A Fine Body Of Men

by Raymond Flynn

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals

Synopsis

The corpse in a plastic sack is the perfect climax to Detective-Inspector Graham's bank holiday weekend: the east coast is sweltering under the August sun, the town is full of trippers and the deceased has been dumped on the busiest part of the beach. Vince Lowther, ponce, welfare scrounger and theif, was the kind of promising young low-life no-one at Eddathorpe nick will miss. But Graham and his colleagues are unprepared for the many shocking revelations surrounding he death of this busy entrepreneur. As the enquiry develops, a discredited psychological profiler from the Midlands sniffs a connection with a series of sec crimes committed elsewhere. But, as Graham sees it, he's overlooking on inescapable fact: Lowthe was undoubtedly a boy, the other victims were girls...

Release date: November 21, 2013

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 248

Sample

‘Wave bye-bye to the lodger, darling!’ Angie sat up in bed, and flapped the baby’s arm. Seven-week-old Laura didn’t care; she was far more interested in acquiring a good old bloat of mother’s milk. I didn’t care much either; I’d been woken at twelve thirty, three o’clock and twenty past five, so leaving the house at ten to seven came as something of a relief.

I blew a raspberry at the women in my life and prepared to depart.

‘You two,’ I said, ‘have no souls. Driving the breadwinner out into the storm without so much as a bacon sandwich to his name.’

‘Everybody say aaaah,’ murmured Angie. ‘On Bank Holiday Monday, too.’

‘It’s all right for you,’ I said untruthfully, ‘lounging about in bed all day.’

‘You,’ said my wife bluntly, ‘shouldn’t go around making your bid for fame and fortune, Acting Chief Inspector. Then you wouldn’t get dragged out at these unearthly hours.’

I finished knotting my tie, collected my jacket from the back of the chair, and distributed my best, my most forgiving smile impartially between the two of them. It ought to have wrung their hearts, but somehow Angie, at least, remained unimpressed.

Making my way downstairs, I admired the way I’d fitted the new carpet, paying particular attention to the carefully screwed-down bronze stair rods. The operation had taken me hours of time, temper and bad language on the previous day. I could, I reflected, have done with a couple of weeks’ leave to sort out the new house. Instead, I was being hauled out of my pit at the crack of dawn to the scene of a suspicious death. Secretly, I preferred the call-out: I hate DIY.

Ignoring the usual hellish clamour from the kitchen, I unlocked the front door. The rattle of key and chain encouraged Joe, alias Joe Stalin, my Lakeland terrier, and his half-grown offspring Paddy, to redouble their efforts to break out into the hall. It sounded as if a pair of highly efficient paint strippers were at work.

‘You’ll have to let the dogs out,’ I shouted meanly. ‘I haven’t got time!’

I didn’t quite catch her reply.

On the other side of the Esplanade, beyond the concrete wall, sea and sky were losing that early morning leaden look. No clouds, and towards the horizon there was a solid band of hard, brassy blue. It was going to be hot. Early or not, there were already one or two thin, trailing groups of pedestrians about at our end of the Grand Esplanade, refusing to lose an instant of their rare day by the sea. Trippers from the Midlands: they must have cut the sandwiches, filled the thermos, and slammed the garage door on their irritated neighbours sometime between 4 and 5 a.m.

I spared a thought for the hundreds of coach drivers with revving engines, and the uncountable thousands of oil-checkers and radiator-toppers preparing their cars in dozens of inland towns, readying themselves for the long grind to the coast.

A bucket and spade day; cans of lager and fish and chips. A day for my fellow citizens to smile their sharky smiles, and flex their till-ringing fingers, while they prayed for the arrival of a golden cargo of mug punters to the limited, if over-priced, attractions of Eddathorpe on Sea.

In the meantime, however, it was back to mystery and romance. Another sudden death: probably an unnecessary panic; hopefully just routine. Beside the slipway this time, at the south end of the Esplanade. And just my luck, right next to the main access to the beach on one of the busiest days of the year, four hundred yards from my new home. I bestowed a passing glance on my ageing Volvo and its residents-only parking ticket, and decided to walk.

