SPRING NOIR

It was the Spring equinox and Ray Comb knew that it would bring some business for him, that strange, uneasy death rattle of winter heralding the first days of Spring always did.

"I call it the March madness cos there's no madness like it," he had tried explaining to his latest date he'd taken out for dinner and drinks up at The Blue Moon diner a few nights before.

Thinking back on the events of that night, Ray recalled how after making passionate love with the glamorous, auburn haired poet (he always dated artists for some reason) back at his apartment/office that she, Nancy, had read him an improvised poem of hers; it was on this very same subject of the equinox which seemed to contain an eery prescience in relation to the crime he was now investigating up at Silver Spoon Lake.

"Equal daylight, equal darkness, a momentary balance of good and evil before the spring wins its battle against the winter. But in that moment before the Earth's axis is led by the light, all Hell breaks loose. The devil's not done with darkness just yet."

"All Hell broke loose alright," Don said looking down at the dead man's stiff body with frozen, fish-like eyes staring back at him. Having been left naked and tied to a mooring by the marshy reeds of Silver Spoon, the man had clearly been part drowned and part slaughtered in a frenzy.

Studying the chubby white corpse Comb couldn't shake the girl's poem out of his mind.

Sometimes he wondered if artists were psychic in a way. The time of night she was reciting the words to her poem would have been around the exact same time of night the guy had breathed his last judging by the state of his bloated body. Perhaps she was some sort of witch incanting the devil via her imagination and he had been complicit in some way just passively lying there, listening to it. Being a man of logic and reason, it was strange that he had even been led to think this creatively about it, but that was Spring as well. In fact, the more he mused on the coincidence of his date's poem and the dead body, the more he remembered the excitement he had experienced as a young boy reading detective comics on soft summer nights whilst his parents entertained guests at the far end of the garden, their adult chattering carried on the night winds.

There was just something about murder, moonlight and the lighter months that was so enticing. If he wasn't a detective, he'd probably be a killer himself just to re-create the death-filled atmosphere he so adored as often as he liked.

But then again, he preferred to catch killers. It was less messy.

Which is why he'd call Nancy for a second date.

Only this time he'd be escorting her to jail instead of back to his own place. She could write all the poems she liked back in the slammer.

It was the way she said how much she liked to visit the lake by herself that had got him curious in the first place, and like with all his hunches, there was usually a reason.

For detectives, like poets, could be psychic too.