Still fully clothed, it was the body of a man – he appeared fairly old, and was completely bald, dressed in a long beige mackintosh, dark trousers and shoes. There was a freezing gale blowing, flakes of snow in the air, and just desolate scrub and marsh around us, but at least there were no grieving relatives to make small talk with, although this also meant there was no-one to put on the kettle for a hot cup of tea, something that would have been very well received.
As with most matters in the Police, there was a form to be filled in. This was a generic form to cover missing and found adults, children and bodies. Most of the time they were used for missing persons, and instinctively I went to strike out the options in the ‘delete as applicable’ sections to leave the words ‘missing child’, as most of these forms were used to deal with. Instead however I had to pause and amend it to show ‘found body’. (The form allowed a permutation to cater for ‘lost body’, but despite many calamities in my service and that of many fellow officers, I don’t recall anyone having to use that particular option). Again in contrast to the normal filling in of this form, I was unable to enter anything in relation to name, date of birth or address. Sections to take physical description were completed with brief details – about 5 feet 10 inches tall, average build, white male and so on. Nothing conclusive there really.
Thought bald, it was possible the corpse had lost his hair through exposure to the elements, as it soon became obvious that he had been in the open for a while. The cold weather had prevented any particular onset of decay, but where the form asked for eye description (and I usually put something like ‘blue’ or ‘hazel’) I wrote the words ‘Two. Probably’.
Then came the fun part of getting the body onto the metal stretcher from the boat. Someone had thoughtfully provided a large polythene sheet with the stretcher, and we decided to roll the body onto the sheet and then lift it onto the stretcher with that. Undignified it may have been, but we also decided to use a couple of long pieces of driftwood to roll him over, as the uniform issue leather gloves didn’t seem remote enough for manhandling someone as dead as this man.
A lever under his shoulders and another one around the area of his pelvis eventually gave enough purchase to achieve the desired movement, and the body rolled stiffly over. There was a pause and we both started to move to the corners of the plastic sheet, when a loud ‘glug’ sound came from the head, and about a teacup-full of pink liquid flowed out from the area of his eye sockets. (I have never bothered to watch a horror film since.)
This caused a further, speechless pause, before we resumed the job and after a short time had the body more or less enclosed in plastic and placed on the stretcher. Moving it onto the canal boat was interesting, as we had to go down a four foot high steep muddy canal bank and then transfer it to a small area of deck at the front of the boat.
I did ponder whether we could just do a quick burial at sea and forget all about it, but the Coroner would probably have asked a few awkward questions, and the British Waterways Board doesn’t like corpses in their canals either.
Another short voyage saw us back at the quayside where a strange welcoming party had assembled, consisting of a doctor, a couple of undertakers and a hearse. Despite the grim nature of the event they were all in reasonable spirits, but then they had been spared the rolling and lifting work already carried out.
A few minutes later the stretcher was back on dry land, and the doctor performed a brief examination. This consisted of a peer under the wrapping, after which he said, ‘In my medical opinion I am quite confident to pronounce that this man is deceased,’ and added,‘if all my diagnoses were this easy I could have done my degree in an afternoon.’
He stopped just long enough for me to sign his expenses form before leaving.
This left me, my Inspector and the undertakers. My Inspector decided he had some urgent administrative work at the station.
‘You can drop me off at the nick before you go and deal with the rest of this. You’re going past the door anyway.’
How thoughtful! ‘The rest of this’ was the real fun part – the stripping and examining of the body – and I was the only one who had to be there. Everyone else had a means of wriggling out of it if they felt so minded.
The undertakers, contrary to their work image, were a jolly pair. Most in their line of work are very pleasant folk in my experience. One or two are a bit glum, one I recall had a massive drink problem, but generally they fall into the category of ‘nice people’, though I never understood the motive for pursuing such a career.
Still, the two at the dockside got on with their job in a very professional way. From the back of their car they produced a collection of aluminium tubes which were quickly assembled into a lightweight stretcher, and they lifted the body onto it with minimal fuss. A black velvet cloth with elasticated edges was stretched over the top, and the now much neater looking package was slid into the rear of their estate car. With an incongruously upbeat call of, ‘see you at the mortuary then,’ they left, and I followed, stopping only to deposit the Inspector back at his office.
The trip to the hospital took around 15 minutes, and by the time I arrived the body had been unloaded and was on one of the fibreglass trays. A mortuary technician was now in charge, and the two undertakers were ready to leave. They waited for my arrival to ensure proper continuity; if you like a re-identification of the body to ensure I could say it was the same one I had recovered from the riverside. It wasn’t as if the mortuary had a big selection of bald, eyeless, brogue-wearing corpses, but procedures are procedures after all I suppose. The undertakers grinned in a slightly disturbing way, and one of them said,‘don’t turn the heat up, will you?’
‘Wasn’t planning on it – why?’ I asked.
‘He’s not very well, your man from the river.’
‘Well he’s stone dead isn’t he,’ I replied.
‘He didn’t like the heater in the car,’ said the undertaker. ‘We had to do most of the journey with the windows open. Never known one so bad. Look at his hands.’
