Blood on the Marsh

by Peter Tickler

  He pushed himself up with this hand, so he was sitting upright, and he became aware of something else. Beyond the pain which lanced through his head, there was a noise. It was a noise he recognized, and yet couldn’t place. Where the hell was he? He was outside, he knew that, and yet there was no light. Nothing close anyway, though he could see two lights in the distance. The pain came surging up the back of his head again, and he shut his eyes against it. When he opened them again, the lights were brighter. ‘Tiger, tiger burning bright’. Back from his past the words came. He had been crap at school; the teachers were so boring. Only Mr Gascoigne had been any good, and it was he who had taught him that poem. God, he had almost forgotten it, just as he had almost forgotten Mr Gascoigne’s piercing eyes, and soothing voice, and the brutal grip of his hand. ‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright, In the forests of the night.’ And the tiger’s eyes were coming closer now, and closer, and behind his eyes the tiger was roaring. A sudden spurt of fear shot through him, and he struggled to his feet. He had to run, to get out of the way, before it was too late, but he couldn’t move. His left leg wouldn’t move. He pulled at it again, screaming at it. But his screams were lost in the roar of the tiger. He looked up again, into its eyes, and he knew it was too late. He knew there was no escaping the beast.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  Andy Stonehouse focused his eyes on the woman who was sitting opposite him and wondered if he had heard her correctly. She was his counsellor. He knew that because she had told him so. She had also told him her name, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember what that was.

  ‘Andy,’ she was saying, in her softest, most encouragingly confidential voice. ‘Why don’t you tell me about it? Tell me what happened. You’ll feel better if you do.’

  He’d feel better! Was that a promise, a guarantee, or just the sort of psycho-babble shit she always churned out? How the hell would she know? He felt terrible. And not just in his head. He felt nauseous. He coughed, and for several moments thought he was going to vomit. He felt the bitter taste of regurgitated food in his throat, but fought it back. It was a natural reaction, to resist being sick, though if he’d been near a loo he’d have let it all come out. Sometimes you had to be sick before you could feel better, but sitting here in this grotty little room with this ridiculously overconcerned woman, he just wanted to get out and go home.

  ‘Look,’ she was saying, trying another tack, ‘I’m not going to pretend that I know how you are feeling right now. Because I don’t know. Only you can know. But you’re not the first person to have had an experience like this, and I do know that it’s important that you talk about it.’

  He looked at her, and he laughed. Not loudly or unkindly. But he had just realized something. She had been looking at him intently, her face all serious and frowning, and her eyes wide and pleading. And then she had raised her hand and stifled a yawn. And realization had dawned on him. Christ, she was just as desperate as he was to get this over with and go home! For all her overt concern, he was just another job to her, at a bloody inconvenient time, and the sooner she had got him done and dusted, the happier she would be. Well, lady, so would he.

  Stonehouse forced himself to speak. ‘I didn’t see him until the last second.’ He paused then, and his face puckered as something occurred to him. ‘Or was it a her?’ He looked at the woman, properly this time, to check if she was really listening. ‘I think it was a him. In fact, I’m almost sure, but it happened so quickly. Anyway, when I realized what was happening, in that split second I thought to myself, what the hell is he doing there? What the hell is that man doing there? And then, bang! Well, not so much bang as thud. It all happened so quickly. Of course I hit the brakes as soon as I saw him, but it was far too late. But I couldn’t just keep driving, could I. Besides, that is what the emergency procedures are there for. We train for it, you see. We train for people throwing themselves in front of trains.’

  He stopped, suddenly aware of what he had said, and he started laughing, though this time it was prolonged and highly strung laughter that see-sawed as violently as his emotions. It wasn’t the first time his counsellor had witnessed hysteria, and she knew it wouldn’t be the last either. So she waited for it to run its course, because what else could she do? And besides, there was a question she needed to ask. Eventually, she judged that Stonehouse had calmed down enough for her to continue.

