A BURIED BODY – 1.

Lucy is shocked when she is told that the man she had been sleeping with only last night had been dead and buried for weeks.

A BURIED BODY 1.

There wasn’t much left of Arnold when Lucy came to identify him because he’d been buried in his back garden for ages. But she’d demanded the right to see him because she couldn’t believe that Arnold had been dead and buried for what the Inspector had called quite a long time when she’d been making love to him only last night.

“That can’t be right,” she wept, I loved him and he loved me.”

She might have added only last night but thought it might make her sound stupid because the Inspector had told her that the pathologist had enough of his remains to know that he’d been dead and buried for, to quote him, weeks if not not months. And you don’t get close and intimate to somebody whose been dead that long.

He’d already left for work when she woke up that morning to the sound of a harsh rat-a-tat-tat at her front door, but that had been all right. He went to work quite early and she usually woke fairly late.

She’d gone to see who was making such a fuss at her front door to find it was a uniformed policeman with a plain clothes detective hovering just behind him.

“Lucy Madden?” the plain clothes man had asked, and she had nodded and gone on to suggest that there was no need for him to knock her door so hard, she wasn’t deaf, and her boyfriend had only painted it last week.

“Your boyfriend?” he had asked.

“Arnold Bingley. He was here only last night,” she had said, to which he had shaken his head and frowned and told her he hadn’t.

“But he was. We made love,” she had said, exposing the intimate truth of their relationship and noting the knowing frown on Mrs Carpenter’s face next door as she overheard.

Then DI Corden had told her not to talk nonsense, and she had invited him up to examine her bed if she didn‘t believe him.

“I want you to come along with me,” the Inspector had growled because he sensed he was getting nowhere, and the uniformed constable had twitched as if he was getting ready to grab hold of her and maybe even snap handcuffs onto her delicate wrists.

“Why?” she had asked.

“Because I say so,” he had replied with so much of a growl in his voice she decided her had probably turned canine.

And she’d complied because she knew she was right and that Arnold was alive and kicking, probably at work because he’d clearly set out before she’d woken up, though he’d probably called into his own place first, to change his shirt and underpants, though he did keep spares in her other bedroom..

So she’d reluctantly gone along with the two officers and Mrs Carpenter frowned and muttered something that not even she heard. The police car drove off, driven bby the Constable who ignored speed limits and got them to the small car park behind the police station in time to be able claim a new record had he dared.

She was escorted into a room that was clearly labelled Interview Room One and the two officers joined her at a scratched and scuffed table.

“We’ve got the body of Arnold Bingley in the pathology lab,” grinned the Inspector, “and he’s not a pretty sight, what with being covered in mud. It’s been raining a lot lately and that rain did its business of washing soil into every conceivable crevice of his body, and the patholgist, Dr Gloucester, has done a decent job cleaning most of it off.”

“That’s twaddle,” she said brazenly, “and you must know it. He was in my bed with me last night, and I’d surely know if I was in a close embrace with a corpse!”

“So you admit to having a relationship with Mr Bingley?” he asked.

“Of course I am! He loves me and I love him!” she snapped.

“But he’s not a pretty sight.” he told her, “and you must have found it difficult because e last night he was in our path lab in a fridge, being kept fresh.”

“I know what I was doing, for goodness’ sake! If he’s my Arnold I demand to see him! Then we’ll know for sure, won’t we?”

“We know for sure now!” he snapped, “DNA evidence can’t lie.”

She had watched television programmes that had taught her a great deal about the genetics of DNA because she loved documentaries and learning new things and coupled with that she was fascinated about life itself. So when he mentioned DNA she was convinced he believed that the police had uncovered a dead body that somehow shared Arnold’s DNA. But she also knew that was impossible, yet she and Arnold had been particularly passionate not more than twelve hours ago.

“I still need to see him,” she said, “I want to see who you think my Arnold might be.”

“It’s irregular,” he mumbled, “but I’ll see what Doctor Gloucester has to say. He’s the pathologist and when it comes to his laboratory what he says goes, and that includes who foes into it.”

And so she was taken to the path lab and doctor Gloucester had a few words of warning for her.

“You might not recognise him straight away,” he warned her, “several weeks under the soil haven’t done him any favours.”

“I don’t understand…” she said quietly, “I was sleeping with him last night, honest I was…”

It was horrific, having the face of the unearthed body revealed to her, bit by bit so that the shock wasn’t too great. In the end, “it looks a bit like him,” she whispered, “only Arnold has a nice bushy beard and this man hasn’t… It can’t be Arnold, it really can’t be…”

Doctor Gloucester reacted to the clattering of a printer and went to it. It had printed off a sheet of paper, and he took it and gazed at it with a puzzled expression on his face.

“Well I never,” he mumbled, “I never ever did.” And he hastily covered the aromatic corpse on his slab so that Lucy couldn’t see it.

“According to the boys doing clever stuff like DNA analysis, this isn’t Arnold Bingley,” he said, “It’s a man called Dominic Stokes, and he was released from Brumpton Prison five weeks ago after serving several years for manslaughter. He’d been living at the address where you unearthed him since then.”

TO BE CONTINUED

© Peter Rogerson, 25.09.24

xxx