I looked and started to understand what he meant. On the icy damp river bank the corpse had been quite well preserved, but as soon as it was in the slightest warmth all the bacteria attached to him sprang into life and began their job of putrefaction with a vengeance. The corpse’s hands and face were turning from a lifeless alabaster colour to a pale green. He was starting to look quite poorly.
The undertakers left and I introduced myself to the mortuary technician.
‘Do you need a hand with him?’ I asked. (This was what in Latin grammar they called a ‘question expecting the answer ‘no’’.)
To my huge relief and slight surprise he just said, ‘No, I’ll strip him if you log everything,’ and started to remove the clothing from the body which was by now not only turning numerous shades of green, but also starting to smell quite ghastly even by corpses’ standards.
‘Sorry you got the short straw with this one,’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’ said the technician.
‘Well, if I ’d timed it differently then one of the others would have got this one and you could have had a tea break or something.’
‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘I love this job. Don’t mind this at all.’
Water, or some form of liquid at least, ran out of bits of the corpse as he talked on.
‘I used to do ordinary portering round the hospital, but when this job came up I jumped at it.’
‘Much better pay is it?’ I asked. (Latin – question expecting the answer ‘yes’’).
He stopped, holding a dead green arm at a rakish angle while wrestling with a soaking wet greyish white shirt.
‘I took a pay cut to do this, I’ll have you know.’
I didn’t ask any more about his career choice. Sometimes it is better not to know.
The scene became more bizarre still when he took off one of the man’s shoes, and inside the shoe was the lid off a food tin. After a brief discussion we both came to the con
clusion that it must have found its way in there while the body was in the river, as it was the sort of river where if you fell in you would benefit more from a tetanus jab than the kiss of life when you were pulled out. All the same, a slight bout of professionalism took over, and the lid was logged in with the property instead of being thrown away, as was the temptation.
Back at the station I finished off the form and made what limited enquiries I could to identify the man. I got quite a lot more work done that day than normal, as unsurprisingly I didn’t feel like stopping to eat anything.
I checked the local missing person records without success, and then sent a telex to the HQ control room with as good a description of the man as I could. This was then sent out to all forces in the country who would see if anyone missing off their areas could be ‘my’ man. There were a number of replies, most of them were nowhere near and just sent in a fit of optimism to try to wrap up some unfortunate officer’s enquiry. The most optimistic one was from a Scottish Force who tried to tell me the man was a close match to a missing person on their books from twenty years ago, last seen camping in a remote glen. God loves a tryer!
A couple of days later a likely one came in – the Force on the opposite river bank had a report of a man in his early seventies with a liking for frequenting the dock areas. The build and general description was spot on, and the clothing he had last been seen in was identical. The clincher was a marker that this man had one or two mental problems, and had a habit of hiding things in his shoes – usually the lids off tins. Bingo!
He had gone missing several months earlier, and it was presumed that he must have been sloshing around in the tidal system of the river for about three months before a high tide and storm had pushed him above the normal high-water line where the farmer had found him.
There was to be an inquest, and in preparation for this I was asked to go with the Scenes of Crime Officer (known as a ‘SOCO’) to photograph the spot where the body had been found. A couple of weeks had passed since the farmer’s grim discovery, and the chances of locating the exact spot were slim as one stretch of muddy wet flood plain looks much like another. It was another cold, blustery day as we returned up the canal on the same boat, stopped in more or less the same place, and spent a few minutes trudging up and down as I tried to remember where the corpse had been found. The cold got into us quickly and I heard the SOCO call, ‘sod this – let’s just photograph anywhere round here if it will do. Who’s to know where he was found?’
He was absolutely right, but a moment later I was able to call back to him – ‘This is the place – just here.’ I must have sounded like a rather cold, lonely impersonation of Joseph Smith as he led his flock to Salt Lake City.
‘That’s the spirit – you tell me it was there and I’ll photograph it. No one will be any the wiser,’ came the SOCO’s reply, thinking I had joined in on his incorrect but practical solution.
‘No,’ I said, ‘it really is the place I found him.’
I had seen something that proved beyond doubt I was right.
‘How can you be sure?’ he asked.
‘Look’ I said, and pointed. In the mud were ten fingernails.
Sixteen
To the outside observer the river bank corpse could be seen as a very sad experience, but it wasn’t one of those matters that haunted me in any way. A man had reached the end of his natural life, died in whatever circumstances and had felt no pain or suffering in the river. He was only late for his funeral, nothing more.
I looked back over the past few years – I had come a long way from the middle-class, middle-England life I had enjoyed for the first two decades and more of my life. Three years earlier the only dead body I had had any association with was at the funeral of my school’s bursar, when at his funeral I had seen his coffin in church. I had found it discomforting that a dead body had been in the same building as me. A few short years later and I thought relatively little of manhandling corpses in all manner of situations. I was becoming a bit battle-hardened.
Having said that, I still derived satisfaction from believing I was doing a useful job, such as I had altruistically wanted to do, although many of the things a career as a Policeman had required me to do were quite beyond anything I could even have imagined as a hopeful, job-seeking student.
