Free Policeman's Progress by Bernard Knight Page B

stormed out to the car.

Chapter Six
    While Alec Bolam was cursing himself towards the city, equally harsh words were being spoken by other policemen at The Quayside in Newcastle.
    The tide was low and so getting the body up from the police launch to the wharf was no easy job. The light was poor and, in spite of plenty of available muscles, the rocking boat and steep wooden piles made the raising of the green canvas stretcher a difficult job.
    With much panting and grunting, the literally ‘dead’ weight was finally brought over the edge of the Quayside. In the darkness it was trotted over the cobbles to the archaic public mortuary and they just managed to squeeze the stretcher through the door of the tiny Victorian relic, which would have just about housed a car with no room to spare. When the police cars arrived, the tiny building was soon packed to suffocation with large men.
    The smallest figure was the one who was to hold the centre of the stage, Dr John Ellison. He clawed his way across to a row of hooks and hung his clothes up. Then he pulled on a wrinkled gown and plastic apron which he produced from a bag, together with some surgical instruments.
    MacDonald loomed up at the end of the antique porcelain table in the middle of the room. With him was Detective Superintendent Potts, his second-in-command at the CID, and the DI of the Tyne Division.
    â€˜Let’s be having a bit of space; anyone not having any real business here, clear off out.’
    A clear zone appeared reluctantly around the slab and the pathologist, together with the arty-looking man from the laboratory, stood alongside as Milburn and a PC unstrapped the stretcher and laid the body on the table.
    â€˜Still a canny bit of mud on him,’ observed the Tyne DI.
    The next few minutes were spent in cleaning up and taking yet more photographs, the cameramen moaning all the time that there were no proper power points for their floodlights.
    When their dust had settled, Gasgoine Burke carefully removed the wire loops from the ankles and wrists. ‘I’ve cut them at the sides, Super, to keep the “knots” intact – they were twisted three or four times in the front.’
    The wires, severed by pliers, were reverently laid on clean brown paper and carefully labelled as exhibits.
    â€˜What happened to the ends, d’ye think?’ asked the Scotsman.
    Burke delicately brushed back his floppy hair with the back of his hand. ‘Recent fractures, on all four ends. They’d been twisted badly at the point of breakage. I’d say they’d been rotated back and forth for some time, then finally snapped.’
    â€˜Think they had weights on them?’
    â€˜Quite probably – the swaying of the body in the tide must have weakened the wires and the final grabbing by the dredger buckets has snapped them right off.
    Meanwhile Ellison had been looking at the wreckage of the face. ‘The bucket hit him there all right – he’s had a devil of a clout. Not a hope of identifying him by his features.’
    Some of the less hardy souls tried to avoid looking too directly at the face, but MacDonald had got used to it and stared at the mess with interest. ‘What can you tell us about him, Doc? He looks a fairly young man, somehow.’
    John Ellison had been busy with a steel tape-measure. ‘Five feet eight, slim build, be about ten and a half stone, I’d guess. Young adult, pretty good teeth – those that are left. Hair sort of gingery blond. Certainly no baldness, though the front part of the scalp has been torn away.’
    He was looking at the fingers now.
    â€˜Hard to tell much, with all this washerwoman’s wrinkling, but they don’t look like the fingers of a man doing hard manual labour. Have a job getting prints from these fingers, but it may be the only way you’ll get a definite identification.’
    He prodded about in the horror of the face and finally decided that