Death of an Ordinary Guy

by Jo A. Hiestand

  From her position near the top of the ladder, the woman grabbed the torch from the vicar. By the yellow light she paused to read the declaration scribbled on a slightly wrinkled square of paper stretched across the Guy’s chest and held upright by an old knife. Its wooden hilt and naked blade gleamed in the firelight and threw hideous shadows across the whiteness of the paper. The crowd cheered louder, urging her on as she leaned closer to peer at the effigy’s face. Ebony and saffron-yellow alternately washed the face as shadow and firelight flitted across the form. At another vocal urge, the woman raised the torch to peer at the face before her. A moment later her scream rose against the clamor as she fell in a faint.

  TWO

  He knew what to expect. Even so, it was difficult to believe the straw-filled effigy sprawled on the ground was really a dead man.

  I had related the facts—skeletal as they were—to him via the phone. I had imagined him picking up the phone, cursing its interruption, yet glad of the respite from his paper-choked desk. He would have leaned back in his chair, adapting his long, thin frame to the chair’s unyielding one. His legs would be stretched across the desktop, his brown eyes staring at nothing while his whole being was focused on my voice. I had seen him like that dozens of times and at first I assumed he was idly chatting up his wife or friend, passing the time until his shift ended. That was before I knew him better. I would never make that mistake again.

  When I had told him the facts I could imagine him leaning forward, the front legs of his chair thudding onto the linoleum floor as they reclaimed their original position, his forearms bracing against the edge of his desk as he grabbed for pen and paper. I had heard his throat clearing, which always announced he had finished cogitating and was ready to act. He had. He arrived in thirty minutes.

  “They call it a necktie party in the States, don’t they?” I said.

  “That, or the tie that binds.” He was looking at the corpse, memorizing the details. The deceased wore a tan, plaid jacket, hiking boots, blue jeans of no particular name recognition, and a sweatshirt proclaiming Yale University. His callused hands and weatherworn face held the physical hardships of his 50 years. Fifty years that lead to this spot and this finish.

  He lay on his back. Clumps of straw haphazardly protruded from the cuffs of the jacket, obliterating his hands. Straw, pale and casting thick, black shadows under the intense police lights, fringed the lower edge of the jacket. Straw escaped from beneath the dusty fishing cap, angled at a rakish angle, and mingled with his blond hair. A small knife plunged into the corpse’s chest secured a square of paper. It looked like a try-out for a Ray Bolger role gone horribly wrong.

  We, no doubt, looked just as bizarre in our facemasks, paper jumpsuits, and polythene shoe covers. Required apparel to keep the crime scene as pure of outside contamination as possible. Fat chance outside, I thought. Still, we played by the rules.

  “But that was in the old days, right? I mean, necktie parties—aren’t they illegal now?”

  “You’re asking me that at a crime scene? I thought murder was illegal. How’d you make Sergeant rank, TC?”

  I colored. I hadn’t yet learned for sure when he was joking, for we had been working together for only a month. But I had learned when to keep quiet. And to watch Detective Chief Inspector Geoffrey Graham note the surroundings before we examined the body.

  Upper Kingsleigh was one of those spots tourists seek out for an authentic British experience, world-weary workers gravitate to on retirement, and local teens escape from in droves. We stood just outside the police cordon, which enclosed the bonfire area of the village green. Within its confines, Scenes-of-Crime Officer Dean Hargreaves and other experts prowled, their bodies half illuminated by the ebbing bonfire, half submerged in night as they stepped into or out of the light. Ancient oaks and junipers jumped out of the anonymous darkness of the November night as Hargreaves moved a flood lamp.

  “So, Taylor,” he said, abandoning my nickname and switching to my last name. “The Derbyshire C.I.D. is called in again to restore and resolve. England expects each man will do his duty,” he quoted, then hastily added, “Sorry, Taylor. Man and woman.”

  I mumbled an acceptance of his apology, past caring that every sentence had to be politically correct.

  “Upper Kingsleigh. A mere 500 souls perched on the fringe of Wormhill Moor.” He seemed to stare through the evening’s blackness, envisioning what lay beyond the village. His voice softened, nearly inaudible. “Five hundred people clinging to life on the ‘spine of England.’”

