They dragged the unidentifiable body of a man out of the Thames: Routine enquiries led nowhere and the case was shelved. Superintendent Harry Lee retired and reopened the case for his own satisfaction. An orthodox approach led nowhere, so Lee tried a few unorthodox methods. That was when he heard the story of the Flying Saucer. Lee was experienced enough to tell a crank from a reliable witness, The Saucer-man was no crank. At last Lee saw the disc-ship for himself and met its pilot. He went aboard and took a trip to the unknown. Apparently the saucer-pilot was working on the same case from a different angle and Lee realised why it had been impossible to identify the body . . . it didn't belong. There were some more disappearances to account for . . .
Release date:
December 19, 2013
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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THE burly stevedore paused and looked thoughtfully at a pink object bobbing gruesomely in the oily black water.
“ ’Ere, Fred,” called the stevedore, as he put down the sack he was carrying.
Fred, an equally burly specimen of dockside life, came across. Charlie pointed.
“Don’t like the look o’ that,” commented Fred. “Don’t like the look o’ that at all, Charlie!”
Fred set his sack down also. The two men stood looking at the sinister pink object that floated near the dock wall, fifteen feet below them. The foreman came across.
“What’s the matter, then? Workers’ playtime?”
His sarcasm died half finished. Fred pointed mutely to the silent thing on the water. The foreman’s eyes narrowed.
“I’ve seen one o’ them before,” he went on grimly. “Keep an eye on it, lads. I’ll call the police.”
In those middle reaches of the docks the mighty Thames moved slowly, his water brackish, his depths very great. The dock foreman raced back to his office and panted a little as he picked up the telephone. He dialled 999 and asked for the police.
“Police Emergency Service,” said a strong, practical, efficient voice at the other end of the wire.
“This is Len Coningsby,” said the dock foreman.
“I see, Mr. Coningsby. Now what’s the emergency?”
“I’m foreman on the No. 7 Wharf, Victoria Dock. I think there’s a body in the river. Two of my chaps spotted it as they walked by the edge of the dock this morning, about two minutes ago.”
“I’ll get one of our River Patrols up there immediately. No. 7 Wharf of Victoria Dock.”
“Yep. My chaps are keeping an eye on it. It’s floating,” said Coningsby again.
“Thank you very much for your help,” said the police telephone operator, and hung up. Coningsby walked back to the edge of the dock. The thing was still bobbing horribly, in the water. A passing tug, fifty yards away across the basin, set up a wash. The wash rolled the thing over. Bloated, water-logged, mud-and-oil-caked features of what had once been a man, looked up at them with sightless eyes.
Len Coningsby was tough, Fred and Charlie were tough; but all three of them felt excusably nauseated at the sight of that hideously distorted face.
The thing rocked from side to side in the wash, and the tug, innocent of what it had done, passed on, out of sight, up the river. It seemed a long time to the waiting, watching dockers and stevedores, before the River Police launch arrived. Coningsby waved and beckoned as the police launch hove into sight.…
In actual fact the launch had been very quick indeed. It had only seemed a long time to the men on the dock with that unwelcome object bobbing about below. The River Police had seen objects like that before. Strong practised hands and boat-hooks dragged the piece of pitiful human flotsam out of the water. They got it into the back of the launch. A smell wafted up to the men on the dock. The two burly River Police officers seemed quite unmoved by the smell. They were strong men, doing a job that required strength and fortitude. They got the launch tied up to a flight of old stone steps and made their way swiftly to the top of the dock wall. The River Police took statements from Fred and Charlie and from foreman Len Coningsby.
At last they left the Number Seven Wharf of Victoria Dock, taking with them the horribly still, blanket covered thing, that had been fished out of the water.
Superintendent Harry Lee was a grizzled old bulldog of a man, only a few days away from retirement. Despite his age he had a remarkably fine set of teeth which he attributed to his habit of chewing gum with monotonous regularity.
From the moment he left his home and arrived at his office, he paused only to drink tea and coffee during his morning and afternoon breaks. When there wasn’t food in his mouth there was chewing gum in it—unless he was asleep. He had been reprimanded by those who outranked him, and considered that a certain dignity should be preserved. Harry Lee was the kind of man who laughed at such pettifogging restrictions, on a man’s freedom.
Chewing gum wasn’t just a hobby, it was a kind of fetish. He was chewing now and chewing viciously, as he watched the police pathologist completing his post mortem on the pathetic body that had been fished out of the Thames.
“He was about forty years old, perhaps a little younger,” commented the pathologist. Dr. Sanders was a short, bald individual, with glasses, and a head that was disproportionately large for his body. He looked like a tadpole. The brain inside that massive skull was nevertheless extremely acute.
“What killed him?” asked the superintendent.
“Oddly enough,” said Sanders, “he wasn’t drowned.”
“Well, that makes sense,” replied Lee, grinding another wafer of gum to destruction between his molars. “If he wasn’t drowned, what killed him?”
“That wasn’t easy to determine at first,” said the pathologist, he smiled a little.
“Never mind playing Sherlock Holmes. I want to know what killed him!”
“Patience, patience,” said Sanders. “You shall know in good time, my dear Superintendent!” He pointed to a small round red mark, not much larger than a bee sting, above the dead man’s heart.
“That killed him?” enquired the superintendent, with interest.
“I think that whoever passed a needle thin stiletto be-between his ribs at that juncture,” answered the pathologist, “had been hoping that the body would be in the river long enough for decomposition to have completely destroyed the evidence, but thanks to those keen-sighted gentlemen on the dock, we got to the body before the pathologist’s enemies, the jolly little microbes of disintegration, had completed their working sufficiently to hide the traces of that stiletto wound.”
“Very interesting, very interesting indeed,” commented the superintendent. “So we have a man of about forty years of age, who has been murdered by a stiletto thrust and thrown into the Thames. What else can you tell me about him?”
“Somebody didn’t want him identified,” said the doctor.
“What about the teeth? Any dental work?”
“Badly decayed, most of them,” said the doctor. “Seems to have been suffering from drastic malnutrition. Calcium and vitamin shortage, I would suggest. The teeth are in the state of a man who had never had dental treatment.”
“That’s a bit odd, in this enlightened day and age, isn’t it?” demanded Lee. “I mean there’s no need to wander around with a mouth looking like a set of broken snooker balls. He could have got them fixed up. If he couldn’t afford the minimum charges the National Assistance would have paid them for him, wouldn’t they?”
“I believe so,” answered Sanders. “There’s certainly no need for this kind of neglect, but it’s in keeping with the general malnutrition.”
“There’s something here that doesn’t make all the sense that it might,” said Lee. “If he’s what he appears to be, a half-starved tramp, why go to all the, trouble of stiletto punctures, and hiding his identity. If he’s what he appears to be, men of his type get found in docks with monotonous regularity throughout the world.”
“But he isn’t what he appears to be. Look at the hands. The hands of a tramp are normally deeply ingrained with dirt. This . . .
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