Policeman's Progress

by Bernard Knight

  With an obscene squelch, it came away from its inelegant sepulchre as two crewmen heaved on the bight of the rope. The waist jackknifed, and the extremities appeared, deformed and bulbous in a glutinous cocoon of mud.

  ‘Turn a hose on it?’ offered the helpful captain.

  Milburn, trained to preserve any evidence of unusual events, hesitated a moment. Then he shrugged – this was just another ‘drowner’ that had already been swirling around in the river for goodness knows how many days. Habit died hard, but he raised a hand to agree.

  ‘Leave it till we get it on the deck – a bit more mud on your plates won’t hurt. You’re not the flaming Queen Elizabeth.’

  A few seconds later, he blessed his caution. As the body swung gently overhead, he put up a hand to pull it to one side as the men lowered away. Instead of meeting slithery wet skin, his fingers closed over twisted metal.

  Two minutes later he was crouched over the radio in the police boat, his voice brittle with excitement as he called up Control Room.

  ‘F for Fox to Tynepol Control … listen, Charlie, get those CID characters on to a boat, pronto! Over to the dredger lying off Smith’s Docks. Tell ’em to step on it … we’ve just raised a body – stark naked and with the arms and legs tied together with wire!’

  An hour later, Bucket-Dredger No. 7 was crawling with people.

  There were three police boats tied alongside, as well as the Vidette, the big blue launch of the harbourmaster, who was responsible for the dredger’s activities.

  The River Division had a CID branch of their own, but for anything as important as a possible murder, the Headquarters CID in Newcastle took over. The third launch, just arrived, brought many of these, including Chief Superintendent MacDonald, the photography and fingerprints team, together with Dr Ellison, the Home Office pathologist and a scientist from the laboratory. This group had travelled by road to North Shields and made the last short lap by water.

  ‘Uncle Mac’ was soon firmly in charge. ‘Let the dogs see the rabbit, boys … Harbourmaster, could you shift all your fellows clear, please. Let’s have a nice clear area around the patient. Give him some air, now.’

  This macabre wit raised a few sniggers, but it also cleared the decks.

  ‘Right, let’s have some pictures for a start!’

  The next few moments were spent in curses from the photographers as they tried to set up their tripods on the slimy deck. Eventually, the night was torn by electronic flashes which competed with the welding glares on nearby tankers.

  MacDonald talked with Milburn and Bewick, then with some of the dredger men, while the cameras rolled. The next two actors on the scene stood quietly smoking in the background, years of practice at waiting having told them that it was useless to bustle around and get in other people’s way.

  Their turn eventually came.

  ‘Right, Doc and Mr Burke – it’s all yours,’ rumbled the old Scot. ‘Fight it out between you, which wants first pick at the chicken.’

  The forensic pathologist and the man from the laboratory decided to perform a duet this time. They crouched one on each side of the slimy mess on the deck. More lights had been rigged up and they had almost too good a view of the mud-encrusted remains. The body had not been touched since Milburn had had it lowered to the steel plating. The top and bottom ends were still thickly enshrouded in black ooze.

  The two boffins murmured between themselves, then the pathologist, a rotund little man with an angry, bright red face, spoke to the detective chief superintendent.

  ‘We’ll have to clean him off somehow. As he’s been in the river and bashed about by the dredger buckets, anything that was going to be lost has already gone, so we can use a gentle hosing-down.’

  A small hosepipe was produced and a stream of water helped the two scientists to delicately sluice the Tyne mud from the body. Squatting there, silhouetted in the harsh glare of the lamps, they looked to Milburn and Bewick like two vultures, or vampires in some horror film.

  The man from the laboratory was a pale, thin man in his thirties, suffering from the unfortunate name of Gasgoine Burke. He had thick horn-rimmed spectacles and wild, straggly hair.

  He spoke now in a surprisingly firm, deep voice. ‘Galvanized fencing wire – three turns on the ankles, two on the wrists.’

  MacDonald was standing close by, looking on intently.

  ‘Bound to be murder, then?’

