There was one body. Male? The face stared at them – one particular eyeball so close to the surface of the ice it reflected the blue electricity of the arc lamp back into the night. The thick, greying, corn-blond hair was matted with dried blood.
At first Dryden thought the head had been severed from its body. It lay twisted and back over its own shoulder. Then he saw the knuckle of bloodied vertebrae protruding from the neck and the thick flap of flesh that still joined shoulder to head. The sudden exposure to the heat of the lamps was melting the ice quickly, the fingers of one hand beginning to protrude along with a naked, blue-veined foot. Around the flesh streaks of black blood made the white skin look like ice-cream drizzled with chocolate.
One of the frogmen was sick in the long grass. Stubbs was unmoved. In control. He called the police photographer over to capture the position of the body before the ice melted. Then he used the squad-car radio to get the pathologist, coroner’s officer, and forensic team. Murder inquiry procedure.
Dryden told the copytaker the story was coming: he did that twice to make sure she’d heard the first time. Three hundred and fifty words by five-thirty. He wrote the intro and gave the rest off the top of his head. It wasn’t great – but it was in time.
Police launched a murder hunt yesterday after the butchered body of a man was found locked in the boot of a car winched out of the frozen River Lark, near Ely.
The police recovered the car – a new blue Nissan Spectre – from 15 feet of water two miles south of the village of Prickwillow after children skating on the river spotted it below the ice.
Det. Sgt. Andrew Stubbs of Ely Police, said: ‘Clearly we are treating this incident as suspicious. We have begun a murder inquiry and would appeal to anyone who can help with information to come forward.’
The police were unable to provide any clue to the identity of the dead man or the ownership of the car. Forensic experts from Cambridge were due to arrive at the scene late last night. The body was being prepared for removal to the city mortuary at Waterbeach.
One eyewitness to the recovery of the car, Ely taxi driver Mr Humphrey H. Holt, said: ‘When they got the car out it was a block of ice. Then they got to work on it with the blowtorches. All hell broke loose when they opened the boot. It must have been a horrible sight – they were obviously distressed.’
Detectives will concentrate on trying to identify the dead man. It is understood that his head was nearly severed. House to house inquiries were underway last night to see if anyone had heard or seen anything suspicious.
Detectives will be hampered by the isolated nature of the scene of the crime. The nearest building is a public house – The Five Miles From Anywhere – over a mile to the east. Traffic at the T-junction is extremely rare. Field work in the area has been halted during the current bad weather.
Dryden got the copytaker to read the story back and then checked with the news desk that he was in time. He was.
The firework display was reaching its climax over the cathedral and the sky was now a riot of lurid colour. The forensic team had got the corpse out of the Nissan and placed it on a body bag. Two medics in protective white suits were struggling to get the stiff limbs inside the plastic shroud. Dryden moved closer while Stubbs was busy on the mobile. The corpse’s feet were still visible, tucked grotesquely into the small of the back. Around one ankle was a short length of heavy rope attached to what looked like a cast-iron pulley block. And one arm hung loose. The hand was tanned and strong and on the wedding finger was a single gold band. Somewhere, thought Dryden, the long wait has begun.
2
By the time Dryden got back to the office, via a chip shop with Humph, the newsroom looked like a cabin on the Marie Celeste. The advent of the computer had brought with it a lot of talk about the paperless office: but it was just talk. And The Crow – established 1882– was hardly at the leading edge of new technology. Waste paper covered almost the entire floor and plastic coffee cups lay in small heaps by the PCs. An ashtray fashioned from an old hubcap contained the contents of a small volcano. Spikes – supposedly banned with the introduction of the PCs – still bristled on every desktop to collect used copy and notes, and the occasional passing eyeball. The newsroom consisted of three reporters’ work stations, a larger mahogany news editor’s desk in the bay window, a subs’ table with two dumpy make-up computers, and a copytaker’s table complete with acoustic hood salvaged from a skip in 1965 when the old post office was demolished. Splash, the office cat, was curled up on the single fax machine for extra warmth. Behind a glass partition was the editor’s office. The glass had been obscured by various absolutely essential pieces of paper carrying information ranging from the tide times at Brancaster to the constitution of the Three Rivers Water Authority. This paper camouflage had been erected by reporters over the years and now entirely baffled any attempt by the editor to see his staff.