Shelf Life

by Douglas Clark

  His voice changed. “I didn’t know,” he said severely. “Not until half an hour ago. Those lads have been investigated—what they do, where they go, and who they go with. What do you think I felt like when I heard you and Rosie Sewell mentioned in connection with those three by one of my colleagues? That’s how I got to know, but I couldn’t really believe it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re a decent girl. A good kid. That’s why not.”

  “I’m not a kid. And you did believe it, else you wouldn’t be here.”

  “I had to come to make sure the report was wrong.”

  “Well it wasn’t.”

  Mrs Watson appeared in the doorway. “What’s going on here? I could hear your voices . . .” She looked from daughter to husband. “What’s going on, Tom?”

  “I’ll tell you downstairs.” He turned to his daughter. “Rosie Sewell and Carol Gilbert can do as they like, but you are to stop having anything to do with those three villains. If I hear another whisper of you being with them there’ll be trouble. Serious trouble. That’s all I’m going to say about it, but see you do as you’re told.”

  As Watson followed his wife downstairs he distinctly heard the shouted words: “Go to hell, fuzz.”

  Freda said: “Have your beer and sandwiches and tell me what all this is about, Tom. You’ve got me really worried.”

  “There’s no need to be worried now, love. I’m sure she’ll see sense.”

  “What about?”

  Watson told her what he knew. He finished by saying: “Don’t harass her about it, Freda, but try and find out what you can and try to discourage her from seeing those lads. If we don’t manage it . . .”

  “She’ll be in court the next thing we know?”

  “She’ll be lucky if that’s all it is. What I’m afraid of is that those three yobs will make a point of involving Pam in some villainy, knowing she’s a police-sergeant’s daughter.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re probably under the impression that it would get us off their backs. Well, it wouldn’t. And then there’s this business of going into Burner’s Wood. I don’t like it.”

  Neither did his wife, and said so fearfully. Eventually she asked: “Are you really going to do the garden, Tom?”

  “Might as well. Work some of this anger out of my system.”

  “In that case, after you’ve changed and got started, I’ll try and have a word with Pam. You never know . . .”

  “Never know what, love?”

  “They could have set her against the police. All policemen.”

  “Including me, by the sound of it.”

  “So perhaps she’ll listen to me better than you.”

  Watson nodded glumly. It was apparent to Freda how much this thought hurt him. He had always adored Pam and, until recently, father and daughter had been great friends. In the past few weeks, Mrs Watson had attributed the change in the girl’s attitude simply to her growing up: to the modern disease that claims so many teenagers as victims of a malaise which was unheard of in her own day—the generation gap.

  “You could be right, love. Try and make her see sense.” Watson got heavily to his feet to go upstairs once again to change.

  Chapter Two

  That night, Watson was again behind the desk at the Colesworth station—alone in an apparently deserted building—when the radio call came. He glanced automatically at the clock so that he could log the call. Twenty past ten.

  It was Constable Sutcliffe.

  “Sarge, I’ve got young Boyce here.”

  “Got? What do you mean? Arrested him, have you?”

  “No, Sarge, he’s drunk.”

  “How drunk?”

  “As a fiddler’s bitch, Sarge. I found him sprawled on the pavement, stinking of booze. I’ve tried to get him on his feet but he can’t stand. I’m having to hold him up.”

  “You want to bring him in?”

  “I’ll have to, Sarge, for his own safety. There’s no charge as far as I can tell, but he’ll have to sleep it off, won’t he?”

  “I suppose so. I’ll send a car. Where are you?”

  “Halfway down Callandar Street, outside Burton’s.”

  “Right. Any sign of his two mates, Lawson and Mobb?”

  “No, Sarge. Hurry it up, please, he’s getting heavy.”

  “Put him down, lad. There’ll be a car there in a couple of minutes.”

  Watson radioed instructions to the nearest car and turned back to the desk to make his notes. It was a warm night late in July and his shirt was damp with sweat. Boyce! Watson clamped his jaws in distaste as he wrote the name in the incident book.

