The Least Interesting Case of Ernesto Klee

A novel written in May 2026, one chapter at a time, every weekday morning.

Chapter 1 — Prawns

You get to know someone very well on a stakeout. Sitting in a car with someone for twelve hours, sometimes, more. You get to know them well. Often better than you’d like. You get to know that their wife is taking Indonesian cooking classes. A fact that requires you to wind down the window to let in fresh icy air at three am for fear of actual suffocation.

You get to know who’s tidy.

You get to know who has exactly three stories and is willing to tell them again and again.

He’d thought it many times. Interrogation? It was one way of finding out someone’s character. Peering into their soul and deciding if they were capable of horrible things.

Another way might just be to sit in an icy car with for twelve hours and see what happened, when the conversation had run out and there wasn’t much left to do, but sit there, shiver and smell each other’s farts.

From freezing his balls off in cars all over London with Jackie Spanner, Ernesto Klee knew a few things about him.

He knew he was an untidy bastard. The number of half-eaten prawn sandwiches he’d peeled off his jacksie because Jackie had absent-mindedly left them on the passenger seat. The number of empty Lucozade bottles he smacked him over the head with, having found himself playing footsie with them in the footwell. The crisps he’d scraped off his seat. If Jackie was eating crisps and you were in a car with him, you were certainly part of that crisp eating experience. And you were probably at some point, trying not to be too obvious about it, wiping them off your face.

Because that was another thing about Jackie Spanner, he was enthusiastic. He was enthusiastic about the job. He wanted to catch villains. He got all emotional about it. He didn’t like it when they got away. He got emotionally involved. The more we found out about a bad guy, the more he’d take it personally. He’d start to hate them. He’d expound about how outrageous it was that they were still getting away with it. He’d explain at length — unnecessarily — Klee often thought, what with them both being policemen — that villains should be caught, and stopped.

If he was doing this while half-way through consuming a meal deal, Klee often found himself leaning back against the passenger window and watching as crumbs of half-eaten prawn-cocktail crisps rain like snow on the trousers of his of the peg suit.

Ernesto Klee knew that there was only one thing that Jackie Spanner hated more than villains who were getting away with it. And that was the cold.

The first time you went on a stakeout you made the mistake. You never made it again. In the middle of the night, even in summer, if you were sitting still in a car with the heating off and nothing but Indonesian curry guffs to keep you company, you could lose a few toes to frostbit. Klee himself had a wardrobe full of thermals and a recipe for how to add an extra layer whenever he started to feel it was necessary, or rather, whenever he started to lose feeling in his extremities.

Normally an extra pair of thermal socks did the trick.

Nothing ever seemed to do the trick for Jackie. He never seemed to be warm.

A tall bloke, with classic copper’s size twelves. The business of him putting on an extra pair of socks in a confined space was likely to cause enough commotion to wake the neighbours. Who, if they’d seen the boring coloured mid-range solution rocking in the middle of the night might have guessed something amorous was going on inside. Rather than the truth, that a man too big for a mid-range saloon was kicking crisp crumbs, sandwich packets and plastic bottles in the air trying to put on an extra pair of socks that this time. “Look Ernie — they say they use them on polar expeditions! These are the fancy ones. They’ve got like NASA technology in them. Do NASA go to the poles?”

They never worked. Ten minutes later, when the crisp crumbs and widely recycled PET bottles had settled. He’d be complaining again about his feet. And for the three hundred and fiftieth time, telling you the story of how Ranulph Fiennes had cut off his own toes with secateurs because he couldn’t stand the pain of frost bite.

Most of detection work wasn’t deduction. Some of was. Most of it wasn’t. Inductive reasoning. Analogical reasoning. The wonderfully named, abductive reasoning. And the awful, awful feeling hovering somewhere in your bowels that you’d missed something, or cocked something up. That was most of detective work.

But this? This was straight forward deduction.

Jackie Spanner was untidy. Jackie Spanner hated the cold. Jackie Spanner hated villains.

So the thing that Jackie Spanner absolutely did not do was walk out onto an icy patio barefoot in only a half-length satin dressing gown (it was his wife’s).

What Jackie Spanner did not do was sit himself down in a lawn chair at 2:40 in the morning. And shoot himself in the face with a shotgun.

And even if he did. And he didn’t, but even if he did. What Jackie Spanner definitely didn’t do was tidy up after himself. And put the shotgun gently and neatly down on a picnic table, six feet away from his now bloody and lifeless body.

What Jackie Spanner had done. Just a couple of hours before he was involved in this semi-naked charade on his frost-covered patio, was text Ernesto Klee.

“I had an idea. Made some enquiries and I think it checks out. We’re nearly there. Talk to you tomorrow.”

Jackie Spanner hated villains. And do you know the kind of villains he hated the most? The ones that were hiding among the ranks of his own police force.

Jackie had been told many times to stop investigating the death of Aimee Finch. Who had been beaten to death by someone, just out of camera shot, in the car park of the Greenhouse pub in Muswell Hill. Jackie hadn’t listened.

The idea that, on the night when he finally thought he’d got to the bottom of what happened, and who had killed her, he would waltz barefoot into the night in inappropriate nightwear was laughable. The idea that, after shooting himself, he’d tidy up, was about as likely as him doing it if he’d still been alive.