  Ellison hopped to his feet. ‘No, no, no … not necessarily. I’ve seen a couple of suicides who tied their feet together, to stop themselves swimming.’

  ‘And the wrists?’ The arty young man’s voice was deep with sarcasm.

  The pathologist throttled back a notch. ‘Well, I’ve never seen it myself – but it has been described.’

  ‘With fence wire as stiff as this?’ demanded Burke.

  He and the doctor were old antagonists.

  Ellison snorted, but the scientist persisted.

  ‘Come on – and do they strip themselves naked first?’

  He bent down again to join the doctor, their differences forgotten in the interest of the moment. Together they cautiously lifted the body sideways and looked at the back. The hose was worked gently about until most of the mud was off.

  ‘No sign of bullet or stab wounds,’ commented Gasgoine.

  ‘Nor strangulation – though part of the neck has been ripped off by the bucket,’ contributed Ellison. He let the corpse flop back on to the plating. ‘In fact, nothing very obvious, except these bruises.’

  He pointed to mottled marks on the sides of the chest and loins.

  After a few more minutes of poking about, with silent policemen watching them, the two Home Office men got to their feet.

  ‘No more we can do here – mortuary’s the next thing,’ said Ellison.

  This sparked off another argument.

  ‘The hospital won’t have it – it’s covered in stinking mud and although it’s all right now, it’ll be pretty “ripe” in a day or two,’ offered the doctor.

  MacDonald shrugged. ‘Have to go to the public mortuary then … none of ’em have got fridges, so we may as well take it up to Newcastle.’

  The remains were carefully wrapped in a canvas stretcher with a polythene lining and taken aboard one of the launches for the journey up to the city.

  Milburn and Bewick watched it leave.

  ‘Like a bloody state funeral!’ the sergeant said scathingly. ‘C’mon, let’s get across for that cuppa.’

  While the morbid cavalcade was advancing up the Tyne, Alec Bolam was just arriving home, oblivious of the murder. He was not to be involved for at least another day, as his present duties were far removed from murder investigations.

  He swung the car into the driveway of his semidetached villa and left it there, as he was going round the clubs later on. He stuck his key in the front door, wondering with a sigh what sort of reception awaited him on the other side.

  His wife was standing at the other end of the hall, at the door of the kitchenette.

  ‘Why haven’t you put the car away?’ she snapped.

  No word of welcome, he thought, resisting the urge to open the door again and step back into the peace of the street outside. ‘Hello, pet – I’ve got to go out again later on.’ He was determined not to start anything – let her do it, then he could salve his conscience by telling himself it was all her fault. ‘Everything all right?’ he added.

  This apparently merited no reply. Vera Bolam vanished into the kitchen. He hung up his coat and hat and wandered morosely into the lounge. It was a modern house, with one long room stretching from front to back, the kitchen and hall being at the side.

  His wife’s head jerked into the serving hatch.

  ‘You’re early. You’ll have to wait on Betty for your tea.’

  The grim face snapped back out of sight. Alec sank into an easy chair alongside the glowing fire. He picked up the Evening Chronicle and shook it open. Though his eyes followed the lines of print, his mind
was hardly registering. For the thousandth time, he wondered why marriage should be such a hell of a thing after starting with such promise.

  True, this business with Betty and that damned poof had brought things to a head but, even before that, they’d had a good many cool years. Vera was still an attractive woman at forty-two, a year younger than himself. She came in now and set the table, without giving him a glance. Neither said anything.

  His wife had an aura of tenseness and Alec held his tongue. He knew that whatever he said, even if it was about the weather, would light the fuse of some new outburst. To occupy himself, he picked up the poker and made a vicious attack on the fire.

  ‘Trying to ruin it? It’s been all right all day and now you come and make a mess of it – look at the dust you’re raising!’

  The words snicked out like the flashing of a rapier, all the more effective because he knew she was right – he was wrecking a perfectly good fire.

  Flinging the poker down, he jumped to his feet. ‘OK, OK, but for God’s sake, can’t you say something pleasant – just for once?’