It was still a surprise to find how many people expected the Police to act as a 24 hour a day service at their own beck and call, to be summoned in the same way that one would turn on a tap for a drink when thirsty, without any real consideration as to what lay behind the provision of such a facility.
More surprising still was the way this expectation was carried with them wherever they were – even when under arrest and in the cells of their local Police Station. There was no thought of contrition, that they should show some humility for the inconvenience they had caused society – far from it. By depriving them of their liberty it was felt that we somehow had to make amends for the restrictions we had placed upon them, and if we were not prepared to do so then they would make themselves as much of a nuisance as possible.
It was quite a regular feature for a prolific burglar or thief to be subjected to what was called a ‘three day lie-down’. This meant that once arrested, they would be charged with one or two offences for which there was overwhelming evidence, and they would then be taken to Court where an application would be made for them to be remanded back into Police custody for a period of up to a further three days while they were questioned about other similar offences, in an effort to get to the bottom of as many previously undetected matters as possible.
The theory was that at the earliest opportunity the individual would be returned to the Court for their Worships to hear what further matters they had been charged with, so the intention was that the three days was a maximum period in the cells. In reality these applications were usually timed to be heard on a Friday morning, so the Prisoner would be in over the weekend – Saturday morning was too early for any satisfactory file to be compiled, and come Saturday lunchtime you couldn’t get hold of a Magistrate for love nor money so Monday was the earliest opportunity for release. This gave a period over which the crime rate could be assessed, and if there was a sudden drop in burglaries in a particular area, then it was a fair bet that you had the man responsible in custody.
Extra (and promising) prisoners meant extra work for the cell Sergeant of course, and he received no extra pay for having the cells full. While able to dispose of a weekend’s worth of drunks and shoplifters he was utterly stuck with a career criminal who knew the ropes and would set out to make life as awkward as possible for his gaoler.
Occasionally overtime would be on offer to assist with the extra workload, and one Saturday on late turn I found my old acquaintance John Morgan sitting in the cell corridor, looking uncharacteristically glum. In the background a buzzer rang out.
‘What brings you to this neck of the woods John?’ I asked.
‘A three day lie down,’ he replied, ‘but I wish I hadn’t bothered. Twelve hours today and the bastard hasn’t had his finger off the buzzer all day. Wants a drink, a smoke, a phone call, a meal, a teddy bear, a visit, anything to piss me off. And I’ve got twelve more hours of it tomorrow. I’m not doing this again in a hurry.’
He was truly miserable, and I pitied him. A demanding prisoner was about as annoying as it got.
The next day I was on lates again and I dropped in at the cells to offer some moral support, as I felt John would be on the edge of insanity.
To my surprise I found him alone in the exercise yard, patently enjoying a relaxing cigarette, and no buzzer to be heard.
‘Your man calmed down has he?’ I enquired.
‘Go and have a look at him if you like,’ he replied.
I went to the cell and lowered the hatch, but only briefly. An overpowering stench of excrement hit me as soon as I put my head anywhere near, and I caught a brief glimpse of a pale figure on the toilet in the corner of the cell. For a moment his eyes m
et mine with a look of despair before I closed the hatch gratefully and returned to the yard for some fresh air.
‘He’s ill,’ I said. ‘Looks and smells like a very upset stomach.’
‘Got it in one,’ said John with a smile.
‘I take it you know more than you are letting on,’ I said.
‘Overtime is one thing,’ said John,‘but a mithering prisoner for two whole days is more than I can stand. Come last night I was ready to kill him, so I went to the pub for a drink after I finished. I bumped into a mate of mine who’s a vet and we got talking. Bottom line is he gave me a horse laxative, and I slipped this bugger half a tablet in his morning tea when I came on. Haven’t had a peep out of him all day. He can’t even take a deep breath without following through, and if he coughs, well...it’s fantastic. Mind you the CID haven’t been able to speak to him either. They’ll have to get a potty in the interview room before they can talk to him for more than 30 seconds uninterrupted, and I’m still on double time. Perfect.’
I left him with it. For once it was very much one-nil to the good guys.
In fact as far as the ‘dirty tricks’ department went, John had a number of successes. He lacked George Upton’s ruthless full-on attack on the criminal fraternity, and whereas George could always provide a loud and blunt justification for his various courses of action, John worked in slightly more subtle, devious and often amusing ways.
One of the big frustrations of the Policeman’s lot is when you know that someone is guilty of an offence, but you haven’t quite got the evidence to prove it, even if you were tempted to indulge in a bit of ‘fitting up’ or similar creative writing. As an ex-traffic man John retained an interest in road-traffic related stuff and was a good, fast driver, but when one day he came up behind a motorbike which refused to stop, he found that the little panda car he was driving was woefully underpowered.
The bike was only a small one, a 125cc Yamaha, but it was a two stroke and one of the newer breed which produced power in amounts only dreamed of a few years earlier. This was obtained by fine engineering tolerances, and the accurate metering of fuel. Central to this was the constant-loss oil system for engine lubrication which was fed from a separate tank, rather than being mixed in with the petrol as had been the case previously.
Prisoners, Property and Prostitutes Page 15