The civilian in the Control Room had sounded confused; she was sure about the body all right. Male, she understood, but something about deck-chairs and a plastic sack. It could well be some poor old tramp in his last bin-liner bed. I sighed. Why couldn’t they have called me from Eddathorpe nick, instead of routeing the call via Force Headquarters thirty miles away?

I knew the answer to that one, of course – somebody at Eddathorpe was just following procedure, merely doing their job. Never mind common sense; they had a set of instructions to tell them what to do.

I could picture the scene: the early morning shift – A body, you say? Suspicious circumstances, and no inspector on duty till nine! The call to arms: a panic-stricken search through Force Standing Orders, and, oh, the relief when they found they could pass the buck!

Action Number One: inform HQ. Terrific! Go back to sleep, responsibility discharged; job done. Never mind telling the local CID boss.

The Control Room Inspector consults his file, confirms the pecking order, and instructs his staff to pass on the vital news; to push it out to everybody from the Detective Chief Superintendent to the canteen cat. I was, I suspected, somewhere down there at the bottom of the list, about as important as puss. Hence the clear and incisive nature of the message: deck-chairs and a plastic sack.

Which all goes to show, I suppose, that I’m not your man for broken nights. Not to mention the telephonic dawn chorus and a pair of destructive terriers doing their joint impression of the Hound of the Baskervilles on new paintwork within moments of my being ripped out of bed.

The scene of the incident had already been tarted up. Somebody had been lashing out with the blue and white plastic tape. It stretched from railings to lamp-posts to litter bin, and festooned the safe-bathing notice as well as the post bearing a largely ignored list of local bye-laws covering behaviour on the beach.

A generous thirty yards of pavement and promenade had been completely cut off. Just as well, really; scarcely seven in the morning, and the crowd at the High Street end of the Esplanade was already beginning to look like an overnight scrum for tickets for the FA Cup. Somehow, the news about the free ghoul show had got around.

‘Hey,’ said a disappointed granny, a couple of eight- or nine-year-old brats in tow, ‘no need to shove; they’ll never let you near enough to see what’s going on.’ Then, having noticed the inevitable self-dramatising traffic cop throwing up a salute as I ducked under the tape, ‘So you’re in charge? Bloody disgraceful, keeping my kids away from the sands!’

If there’s one thing I hate it’s the keen bastard; especially in the early a.m. His uniform was pressed and glitzy and clean, and he’d even bulled his boots. I could practically see him, zooming round in his batmobile, glorying in the blur of blue lights and go-fast stickers, and leering at female speeders in short skirts. Unfair, but that’s how I’m inclined to greet the onset of a brand-new day.

‘If you enjoy doing that so much,’ I breathed, ‘why don’t you join the Guards?’ Fortunately for my reputation, he didn’t hear. At his age he probably thought my lips were moving in a senile rehearsal of what I ought to do next.

I took a look at the deployment of police resources, and my heart sank. Two traffic cars, stationary, lights flashing; both area cars, the entire morning shift including the sergeant, and George. They were not there to provide a guard of honour for a vagrant, naturally deceased.

George Caunt, my detective sergeant, lumbered forward, his thick grey hair ruffled, the left sleeve of his smart grey suit besmeared with some nameless green gunk. Typical of the Eddathorpe clan; they’d sent direct for the well-established local man. Sod the imported boss.

‘Morning, sir.’ This for the benefit of the assembled legions; he usually called me ‘boss’ or nothing at all.

‘Anything for us? Morning, George.’

‘I think we’ve got one.’ No need to say one what. ‘The victim looks as if he’s been tipped off the top of the slip, and fallen into the gap between the wall and the stack of chairs.

‘I managed to force my way through and take a look. I didn’t want to disturb the scene, but the wooden-tops were standing around like wallies when I arrived, and he might not have been dead.’

‘What’s all this about a plastic sack?’

