7. THE MISSING GUN

Rosie takes the local inspector to the van in the woods.

Inspector Dai Jones was getting close to being at the end of his tether.

It seemed that half of his manpower was away basking in the sun and the other half was three-quarters asleep most of the time, and there was a nasty murder on Bollingbroke road, a serious road traffic accident because some nana was busy making indescribable and very vulgar signals out of his car window whilst trying to break every speed limit under the sun, and to cap it all there had been a bout of house-breaking on the council estate. The obscene motorist had subsequently joined the murder victim in the morgue, but that hadn’t made Dai’s work any less frustrating.

Now there was this message from an interfering out-of-area D.I. about a body in a caravan, and because the complainant had been the almost legendary Rosie Baur, she who managed to put her hands on more collars than anyone else in five counties, and whose reputation suggested might be quite a doll with or without her clothes (her naturist tendencies accompanied her fame). So he had to seem to do something about that, and with everyone busy on at least two jobs each he had to do it himself.

As he drove towards the Twelve Trees park he couldn’t help hoping there would be nothing in the reported body to interest the police. He knew the pathologist (the one from Brumpton because his own team was as overworked as he was) because they sometimes played golf together. Cardew Dingle was as eccentric as you might expect someone who spends his days cutting up cadavers and his evenings embroidering doilies to be but with a decent handicap he was a golfing challenge. What he didn’t like was the fact that funding cuts had even reduced his own pathology department to one of almost criminal inefficiency.

Cardew Dingle was already there when he arrived at Twelve Trees, there being the caravan park where he was in conversation in a seemingly light-hearted way with a beautiful woman of mixed race and very little clothing. Two children were sitting on the grass quite close, which he didn’t like. When he was in this mood he preferred it if ankle-biters were rarely seen and never heard, even his own at home.

“Dingle!” he called, “where’s this body, then?”

The pathologist reached a hand towards him, beamed and said “we thought we’d wait for you. Apparently it’s in the woods. Inspector Baur will show us the way.”

“Inspector Jones,” said the beautiful woman (in her thirties or very early forties, thought Dai), “I’m Baur, spelt in a Teutonic way. If you’re in a hurry we can go as soon as I’ve covered my legs.”

So this is the famous Rosie Baur, thought Dai Jones, and her reputation concerning her looks has been well-earned…

“I’ll just slip something over my legs,” she explained, “it can be quite prickly where we’re going. You two stay with Jerry and Cat like we agreed.” This last bit was aimed at the two children who Dai decided must belong to her. He found himself wondering how come it was possible for one so attractive to both be an Inspector in the police force and a mother, and decided that there must be, after all, something really special about her.

It took Rosie no time to pull some jeans over her delicious legs, and she led the way down a path so narrow it was clear her legs needed protection from both sides.

“I’ve been coming here for years with the kids, and even briefly before they were born,” she told Dai Jones, “and I never suspected there was a body in the woods!”

“It’s been here long?” asked the still breathless Dai Jones.

“I can’t be precise, but I’d say for at least a couple of decades,” she replied, “and that’s judging more from the age and condition of the caravan it’s in rather than an examination of its withered flesh. It’s what my kids call a skellington!”

“And why is it a police matter?” asked Dai, feeling awkward asking the question because he was perfectly well aware of the answer.

She smiled at him.

That smile could drive me bananas, he thought, and I’m a married man…

“We didn’t feel it appropriate to disturb the scene when we came upon it,” explained Rosie, “and your Inspector Green agreed. If there’s been something nasty, like a murder, then any evidence will have decayed anyway and clomping around purposelessly would have only made it worse.”

“Of course,” he muttered.

She puts it so damned well only a moron could disagree with her, and I don’t think I’m a moron… flashed through Dai’s brain.

“We’re almost there, Cardew,” she said when she noticed that the pathologist was breathing heavily.

“It’s okay,” he replied, grinning diffidently, “I’m in need of a good diet and exercise. And to think I ran a marathon a couple of years back!”

“I remember sponsoring you,” replied Rosie, “I’d worked out that you wouldn’t manage above a couple of miles, hence my generous offer of too much a mile … and you finished the damned thing!”

“All donations were willingly accepted. My dad died of prostate cancer, and that’s what I was running for,” he said, trying not to seem too breathless.

The caravan, old and filthy with the detritus of several years at the least, was exactly where they’d left it earlier that day, and looked unchanged.

Inspector Dai Jones sighed heavily and made his way towards it. He peered in through the window and noted the emaciated figure still sitting in its seat, motionless and macabre.

“Let’s open it up,” he decided, “just about every scrap of evidence if a crime’s been committed here will have been all but obliterated anyway. Those piles of black stuff, what would you say they were?”

“Flies,” replied Rosie.

“An interesting way of dating whatever’s happened,” said Cardew Dingle, “though if there are any alive I feel sorry for them. They’ll be mighty hungry!”

The door to the caravan was still locked, and with an annoyed click of his tongue Inspector Jones looked around for something to use as a lever. Under the van, not pushed too far, and almost covered by generations of fallen leaves, was a handle, the sort used to adjust the jacks that balanced the four corners of the van, and he used it to force the door open.

There were piles of dead flies everywhere and the smell inside the van was the nauseating one of death and decay.

“Most unpleasant,” muttered Cardew Dingle as he paid his undivided attention to the body in its chair. It was little more than a skeleton draped in the clothing it had worn before it died, and with dehydrated skin stretched over lifeless bones.

“Poor thing,” he muttered, “I thought you called it a him?”

“You mean male? That’s what it looked like through the window,” said Rosie.

“Well, it’s a woman … or was. She’s wearing a dress, quite a pretty one if you ask me, and the thing that may well interest you is this hole here...”

He indicated something on the stomach region of the skeleton’s dress.

“The lass was murdered,” he said, hollowly, “unless she shot herself, that is, and disposed of the gun before planting herself here. Oh yes, this is a murder scene, about thirty years or so old, I’d say, and it’s up to you clever bods to decide who did it...”

TO BE CONTINUED…

© Peter Rogerson 26.03.17