  I nodded, picturing the great snaking mountain chain of the Pennines, the 300-mile link of towering tors, dales, desolate moors, caverns and streams stretching from midland England northward to the Scottish Lowlands. Giant vertebrae. Derbyshire’s Peak District was part of the Pennine progression, comprised of Dark and White regions. The White Peak, characterized by its white limestone, gave way in the northern section to the Dark Peak, named for the dark Millstone Grit running through the moors, cliffs and peat hags. Upper Kingsleigh indeed hung onto life, as Graham noted, precariously balanced between the moorland at its front door and the forests and mountain faces at its back. A village nestled into its environment, secluded and tranquil, where not long past in its history the most difficult aspect of life was getting ‘over the tops.’

  As if reading my mind, Graham said, “This is usually a peaceful place, Taylor. Very few call outs. But it seems to have had quite a jolt tonight.”

  “Yes, sir. When I was growing up, our village celebrated Guy Fawkes with roasted potatoes, and making and hoisting the dummy. The biggest leaning toward a law offence I can remember was my friends and I lighting the leftover straw and pretending they were cigarettes.”

  “What a radical you’re revealing yourself to be, Taylor! I wouldn’t have taken you for a smoker.”

  “I gave it up after my mom persuaded me to do otherwise.” I rubbed my buttocks. It was an automatic reaction when that subject came up. “Anyway, we didn’t finish the evening off with murder.”

  “Murder on a Sunday evening,” Graham said. “Dark deed on a dark moor. Forgive the poetical license.”

  I murmured it was close enough, for Wormhill Moor began a scant quarter mile from the edge of the village. And it fit with the Dark Peak, I wanted to add, but he was looking across the village green.

  Ivy-wrapped stone buildings, their gray slate roofs glistening from dew, stretched the length of the road. Beyond the cluster of shops, homes alive with light pinpricked the black evening. A great stand of sycamore at the base of the church hill swayed in the gentle breeze, their bare branches grasping at the moon like a net thrown at a fish. Moonlight danced on the rooftops and in the depth of the pond, gurgled over stones in the stream, painted the foliage with silver.

  Someone let a door slam and the magic evaporated. Graham wondered aloud if the baker’s shop across the street would have anything left from the day’s sales.

  “I don’t think they’re open, sir,” I said, pointing out the darkened windows.

  “Like a cop, Taylor. Never around when needed. I’m hungry.”

  I told him I probably had a slightly crushed granola bar in my purse, if he could wait until we finished with the scene, but he declined gracefully. “Despite the urging of my stomach, murder calls. Rather good title, that. Murder Calls.”

  I nodded while Graham slipped on his face mask and stepped into the brightness spotlighting the corpse. The white of the footed, plastic squares used to protect the ground and give us access to the body and scene seemed to hover above the dark soil. Like earth-bound clouds against a midnight sky. Graham walked carefully along this path, his head down as though he was focused on every detail the land could give. Which may not be much, considering the barren hardness of the rock-and-soil composition. No such thing as a muddy footprint, in other words.

  Graham squatted at the corpse, lifted a corner of the impaled paper with his pen, and peered beneath it. He seemed to speak to the body. “T
hat knife would give anybody chest pains. But that whacking great rope, yet! Hung up very much like your cattle rustler. What a nasty thing this is, TC.”

  “Quite nasty,” I replied and then explained that the police surgeon and the superintendent had already looked at the body. No one liked the look of it. “Deceased is a Steve Pedersen,” I said while Graham went on with his cursory look. “American. Fifty years old. Tourist who had just entered the Kingdom a few days ago.”

  “Traveling with anyone, or free and unencumbered?”

  “He was with his brother-in-law and his wife. Arrived about the same time as a number of other tourists.”

  “For their three days of revelry, I expect. It is that time of year, isn’t it? Dole, Mischief Night, and the Fawkes Celebration. One tends to lose track of the calendar, TC.”

