Crime Fiction / Murder Mystery
This is a guest post by A. J. Evley. Please see the author’s links if you enjoyed this piece.
The phone rings at twenty past eight while I’ve got my arms elbow deep in the washing up. I tap the loudspeaker with my driest finger.
“Marion Turner?”
“Speaking.”
“DC Dana Hartfield, Thames Valley cold case unit. Sorry to call so late…
…, are you available to speak?”
It’s never a bad time – something no one tells you about retirement. I sigh to myself.
“Yes, I can talk. How can I help?”
There’s a slight pause. I assume it’s because she’s trying to decide how much to tell me over the phone. I know that pause. I’ve lived that pause.
“It’s about a call you attended in 2004,” she says. “Near Shardeloes Lake, elderly male, found near the water.”
I felt my heart drop. Gerry.
“Yes, unfortunately I remember.”
What I don’t mention is that I remember it like it was yesterday. I remember him lying there, blue and still, and thinking before I’d even reached him, that’s Gerry. I stop washing and dry my hands, moving to my armchair in the lounge.
“We’ve had some new information come to light,” Dana says. “I wondered if you’d be willing to come down to the station so we can talk about this?”
“What, now?” I looked at the clock. 8:24.
“No ma’am, tomorrow is fine.”
Tomorrow reached today and I found myself numbly driving towards the police station. I’d been interviewed before in my past career, sometimes it came with the job, but this felt unnerving. Why did they want to know about a job that happened 22 years ago?
I found a space and made my way in, signed in at reception and followed their direction to locate the detective.
“Good morning, Ms Turner,” Dana chirped as I entered the room. “If you’d like to follow me, there’s a room we can chat. Don’t worry, it has a kettle and snacks,” she winked.
The rain had started to beat against the window as we sat with tea and a couple of biscuits. My body shivered although it was warm.
“We think there may be similarities to some of our cases,” Dana started.
“What kind of similarities?”
“The clothes.”
My mind raced back. It had come through as a category 1 call, unconscious, not breathing next to the lake. We’d prepared for a drowning but that all changed when we arrived. I made my way carefully down the bank, holding onto trees to keep my balance. I recognised that RAF insignia on his arm from back on the path, but I didn’t want to believe it was true until I saw his face. Gerry. He’d been a regular around the park. A recent widow. Always spending his evenings taking a leisurely stroll around the lake as part of his evening routine, so I don’t fester, he’d always say. A kind man that always bought us coffee from the van if he saw us parked near it. If we weren’t busy, he’d sometimes offer a chat about his late wife, or his time in the RAF. But most of the time, he’d check on us and make sure we were looking after ourselves. A kind man. He was blue as the sky as I stepped over him. His whole, naked body. My crewmate brought down the Lifepak so we could do our tests, confirming there was nothing we could do for him. They say a person isn’t dead until they’re warm and dead, but we knew. His body felt as if it were made from ice. A purpling tinge had started to spread along the base of his body. I requested the police attend as I took a step back from Gerry. His clothes were a few feet away from him. Jeans, shirt, jumper, coat, underwear, all neatly in a uniform pile with his shoes paired on top. I didn’t think much of it. I’d heard of a medical phenomenon called paradoxical undressing where victims in the late stages of hypothermia feel a burning sensation and end up stripping off their clothes. I’d never seen it in person though.
“You wrote in your PRF that there was evidence of paradoxical undressing,” Dana said, sliding a photocopy of my own report across the table. My handwriting looked younger and more defined.
“That’s correct. His clothes were folded a few feet away from him. It’s known that hypothermic people sometimes remove their clothes.”
“Yes, but people don’t fold their clothes.”
I looked at her, aware that confusion was radiating from my face.
“I…I didn’t realise,” I stuttered.
“That’s okay, we’re not blaming you Marion. Even the police on scene thought nothing odd about it.” She patted my hand, easing some of the tension. “People in that state aren’t capable of folding so intricately. It’s the last thing the brain does before it stops doing anything useful. The clothes get torn off, left in a heap or still half hanging off of them when we find them. We’ve had 6 more known cases over the last 22 years. All near bodies of water in woodland, all deemed as hypothermia, all of their clothes folded neatly nearby with the shoes sat on top.”
“You think whoever did this folded his clothes,” I said. “As some kind of -”
“Signature,” Dana finished. “Something that is unique to the offender.”
My brain felt like mush as tears sprouted. Signature. Offender. What she was really saying was Gerry was murdered.