‘Over his head and shoulders, tied around with string.’

‘Any obvious cause of death?’

‘Can’t tell. Might be injuries covered by the sack; I don’t think he was glue-sniffing, boss.’

Inevitable, I suppose; fifty-plus, and still seizing the chance to play the hard-boiled detective; another canteen legend being formed. I scowled; over-sensitive I may be, but there is a time and place. Besides, it wasn’t my joke.

‘You can get a good view from the top,’ said George hurriedly, ‘without disturbing the scene. The pathologist and Scenes of Crime are on their way.’

‘OK; you haven’t touched the sack?’

‘No; he’s dead all right. The body’s pretty stiff and cold.’

‘Rigor?’

‘Yep.’

More good news; rigor mortis, the gradual stiffening of the body, commences some four hours after death, beginning with the small muscles of the face and neck, then working its way via the extremities to the whole body. It was beginning to sound as if our victim had been dumped, and left overnight.

I retraced my steps to the top of the slip; we leaned forward, stuck our heads between the rails on top of the sea wall like a couple of kids and stared down at the corpse. It looked oddly inhuman, sprawled face down, almost in the classic recovery position in a three-foot gap between the dirty, green-streaked wall and the stack of chairs.

‘How the hell,’ I said, ‘did anybody manage to discover that?’

‘Dog-walker.’ George began to rub the sleeve of his suit. He only managed to make matters worse; green algae on grey worsted spreads. ‘On his way to collect the morning paper. He stopped to light his pipe, apparently, and to admire the view. Propped himself up against the wall for a quiet smoke, glanced down, and bingo! Fame at last.’

‘Oh yes?’ I experienced the beginnings of what might have been hope. A potentially productive business, interviewing the ‘finder’ in a case like this. I might be in for a happy holiday, after all.

‘His name’s Armstrong,’ said George, reading my mind. ‘He’s well over seventy, and I reckon the miniature poodle he was walking could pull him flat on his face.’

‘Unlikely to have committed murder, and dropped the body over the edge?’

‘Unlikely,’ said George gloomily, ‘to be able to carry anything heavier than a rolled-up copy of the Sun.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘Sipping a reviving cuppa in Eddathorpe nick. Statement as soon as you like.’

‘Incident log started?’

‘Yep.’

‘CID call-out?’

‘Being done.’

With a screech of tyres, a dog van, blue lights flashing, the driver doing his best to force a five-hundredweight Ford to perform like a Formula 1, negotiated the High Street island, and jerked to a halt inches in front of the barrier of fluttering tape. The crowd gave an ironic cheer.

‘Am I to assume,’ I said, ‘that nobody sent for him?’

‘Too bloody right.’

I watched approvingly while the morning sergeant, his face rigid, stalked over to the van, and distributed a swift round of applause. The first of what was probably going to be a long line of scene-infesting enthusiasts bit the dust.

I sighed again; unless we got an immediate grip, the usual, the inevitable, was about to happen. We were going to play host to a convention of rubber-necking coppers. There are those among us with the curiosity, not to mention the intellectual capacity, of ten-year-olds.

I glanced across at George; no need for speech. Jointly, we automatically assumed the standard CID-are-nasty-bastards expression. No chaos, no idlers allowed; no headless chickens rushing around in our particular farmyard. A proper murder enquiry had, by mutual consent, begun. What’s that old saying about the human breast, and hope?



I’m not all that fond of sweets, but I offered the packet to Detective Constable Malcolm Cartwright prior to stuffing another Polo mint into my mouth. I’d learned that trick attending sudden-death post mortems as a probationer, in the days when I used to smoke. Half a dozen mints and a fag, both at the same time. It tasted awful, but it masked the smell. Now, nicotine banished, I was left with the mints; besides, I doubted if I’d be allowed to contaminate the evidence with smoke and ash at a murder PM.

The Home Office pathologist lifted his head for a moment, and gave us a tight, sardonic smile. Thin to the point of emaciation, gowned, aproned, and gloved, Andrew Lawrence was the only one of our select little party, other than the mortuary assistant, who looked at home.