  I nodded, wishing I could have come up with a list of attractions or statistics about the village that would impress him. Instead, I stood there, looking at the corpse, and said, “They do very well in the tourist trade, yes, sir. At the moment they host several Britons and several Americans. But besides playing the tourist, Pedersen was here to see friends.”

  “So that’s why he didn’t melt into the vastness of London or Blackpool, say. I suspected there must be something other than jacket potatoes to lure him here.” Graham nodded, his mind now fully absorbed in physical details. The deceased’s left palm had recently sustained an injury, the skin on the heel was cut, and there was a large gouge approximately one-quarter inch square that was red and fringed with broken skin. Several cuts ran parallel to this gouge and appeared dark red, nearly brown. A large, purple bruise covered the heel. I leaned over the chest in order to view the right hand. The palm showed no such injury.

  In general, the facial skin was as pale and cold as that of other corpses we had attended. Bruises at the side of the throat were overwrapped in places by abrasions and a ring of redness that followed the jaw line. There were bruises, nearly black, on the left jaw and side of the neck. A thick patch of hair near the left temple was matted with dried blood. The eyes stared vacantly at nothing, though the left pupil had dilated larger than the right one had.

  “Have a look, Taylor. Let’s see if you spot the same thing I did.”

  “I don’t know what the rest of the lads mean when they talk about pressure in his job.” Especially for a woman, I wanted to say, but adjusted my face mask and silently took Graham’s place by the body. I had learned Graham’s meticulous nature and his impatience with sloppiness. It was a wise partner who stayed alert, responsible and showed superior intelligence. Graham could make or break any rising career. Moments later, I said, “You referring to the head injury, sir?”

  THREE

  “Not bad for a refugee from university, Taylor. What were you reading?” He congratulated me on my observation and turned away before I could say I had considered majoring in archaeology. He would have laughed. Here I was 20 years later, involved with a different type of dead body.

  I said, “Wanted to be sure Pedersen was dead, from the looks of it. Attacked, hanged and knifed. What do we have—a lunatic, or an annoyed trio?”

  “I assume Pedersen was knocked out first—that’s what the head wound suggests to me, at any rate—then the rope slipped around his neck for the hilarity of the bonfire. Note the bruises at the side of the neck, near the ear, Taylor,” Graham went on, gliding over my editorial comment. “And the flap of skin and scalp where the blood has clotted. Classic signs of head trauma. I hate to assume it’s a skull fracture, but…”

  “From the wounds on his left palm… Could he have fallen, sir?”

  “Looks like it. His palm took the brunt of his fall. Ahrens will tell us if his knees or hip are bruised—that’ll tell us, certainly.”

  Dr. Hugh Ahrens is the Home Office pathologist who will conduct the post-mortem. Karol, the local police surgeon, was here, hovering in the background while Graham spent a few more minutes over the body. Satisfying himself as to its condition, he handed me his pen as he stood up. I took it out of habit, clipping it onto the neckline of my jumpsuit, and watched him follow the white plastic stepping stones to the oak.

  The lads had dispensed with the usual tent we would normally erect around a corpse outdoors. A waste of time, that, the Super had said on viewing the scene—a jumble of grass, gravel, wood chips, fire ashes, straw, dry leaves and twigs. A hundred people coming and going all day, milling about at the bonfire, contaminating the area beyond any defense that the tent could tender. I shuddered as a gust of wind dusted the air with a handful of ash. A Scenes-of-Crime Officer’s nightmare, this—bonfire debris, hair, lint and other foreign objects. No, the tent would be ridiculous.

  Graham stopped beneath the great, overhanging branch and looked around the tree’s base, ready to give the area the same intense observation he had given the corpse. Glancing at the rope that swayed slightly above the corpse, Graham said, “No one in our happy group of revelers, I take it, thought anything of the knife? Part of their Guy Fawkes tradition?” His voice sounded tired and he rubbed his eyes, looking remarkably like a small boy who had stayed up past his bedtime. “I agree with your childhood recollections, TC. The effigies of my childhood had some sort of note pinned or stuck to the dummy, the knife borrowed from one of the villagers’ households. We’d always thrown our effigy onto the fire, though. This hanging is a bit unusual, though in keeping with the historical end of Guy Fawkes.”

