The Mystery of the Photo Album

I was at the station one evening when I got a call of an unusual hit and run car accident on a quiet street. I came right away. The person in the car crash had only minor injuries except for their leg. I had to go with them to the hospital to interview them. I was interviewing him when a doctor came in abruptly and said that they may have to amputate. Seeing as this was big news I left the hospital. I went back to the station where all the reports and evidence had been collected. Unfortunately there was no CCTV footage due to their being no cameras on that corner. There were a few witnesses but all had told different stories. All we had was forensic evidence, so I went home because I thought that it would be good to sleep on it.

The next day, I had breakfast, said goodbye to my brother and went to work. My brother was living with me at the time and was trying to find a house of his own. He didn’t have many friends yet he tried. Nobody would talk to him so I helped him out. For most of the day I looked through some evidence and at lunch time I walked home. My brother and I talked as we had lunch. He asked me, “what was that photo album over there on the table?” so I examined the brown leather backed book and stated, “I don’t know where this might have come from.” I opened the photo album and it had various pictures of different things. I noticed the fact that there was a car with red paint in one of the pictures. I remembered back to the car that was hit having scratches on it with residue of red paint. On another page there was a picture of the car that had been hit. There was no name on the book but at least we had some leads. I thanked my brother and he smiled back at me and said, ‘You’re welcome and I hope this helps,’ and I went back to the station to hand the album in as evidence. 

As I walked to the station I thought what a mystery this was – a photo album arriving on my table that no one had seen before. I watched as the finger prints were examined and then watched the other minor detectives analyse the pages. They found that one of the pictures had the red car in front of a house with the street name, but obscuring the house number. At least we had something to go on. So we investigated every red sports car with detail on the door and a personalised plate as it was in the photo. There were surprisingly few that matched the description.

One week later we had caught the man. The amputee got his hospital bills paid in full and my brother got his recognition for the key piece of evidence. To this day, no one has collected their album and I am still at my job as a detective at the station.