“There’s something else,” Dana said, sliding a second sheet across. “The 999 call. Do you know who made it?”
I hadn’t thought about that part since that day. There’s always someone to call these things in: a jogger, a dog-walker, someone who just happened to be passing. You rarely remember them if they’re still on scene when you arrive, usually because they leave once you’ve made contact with the patient.
“It was a woman, I remember that much,” I said slowly. “Youngish. She said she’d found him whilst out walking her dog.” I frowned. “I don’t actually remember the dog.”
“No dog,” Dana said. “She’d left a first name only and said the same story to the call handler. We checked the CCTV at the entrance of the park. Surprisingly only nine people took their dogs for a walk at the park in the hours leading up to Gerry’s death and all were male taking their dog as they went for a run. Gerry entered, as he always did, at 8pm that night, alone.”
The rain kept going against the glass, pounding with some urgency now as the seriousness of this situation settled in.
“Do you know if he ever met with anyone in the park?”
“He’d always look for our truck near the coffee stand, but I’d never seen him with anyone.” I rubbed my temples, as if that would help my memory rewind. I thought about all the times he’d lean up against the ambulance with his coffee, telling us about his evening, his late wife, his RAF days. But there was one time…
“He spoke about a young lady that he’d started seeing regularly on his walks, always appeared a bit lost so he said he’d walked with her a few evenings to see how she was doing.”
That was Gerry, always looking out for people and making sure they were okay.
“I didn’t ask her name though, I didn’t even think anything of it at the time. Gerry was just like that.”
Dana sat frozen, tension pinning her shoulders.
“Marion.” Her voice had dropped almost to a whisper. “Is there anything – any detail at all – that might connect them to Gerry’s death? A description? Anything?”
She seemed almost pleading. I closed my eyes, trying to visualise all the times we’d seen Gerry at the coffee truck, but all I could see was the treeline and the shape of him curled up at its edge. Then a face. Soft at the edges…blurred. The more I tried to focus on it, the more it went out of focus.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I thought I had it. It was right there.”
I sat there with my hands around the cooled tea, begging with my mind to bring the image of her face back. The woman who had possibly killed the kindest man I knew. I know I’d seen her. She’d been stood there and said she’d found him whilst walking her dog. But there was no lead. There were no toys. There was no dog in sight. It must have been her. It had to be her.
My stomach lurched as the realisation sunk in. She’d been stood there for minutes after we arrived, watching us work and admiring her own handiwork. She heard us say we thought it was a hypothermic cause of death and walked away, probably smirking because she knew she’d got away with it.
“Take your time, Marion. Let me fetch you some more tea.” Dana got up and bustled with the kettle. The rain continued beating against the window, fast-paced and booming as if it wanted me to hurry up and remember. Now I was rubbing my temples because my head was throbbing. The face felt so familiar but so distant in my memory. A loud clatter broke my train of thought and I looked up to see a mug, of what was supposed to be filled with tea, now laying on its side with the steaming brown liquid pooling over the side of the counter.
“Oops!” said Dana, fumbling through a drawer to grab out a tea towel. She set about wiping up the mess she’d clumsily made as I watched her move with such perfection. I couldn’t fault the way she cleaned up. She worked from top to bottom, moving with elegance, the way one would when cleaning up blood.
I shook my head. What was that thought? I laughed to myself and looked back over at Dana who was folding the tea towels neatly on the side. Perfectly crisp lines, albeit soggy. Lined corner to corner. Stacked so neatly on top of each other.
“Marion.”
I admired the perfection of what I’d just witnessed, sighing at the feeling of experiencing such a moment.
“Marion!”
A sharp tone snapped me back into the room.
“You’re doing it again, you’re getting carried away.”
A male voice washed over me as I got my bearings. I felt my muscles tense as I slipped back from the memory and into the heart of this insufferable place.
The room had turned back to its cozy browns and reds and I shuffled myself up into a more seated position on the red leather sofa. My therapist sat across from me, hands crossed on his lap and a frown etched deep into his young, slim face.
“You’ve told me Gerry’s story plenty of times.”
I sighed. It was my favourite story to tell.
“What I need from you is to tell me what you did with the other victims’ bodies?” He leaned closer, trying to look directly into my eyes as I turned my attention to the window. No rain, just sunlight pouring in from the warm summer’s day.
“Where are they, Marion?”
A. J. Evley is an aspiring author, voice actor, paramedic, and sound designer with several written works that you can find online at his substack here. Please be sure to check out his other work there if you enjoyed this piece.
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