Policeman's Progress (8 page)

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 dredger 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.'

The chief superintendent rubbed his own cadaverous chin. ‘All caused before death?' he asked.

Ellison bobbed his head, rather curtly. ‘Of course. He also had seven bad bruises on his chest and side, tallying with the damage around his kidney and some of the rib fractures. My guess is that someone put the boot into him.'

‘What about the broken neck?'

‘Looks as if he's had his head cracked against something. No fracture of the skull, but the bruising on the front of the brain shows that he's fallen backwards on to something hard – that's how his neck was broken.'

Potts, the Headquarters man, looked ruminatively at the wreckage of the dead man's face. ‘All that mess was done after death?'

Ellison nodded. ‘All post-mortem injuries – he'd probably been in the water a couple of days before that happened. The water is damned cold at this time of year, but a bit of decomposition has started on the stomach wall.'

MacDonald jumped on this. ‘So what's the likely time of death?'

Ellison began peeling the grubby gown from his tubby figure. ‘Very hard to say … more than two to three days, less than ten. I'm only guessing. Damned impossible to be at all accurate,' he added with a sudden outburst of petulance.

MacDonald turned to the drooping figure of Gasgoine Burke. ‘Can you help us any more, Mr Burke?'

The young man shrugged. ‘No clothes, no damn all – only a couple of bits of wire!' He sniffed disdainfully. ‘Forensic-wise, this is about the most sterile murder we've had. Can't expect much trace evidence, after swilling about naked in the Tyne for days.'

The Scots detective looked more dyspeptic than ever. ‘What have we got, then? … a dead man, definitely murdered, gingery-fair hair, five foot eight, age …' He looked across at the pathologist who was struggling back into his outer clothes. ‘Any nearer age, Doc?'

Ellison paused, one fat arm jammed in a sleeve. ‘More than twenty to twenty-three – all his wisdom teeth are through. The seams in his skull bones suggest he's less than thirty-five. That's the best I can do for you. If it turns out to be important, we'll have to organize some X-rays of his bones, but that'll be a hell of fag in a place like this.'