6. A Grassy Slope

Discovered by a boy on his way to school

Monday came around as Mondays often do, and David set our for the school where he laboured to impart knowledge into minds that were reluctant to receive it He looked less positive than was normal for him and although it was supposed to be one of the hottest days of the year he eas seen wearing a thick overcoat, carrying a heavy suitcase and, oddly, an umbrella.

But odd as he appeared to be, it was not as alarming as the sight that met Rufus Enderby’s eyes when he slid down the grassy slope that led to a disused corporation tip. The ground had been levelled and covered with a veneer of top soil and children often played on it after school or during the weekends, and that slope led down to the levelled grassed surface.

So Rufus allowed himself to slide down that slope like he did on many other mornings. It was his one bite of fun until school loomed to form a barrier between him and happiness and he was usually joined by one or two friends. But there was a gastric epidemic doing the rounds locally and those friends were being kept away from school for their own good.

So Rufus was quite on his own when he collided into something that shouldn’t have been there. It forced him to a hideous stop. Hideous because what was there, the obstacle which must have been tipped onto the top of the slope and forced to roll to a rest at the bottom pulled by gravity, wasn’t the sort of thing that schoolboys enjoyed bumping into.

It was dressed in a shirt and trousers, looked very much like a man if you discounted the way its head was twisted to a surely frightening angle. But that wasn’t what made Rufus scream like he did.

The eyes, open, had a horrible desperation to them, but that wasn’t the worst. The mouth of what looked as if it was an elderly man was wide open and a once-pink tongue was hanging out grotesquely.

Rufus’s scream was loud and might have woken the dead if that was ever possible, but this particular dead didn’t stir, and it clearly wasn’t a stuffed dummy or plaster cast of a person, but a dead person itself, and it had what looked like the handle of a knife sticking out of a large red patch on the otherwise white shirt.

Loud screams rarely go unheard, and the boy’s didn’t.

Bordering the newly created patch of parkland was a row of houses, a terraced remnant from an earlier century that for some unknown reason hadn’t suffered the indignity of being demolished like so many others in the area had, and in the end one lived Brenda Cartwright. She was a widow in her mid forties and she lived a very quiet solitary life.

She’d been married to a terrible man, one who had bullied her almost into an early grave after they had married. His belief was that a woman is there for two things: to be physically worshipped and then to be physically abused. He could see nothing wrong with some of the things he had done to his wife, and it was only right and proper that the law had stepped in when he had sent her to hospital for the umpteenth time with nasty injuries and broken bones. His crimes against her person were so vile that he was sentenced to a term in prison, and it was whilst he was in prison that a decent fellow prisoner took exception to some of his boasting and gave him a dose of his own medicine.

That dose rendered him unconscious, and despite the best efforts of the prison doctor his heart couldn’t cope and the inevitable happened. So Brenda Cartwright became a widow and decided at the offset of that single state that enough was already enough and she was never again going to expose herself to the crazed ideas of a member of the opposite sex even though, still being reasonably young, she might have regretted the absence of some of the advantages of matrimony. And it was Brenda, still in a weakened state of mind, who was first to hear Rufus’s screams.

She opened her door, and looked out.

And there was a boy, one she’d seen before because she’d often noticed him making his way to the school at the other side of the new field, and she knew that something really terrible had frightened him.

Maybe, she thought, it was the boy’s father who probably enjoyed beating him with all manner of implements and scorching his tender skin with a cigarette end just for the fun of it. And she should do something about it. The boy was clearly in some form of hideous pain following an altercation with a man.

She was, of course, partly right, only the man who was causing so much grief wasn’t the boy’s father but a dead man, one that was incapable of administering any kind of actual physical torture except to the mind of an inquisitive child. And lest the boy’s father, Mitchel Enderby, is misjudged, let me make it clear that although he barely enters into the events of that Monday morning, he was in actual fact one of the kindest and most loving men on the planet.

But leaving that aside, Brenda Cartwright went ot see what was ailing young Rufus, and when she saw what it was she fainted and slumped in an untidy heap onto the virgin grass of a slope children loved playing on.

It was just as well, then, that Joe Wimple was also passing that way. His job it was to be the local lollipop man and see children safely across the road to school, and he was on his way towards his proper position at the end of the road, and he saw the smart woman from the end house as she seemed to melt into Mother Earth herself. And at the same time he was aware of the boy whose screaming had caused her to be alarmed in the first place.

In his late seventies, he might have been slow on the uptake, but he wasn’t. He almost (but not quite) ran to the scene of a dead man with a knife in him, a scared witless schoolboy and a fainted widow, and he telephoned the emergency services, demanding both an ambulance and a policeman to sort out what looked like a dreadful murder.

And when the call was made to the police station it so happened that Detective Inspector Ian Glumpy was the one to receive the order to see what on Earth might have so alarmed a lollipop man, and because he had mentioned a knife sticking out of somebody it seemed appropriate that it fall into the hands of a senior detective.

It was Police Constable Amelia Pincher to whom fell the task of transporting the Detective to the scene of so much disturbance, and when they arrived there she drew a conclusion that many might call sheer genius.

She spoke quietly to DI Glumpy, “I was called out by a very believable female witness yesterday,” she said, “and I can’t help wondering if this deceased gentleman has anything to do with what was troubling her…”

© Peter Rogerson25.05.24