Policeman's Progress (7 page)

‘How's the battle going then, Alec?' he asked.

‘Very slow, sir. I don't know whether the rogues are getting more cunning or more honest, but there's been hardly a thing around the clubs these past few weeks. Thought I had something to hang on Eddie Freeman, but I doubt if it'll stick.'

‘What's that'

‘Oh, the old chestnut about harbouring toms in his place. We know fine that the girls hang about there, but he says if they pay their membership fees, he can't stop them – and who they sleep with after the club shuts is none of his business.'

MacDonald nodded. ‘He'll say naught about the backhander he gets from them for using his place for the old come-on … it's a damned hard charge to survive a good defence lawyer – and we're cursed with enough of those in this city, God knows!'

‘Anything else?' he asked after a moment.

‘A bit of a punch-up on Jackie Stott's boat, that's all.

The Scotsman's curly grey eyebrows went up a trifle. He wanted to hear all the details. ‘And didn't this Armstrong make a charge?' he asked at the end.

Bolam turned up his palms. ‘Dunno – no one's seen him since. I sent Grainger around to his digs, but he's gone. The sergeant tried again today, just for the record, but his landlord had had a telegram from London saying that he wasn't coming back. Wanted his stuff packed up, ready for forwarding. Jackie Stott must have scared the daylights out of him.'

‘Was he on the fiddle'

‘Probably – one less villain in the town.'

MacDonald sighed. ‘Always another to take his place.'

The conversation drifted on to other things, just as the curtain rose on another scene in the drama, at a spot eight miles away, where a Tyne Division launch was leaving the River Headquarters at South Shields. It was a routine patrol, on the other beat from Ernie Leadbitter's section.

This boat had the wider, busier part of the river, from the shipyards at Wallsend and Jarrow down to the great piers which jutted out pugnaciously into the grey North Sea.

The launch,
F for Fox
this time, growled away from the Mill Dam jetty and headed down river towards the sea. Mike Milburn was the sergeant in charge, a younger man than Leadbitter, but with plenty of experience on the river and, before that, in the Navy.

He and his constable had done the up-river section of their beat on the first part of the shift and were now setting off for a leisurely circuit of the seaward end before it got dark. The fine December morning had given way to a mist with a threat of snow. At three-thirty, visibility was already poor. They slid between a pair of colliers waiting at the buoys and headed along the south bank of the river.

‘Quite lively these past few days, sarge.'

This driver was a talker, unlike Horace. He was talking about ships, not crime, nodding at the clutter of vessels in the lower reaches of the river.

Milburn looked around, his sailor's eyes identifying all the different craft. ‘Marvellous how quickly it can change – might come out in the morning and see damn all here!'

The views slowly altered as they moved downstream as far as the hailing station opposite the pilot jetty. There was nothing beyond except the great open triangle of water between the granite piers. The constable swung the police launch around and by the time they got up to Smith's Dock again, the light had almost gone.

As usual, their thoughts turned to the imminent ‘cuppa' back in the station office, but when they were level with a rusty old dredger, Milburn looked curiously through the side window at the ugly craft.

‘What the hell they doing on the bucket-dredger – having a strike or summat?'

More from the reflected lights of the docks and ships than from the sky, he could see a group of figures clustered on the bow of the clumsy vessel. Then there was a thin, bleating wail and a jet of steam from her funnel.

‘She's blowing her flipping hooter!' exclaimed the constable from the driving seat. He sounded incredulous. ‘I never heard that in seven year on t' river. Didn't even know she had a one!'

The sergeant slid back the Perspex side window and stuck his head out for a better look. ‘I think they're waving at us – there's the siren again. Take her over there, something's going on.'

The constable racked his wheel around and they swerved across towards the dredger which was moored both to the dockside and to buoys out in the river. By winching itself back and forth between these, it moved slowly sideways while scooping the mud from outside the dry dock gates.

As they cruised up to it, Milburn could see that the crew were waving wildly at them. The great wheel at the top of the pithead device had stopped and the endless chain of huge buckets had ground to a halt.

When they came alongside, Milburn clambered onto the launch's gunwale and threw a rope to a ready hand on the dredger.

‘What's all the panic – you been torpedoed?'

‘We was just going to send a boat ashore to ring up the station – then we saw you coming up river … we just raised a body.'

The sergeant sighed. Their Division recovered a dead body from the river at least once a fortnight, so another would be no novelty. ‘Let's have a look at it, then.'

He jumped aboard and marched forward along the rusty deck.

Though it was virtually dark, the bow of the dredger was well-lit, thanks to a battery of lamps hanging overhead. The rest of the crew were clustered around the deep slot in the centre of the vessel, where the chain of buckets vanished into the black water.

‘Hasn't got a bloody stitch on, sarge.'

The captain of the dredger came up to Milburn and led him across the tangle of chains and cables to the side of the dredging well. He pointed at the third bucket from the bottom, which was about level with the deck.

From the lip of the great steel scoop, a curious white object stuck out. It took Milburn several seconds to realize that it was the bare backside of a human body. The head and feet were doubled up inside the bucket, which was big enough to hold three men.

Bewick, his constable, came stumping along the deck behind him, having secured the police launch to the side of the dredger.

‘Another drowner – stuck in a bucket this time,' report Milburn.

‘Makes a change – being in t' scoop, I mean,' observed Bewick phlegmatically. ‘How do we get him oot?'

Eventually, the dredger boss decided to hoist the bucket boom from the water. The great scoops travelled in an endless belt around a long arm, which was pivoted at the top, twenty feet above the deck. The boom was winched up and as the buckets became more and more horizontal, mud and water gushed from them.

‘For God's sake, don't tip him out!' warned Milburn in alarm, as the buttocks gave a sudden lurch.

The winch stopped wheezing and the two policemen scrambled on to the boom, slipping on the treacherous coating of black Tyne mud. One on each side of the bucket, they clung to its lip and peered in. There was still a lot of water and sludge inside and no head nor feet could be seen.

‘Pretty fresh – though in this weather, he might as well be in a fridge.'

Milburn's implied decision about the gender of the remains was confirmed by the view they had of the body.

‘Right, let's be having him,' muttered Bewick.

‘Want a sling on him?' called the dredger man.

In a moment, a coir rope was slung over some structure above and dangled down into the bucket. The policemen then ran a clove hitch around the hips of the corpse.

‘Haul away!' called Milburn, stepping back off the bucket boom to avoid the shower of filth that would drip off the body as it rose.

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.