Side On

The detective's problem is always the same. Perspective. The world comes at you upside-down, back to front, and inside out. You don't see the events in a logical sequence, just whatever damned order they happen to happen in, or whatever order you find out about them. Maybe you get sent to find some guy, but there's every chance he's not important. His disappearance is just a consequence of what's really going on, just a side-effect of fantastic machinations beyond your imagination. And you're still just trying to find this guy, so you come to everything in the case from the wrong point of view. You see everything obliquely, side on. Even once the right events grab your attention, they seem jumbled. They share a sort of common theme, but the patterns you can see in the them are maddeningly incomplete. So you run all over town trying to unjumble them, and slowly you get an odd feeling about things. A sort of fascination mixed with unease and the anxious premonition of something to come. Maybe this is your subconscious starting to work things out, or maybe you're just starting to feel like a sap, but there's nothing you can do to shake it. For days its like an itch you can't scratch, and then you have a revelation. You see something, or someone says something, and it triggers a memory - and in a split-second of revelation your perspective shifts. And you yell out or drop your coffee or stop dead crossing the street because you can see now how close you came, and what you need to do.