  It was only the third entry he had made since coming on duty. The first had been a complaint from Miss Foulger. Had his mind not been so occupied with his daughter and her friendship with the young man who was about to be brought in—according to Sutcliffe—dead drunk, he would have thought it a surprising coincidence that the magistrate who had heard the Boyce case and the accused himself should both appear so close together in the book. Miss Foulger, it appeared, was something of a home wine maker. Her cottage on the outskirts of Colesworth boasted a small brick outhouse—a former laundry—where she now housed a deepfreeze cabinet and her wine-making equipment. During her absence from home somebody had entered the outhouse and broken six bottles of wine which she had siphoned off before leaving for court that morning. They had been left standing on a bench, from which they had been knocked to break on the stone floor, leaving the place strewn with broken glass swimming in white wine. With so little damage done, Watson might well have ignored the report, but because Miss Foulger was Chairman of the bench, he had sent a constable to get a statement which would appear, no doubt, in the morning.

  The second complaint had come from a Mrs Edna Corby who had explained that she was the daughter of Jack Berry, owner of the nearby fish and chip shop. She was looking after the shop for her father, and had left the gumboots she wore when hosing down the preparation shed standing beside the sink. She had also, it appeared, been unwise enough to leave the doors of the shed open, thereby giving somebody the opportunity to sneak in unseen and deposit in her boots a liberal helping of—to use her own words—dog muck. She had inserted her bare feet into the boots before fully appreciating the presence of their unpleasant contents. Mrs Corby had expressed herself as highly incensed by this incident and demanded to know what the police intended to do about apprehending and then jailing the practical joker. Watson hadn’t told her that he proposed to do precisely nothing, but that is exactly what he did, apart from logging the complaint.

  Ten minutes after the call from Sutcliffe, the constable and the driver of the car, P.C. Younghouse, were carrying Boyce into the station.

  “Completely blotto, Sarge,” said Younghouse. “And he stinks of booze.”

  “I said it first,” grunted Sutcliffe, releasing a limp arm from round his neck.

  “Don’t dump him there,” ordered Watson. “Straight into number three cell with him. It’s open. Lay him down to sleep it off and see he hasn’t got any of our blankets near him. I don’t want him puking over everything we’ve got.”

  “Who’s jailer tonight, Sarge?”

  “There isn’t one. We haven’t got the staff, have we? Only for Friday and Saturday nights.”

  “Do we lock the cell?” asked Younghouse.

  “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “To take his bovver boots off, Sarge?”

  “You can do that, lad. Go on, take him away.”

  Boyce was plonked unceremoniously on the bare cot. Younghouse emptied the pockets of the tight jeans, while Sutcliffe took off the heavy, rubber-soled boots.

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t give him a blanket, Sarge? He’s only got a thin T-shirt up top.”

  “I’ve got eyes in my head, lad. No blanket. Right, let’s see what he’s got? Two quid in notes, seventy-four pence in coin . . . here, what’s he doing with this?”

  �
��It’s a cork, Sarge—or, rather, it’s one of those modern plastic stoppers some bottles have these days. He probably picked it up in the pub.”

  “Like a magpie. Picks up anything that takes his eye.”

  “Are you going to book him, Sarge?”

  “We’ll see in the morning. If there are any reports about some young yob misbehaving . . .” They left the cell and locked the door behind them. Younghouse drove off in his car to resume his patrol. Watson said to Sutcliffe: “You might as well take your break now. It’s getting on for eleven. Come and see me before you go, though, because I’ll need your report.”

  As Sutcliffe went for his supper, Watson completed the book entries, carefully timing each entry until the final one—Cell 3 locked on occupant at 22.53. No charges preferred.

  A minute or two before half past eleven, Sutcliffe reappeared, carrying a cup of tea. “Not bad pie and chips tonight, Sarge.”

  “Get writing,” said Watson, ignoring the gastronomic comment. “How you found him. The lot.”

  “Just for a drunk, Sarge? If you’re not going to charge him . . .”

  “Do it, lad.”

