A BURIED BODY 2.

Two men with the same DNA...

“That’s not possible!” Lucy couldn’t help interrupting the pathologist. “Because he was in bed with me last night and we were closer than close, and he was very much alive,” she added, “I could feel how warm he was.”

The identity of the body on the slab might have continued with Lucy insisting that her memory might have holes in it if she was trying to remember something from her dhildhood, but not after as few as less than twenty-four hours.

Suddenly they were disturbed by the sound of a loud complaining voice voice somewhere outside Interview Room One accompanied by the more soothing sounds of the desk sergeant who left his place to go to the room where Lucy was frustratedly trying to understand how she could have done with Arnold what she had as recently as last night when the person she was doing it with because she loved him was dead, and then the door was opened from outsude and the desk sergeant stuck little more than his nose in.

“Sir,” he addressed the DI, “there’s a man out here who wants to know why we’ve got his girlfriend, Miss Madden, in custody because according to him the girl’s as innocent as the skies are blue, and he’s dead worried about her.”

“And who might be causing all this fuss?” demanded DI Corden, almost fiercely, “I’m in the middle of a complex investigation and she’s an essential part of it!”

“But I’ve no idea why…” she whispered.

Then the desk Sergeant was pushed almost roughly to one side and Arnold Bingley took his place, glaring around the room until his face broke into a heart-warming smile when he caught sight of Lucy.

“Angel..” he started, but,

“Arnold, my love, they said you were dead!” shouted Lucy, her face suddenly wreathed in the prettiest array of smiles imaginable. Then she turned to face the DI, “See,” she said forcefully, “I told you he was alive! And just you look and tell me why you think he’s dead! I don’t know who the muddy corpse in that laboratory place is, but this is Arnold Bingley and I love him to bits!”

“I went home to find someone’s been digging a dirty great big hole in my back garden!” Arnold protested, “and without so much as by your leave or a would you mind if I dug your spuds up. My neighbour told me it were white-coated blokes who said they were coppers looking for a body when he asked, and then they went on to find one!”

“If it wasn’t for this man’s beard I’d say there was closer than a superficial resemblance,” put in Dr. Gloucester, “tell me, young man, do you have a brother? Maybe a twin brother?”

“How on Earth would I know that?” asked Arnold, “I was adopted, wasn’t I? My mum, not my genetic mum but my real mum, couldn’t have a baby, so she and my dad opted to adopt one, and I was that one, and we’ve been okay ever since. There’s certainly not a caring parent buried there if that’s what you think.”

Doctor Gloucester perked up when he heard what Arnold had said, and he interrupted by asking Arnold, “You say you were adopted? Would you happen to know where from? I mean, do you have access to any of the paperwork?

Arbold looked aggrieved at being asked a personal question he wasn’t quite sure about.

“I was only a baby!” he protested, “newly born, I was told when I was old enough to try to understand why my birth parents didn’t want me. I mean, they would have done but my birth mother died and my birth dad couldn’t hope to cope. It’s not that he was simple or anything like that, but he was big in politics, or that’s what I was told, and too busy to change nappies. So my parents took me off their hands.”

.”Would you happen to know…” began the athologist, but Arnold flashed him a fiercely stubborn look.

“I’ve told you all I know,” he said firmly, “and that’s all I want to dredge out of my own past.”

“Have you ever met a man called Dominic Stokes? He’d be your age, probably to the second…”

“No I haven’t, but… wait a tick, Stokes, you say? That was the surname of my birth father. I’m pretty sure of that. When I was a kid my parents wanted to give me information about who I am, though I’ve always known I’m Arnold Bingley. But that bloke, the man who might have been my dad if he’d kept me, he would be, what twenty or thirty years older than me.. I remember being told once and it’s lucky I haven’t forgotten it. Probably because the man who lost at the last general election was called Stokes and folks said he was the sort of man nobody would ever be able to trust. Anyway, what’s he got to do with the price of cabbage?”

“He had a boy of your age. Dominic, a posh name but not a very posh man,” sighed the DI. “He killed a woman, driving too fast near a school just as it was turning out and he was half cut with booze. He was sent to jail on a manslaughter conviction and only came out a month or two ago And if the pathologist has got it right and not twisted it round his many brain cells we’ve got him confused with you.”

“Then you should be more careful,” snapped Arnold, “causing all this grief over a simple mistake. And upsetting my beloved lass like you have.”

“It wasn’t a c**k-up on our part,” declared Doctor Gloucester, “You see, we’ve got his DNA and we’ve checked your DNA and you’re as good as being the same person. And DNA never does that, throw up random thing like that. It can only mean that Dominic is your twin brother, and not just that, he’s your identical twin…”

“I’ve seen his body,” nodded Lucy, “and if you shaved that fungus off your face, Arnold my love, you’d be his exact double.”

“And of all the places to be buried he chose your own potato patch,” added DI Corden, “and that gives us a whole new problem to solve. I mean, in his twin brother’s garden: who would have believed that could ever be likely?”

TO ME CONTINUED

© Peter Rogerson 27.09.24

xxx