  ‘It’s interesting that you talk about people throwing themselves in front of trains. Is that how you saw it? Someone throwing himself in front of your train? An act of suicide? Or could it have been something else? Someone wandering onto the track under the influence of drink or drugs, for example?’

  Stonehouse winced as he tried to think. He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Christ, that’s the last thing you expect. Suddenly he was there, in front of me. He looked up at me. And then he was gone.’

  The woman nodded. She was satisfied. Whatever the police might say, the guy had been through enough. And he had told her enough. It was up to them to work out how it was that the victim had ended up there in front of Stonehouse’s train. Her job was to help the driver survive. That would be hard enough. Some drivers never got over it. She knew that. So the least she could do was protect him from unnecessary questions.

  They drove in silence – round the southern ring road, over the endless humps which litter the road through the elongated village of Kennington, and past the umbrella of bungalows which mark the start of Radley. Fox was driving, Holden was sitting next to him, and in the back was one detective constable. Wilson had been late. Just as they had been drawing out of the Cowley station car park, he had hurtled in on his bike, and had almost skidded into them. ‘Drive on, Sergeant,’ Holden had rasped, sensing that Fox was about to stop the car. And she had held up her wrist so Wilson could see it, and tapped ostentatiously on an invisible watch.

  No one was speaking. Even Lawson was improbably quiet. It wasn’t just because she had been shaken by Holden’s brutal treatment of Wilson. It was more what was in front of her. Train incidents were outside her experience, and she had realized that she was feeling rather unnerved at what she might see. She looked out of the right-hand window to distract herself. The bungalows had given way to farmland, and above it, no more than fifty metres up, a red kite was wheeling idly around the grey skies. She watched it briefly, but red kites are a common sight now in Oxfordshire, and besides, her mind kept lurching back towards the task in hand. Fox was turning left now, past the church of St James the Great, and she tried to focus on that. Her father had taken her there once as a young teenager. He had been invited to preach during an interregnum. Not that she remembered anything of the sermon (who would have?), but she did remember him telling her about how the church had been a battleground in the civil war, when royalist soldiers had taken refuge there from the parliamentarians. Or was it the other way round?

  ‘There they are.’ Fox’s words dragged her back from her interlude. They were through Radley now, driving down a rough narrow lane with open farmland on either side. The ‘they’ were a pair of figures in the distance, one with an arm raised in greeting. The raised arm belonged to Nick Birch of the British Transport Police. Holden knew him vaguely. They had met on a training course, and sat together in some small group sessions. He had, she recalled, a taste for cheap aftershave and a tendency to apply it liberally.

  Holden was out of the car almost before it had stopped moving. She shook hands with Birch and introduced her team. Birch’s colleague had already wandered off.

  ‘There’s not much for you to see.’ Birch launched straight in. He wanted to keep this short. He couldn’t think they could gain much from the scene that he couldn’t have told them over the phone or in an office, but Holden had insisted on it. ‘Frankly, that’s lucky for you. The train would have been going between fifty and sixty miles per hour, and at that speed it’s going to make one hell of a mess of anyone stupid or desperate enough to get in its way. Sometimes they end up like a sack of jell
y, but other times, like last night, they end up sliced and diced. We’ve picked up all the bits we’ve been able to find. That includes various items of clothing, both boots, and as I mentioned on the phone a wallet complete with credit cards. Which is why we can be pretty sure the victim is Jim Wright.’

  ‘Were the boots on his feet?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Can I see them?’

  Birch studied Holden. He remembered her from the course too. Nice enough, but talking of boots, she was as tough as the oldest. Even so, he tried to dissuade her.

  ‘I wouldn’t recommend it,’ he said firmly. ‘We’re used to this.’ And you’re not, he implied.

  ‘I need to be sure they are Jim Wright’s boots,’ she said with equal firmness. ‘At the very least, I need a photo I can show Mrs Wright, and I need to know the size.’

