3. A QUESTION OF GENDER

Rosie notifies the local police as to the existence of a body in a disused caravan.

Rosie stared at the twins and wondered whether this was a trick or if they had really seen something macabre on their adventure in the ancient patch of woodland. She knew they were capable of being up to all sorts of tomfoolery, especially if it involved the gruesome, but the expressions on their faces were deadly serious and Jill looked scared.

This, she decided, must be real.

“Are you sure?” she asked, the stop-gap question she usually resorted to if she needed time to think.

“Have you kids been trespassing?” asked the naked Tom Coppleby, scowling.

“They’ve just been walking in the old woodland,” said Rosie, “and as there are no signs to the contrary, it’s not trespassing! Now tell me about the old caravan and the skeleton: you first, Jack.”

“We hadn’t gone far and we marked all the trees like you told us,” said Jack, “and it was a good job we did or we might still be lost in the forest. There’s a place where the trees sort of thin out, and in it there’s this dead old caravan with flat tyres and filthy windows...”

“Is that what it’s like, Jill?” asked Rosie.

Her daughter nodded. “And when we went to look in the window there was this skellington and piles of little black things on the window sill,” she said, “and I was scared!” she added fervently.

“Must be some kind of silly game,” grunted Tom Coppleby. “kids are always playing silly games.”

“It’s not so!” said Jill indignantly. “I took a picture on my phone. You can see...”

And she produced her android phone and clicked on the photos she had taken. “There,” she said, and held the phone up for her mother to see. “And if you look at the next picture you’ll see the skellington.” she added.

“Just a minute,” said Rosie, frowning. “I must use this straight away, you don’t mind, do you?” she added, and she used Jill’s phone to ring a number.

“Hello,” she said when someone answered, “this is D.S. Baur of the Brumpton Police. I need to report something rather macabre that my children have discovered buried in the ancient woodland adjacent to Twelve Trees caravan park … yes, Twelve trees … it’s a deserted and unroadworthy old caravan and inside, if you look through the window, there’s what looks like the decomposed figure of a corpse, and it’s impossible to be sure of its gender from the photo my daughter took.”

There was the whisper of a voice at the other end, and then Rosie said, “we’re staying here on holiday, me and my two kids. We’ll wait for one of your officers to come, though it does seem odd to me that someone’s been missing for what looks to be years, and nobody’s missed them. After all, if my kids could find the wreck in less than an hour then a proper search would surely have found it. Unless, of course, if the missing person wasn’t reported and something rather nasty is afoot.”

She hung up, and Tom was about to say something when she was greeted by a familiar voice.

“My goodness, there you are, Rosie,” it called, “and to think you arrested my worker! Of all the cheek!”

It was the farmer whose labourer, Joey Boneham, had been responsible for the final demise of a murder victim in Brumpton, an unhappy event that had cut short Rosie’s last holiday on Twelve Trees Park.

“I thought I might spot you here, Eggy,” she smiled, “it seems that trouble ever follows you!” Eggy was Farmer Croft’s nickname, one he had earned years earlier after a political protest involving egg-throwing and a disgruntled member of Parliament.

“What have I done now?” he demanded.

“It’s what the kids have found in the woods,” she said, and went on to explain what she had been told by two excited twins, using Jill’s phone as a visual aid.

“Hadn’t we better go and see if we can help whoever it is?” asked Eggy.

“We’d better not,” she said, “by the look of it, whoever is sitting in that chair in the caravan has been there for years and hasn’t moved once. No, at a guess it’s either the last resting place of a lonely soul on holiday, or it’s a crime scene, and I favour the latter.”

“”I can’t see why you should jump to that conclusion, Rosie,” grumbled Tom.

“You’re an old grouch, Tom!” teased his wife June, “just you think about it. If the unhappy figure in that caravan was spending a lonely holiday in that clearing, how did he get the caravan there? I don’t see any car for towing it in the picture the girl took, and you can see just about everything unless it’s been hidden in the undergrowth, which seems unlikely.”

“There’s no car,” confirmed Jack, “just a dusty old caravan covered by years of fallen leaves and muck.”

“If people go missing, Tom, there’s usually someone somewhere who misses them and reports them missing,” said Rosie gently.

“I wonder how long it’s been there?” mused Eggy.

“I started caravanning about a dozen years ago, soon after I got married, and that van would have been old them,” said Rosie thoughtfully. “It’s been some years since vans were styled like that.”

Eggy was staring closely at the photograph on Jill’s phone, and using his fingers on the screen he stretched and enlarged part of it. “This might help,” he murmured, “look at the table next to where the skeleton’s sitting. There’s a computer on it, but they haven’t made computers like that since I don’t know when! You see, I had one once, to keep my notes on, and it was the nineteen eighties. Unless I’m very much mistaken that’s an old Amstrad 6128!”

“The eighties, you say?” asked Rosie, “that makes sense. So we have a skeleton in a caravan that’s been parked where it is for around thirty years, maybe longer, and apparently nobody has reported the person missing! Though the local boys will check their files, I’m sure that a decent search of the area would have discovered something as close to a camp-site as that, especially if it was known they were actually in a caravan!”

“I don’t know...” began Tom Coppleby, frowning.

“What don’t you know, Tom?” asked June.

“Well, if that someone really wanted to be alone and away from the crowds then why can’t she be left there?” he grumbled.

“She?” asked Rosie, “it’s hard to tell what sex the person is, what with all the shrinking and skeletonising that’s happened to it.”

“I just thought...” mumbled Tom, “I just thought it looked like a woman...”

“Whoever it is, it’s not a very nice way to greet the hereafter,” said Farmer Croft, or Eggy. “I wouldn’t like it, not one little bit!”

In the distance they could hear the sound of a police siren, its Doppler whine rising and falling as it wound its way down the winding main road.

“Well, we’ll soon know who it is, and maybe how and why,” said Rosie. “Until then, kids, it’s just about time for lunch!”

“And I think I’ll get dressed,” grumbled Tom Coppleby.

TO BE CONTINUED…

© Peter Rogerson 22.03.17