  I stared again at the wrinkled white paper, lifted from the jacket’s dark background by the intense flood lighting. The note seemed to float above the corpse—except for its center where it was cruelly affixed by the knife.

  “Well, sir,” I said, hating to break into his contemplation, “it’s the sort of thing they do each year. Knife in old Guy, note stuck to his chest. No one took any notice. When Ramona VanDyke—that’s the woman who discovered the body—started to light the dummy, she noticed it wasn’t. A dummy, I mean.”

  “Must have given her quite a fright,” Graham noted, staring at the rope that ran over the overhanging oak limb. The slowly swaying form, washed by shadow and firelight, with the knife blade winking at the villagers, shimmered before my mind’s eye. “Fright?” he revised. “Hell, she would have been terrified.”

  “No doubt. Anyway, no one noticed a thing. The dummy’s been out in plain view since Thursday.”

  “Three days ago.” When Graham turned toward me, I could see his interest.

  “Yes, sir. There was nothing extraordinary, it seems, about the dummy. The villagers passed it every day, whether to bring more wood for the fire, or just to see how the fire building was progressing. They were used to seeing it, so they really didn’t see it, if you take my meaning.”

  Graham mumbled that unfortunately he did know what I meant. “I most likely wouldn’t have noticed anything unusual about the dummy, either. How many would?”

  “I wouldn’t. You see what you expect to see. Especially if you’ve no reason to expect otherwise.”

  “Especially if you’ve seen it year after year with no disastrous results.”

  I agreed. It was difficult to imagine someone substituting the corpse for the effigy, but it was clever. “I bet they think of this next year, and give their effigy a good going-over before hand.”

  “You think it likely lightning will strike twice in the same place?” Graham eyed me.

  “Not likely. But it’ll cross their minds when it comes time to light it. That’s certain. Someone’ll have a good look, just in case.”

  “Perhaps.” Graham sighed. I knew he was annoyed with the hour, the murder, and the obvious tampering with the scene. He looked again at the tree branch that stretched overhead like the arm of an ancient crossroads gibbet. “Who would have thought that the mundane practice of lighting bonfires, begun on the evening in 1605, would evolve into a tradition still observed nearly 400 years later?” Graham said.

  “Or that Guy Fawkes would evolve into the arch villain of the gunpowder plot?
Ought to be Robert Catesby.”

  He looked at me, either surprised I knew my history so well or unsure of his own. Silently I yelled Carpe diem, then said, “Catesby, the leader of the gunpowder conspiracy—not poor Guy Fawkes, whom we love to revile.”

  Graham regained his composure and said, “No wonder you turned to detection, Taylor. Your memory of the smallest detail does either your ancestral genes or your police schooling proud. How’d you like Hendon, by the way?”

  I avoided his gaze, afraid I would color. “Seems a pity to hang the blame on the wrong lad. Like sending the wrong man to the dock.” It had a strange ring of contemporary cases and left me feeling uneasy.

  “Do we have any measurements, yet, on height of the tree limb and all the rest? I see they used a stepladder.” He indicated the impressions of the ladder’s feet in the earth, then gestured to the rope that ran from the limb to the deceased. The rope was about an inch in diameter, creamy white and very new. “Effigy must have been damned high if they resorted to a ladder.”

  “Yes, sir. They raised the dummy first, then read the note aloud. You’d have to be at chest level to read it. That’s when Miss VanDyke discovered the effigy was Pedersen.”

  “A face-to-face identification. So, VanDyke had the honor—or horror—of discovering the corpse. I can’t see her scrambling down the ladder to undo that whacking great knot. How’d Pedersen get down?”

  “Well, sir, you know how it is…”

  “I probably do,” Graham replied slowly as he steeled himself for some horrendous account of crime scene destruction. “But let me have it at once so I get over the shock.”

  I was glad of the mask covering my nose and mouth. He couldn’t see my smile. “Well, just like anybody, their first thought was to get him down in case he might still be alive.”