Malc, I decided, with a touch of the old wishful thinking, looked a trifle green. Fleetingly, I was glad; it didn’t do my ego a lot of good, having foot-soldiers with superior stomachs to the boss. I tried to look as if I was concentrating on the job in hand. Silly, but to tell the truth I was concentrating almost entirely on the presentation of my own stoic image. It doesn’t do for commanders to get a bad report from the other troops at the front.

I sneaked another look at my newly recruited exhibits officer; his thoughts were apparently elsewhere. The unhealthy tinge, I realised, was nothing but the reflection of the harsh neon lights. He was interested, damn him.

I’ve attended dozens of PMs; the thirty-minute routines, mostly. The ones done by local men at a fixed fee to establish Granny’s cause of death in circumstances where she hadn’t been expected to die, or she hadn’t been visited by her GP in the past seventy-two hours.

Acting coroner’s officer; standing beside the necropsy table in graveyard mortuaries, representing law and order, looking and feeling like a waste of space, just in case there’s something wrong, while the local medical contractor did his stuff. Myocardial infarcts, atherosclerosis, the occasional carcinoma of … Preparing the sudden-death report. That doesn’t mean that I’m forced to like attending autopsies, or become even slightly used to them, come to that.

And I was none too keen on undressing the corpse on behalf of the pathologists, either. Some of ’em, in the absence of a mortuary attendant, expected you to do that. A police task: searching for unusual marks or knife wounds, they called it, but only if you were young enough and daft enough to fall for their line of chat. They used to appease the older, wiser scroungers with the big, munificent gesture; the price of a couple of pints.

‘Sensitive, Chief Inspector?’ Lawrence’s eyes were on me again. He appeared to be enjoying himself.

I looked from the stainless-steel saw in his left hand to the Y-shaped incision in the body. It spread across the upper chest from just below both clavicles, joined, and swept down to the pubes. I knew what was coming next: saw through the breastbone, and part the ribs, lifting and ripping at the same time to expose the organs beneath. The medical equivalent of the Viking trademark, the mutilation they’d called the Blood Eagle: enough to put your average warrior off the fun side of raiding, raping and looting, I shouldn’t wonder.

‘I was just thinking,’ I said disingenuously. ‘We already know the cause of death.’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Do we, indeed? Well, if you’ll excuse me, I’d just like to plod along and establish it to my own satisfaction. After all, somebody may have stuffed arsenic down his throat, as well as putting a ligature round his neck.’

I don’t have to like post mortems, and I don’t have to like you either, pal. I gave him my widest, most appreciative smile. He looked slightly taken aback.

‘Tell me.’ He got down to business with his little saw. ‘Are you looking forward to the retirement party?’

‘Eh?’

‘The ritual bash; you know, Detective Superintendent Hacker’s farewell do.’

So that was it. The one and only time I’d met Lawrence before. A murder scene, in company with Hacker, the best-hated senior officer in the Eastern District. A man so selfish that his juniors had nicknamed him the Lone Ranger, prior to changing their minds and amending the sobriquet to Silver, because he was only as bright as the masked avenger’s horse. Lawrence had marked me down as a Hacker fan.

Now the most notorious incompetent in five forces was retiring on pension after thirty years of professional disaster, interspersed with episodes remarkable only for malice, hypocrisy and the playing of dirty tricks. I had, I flattered myself, about as much chance of getting an invite to Silver’s do as I stood with the College of Cardinals when next they elected a pope. Somehow, though, I felt disinclined to tell Lawrence that.

If the Professor wanted to bracket me with the enemies of mankind, it was perfectly OK by me. Silver might be the biggest constabulary disaster ever pupped, but I wasn’t about to hand out protestations about the purity of my life and intentions to any passing spiritual descendant of Burke and Hare.

Malcolm Cartwright’s eyes flickered over me for a moment: contrary bugger, he was saying. His best ironic look.

‘Are you going to the party?’ asked Malc.

