As a new recruit in the force, his job was simple enough.
He was tasked with receiving complaints from those members of the public calling in. It should have been simple. He would take complaint calls and make out a report. This was forwarded to an investigating officer, who would follow up with a call back, and sometimes with a visit to the complaining party. The phone call in question came in mid-afternoon and lasted until his knocking off time. It came from an angry woman who basically complained about her lodger, who was constantly annoying and confusing her. She felt that the advice she had received on a recent visit to her ridiculously expensive psychiatrist, about holding her breath and counting slowly to ten, just wasn’t going to cut the mustard.
The lady in question rented out her back room to a lodger who was an elderly gentleman recently retired. He had spent many years producing cryptic crosswords for a major newspaper. This constant activity of coming up with cryptic clues had spilled over into his everyday life. It was his constant habit to use such language while carrying out what would otherwise be normal, run-of-the-mill discourse with people. Of course, this included his landlady. She was a single woman in her early fifties who had never been fond of crosswords and certainly didn’t have the temperament for conversations based on obscure phraseology. In fact, anyone who knew her would tell you that she had little patience and a filthy temper.
It was a long call, with her doing most of the talking, together with a fair amount of crying, shouting and swearing. His report on the call was equally lengthy and he left the station late. Unhappily, his keenness to excel in his duties wasn’t reflected in the aftermath. His report failed to convey any hint regarding the fact that the lodger lay in a pool of his own blood the following morning, and quite naturally this particular case ended up as a murder enquiry. Although, once his report was finally read, it was not a difficult case to solve. Although he meant well, the report writer was far too fond of the inner mysteries of the English dictionary.
The case would have gone down a lot better and would have received proper attention had he not given it the heading ‘Discombobulation by an Erudite Septuagenarian’.