Everything pointed to...

Everything had pointed to Frank. Well, almost everything had pointed to him. The footprints that matched his shoes, the dirt in the boot of his car, the suspect alibi... At the time, I was confident that we had the right man. But there was something that niggled at me over the years. Something about the dodgy alibi. And then, when I found the final piece of the jigsaw, it all made sense. Frank’s alibi was so shaky because it hadn’t been put in place to protect him from MY investigation - he was worried about the crime that he HAD done. He hadn’t concerned himself with my case because he was genuinely innocent of that particular crime. This innocence hadn’t protected him and he had died whilst serving time for a crime that he hadn’t committed. But my final jigsaw piece had not simply put him in the clear - his innocence was established only as a consequence of his brother’s guilt. I had no chance of setting the record straight now. If I tried, I would be laughed out of court - except that I would never get to court. But I couldn’t leave things like this - his brother scot free and Frank’s real crime unpunished. But if I were to arrange things in such a way that his brother went down for Frank’s crime, well, that would be a kind of justice, wouldn’t it?