‘I wouldn’t miss it for worlds.’

Still deciding whether to equip himself with a few ounces of Semtex, or gift-wrap a jar of bubonic plague for the occasion, from Lawrence’s tone of voice.

The pathologist freed the ribs and opened the pericardial sac to take a sample of blood, prior to lifting heart, lungs, oesophagus and trachea from the cavity in one fell swoop. The organs made a horrible slurping noise as he pulled them clear. The Scenes of Crime photographer took some more photographs, swallowing hard.

At a nod from the chief ghoul, the mortuary attendant separated the organs, weighed them individually, and placed them carefully on the steel side-table. The great man wielded his scalpel again, pulled out the miniature tape recorder he kept slung around his neck, tucked behind the top of his apron, and muttered incomprehensibly for a few moments.

‘There we are,’ he said finally, ‘that’s better; all the classic signs.’

‘Asphyxia,’ I said wisely. ‘Haemorrhage in the upper lungs?’

‘Good enough. Preliminary opinion as to cause of death, asphyxia and vagal shock. Look at these, too.’ He moved back to the head of the still-anonymous male body, and peeled back the lips, then the eyelids, to reveal the telltale spots of blood. ‘Petechia,’ he said, intent on providing me with the full tourist trip.

‘No doubt we’ll discover that the hyoid bone is fractured in the larynx, and the cartilages will be crushed. The ligature was applied with considerable force. Normally, the face and neck would be congested too, but the evident post mortem staining here has resulted from fixed lividity – in other words blood settling to the lowest point of gravity, in this case, the face, chest, belly and thighs.’

‘Yes,’ I said. I was managing to sustain a modicum of professional interest; no enthusiasm, not by any stretch of the imagination. Nothing so unpleasant as that.

Malcolm went back to the coiled wire he’d carefully placed in one of his labelled plastic bags, and picked it up. I shared his interest; a two-foot length of thick, flexible steel wire, carefully whipped with copper at either end into two one-inch-diameter loops. Lawrence had severed the ligature a couple of inches to the left of where it had been secured, to preserve the knot.

‘Have you ever seen anything like this before, Doc?’

Principal Home Office pathologists, university professors, are not often addressed as ‘Doc’. Once this lot was finished, Malcolm had just earned himself a refreshing pint.

‘No,’ said Lawrence, apparently unperturbed, ‘I have not. You probably know,’ he continued, speaking directly to Malc, ‘the majority of homicides of this type are committed on women, and they result from manual force. The few that don’t also almost invariably involve females, and the ligature usually consists of the victim’s tights, or a scarf.’

‘It’s definitely homicide, sir?’ Coward. I was after information; I didn’t dare do a Malc by calling him ‘Doc’.

‘Yes – you’ve seen the angle of the ligature.’ He traced a line with his scalpel, barely clear of the livid, horizontal indentation across the throat of the corpse. ‘You can see how the force was applied from behind, and the garrotte eventually twisted and knotted on the left side of the neck. No signs of suspension, no vee-shaped weal. Homicide: no question about it, in my opinion. Can we get on?’

‘Yes, er – just one thing. You say you’ve never, in your professional experience, dealt with anything similar?’

‘Never.’

‘What about in the literature?’

‘Bound to be one or two, Inspector; I’ll look it up. I will also make some enquiries among my colleagues, if you wish.’

‘Thank you.’ Things were looking up, apart from him demoting me again. ‘And this garrotte; would you say it was specifically made for the job?’

‘So far as that’s concerned, I’m no more expert than you. It seems very probable, however. Yes.’

‘And used a bit like a cheese-cutter; pegs thrust through the loops?’

‘Evidently; unless our murderer wished to lacerate his own hands.’ Ask a silly question; get some snooty bugger looking down his nose. Never mind; ignorant, uncouth investigator presses on.

‘Somebody who knew what he was doing; almost commando stuff?’

He gave an exasperated sigh. ‘If you say so, Chief Inspector. If you don’t mind, I’ll leave the . . .