21. PREJUDICE

I bigoted policeman and an innocent boy.

It should have been Detective Inspector McGivven’s day off when he got the call that a body had been found in the old tumbledown cottage in Swanspottle Woods, and he was far from happy setting off for the police station when he could have been in his garden shed enjoying a smoke and a few moments with his small but select collection of illegal girlie magazines whilst his lady wife was supervising some charitable cause with her usual self-assertiveness and his daughter was on a camping trip with the guides.

“It should have been knocked down years ago,” he mumbled to D.C. Swinburne when the two of them set off for Swanspottle in an unmarked police car/ The D.C. was a new recruit to his department at the police authority, and keen to move up the ranks.

“Any idea what it is?” asked his constable.

“Dunno. Just a body, I was told, suspicious death, probably too much booze, or a down and out in search of a bed for the night in the possession of a body ready to give out through drugs. Anyway, I shouldn’t be here on a day like this, I should be digging my taters!”

He took the uneven road towards the cottage much too quickly and Constable Swinburne felt his stomach lurching and about to disgorge its contents of mostly digested fish and chips and best bitter from last night when he screeched to a standstill yards away from the ruin of a cottage.

“They say a witch lived her,” he told his constable, “before the war, you know. With herbs and spells and the like, a wicked old creature. There’s no such thing as witches, we know that, but it makes a fine tale to use when the kids don’t want to go to bed! Scares the s**t out of them, that it does!”

“Looks spooky enough to me,” muttered the younger officer, “where’s this body supposed to be?”

“Two kids found it and they were told to hang around until we got here,” grunted the Inspector, “look: there’s their bikes. They can’t be far away.”

Two boys appeared from somewhere behind the cottage, one of them clearly pale as a ghost himself whilst the other had the colour of his African roots.

“I know the darkie,” exclaimed Cecil McGivven, “I’ve seen him with our Sarah. Put a stop to it, I did, showed her the length of my belt and warned her she’d get a taste of it if she went near his sort again. Can’t have decent white English girls going around with creatures like that!”

“What you got on him, sir?” asked Constable Swinburne, “looks respectable enough to me, from a distance.”

The two boys approached the officers, the Inspector scowling at Innocent. There was clearly no love or friendship lost there. The Inspector had made his mind up years ago that the only decent folk anywhere on the planet were white folk, and even then he had reservations about Italians and Irish. Afro-Caribbeans he put in a mental category somewhere below stray dogs and feral cats.

“She’s in the cellar, sir,” said the white boy, Wallace, “we found her and phoned 999 straight away, on the call box near the pub. They said to come back and show you where the girl is.”

“A girl, is it?” growled Inspector McGivven, “in a cellar, you say?

“Yes sir,” nodded Wallace whilst Innocent eyed the senior policeman with dislike. He’d met him and been shouted at regarding Sarah and thought that the man was a brute and a bully if he wasn’t something worse than that.

“Where’s this cellar, then?” asked the Inspector.

“This way,” replied Wallace, and he led the way into the derelict kitchen of the old cottage and pointed at the door that led down into the cellar.

“Let’s go and take a look,” growled McGivven, “and if this is some kind of lark you can take it that you’re in for more than you could ever cope with. Now don’t you go away because whatever we find down there, there’ll be questions that need answers.”

The two officers made their way down the steps, and the constable, who was carrying a torch in need of new batteries went first. In the dim light of his failing torch he could just about make out the figure lying totally still on a dirty old camp bed, and the aforementioned mostly digested fish and chips with best bitter started erupting from his mouth as the horror and smell of death, his first such case, overwhelmed him.

“That’s enough of that, lad!” barked his superior, “if you puke you’ll be messing up the crime scene, and you’ll get hell for doing that!”

Constable Swinburne couldn’t reply. Instead he darted back up the stairs and out of the cottage until he could dart no further, and vomited onto an overgrown patch of what may have once been an ornate lawn but was by then an overgrown jungle of weeds and shrubs.

Minutes later the Inspector reappeared, his face a grim mask of judgemental severity because he knew with an absolute certainty what had gone on, and he was going to get the reward for the swiftest solution to a murder case on record.

“So who found the poor lass?” he asked.

“We did,” replied Innocent, “in our fallout shelter.”

“She was there when we got here,” volunteered Wallace.

“There’s been a report of a lass going missing and I reckon this is her,” continued the officer, “and if I’m right this is Penelope Ashton whose parents notified out office about a week ago.”

“It is Penny,” confirmed Wallace, “I used to sit next to her in English.

“And you: did you know her?” McGivven barked at Innocent.

“Yes, sir,” he replied. “I was in the same class, but we’ve left school now.”

“Then you’ve got to guess what’s coming your way, darkie thug,” growled the Inspector, “you’ve just got to have seen it coming, because I’m going to arrest you … what’s your name?”

Innocent looked suddenly bewildered but he wasn’t surprised. He was from a racial minority, and there have always been some men who can’t see beyond their own bigotry.

“Innocent,” he said, quite clearly, “my name is Innocent Umbago.”

“Then, mis-named Umbago, I’m going to arrest you here and now for the murder of the young woman down in the cellar. Come on, lad, into the car and if you put up any objection you’ll get my fist in your solar plexus, and that’ll be just for starters!”

“But sir,” protested Constable Swinburne, who had recovered from his bout of nausea, “we don’t know...”

“We know everything we need to know, Constable,” snapped his Inspector, “we’ve got a murdered girl down there and here we’ve got a darkie who knew her. Put the two together and no matter how you look at it you’ve got a guilty piece of s**t and a conviction!”

“But,” cried Wallace, confused, “he didn’t have anything to do with it! He can’t have!”

“So he’s managed to fool a bright lad like you?” asked the Inspector, “it’s what they do, these criminal types. They get a decent white boy and hide behind his innocence. That’s what he’s done to you, sonny, and that’s all the proof I need!”

© Peter Rogerson 25.06.19