  Sutcliffe sighed. He would rather be out on the beat than doing paperwork on a hot summer’s night, especially for a young drunk who would be let go in the morning. He supposed Watson was playing it safe with Boyce, in case there had been some incident not yet reported but which could implicate the youth and lead to a charge. He, Watson and Snell would all like to nail Boyce. So, Sutcliffe supposed, Watson wanted chapter and verse in case the chance came to get back on the villain who had made a monkey out of the Colesworth police for so long.

  At last Sutcliffe handed over his report. “It’s all there, Sarge.”

  “Right. Go down and make sure Boyce is all there, too, lad.”

  “He couldn’t have broken out of a doll’s house in his state, Sarge.”

  “Never mind that. Look in on him for a routine check and log it for midnight.”

  “Why all the bother, Sarge?”

  Watson frowned. “We’re not going to put a foot wrong with this one this time, Sutcliffe. But it needn’t concern you. Get on with it.”

  Sutcliffe departed slowly down the corridor that led to the cells. His mind was not on the man he had been sent to visit. He was thinking that, despite the heat, he had better put on a tunic for the rest of his patrol. It could be bloody cold in the small hours even in the hottest spell. When he arrived outside number three, he peered disinterestedly through the spy hole. For a moment or two he stood there and then he turned and legged it back in a hurry.

  “Okay is he?”

  “I think I’d better have the keys, Sarge.”

  The suggestion caused Watson to stare for a moment and then to reach hurriedly under the counter for the large ring of jailer’s keys.

  “What’s up, lad?”

  “Maybe nothing, Sarge, but I honestly don’t like the look of him.”

  “I’ll come.”

  They went together. Watson, after a quick look through the spy hole, hurried noticeably in selecting the right key and unlocking the door.

  The body was sprawled on the cot much as it had been when first dumped. But whereas then there had been obvious and, indeed, noisy breathing, now there was only a stillness—Boyce was a limp and silent mass from which all semblance of life had, apparently, passed.

  His face puckered by worry frowns and grimacing with distaste at the smell, Watson bent over the body. He tried to detect breathing at the dropped-open mouth and felt for pulses at neck and wrist. When he straightened up, his face was solemn-grey and glistening with sweat.

  “He’s gone, lad. Lock up and stay around. I’ll get Dr Scovell and Mr Snell on the blower.”

  When Sutcliffe rejoined Watson at the desk, the sergeant was speaking to the inspector at his home.

  “. . . the doctor says he’ll be here immediately. Yes, I’ll keep Sutcliffe here until you arrive. No, sir, nobody went into him after the cell was locked. We put him in at ten thirty-five and left him soon after a quarter to eleven. Sutcliffe made the midnight inspection—a few minutes early, that was—and that’s when . . . yes, sir, all logged.”

  Watson put the phone down. “Get some coffee up here, lad. We’re going to need some sustenance before this party’s over.”

  *

  Dr Rex Scovell had been a police surgeon for more than a decade. He knew what to do and how to do it in cases of sudden and unexpected death. What he was equally sure of was that many of the policemen he had to work with on these occasions—particularly the young ones—regarded much of what he did as so much mumbo-jumbo. So, whenever possible, Scovell sought to dispel the mystique of his profession by turning his examinations into illustrated lectures for the benefit of his audience. A well-lit police cell seemed an appropriate place with Watson an appropriate audience. Sutcliffe had been left to man the desk.

  “The first thing,” said Scovell, who had dressed so hurriedly that, though he wore a pair of grey slacks, he still had on a pyjama jacket, the collar of which showed above the thin sweater he had pulled on over it, “the first thing, Sergeant Watson, and the most important, is to make sure that the chap is well and truly dead.”

  “I made pretty sure, sir,” said Watson as Scovell knelt beside the body.

  “I’m sure you did, but there have been times when so-called corpses have revived on mortuary slabs. Caused a few red faces in my trade. Remember that people suffering from hypothermia or who have been electrocuted and, sometimes, those who have been poisoned are the ones likely to start groaning or moving after they have been taken for dead.”

  “I see, sir.”

