Free Stone Cold by Andrew Lane Page B

thought it would be funny, knowing that there was a dead body in the audience as well as on the table.’
    ‘Sacrilege, treating God’s creation like that,’ Millard murmured, shaking his head sadly, but he didn’t sound surprised. Presumably it was the kind of thing that students
regularly got up to.
    ‘I’m guessing that you didn’t manage to get hold of a body,’ Sherlock said.
    Chippenham shook his head. ‘The pathologist – Doctor Lukather by name – was too fly. He wouldn’t give me the time of day, let alone a look at a body. I told the police
that. They said they’d check with Lukather, but they seemed to believe me. I won’t say they were satisfied, but they let me go.’
    The conversation moved on to famous jokes and japes that had been played by students on each other, and on the lecturers, over the years. Sherlock slipped out after a while and went up to his
room. He had a lot to think about.
    The next morning he rose early, had breakfast and went straight out into the town. Something had occurred to him overnight, and he wanted to try it out.
    He went straight to the offices of the
Oxford Post
. At the reception, he asked to see whichever reporter was on desk duty that day. He knew that most reporters would be out researching
stories, but there was always one left behind just in case anyone wandered in with something.
    The one left behind today was Ainsley Dunbard, a man not that much older than Sherlock with a sparse moustache and beard and an expression that suggested he’d seen too much of life and
didn’t like what he had seen.
    ‘What can I do for ya?’ he asked when Sherlock was shown to his ‘office’ – actually a room barely larger than a broom cupboard with a desk, a typewriter and no
window.
    ‘Sorry to bother you,’ Sherlock started, ‘but I’m interested in becoming a reporter myself when I leave school. I wondered if there are any tips you can give
me?’
    ‘Just what I need,’ the man muttered; ‘competition.’ He stared at his desk, then at the wall. ‘There’s only a couple of things you need to know,’ he
said eventually, sighing. ‘First is, always check your facts. Make sure that if you print something, at least two people have told you about it, and check that the first person didn’t
tell the second one.’
    Sherlock dutifully wrote this down in a notebook he had bought from a stationer’s just a few minutes before.
    ‘Second thing is, people don’t talk in a way that makes good newspaper reporting, so you got to tidy it up. Take out the “um”s an’ the “ah”s an’
the “oh, I say”s, an’ put the events in the right order, cos people tend to remember things out of order an’ keep correctin’ themselves. When it all gets printed
they’ll remember it the way you wrote it, not the way they said it. Third –’ and he glanced sideways at Sherlock through eyes that were bloodshot and tired – ‘remember
that if a dog bites a man then it ain’t news, but if a man bites a dog then it is. People want stories that are out of the ordinary, maybe a bit grotesque.’ He thought for a moment.
‘Take this story I worked on last year,’ he continued. ‘Some people wrote to me from one of the local villages. It was like a petition – they all signed the letter. They
told me that there’s this creature that lives in the woods near them who’s not actually a real man, with a mother an’ all that, but ’e’s been
made
by sewing
bits of dead bodies together. Now
that’s
macabre. Would’ve made a great story, except that it sounds just like that book
Frankenstein
by the poet’s wife – Mary
Shelley. I reckon someone’d read the book, or seen the play, an’ ’ad a nightmare about it. Too much cheese for supper, I ’spect.’ He sighed. ‘I did do a bit of
digging around, just in case, but I couldn’t find any corroboration. There was nothing to the story.’
    This story sounded like the one he’d heard from the farmer who