accardi. He’s not an idiot. Among them all, he’s the one less affected by the withdrawing of funds, since he came with a grant from his own University in Italy. And he is the meticulous type: even if he wanted to kill me, he’d plan something subtle and clever. He wouldn’t use his own letter opener. It can’t be Accardi.
And what if the letter opener is not the murder weapon? I need to know. Too much rests upon that particular point. I have too little data and too little time. This is not going well.
The third, final, and entirely unnecessary strike hits my rib and bounces off.
This one really hurts. I must have grunted or made some noise through the pierced lung, or the useless throat; I don’t know which. Then I hear a noise, the clear ringing of metal on hardwood. The ringing of a sharp, silver-handled, steel-blade letter opener. It must have escaped the murderer’s grip, slick with my blood, when it hits the rib.
Exactly what I need.
Mencken and Hong have solid alibis. The fact that I’m being stabbed by Accardi’s blade gives me the final piece, since Accardi’s profile doesn’t fit this manner of murder.
It’s Gerson.
It fits as well. Gerson is smart, able to think fast in a pinch: the kind of man who’d try to redirect suspicions from himself by using a weapon that would point clearly in another direction. But not a man subtle enough to work beyond the immediate implications.
This gives me a name but precious little else. I cannot shout. I cannot fight. I already feel myself falling. Last chance. There must be something I can do.
He got me as I was entering my office. There are all kinds of books here. I contort muscles that are not functioning well and I put all I have left on making the shelves come into focus.
There. Principles of Archaeology. By Dr. Troy Gerson.
I don’t hear myself hitting the ground. I don’t know if I’ve done it. I hope I have.
I realise something else before everything goes dark, something tinged with urgency and a surprisingly sharp sadness.
Wait.
Wait, I’m being
I’m being murdered
I don’t want to d
###
«Well, her back was turned,» the constable said. «She probably didn’t even know who hit her.»
«Isn’t her position a bit odd?»
«I couldn’t say, inspector. Probably not. Death throes and all that. Why?»
«Well, there’s a splatter of blood that doesn’t fit the rest. It goes toward that shelf. It looks, I don’t know, deliberate. See how the blood spattered towards a very specific point, as if thrown there deliberately?»
The inspector’s gaze goes from the letter opener, to the dead woman’s bloodied hand, and finally to the shelf.
«Let me see that book.»
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