The apartment. Axel, Angelo and Frank all meet in the hallway and walk into the apartment together, Frank enters first and shouts in horror.

FRANK: Oh damn!

Axel and Angelo follow him.

AXEL: What the hell, is that a dead body?!

ANGELO:  Good God! It’s Mr G, the landlord! I’m calling the cops.

Angelo pulls his phone out of his pocket, shivering.

FRANK: Wait!

He grabs Angelo’s phone and shuts the door.

FRANK: Think, if you call the cops we are screwed! I’m high as a kite, you’re crazy and Axel here writes books about people killing each other. They’ll just pin it on one of us. You know the cops in our country care about closing cases and not justice.

AXEL: He’s right. Put the phone down, Angelo.

ANGELO: That’s not all he’s right about. One of you killed him. It’s either Frank did because he wanted to get “high as a kite” or Axel because he wanted to star in a real-life thriller.

AXEL: Or you did it because, you had an episode of the crazy!

ANGELO: (grabbing Frank by the collar) Who are you calling crazy, you brain-dead junkie?

FRANK: You want to kill me too?

AXEL: (Pulling Angelo back) Hold on. It’s obvious that we can’t trust each other, one of us is the killer and we need to figure out who it is before we get arrested. So, let’s start by locking the door and throwing our keys out the window, so that the killer cannot escape. If we’re all stuck in here the killer cannot murder all of us, otherwise the culprit will be too obvious. 

Axel locks the door. They all throw their keys out of the window. 

FRANK: What now, Einstein?

AXEL: Now, we investigate. Let us look at the body. The first thing we look at is the body. 

They all move towards the corpse.

AXEL: The stab wounds are shallow and random, some even overlap. This is usually an indicator of rage, this wasn’t planned. Emotions got heated. Whoever killed him did so out of impulse. There’s money stuffed in his pockets – it could belong to us. I heard Mr. G enters apartments and steals from tenants. One of us probably caught him and killed him in rage.

ANGELO: Makes sense… I guess.

FRANK: What’s that? (Pointing at pink fibres around the floor).

AXEL: That would be foreign matter, probably some material from the clothes the killer was wearing. 

ANGELO: How do you know all this stuff?

AXEL: I have written and consumed so many crime thrillers, that I could be a junior detective. In fact, my phone is low, Angelo please take pictures with yours.

Angelo takes multiple pictures.

AXEL: Great. I think we have all we need for now, so let’s move on to searching the other rooms.

The stage darkens.

Tell us: Who do you think the killer is?