  She sneered at him. ‘I might – if you did! You use this place like a lodging-house. In and out at all times, face like a fiddle …’

  The usual row began, but was interrupted by the sound of another key in the front door. They both stopped. ‘No fighting in front of the child’ had been the rule for so many years that they still kept the habit, though the ‘child’ was now a grown woman.

  Vera Bolam hurried out to meet her daughter and the murmur of female voices was abruptly cut off by the slamming of the hatch.

  Alec breathed heavily and snapped on the television in reprisal. The six o’clock news was just finishing and the local Look North news magazine came on the screen. ‘… just reported that members of Tyneside Criminal Investigation Department were called to a dredger at North Shields late this afternoon when a body was recovered from the River Tyne. Apart from the fact that foul play could not be ruled out, a police spokesman would make no comment, but a Press release is expected later this evening.’

  Alec raised his eyebrows at the little screen. To his experienced ears, this phraseology suggested that ‘something was up’. He had left Headquarters fairly early and had heard nothing about any flap. It was none of his business, but anything that went on at the ‘shop’ was interesting.

  His ruminations were rudely shattered by the appearance of his wife and daughter.

  ‘Do you want this thing on?’

  Without waiting for an answer, Vera switched the set off. Betty Bolam muttered a subdued ‘hello’ and they all sat at the table in silence.

  Vera was the first to break it. ‘You said you’d mend that plug on the landing – it’s not done yet. I can’t use the Hoover,’ she said accusingly.

  ‘I can’t do it in the dark, can I? – I’ll have to turn the power off. It’ll have to wait till Saturday afternoon. Anyway, I told you, I’ve got to go out tonight.’

  Betty went a shade whiter around the mouth. She was a slim, pale girl and her blanched cheeks made her hair and eyes all the darker by contrast. She stared at her plate, then spoke. ‘You – you’re not going round the clubs again tonight?’

  Alec stared at her grimly. ‘I am indeed – what about it?’

  She gulped, but said nothing.

  Her father thumped the table with his fist. ‘I spoke to you, miss … by some chance, are you thinking of going to a certain club as well? Is that it?’ His voice rose to a shout.

  Betty burst into tears. She jumped from the table and ran from the room.

  As her daughter’s feet hammered up the stairs, Vera Bolam went into action. ‘You’ve done it again. Why don’t you mind your own business?’ she hissed. ‘If she wants to go out with King Kong, that’s up to her. You damned, interfering …’

  He wasn’t listening. Striding out into the hall, he looked up the stairs, then stamped up after his daughter. She had locked her bedroom door by the time he got there. He thumped on the thin panels, before putting his face to them. ‘Listen, my girl, just because you’ve got your mother on your side, you needn’t think it will make any difference. You may be twenty-one now, but you’ll get fixed up with that layabout over my dead body, and by God, I mean that!’

  There was a fresh outburst of sobbing from inside.

  ‘He’s no good, Betty. If he’s up to what I think, he’ll be before the court before long. And then you can do your courting on visiting days in Durham jail!’ He listened again. ‘D’you hear me, then?’

  There was no reply and he came slowly down the stairs, baffled. At the bottom, his wife stood waiting, her hands on her hips. She said nothing, only looked at him with almost a pitying hatred. He brushed past her into the lounge and stood glowering in the middle of the carpet. She followed him in.

  ‘Come on then, say it,’ he snapped. ‘Why don’t I mind my own business? Look, Vera, if you knew that fellow like I do – knew his sort, the types he mixes with … twitchy with pep pills, and making pin money flogging his spare ones around the town.’

  She still said nothing, just looked at him. Sitting down at the table, she began sipping her cup of tea.

  Alec rounded on her. ‘All right, stay dumb – I’m off!’ He tore out of the room, grabbed his coat from the hall and stormed out to the car.

  Chapter Six

  While Alec Bolam was cursing himself towards the city, equally harsh words were being spoken by other policemen at The Quayside in Newcastle.

  The tide was low and so getting the body up from the police launch to the wharf was no easy job. The light was poor and, in spite of plenty of available muscles, the rocking boat and steep wooden piles made the raising of the green canvas stretcher a difficult job.

