‘That’s two seconds to get changed,’ said Lesley. ‘That’s not humanly possible.’
I clicked forward. The man in the smurf hat produced his bat and stepped smartly up behind William Skirmish. The wind-up was between frames but the hit was clear. In the next frame Skirmish’s body was halfway to the ground and a little dark blob, which we decided must be the head, was just visible by the portico.
‘My God. He really did knock his head clean off,’ said Lesley.
Just as Nicholas had said he had.
‘Now that,’ I said, ‘is not humanly possible.’
‘You’ve seen a head come off before,’ said Lesley. ‘I was there, remember?’
‘That was a car accident,’ I said. ‘That’s two tons of metal, not a bat.’
‘Yeah,’ said Lesley, tapping the screen. ‘But there it is.’
‘There’s something wrong here.’
‘Apart from the horrible murder?’
I clicked back to where Smurf Hat entered the scene. ‘Can you see a bat?’
‘No,’ said Lesley. ‘Both his hands are visible. Maybe it’s on his back.’
I clicked forward. On the third frame the bat appeared in Smurf Hat’s hands as if by magic, but that could just have been an artefact of the one-second lag between frames. There was something else wrong with it too.
‘That’s much too big to be a baseball bat,’ I said.
The bat was at least two-thirds as long as the man who carried it. I clicked backwards and forwards a few times but I couldn’t work out where he was keeping it.