  “Vital functions,” murmured Scovell, using his stethoscope and fingers to search for signs of life. “Breathing and heart-beat irreversibly ceased, but we must test him for quite a few minutes, not just cursorily. Auscultation—using the stethoscope—for heart or breath sounds is best. The old trick of using a feather or a mirror is not as reliable. Now . . .” he put down the stethoscope, “. . . the eyes.” He took an ophthalmoscope from his bag. As he screwed his face up and lifted one of Boyce’s eyelids, he continued: “. . . You can often confirm that the blood has stopped flowing by looking . . . yes . . . there are signs of the collapse of the columns of blood in the retinal vessels.”

  He looked up. “That’s virtually it, Sergeant. Together with pallor of the skin and flaccidity of the muscles.” He lifted one arm and let it fall to prove his point. “Now I suppose I’d better take a few temperature readings, but my guess is they’ll tell us nothing we don’t know. A warm night like this and so soon after death . . . no cooling, no rigor . . . you know when he died, don’t you? Between what? Eleven and a quarter to twelve?”

  “We left him about a quarter to eleven, sir. He was alive then, but dead drunk.”

  “Yes, he’d had some drink without a doubt. And when exactly did you find him dead?”

  “A few minutes before twelve. Constable Sutcliffe came to do the midnight routine visit a bit early, like.”

  Scovell got to his feet. “Well, Sergeant, I’m afraid this is a case for the coroner. It comes under the headings of Death in Suspicious Circumstances and Being Summoned by the Police.”

  Watson looked a worried man. He was about to reply to Scovell when Inspector Snell, fully uniformed, hurried in.

  “You’ve got a bit of a problem on your hands here, Roy,” said the doctor.

  “Death in police custody, you mean?”

  “That’s right. I’ve got to send a Med A to the coroner on about half-a-dozen counts—unexpected death, unexplained death, haven’t attended deceased within fourteen days, alcoholism, perhaps poisoning, death in legal custody and, according to how you instruct me, there could be crime or suspected crime.”

  “Crime? He died of drink, didn’t he?”

  Scovell shook his head in doubt. “I can’t say for sure, yet. It’s obvious, I agree, that he had been drinking, and this cell stinks like a brewery to prov
e it. But have you noticed anything missing?”

  “Yes,” mumbled Watson. “He hasn’t puked.”

  “Right. Your average drunk throws up. Boyce didn’t.”

  “Meaning?” demanded Snell.

  “There’s a possibility that though he had been drinking he hadn’t got to the stage of being drunk.”

  “But he was lying out on a pavement, doctor. Incapable, according to Sutcliffe.”

  “That could well be. But not through being incapable because of drink if we take the absence of vomit into account. We’ll have to ask the constable if he vomited on the pavement, of course, or in the car on the way here.”

  “Not in the car, he didn’t,” said Watson firmly, “or I’d have heard about it.”

  “We’ll ask Sutcliffe,” said Snell. “What I want to know is, if it wasn’t drink, what did he die of, Rex?”

  Scovell said: “What are you asking me to do, Roy? Simply to establish that the man is dead? Or are you proposing to ask me to make a more detailed examination because you intend to investigate the death as suspicious?”

  “The latter. I’ve no choice.”

  “Fair enough. I’ve been careful not to touch or destroy anything. I’ve heard the statements of Watson and Sutcliffe concerning why Boyce was brought in. I’ve checked time of death. I’ve checked there are no obvious marks or injuries and noted the state of the clothing. I’ve searched for, and failed to find bloodstains, cups, bottles, syringes, weapons, drugs, tablets . . . the lot. All I’ve got to do now is to make a quick sketch of the position of the body, check that the identity of the chap is correct and get his full name from you. After that, I’ll get it all down on paper—in your office, if you don’t mind. I’ll report to the coroner immediately. He’ll arrange for the body to be moved for autopsy. He’ll get Haywood to do it, I expect. And he’ll order the full works.” He glanced at Watson. “Sorry, old chap, but that’s how it will be. I can’t give you any grain of comfort at this stage because quite honestly I don’t know how young Boyce died. I’m just not familiar with what appears to have happened here and, without a post-mortem, I don’t think any doctor could give a firm opinion. So, shall we go to the office?”