  With much panting and grunting, the literally ‘dead’ weight was finally brought over the edge of the Quayside. In the darkness it was trotted over the cobbles to the archaic public mortuary and they just managed to squeeze the stretcher through the door of the tiny Victorian relic, which would have just about housed a car with no room to spare. When the police cars arrived, the tiny building was soon packed to suffocation with large men.

  The smallest figure was the one who was to hold the centre of the stage, Dr John Ellison. He clawed his way across to a row of hooks and hung his clothes up. Then he pulled on a wrinkled gown and plastic apron which he produced from a bag, together with some surgical instruments.

  MacDonald loomed up at the end of the antique porcelain table in the middle of the room. With him was Detective Superintendent Potts, his second-in-command at the CID, and the DI of the Tyne Division.

  ‘Let’s be having a bit of space; anyone not having any real business here, clear off out.’

  A clear zone appeared reluctantly around the slab and the pathologist, together with the arty-looking man from the laboratory, stood alongside as Milburn and a PC unstrapped the stretcher and laid the body on the table.

  ‘Still a canny bit of mud on him,’ observed the Tyne DI.

  The next few minutes were spent in cleaning up and taking yet more photographs, the cameramen moaning all the time that there were no proper power points for their floodlights.

  When their dust had settled, Gasgoine Burke carefully removed the wire loops from the ankles and wrists. ‘I’ve cut them at the sides, Super, to keep the “knots” intact – they were twisted three or four times in the front.’

  The wires, severed by pliers, were reverently laid on clean brown paper and carefully labelled as exhibits.

  ‘What happened to the ends, d’ye think?’ asked the Scotsman.

  Burke delicately brushed back his floppy hair with the back of his hand. ‘Recent fractures, on all four ends. They’d been twisted badly at the point of breakage. I’d say they’d been rotated back and forth for some time, then finally snapped.’

  ‘Think they had weights on them?’

  ‘Quite probably – the swaying of the body in the tide must have weakened the wires and the final grabbing by the d
redger buckets has snapped them right off.

  Meanwhile Ellison had been looking at the wreckage of the face. ‘The bucket hit him there all right – he’s had a devil of a clout. Not a hope of identifying him by his features.’

  Some of the less hardy souls tried to avoid looking too directly at the face, but MacDonald had got used to it and stared at the mess with interest. ‘What can you tell us about him, Doc? He looks a fairly young man, somehow.’

  John Ellison had been busy with a steel tape-measure. ‘Five feet eight, slim build, be about ten and a half stone, I’d guess. Young adult, pretty good teeth – those that are left. Hair sort of gingery blond. Certainly no baldness, though the front part of the scalp has been torn away.’

  He was looking at the fingers now.

  ‘Hard to tell much, with all this washerwoman’s wrinkling, but they don’t look like the fingers of a man doing hard manual labour. Have a job getting prints from these fingers, but it may be the only way you’ll get a definite identification.’

  He prodded about in the horror of the face and finally decided that the eyes had been blue. ‘No tattoos or operation scars – in fact, a dead loss from the identification point of view. No fillings or extractions in the teeth, either.’

  He took time off to record all this into a small portable tape machine.

  The small room began to warm up from the sheer fug of policeman’s perspiration and cigarette smoke, and two of the photographers eventually decided that they would rather suffer the cold night air than the sordid atmosphere inside. They stood at the door, lighting cigarettes and gazing over the cluster of police vehicles to the lights up on the Tyne Bridge.

  Presently there was a bellow from inside and the Tyne DI stuck his head out. ‘They want some more photos, so come and hold up your dicky birds.’

  Inside, the pathologist had started on the inside of the body and had an assortment of fractures and bruises to be recorded on film and tape.

  ‘He’s broken his neck – that’s the actual cause of death,’ said Ellison to MacDonald later. ‘Apart from that, he’s had a fair old battering. Four broken ribs, a haemorrhage around one kidney and a hell of a clout on the back of the head.’