John Browns Body 4

 

I got out from the vehicle and examined our predicament.  We were probably overloaded, up to the wheel hubs in thick icy water, on the moor, at night, in winter, snow on the ground, temperature dropping quicker than a prossies knickers at a Naval dockyards with a totally incompetent prat who was masquerading as a driver.  I looked to the cloudy skies for some form of divine intervention.  As usual nothing came.  We were knackered, goosed, buggered and totally up the creek without any form of propulsion.

I sat in the passenger seat of the Land Rover trying to dry out my frozen and wet shoes and trousers from the completely inadequate warm air draft coming from the heater. “I could fart warmer air than this thing is producing” I muttered.  Dickie looked sideways at me but said nothing.  His spectacles glinted in the reflected lights of the instruments on the dashboard.  Ahead of us down the moor and beyond the wall of the reservoir were homes and farms, their lights taunting us as we sat in our icy cold tin can.
“I suppose there is one good thing about this whole mess” I said.  “What’s that?” Dickie asked.  “Well at least John isn’t going to go off in this cold.  Should be still well preserved for the post mortem.”   If my nether regions were in danger of death by freezing, at least my slightly warped sense of humour was still intact.

We sat for a while trying to work out how we were going to get the Land Rover and contents off the moor and back to civilisation.  Nothing immediately presented itself.  Calling out divisional transport would be out of the question, they would simply call a rota garage from the call out list, and we would suffer the ignominy of the cat calls and jokes from our fellow officers for months to come.  I looked at Dickie and mentally stabbed him between the eyes.  It didn’t work, he was still alive.  I reached into my pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes.  Dickie half turned towards me, his arm starting to reach out to take one from the pack.  “Piss off” I said, “Smoke your own”.  I was not in a benevolent mood.  “Charming”hereplied and sat back in the drivers seat.  I lit the cigarette from a box of matches and slipped the spent match out t hrough a crack at the top of the window.  It was the only thing stopping the whole vehicle from steaming up as our damp clothing and bodies started to thaw in the meagre heat.

My thoughts turned to the dead body in the back of the Rover.  How had he suddenly reappeared after being missing for six week?  Where had he been?  Had he been with someone?  What further light would his distant relatives be able to throw on him and his life?

John was in his mid forties, never married, lived alone but had one or two cousins living in the local area.  He was something of a loner and rarely saw his family.  His disappearance had been reported to the Police some three days after he had failed to turn up for an arranged cycle ride with a lady friend.  She lived some twenty miles away, and two days after he had not materialised for their ride she telephoned John’s cousin.  Together they went to his house, fearing that they would find his body somewhere in the house having had an accident or been struck down by some sudden and fatal illness.  He wasn’t there.  He wasn’t anywhere.

The law presumes that a sane adult is capable of deciding where and how they wish to live.  The fact that sometimes those decisions might not accord with those of the people living with or around them is of no significance.  An adult can go where they wish, live where they wish and talk with who they wish, and it should be no concern to anyone close to that individual.  In other words you can suddenly take off in the middle of the night taking with you whatever you want and the law deems this to be perfectly alright.  You will have broken no law, you go where you want and do what you want to do.  When John was reported missing from his home to the Police the initial reaction of the officer taking the report was almost, “So what?”, but maybe not thatcallas.  From the questions asked of his relatives there appeared to be nothing untoward in his sudden unexplained non appearance for the cycle ride.  However, because he had not shown any signs before of ill health, mental instability or in fact anything out of the ordinary, some alarm bells started to ring.  

Here was a quiet single man, living by himself yet who had a friendship with a single lady of similar age who lived twenty miles away.  They both shared an interest in cycling and had in the past on many occasions taken themselves off for rides in the hills of Lancashire and Yorkshire.  They had had meals out together and been for the odd drink in one or other of the pubs in Milnrow, but never anything to excess.  Neither had a problem with alcohol, and both in fact lived single contented lives where they were able to meet with each other when it suited both of them.  The only thing slightly out of the ordinary was that John had been prescribed sleeping tablets some months before which he apparently took only irregularly.  For him suddenly to disappearwas a cause for concern, as the only seemingly obvious answer to the reason for his disappearance was that some misfortune had befallen him, either at his own hand, or the hand of someone else.  From the outset it was not a straightforward Missing From Home enquiry.  I was given the job of trying to progress the enquiry file after it had been running for some four weeks.  The file was thick.

Judging from the paperwork numerous enquiries had been made with the Yorkshire police force to try and gain some more information about the appointment he had made with his friend to go for a rid on their cycles.  It seemed that the arrangement had been made the week before he suddenly went missing.  He was to cycle over to her house on a Saturday and they would then go off for the remainder of the day.  When he failed to turn up at the house she did not immediately feel that anything was amiss, simply that he was not feeling well, or he had a cold, but nothing to raise her fears.  After two days during which time he had failed to contact her she went over to Milnrow to his home, she had her own front door key to the house, and let herself in.  Whatshe found there was what I subsequently found when I visited the house for the first time.

The house was cold and I shivered as I stepped over the threshold into the kitchen.  The floor was made of stone flags, large irregular rectangles of stone which had been partially covered by a rag rug.  There was a white porcelain sink set beneath the one window in the room which had a wooden draining area to one side.  On it were the washed plates, cup and small pan with which he had made his last meal in the house.  A question raised itself in my mind.  When was that last meal consumed?  There was nothing to indicate when it had been made or eaten.  

Upstairs in his bedroom the bed was made up ready for his return, his wardrobe contained a two piece suit, a few shirts, a couple of pairs of trousers and little else.  The bathroom was as sparsely furnished as the rest of the house.  In general terms this was the home of a single unmarried man, plainly furnished with none of the ornaments or pictures on the walls or on furniture which you would find in a home furnished by a woman.  It lacked ‘a woman’s touch’.  Comparing this house to my own it was Spartan, even the walls of the few rooms lacked any life.  The place was sterile and had no semblance of warmth in it.  As I moved from room to room I felt time and again how simply this man had lived, how frugally he had existed, how lonely he musthave been.  Even with the company of the one woman who was occasionally in his life he had only a few people where he worked who spoke to him.  He was something of a loner, but from what I read, did not appear to be unhappy with his life.

So what to make of his disappearance and his death on the moors high above Milnrow?