  ‘We can email you the details – size, make, distinguishing features – and photos within the hour. Is there anything else?

  ‘I’d like to see where exactly you think the impact took place.’

  ‘If you think it will help.’ He spoke slowly, reluctantly, as if to demonstrate his own belief that it couldn’t possibly help.

  ‘I don’t know if it will help or not!’ Holden flared. Bloody men! Why was it they always had to know best? They always want to be in control. And Birch was no different from the rest of them. ‘The fact is that yesterday we were trying to get hold of Jim Wright to question him in relation to a murder. And today he’s dead. Now it could be suicide, and I dare say you’ll trot out the statistics for railway suicides to underline your belief that suicide is most likely, but as far as I’m concerned, suicide is just too damned convenient. So if that is all right with you, Inspector Birch, I’d like to take a closer look at what may be the scene of a murder.’

  ‘OK!’ Birch said, looking down at the ground. Sometimes, a tactical withdrawal was the only option. ‘But just be alert to the fact that the track is open and trains are running.’

  Birch led them some twenty metres down the road, before cutting right through a narrow gateway. As if to prove his last point, a passenger train hurtled past from right to left, on the way towards Didcot, Reading and – most likely – London Paddington. He, however, led them in the opposite direction, towards Oxford, keeping tight to the side. ‘We should be OK for ten minutes.’ He had gone about fifty metres when he stopped and turned round.

  ‘It’s hard to be sure exactly where the impact took place, but this is where we started finding debris. Human debris. The actual impact may have been a bit further up the track, but in my experience not a lot.’

  Holden looked around, half expecting to spot a severed hand that Birch’s team had somehow missed. What had she come here for? She looked up the track towards Oxford, and tried to imagine how it might have been for Jim Wright, assuming it was him. It had been dark, of course, but trains had lights, and trains made a substantial amount of noise. It was hard to imagine that he could have been oblivious to the approach of the train unless he was drunk or unconscious or off his head on drugs. Or dead of course. There was no reason to think it was an accident. That much was pretty clear. Why would he have come here, except deliberately? Which meant he came here to commit suicide, or he came here to meet someone, and that someone ensured that he ended up in front of the London express.

  She turned towards Fox. ‘Sergeant, do you see Jim Wright as the suicidal type?’

  ‘No, Guv.’ The answer was immediate.

  ‘So how easy would you reckon it is to murder someone with the assistance of a train?’

  Fox sniffed, and looked around. At night it would be a fairly lonely spot. The road down here was going nowhere. How many people ever drove this way, especially at night? ‘There are easier ways, no question,’ Fox said, feeling his way. ‘But it is isolated. If I was the murderer, then I might have lured him out here with the intention of killing him. Then I might have dumped his body on the track just to make identification a lot harder.’

  ‘In which case,’ Holden replied, ‘why leave the guy’s wallet in his pocket, for us to find?’

  Fox shrugged. ‘Panic maybe. Or maybe it all happened very quickly as the train was approaching. The killer wouldn’t want to hang around. So he pushed the body on the track, and scarpered.’

  ‘It might have been a she,’ Lawson commented, anxious to get a toe hold in the conversation.

  ‘If I can throw in my penny’s worth,’ Birch said, ‘my understanding is that the man was alive when the train hit him. The driver said he saw him on his feet.’

  ‘What?’ Holden spat the word at him. ‘How the hell do you know that?’

  Birch held his hands up apologetically, as if fearful that DI Holden might pull out a gun and start shooting. ‘The driver spoke to a counsellor afterwards.’

  ‘So there’s a report somewhere, is there? Why haven’t I had a copy?’

  ‘Hey, don’t shoot the messenger. The report is probably being punched into the computer even as we speak. But it just so happens that the counsellor is my wife, and I rang her a few minutes ago.’

