It was a few days after Christmas and the weather was cold, there was snow on the ground from last night and I was just starting the 3pm -11pm shift in a hamlet a few miles away from the station in the village where I lived.
Shortly after three o'clock I parked my Police car in the drive way of my mates house. He and his wife and three kids had long been friends of mine and my wife, we used to knock around together in our off duty time. It was Sunday, I was cold and because it was just after Christmas and freezing cold there was nobody out on the streets. What other incentive could you ask for to stop off for a brew of tea and some home made Christmas cake in front of a roaring coal fire? Not much.
Margaret opened the front door as I walked up the drive and welcomed me into the warmth. Frank was going to be off for two days and was seated by the side of the fire toasting his feet in the hearth and nursing a large single malt whisky. He smiled as I walked in and sat down in the large comfy armchair opposite him. "I'd offer you one" he said, lifting the glass of whisky to his lips. Shame you are on duty". I smiled thinly at him. "Bastard" I muttered. We sat for a few moments talking of the quiet day he had had on the early morning shift. It was Christmas, nothing was happening. A dead time of year as the festivities of the parties leading up to Christmas had been and gone, and New Years Eve parties were still a few days away.
Margaret came in and presented me with a couple of mince pies and a cup of coffee. I smiled and thanked her, she knew what my appetite was like. Biting into one of the pies I grimaced as my personal radio called my name. Frank turned down the sound on the television and I reached to answer the call.
"Report of a body on the moors above Milnrow. Two children found it. They are with their father at the Ogden reservoir. Can you attend?"
Can I attend? What bloody choice did I have. John Brown had finally turned up.
The thin wintry afternoon sun cast hardly a shadow as I left the warmth of the fire in Frank's house. I pulled my short heavy woollen overcoat around me as I settled down into the Panda car and turned on the engine.
The road out of the village onto the moors was icy. The highways department had not yet started to grit them following the onset of ice that afternoon, and driving skills learned during the previous eight years on traffic patrol came in very useful as I drove higher out of the village onto the moorland roads. Along the sides of the roads the trees in the woods were tinted with white frost and occasionally, as the car pulled out of the tree line onto the moors, there was a thin covering of fresh snow clinging to the branches and lying in patches on the ground where it had fallen the previous night.
The car heater was good, about the only thing about the small Ford which was good. The screen heater worked overtime to clear the ice forming on the inside as I pulled into the unmade road leading to the reservoir I was looking for. Ogden Reservoir, a cold inhospitable place on a warm sunny summers day, but in the middle of a cold winters day there was nothing at all remotely pleasant about it. It had been built into a level piece of hillside on the moors. It was remote and cold, the water black and icy. Around it's perimeter was a seven foot high wall of stone, the only access a large ornate metal gate with the name of the water company made out in twisted metal at the top of the gate.
In front of the gate stood a man with two shivering children, both boys. Shivering despite the heavy outdoor clothing they were both sweating and the heavy wellington boots they sported. They huddled close to the man and watched me with some apprehension, I thougth, as I walked towards them from the car.
The man told their story for them. They had been on the moors high above the reservoir playing in the snow. At one of the highest points on the moor was a dry stone wall, he said, and lying on the ground beneath it was the body of a man. I looked at the two children. Their faces were white and they made no comments to interrupt the man, their father, about what he said. I took out my notebook and started to make a note of their names and addresses when one of the boys suddenly said, "He's lying on his back and he's got snow on him". Then as suddenly he stopped and reversed back into the shelter of his fathers leg. The boy was about seven years old and had the scrawny build of most of the kids from the remote moorland village, thin and pinched. "Built for speed not comfort" as my father would have said. I questioned them both, brothers who played regularly on the moors and knew every inch of the hummocky ground. The man, it appeared, was lying near to the junction of two dry stone walls right at the top of the moor, at a place just where the moor started to slope away from reservoir and off towards the eventual summit of the moor known as Windy Hill.
I left the three of them standing by the gate to the reservoir and went through the gate, making use of the pathway which wound around the perimeter and off up onto the moor proper. I glanced over my shoulder as I started to make the climb off the path and into the peaty boggy ground. There was no sign of the man and his sons, they had obviously gone to seek warmth at home and retell the story to their mother, who no doubt would admonish them about going out on the moor alone in the cold and with the dark drawing in.
The dark was drawing in, and by the time I had fought the sodden ground to reclaim my feet and walked across the open moor to the wall at the summit of the hill, the light was failing quickly. It was almost four o'clock by the time I reached the point which the boys had told me I would find the body. I was forced to bend my legs hard to push my way up the hill, a hill made by the glacial action of the last ice age and the almost total lack of any real habitation for thousands of years, at least since the Iron Age of man.
