Shooting Elvis by Stuart Pawson Read Free Book Online Page A

Eddie was seconded to me. I got straight on to the Chief Superintendent and asked what it was about. CID sergeants are not moved sideways for nothing.
    Eddie had had a chequered career. He’d startedin East Pennine and made it to sergeant, then made the big jump to the Met to get into plain clothes. Unfortunately a fracas with a suspect saw him busted back to uniform and he eventually came back north. At HQ a female in the case building unit had accused him of harassment after she’d spurned his overtures, which had led to him being moved to Heckley under a ‘leave it with me’ agreement.
    ‘You can sort him out, Charlie,’ the chief had told me. ‘He has some old-fashioned ideas, that’s all. Nothing you can’t deal with.’
    His record didn’t bother me. If he was a good copper I could forgive him the odd transgression, but I wasn’t happy about Dave’s attitude towards him. We weren’t bobbies anymore, we were a human resource, trained to salivate when required, to run and fetch on demand, and to turn the other cheek when some thieving little rat-fink with the IQ of a sausage gave us two fingers as he walked free. Clear-up figures were the Holy Grail; putting bodies in front of judges and convicting them counted for little. The old order was changing, and it hurt, but there was nothing we could do about it. Sometimes, I thought, we needed more officers with old-fashioned ideas.
    I’d met him before, I remembered. It had been bugging me but suddenly it all came back. The Old Mother Twanky case, we called it. Edith Tweddle lived all alone in sheltered housing, never botheringa soul, until one evening she became over-excited while watching an old Cary Grant film and spontaneously combusted. I was duty inspector for the first time in my burgeoning career, and the green-eared PC who called me out was the one and only Eddie Carmichael.
    The postman had smelled smoke and sent for the police and fire brigade. All we found of Mrs Tweddle and the easy chair she’d been sitting in was a pile of ash, a right foot and a left hand. She was identified by her wedding ring.
    It made the nationals as another example of the mysterious phenomenon known as spontaneous human combustion. The papers were full of it, and the more lurid ones showed pictures of the poor woman’s remains. Eddie and his sergeant were interviewed by the press and credited with extravagant descriptions of the scene. They made great capital out of relating that one foot, one hand and the rest of the room were completely untouched by the conflagration, as if that were proof of strange forces at work.
    I had a word with the fire chief and learned differently. In every recorded case of supposed spontaneous human combustion there has been a possible source of ignition close to the body – usually a cigarette or an electric fire. Mrs Tweddle was a smoker, and there was a three-kilowatt electric fire blazing away eighteen inches from her remains.
    And , the fire chief told me, we are composedlargely of fat. Particularly elderly women. Once ignited, we burn like a candle. Light a fire, he said, and let it burn out – doesn’t matter if it’s a bonfire or a campfire – when it is dead there will be the unburned ends of pieces of wood surrounding the ashes, just like Mrs Tweddle’s hand and foot. I made a statement at a press conference, expounding my newly found knowledge and pooh-poohing the spontaneous combustionists, and it was shown on Look North .
    I found an Argos catalogue in Jeff’s drawer and looked at the price of mountain bikes. They were cheaper than I expected. Sonia was in a different league to me when we went out jogging. Sunday morning we’d driven to the park and I’d accompanied her on one three-mile circuit; then she’d done another one, much faster, while I waited in the car. Afterwards she’d suggested that in future she might even run the two miles back home. She’d bought a ledger and started entering her times and distances in