We laid the coffin down alongside John’s body and unfastened the zip all the way down to the bottom. I looked at Dickie and then Alan. “Well one of you is going to have to help me get him in here” I said, indicating the coffin. Dickie made a move to Johns side and took hold of his arm to bend it back towards the side of his body. It refused to move. He glanced up at me. “Oh bugger” he said, “It’s rigor mortis isn’t it ?” I reached down and took hold of his other arm and tried to bend it. There was an instant when the arm moved for a fraction of an inch, then it held firm. The flesh was cold, and covered in a thin layer of snow from the previous night. I let his arm fall to the grass and thought foramoment. “Don’t think it is rigor mortis alone, I think he is frozen stiff. He’s been here a good few hours and it’s been bloody cold all day, let alone last night. He must be frozen solid.” I said. The other two stood looking at the body not wishing to make a decision or judgement on our course of action. A wicked thought went through my mind. I looked at Dickie and winked, then looked sideways at Alan, our young new recruit.
“Only
one thing for it “ I said. “Going to have to break his arms
to get them by his side so we can get him in the coffin.” Alan
looked alarmed and stuttered. “We can’t do that can we?”
he asked. “How will it look when his family come for him and he has
two broken arms?” He was obviously concerned, and lacking in
experience, guile and the finer points of the 1861 Ways and Means
Act. This little known act of Parliament, amended by the Smart
Arse Act of 1960, enables the Police to sort out seemingly
intractable and insoluble problems without resorting to certain
niceties or conventions, like due respect for dead bodies where the
said dead body is creating a bloody nuisance and stopping the officer
concerned from getting back to the nick for a warm brewand something
to eat when they have been on the freezing cold moor for what was now
approaching three long bloody hours. I was not amused, nor was
I in any mood to stay up there in the cold any longer than I really
had to.
“Dickie”
I said quietly, “Grip his arm and bend it to his side.” For
once Dickie did as he had been told. He took hold of the arm on
his side and gently eased it from the horizontal to lie alongside his
trunk. I repeated the same action with the arm on my side, and
between the three us we managed to get John’s body into the canvas
coffin. Standing with one foot straddling either side of the
coffin, Alan held the two arms down inside the coffin as Dickie and I
tugged away at the zip until we had managed to pull it all the way
down from the top to the bottom of the bag. John was now all
sewn up, so to speak.
With
the coffin lying in the spikey grass between us we stood and
stretched our backs for a moment and caught our breath. I glanced
from one to the other. “Are we fit then?” I asked. Dickie
nodded, still gasping for breath from his exertions, Alan nodded too,
a little grim faced I thought. “Take a hold of a handle and
lets get him back to the Rover” I said. Six handles were on
the coffin for a very good and logical purpose. A dead body is
a dead weight, that’s how the phrase came into being. Six
handles presumes six people are going to be used to transport the
stiff from where it had been found to where ever it was going, not
three. Now, believe me, with the best will in the world, unless
you are an Olympic class weight lifter you arenot going to be able to
carry a dead body in a canvas coffin across a stretch of black icy
hummocky grass in the mid evening in winter in the north of England
without having the right number of people to carry out the task. It
is not going to happen. But it had to, we had to get the body
the twenty yards from where he had decided to lay himself down, or
where someone else had decided to lay him down, and into the Land
Rover so that we could transport him from the freezing cold moor to
the freezing cold mortuary at Birch Hill Hospital at Littleborough.
Dickie
and Alan took one handle on either side whilst I took the handle at
the back of the coffin, and we lifted. The coffin immediately
nosedived towards the grass. We laid it down and I went to the
front handle. Again we lifted. It taildived this time.
Dickie giggled. “This isn’t going to be easy is it?”
he said. “No” I grunted as we tried lifting again. No
matter how we tried it the damn coffin insisted on diving into the
earth from either the front or the rear, it seemed like we were
trying to carry a see-saw down the moor. We slid on the grass,
we fell into puddles, we swore and slid some more, but eventually by
the grace of whoever was up there watching us, we reached the rear
door of the Land Rover. We stoodthe coffin up on ‘it’s
feet’ against the back door and stood to catch our breath and try
to remove some of the peaty mud from our trousers which by now had
lost any semblance of creases, and our overcoats which were now
splattered in large brown stains from contact with the mud and grass.
“Lets have a fag” suggested Dickie. “Yes,” I
responded. There were the odd occasions when Dickie Night made good
suggestions. “Then we get him in the back and off this bloody
moor”.
We
stood smoking away and gradually got our breath back. Alan kept
looking around him nervously at the dark moorland fields. The
only sounds were coming from the motorway, the only lights from the
village in the distance. Otherwise there was total moonless
cloudy darkness. We flicked our cigarette butts out into the
moor and heard them hiss in the wet grass. Dickie and I
manoeuvred the coffin away from the door handle and Alan opened the
door wide to allow us to access the rear compartment. It was
then immediately apparent that the compartment was not long enough to
enable us to feed the coffin in lengthwise and flat on the floor of
the vehicle. There just was not enough length between the rear
door and the back of the passenger anddrivers seats in the front of
the vehicle. He would have to go in cross ways, from bottom
left to top right, slanting. We eventually managed to get him
into the back of the Land Rover. One person would go inside and tug
at the head of the coffin and the others two would stand in the peaty
puddle and push and shove him. His head was in the top right
hand corner of the compartment and his feet lodged securely against
the bulkhead of the bottom left door stanchion. There was a
problem however, John Browns body insisted on trying to get out, or
fall out of the back of the vehicle. Frozen solid as he was
there appeared to be some sign of life left in him yet. “Dickie”
I said, “You hold the bugger in and I’ll shut the door on him to
jam him in. OK?” Dickie did as he was instructed and I
managed to get the door closed against the coffin. We now were
faced with a second problem. Two seats in the Land Rover and
threepassengers. Dickie was the driver, and I was certainly not
going to have anyone sat on my kneed whilst we struggled to get the
Rover off the moor and to the hospital. The seats just were not
big enough. Alan looked from Dickie and myself and back agin.
“What?” he asked suspiciously. “What?”
“Is
this the first dead body you have seen Alan” I asked. “Yes,
it is” he replied taking a great gulp of air. “You’ll
like him by the time we get to hospital.” I said. “Get
in the back with the body.” I jerked my head back toward the
rear of the vehicle. His young face creased like he suddenly
knew he had filled his trousers with whatever he had eaten for his
last meal. Then realisation dawned and he slowly and very
quietly slid his way to the back door. I opened it and reached
inside to stop the coffin falling out. “In you get “ I
said. Quietly, ever so quietly, he climbed up onto the step and
into the cramped compartment, clutching his arms tenderly around the
coffin for support. Gently, ever so gently, I closedthedoor on the
pair of them and got into the passenger seat.
“Get
that bloody heater going Dickie” I said. “My balls are colder
than a brass monkeys, and my stomach thinks my throat has been cut”.
Dickie fired up the engine, set the heater to blast setting and
engaged first gear. We jerked forward a foot and the engine
stalled. Dickie fired it up again. We stalled again. I
looked sideways at him. “Want me to have a go?” I asked.
He looked forward through the misty windscreen which the
pathetic excuse for a heater in the Land Rover had failed miserably
to clear. With his freearm he leaned forward and with his
gloved hand wiped the condensation from the screen. “No, No
it’s okay, I’ll be alright” he stuttered. This was
getting a bit beyond a joke.
No comments:
Post a Comment