  Holden opened her mouth to say something more, but bit back on the impulse. She suddenly realized she was trembling. She looked at her right hand, and tried to make it still, but it refused to co-operate. So she stuffed both hands in her jacket pockets, and took a deep breath in, and a long one out. Standing here, where Jim Wright had been mangled to death, where a train might hurtle by at any moment, it was no bloody wonder she was shaking. Had Wright been shaking? If he had been conscious and on his feet, why the hell hadn’t he thrown himself out of the way? Like Fox, she didn’t see him as the suicidal type. So what had happened?

  She turned towards Birch. ‘Any chance of me talking to your wife, Inspector?’

  He nodded, dug his hand into his back pocket, and located his mobile. Within moments, he was passing it across to Holden. ‘It’s ringing. And her name is Dr Eileen Birch.’

  ‘What the hell do you want now?’ Dr Eileen Birch did not, it seemed, like being rung at work by her husband, at least not twice within the same morning.

  ‘This is Inspector Susan Holden, Thames Valley Police.’

  ‘Bugger!’ came the reply. And then, almost as an afterthought. ‘Sorry! I thought you were my husband.’

  ‘He’s kindly lent me his mobile.’

  ‘Kindly!’ There was an explosion of laughter. ‘My husband doesn’t do kindly. Not during office hours, and not much outside them either.’

  ‘I understand you spoke to the driver of the train that—’

  ‘Mostly I listened,’ she broke in. ‘That’s what I do. Listen as much as I can and say as little as I need. More people should try it.’

  Holden felt the rebuke like a slap round the face. ‘I understand the victim was standing up at the time of impact?’

  ‘Not that that did him much good!’

  Holden paused, recognizing something of herself in the sharpness at the other end of the phone call. She’d like to meet her. Or maybe not. She took a breath and tried again. ‘I don’t want to be doing this, but the fact is that we have reason to believe that it may not have been suicide and—’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry.’ Again Dr Birch cut in before Holden had finished. ‘You caught me on the hop. It’s not something you get used to, listening to people’s trauma. Sometimes, I wonder if I shouldn’t go and run a B & B on the Cornish coast.’ There was a sigh down the phone. Holden waited for her to collect herself. ‘The victim was on his feet when the train struck. That really is as much as I can tell you.’

  ‘Was he trying to get out the way, do you think? Or was he maybe drunk, and just staggering along the line oblivious.’

  ‘Hey, listen Inspector. When I tell you that the victim was on his feet, that really is all I can tell you. The driver had only the briefest glimpse of him. He saw him at the last moment. A single nightmarish moment where a man appears in front of his train and disappears almost in the same fraction of a second, with a thud that
will live on in the driver’s dreams for months to come. Or maybe even years.’

  ‘I see.’ Holden paused, as she tried to frame her response. ‘Do you think I might be able to talk to the driver myself?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’ The reply was emphatic. ‘My concern is to protect the driver so he recovers. Nothing he can say to you is going to solve your problem, and even if there was a possibility, I wouldn’t let you anywhere near him. His well-being is too important.’ For a moment, neither of them spoke. ‘So that’s all then, is it?’ Dr Birch said, bringing the conversation to an end.

  ‘Yes,’ Holden said. And then grudgingly added, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘My pleasure.’ Dr Birch’s tone was, as far as Holden could detect over a poor mobile signal, suddenly softer. ‘I’ve enjoyed our chat.’

  ‘So have I.’ Holden wondered what Dr Eileen Birch looked like. It was a shame they had had to do this over a phone, and with an audience. ‘Would you like a word with your husband?’

  There was a guttural laugh. ‘Just pass on my worst wishes to him, and tell him if he forgets it’s his turn to do supper, he’ll be sleeping with the dog.’

  Holden passed the mobile back to Birch, but said nothing about supper. If he didn’t remember, then he’d deserve everything he got. Besides, it was Jim Wright’s death that she was interested in, and nothing else.

  ‘I assume the victim was on this nearside track when he was struck?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Holden moved across and stood on the sleepers between the rails. Then she started walking slowly towards Oxford, her eyes on the ground.