She was declared dead at 8:54, in the dampest November morning the town had ever witnessed. In fact, everyone was so busy witnessing the damp morning that no one saw the crime happen, although her body was found in the middle of the central square at broad day light. Actually, not that broad, considering it was so very damp even the sun decided to stay home a little longer.

                 Unlucky woman, killed in the worst day of the year to identify a murder. Not that her life had been the greatest anyhow. A series of uneventful years, stuck in an office job she hated, but needed to keep in order to pay the bills. No love life strong enough to call any neighbour’s attention, which can come as shocking in such a small town where everybody’s favourite habit is to spice someone else’s life up to escape from their own bland routine.

                Had she only disappeared, it would have taken weeks for someone to go to the police and register she was missing. As the detectives could not find any kind of identification in her pockets and fingerprint technology had not yet reached such a small and unimportant town, they had to take a photo of her dead face and spread it around so someone would come forward and tell them who she was. Luckily, her face had not been touched by the murderer and was only slightly white. A little make-up and she was good to go.

                 Still, they spent a whole day working on the case without knowing who it was that had been killed. Finally, at 9:43, in a now clear November morning, a random lady came to the station and identified the victim. Poor Anna Brown. Had she died that morning, and not the one before, there would have been a whole lot of children playing in that square to witness the murder and be traumatised forever.

                 No connections were found between Anna Brown and anybody else in town. Even her boss needed a little time to acknowledge the owner of that face worked for him for over a decade. But someone was to blame for such a horrendous act and they needed to be locked up. So the search for the murderer began.

               After a long meeting between detectives and a citizens’ board, they decided the prime suspect was the Writer. Had not the man continuously sent innocent people to tragically die in all his novels? Maybe he would not have the guts to do it himself, but he was sure capable of hiring a hitman to do the job for him. In fact, one of his deceased characters, one Roger Smith, had been killed in the middle of the same square by his lover’s husband, in a duel full of passion and heart-breaking lines by two men madly in love with the same woman.

                Of course, Anna Brown had not been stabbed in the heart with a broken sword, but there was a deep wound in her stomach that matched the story’s violent description. So the Writer was immediately arrested.

              He denied the crime vehemently and used powerful words no one else knew the meaning to, which only made the situation worse for him. A trial was scheduled and the suspect’s own books were the main evidence against him on The Case of the People Against the Writer.

              Meanwhile, something got the attention of the Drunken Old Nurse who lived in the central square. She was a war veteran who had decided to live on the streets the minute the bombs stopped, for she knew once she got home she would be forced to marry the idiot they got her engaged to before the war. For years, she had been sleeping on a bench at the far end of the square. Unless it rained, in which case she would take an umbrella from her hidden spot in the marble wall and walk to the brothel to sleep under the ticket canopy. The day after Anna Brown was killed, she got back to the square to put her umbrella back in the hidden spot and found it was filled with blood.