The cold bit into me despite my exhausting climb up the hill, a cold based on fear of the unknown as well as the rapidly dropping temperature. My inadequate uniform was no comfort or protection against the snow and my sodden frozen feet were rapidly taking on the feeling of a lump of frozen meat. I was wearing shoes which were normal protection for town work, but completely useless for walking in the wet moors.
There he was. Suddenly in front of me, exactly where the boy had told me he would be located. Lying near to the join in two sections of wall, the back wall forming a frame to the scene of the moorland and separating it from the sky. He was lying on his back with his feet crossed at the ankles and his arms spread out wide level with his shoulders. His head was pointing in the direction of the wall behind him, and he was about ten feet from it. From where he lay he could see over his home in Milnrow and the town of Rochdale, had he been alive. His eyes were closed and his face was at peace, relaxed.
A light cover of snow had dusted him with white, and had then frozen. He was wearing clothing which was more than adequate for the hills and cold weather. A waterproof outer coat with a long zip up the middle and then velcro fasteners as double protection. Under that a thick high neck jumper, and beneath that a woollen shirt, and under that a cotton tee shirt. On his legs he wore moleskin trousers thick enough to ward off the cold, and on his feet heavy leather walking boots.
The jacket, the jumper and the shirt were all unfastened and opened so that I was able to see the tee shirt he also wore. The hat and gloves he had also been wearing were lying by his side. The tee shirt, the jumper and the jacket were covered in snow, as was his pale grey face. Obviously he was dead, but the law determined that the only person to give this verdict was a doctor, so he had to be taken to a mortuary. But before that Force regulations determined that an unusual death out of doors had to treated as suspicious. Suspicious deaths had to be investigated by the Criminal Investigation Department, the CID, otherwise know to the uniform branch of the force as Coppers In Disguise, but not to their faces.
With some malicious delight I took up my personal radio and with frozen icy fingers called up the control room.
"Can you contact the Duty CID Officer for me please?" I asked, hoping that the duty officer on a Sunday at this time of year would be a high ranking one, a Chief Inspector at least. "Tell him I have a suspicious death on the moors. It's John Brown."
"Roger will do" Came the reply.
I looked down at his body and said, "Sorry John. You'll have to wait a bit longer before we can get you home."
I climbed up onto the wall a lit a cigarette. Drawing on the Dunhill I watched the last of the winter sun disappear behind the misty town in the distance, and prepared to wait for the Brass to arrive.
Sitting
on top of the wall it was cold, very very cold. The light
had finally gone and all I could see in the distance was a steadily
increasing number of lights on the roads of the towns visible in the
distance. I pulled my overcoat tighter around me and lit
another cigarette. There was nothing to be done until the brass from
CID had arrived. The occasional radio call from the nick told
me that the duty CID officer had been informed and would be attending
in about forty minutes, and the divisional Land Rover was also being
dispatched with a canvas coffin to load John into and take him to the
mortuary at the local hospital in Rochdale.
I
lit yet another cigarette and shivered as the temperature fell to
well below freezing point. My feet were sodden through tramping
over the soaking humocky grass. On these moors and over these
fields the water level is only inches below the surface, one of the
reasons why the reservoir was built there in the first place in the
1800’s. When the water came to the surface it was black or at
least a very dark brown due to the peat inches beneath the surface.
Icy peaty water dripped from my feet. I took off a shoe
to try and squeeze the excess water from my socks, bit of a useless
exercise really, made no difference to the temperature of my toes. I
kicked my feet together and tried to get some life into them, waste
of time.
Eventually
it became so cold that my body was starting to become so numb that I
climbed down off the wall and went to have a closer look at John
Brown. He looked very peaceful lying on his back in the grass.
There was no sign of a wound that I could make out anywhere on
his head, his mouth was closed and his head lay slightly angled to
his right shoulder. His eyes were closed gently. I was
fairly certain that he had not died due to the actions of any other
person, but it was very puzzling all the same.
John
was a single man, never been married, in his mid forties and lived
alone in a small cottage in Milnrow, the village I had been
patrolling for the previous six months since leaving the motorway
patrol. As a village it was now little more than a dormitory
for the bigger town of Rochdale and had struggled for years to
establish its own identity. The main industry in the times of
the industrial revolution had been cotton spinning and coal mining.
Now the cotton looms had gone, the mills closed and the coal
pits long ago closed as well. People travelled to Rochdale and
Oldham in the main to find work and new housing had grown all over
the area of the original village, but the original village still was
there if you knew where to find it.
