Last Train to Lime Street

Chapter 3

Chapter 3Sunday, Bloody Sunday

The harder he tried to kick his way clear of the cloying morass, the more he felt the power of the undertow that was slowly threatening to pull him down, deeper into the mire. His arms clawed at the side of the trench, yet they were so smooth his grasping fingers failed to find a handhold.

Andy Ross felt as though he was clawing his way out of a deep trench but was being held back by a deep layer of mud that acted like quicksand on his scrambling legs, pulling him ever deeper. Another loud, squelching, sucking noise assailed his ears as his legs sunk another few inches into the all-powerful mud. He was losing the battle and there was nothing he could do to prevent it. Buried up to his waist, he continued to try and think of a way out of his dilemma, when he suddenly saw a face appear at the top of the trench, about ten feet above him.

“Derek?” he called out as Derek McLennan's smiling face looked down at him. “Get me out of here, there's a good lad.”

Instead of replying, Derek reached over the lip of the trench and slowly lowered a bottle of champagne, tied to a rope, to his boss.

“What the hell do you expect me to do with this?” Ross screamed in anguish as he sunk another six inches into the mud.

“Drink it, of course, Boss,” Derek eventually replied, grinning from ear to ear.

“Then what?”

“Then we can have a real party”

“Derek, get me out of here, for f**k's sake,” Ross shouted again.

A loud bell rang, almost deafening the floundering man. As he tried to block out the sound by placing his hands over his ears, it sounded again.

The trench shook, almost as if someone had taken hold of him and was shaking him.

“Andy, ANDY,” the voice of his wife, Maria sounded in his ear. “Answer your phone, please!”

Opening his eyes, Andy Ross realised he was coming out of a dream, well, a nightmare really as he reached across to his bedside cabinet, picking up his mobile phone as his fingers made contact with it.

Maria stroked his back as he turned over, aware that her husband had been caught up in a nightmare when he'd begun talking to newly married Derek McLennan in his sleep.

“Ross,” he almost shouted into his phone, relieved to be free of the cloying, sticky mud of the dreamworld. He listened carefully as the voice on the other end of the line spoke and finally responded.

“What time is it, Sergeant?”

On receiving the reply, he looked at his left wrist, confirming that it was indeed two o'clock in the morning, Sunday morning, when he should have been off work, relaxing after attending Derek's wedding the previous day.

“And D.C.I. Agostini wants me there right away?”

“Yes sir, the duty sergeant replied. He said he needs you and Sergeant Drake there asap. Said something about wanting to reopen the railway lines as soon as possible, it being an important commuter line and all that.”

“Have you notified Sergeant Drake yet?”

“Doing that next, sir. I wanted to notify you first.”

“Okay. Tell her to meet me at Mossley Hill as soon as she can, and Sergeant?”

“Sir?”

“Thank you.”

Thinking Ross was being sarcastic, the duty sergeant just mumbled in reply to the inspector, little realising his call had helped put an end to Ross's nightmare, one he'd been having a little too regularly in recent weeks.

Turning to Maria, he spoke quietly, “Sorry love, body on the tracks at Mossley Hill. Nasty one by all accounts.”

“And just why do they want the specialist murder squad out there at this time of night?” his wife queried.

“Seems he fell, or was pushed, naked from a bridge and fell under the wheels of a train. The body's in pieces all over the tracks. The transport police woke Oscar up and he must have decided it was one worth waking me and Izzie for too.”

“You were having that nightmare again, weren't you?” Maria changed the subject quickly.

“Mmm, yes,” he replied. “God knows where it's come from or why I'm having it. I've never had bloody nightmares before.”

“We'll find a way to stop them,” his doctor wife replied. “Can't have you losing sleep when you've important work to do.”

“Right, whatever you say, Mrs. Ross.” he smiled for the first time since waking up.

Ross quickly dressed and felt relieved he hadn't stayed and drunk too much at Derek's wedding reception. Arriving at Mossley Hill station just before 2.45 am, he was pleased to see his partner, Detective Sergeant Izzie Drake already there waiting for him. Dressed in a khaki-coloured parka, jeans and a pair of knee-high boots, with a Russian-style furry hat to combat the cold, Ross thought she looked a completely different person to the svelte, smartly dressed woman who he'd danced with at McLennan's wedding reception just a few hours earlier.

“No comments about the hat, please,” she grinned at him. Despite it being a cold December night, Ross had grabbed the first things he'd come to before leaving the house, and was shivering violently in his black trousers, and turtle neck sweater, topped off by a black leather jacket and a blue Everton Football Club baseball cap.

“Hey, I don't mind what you look like as long it keeps you warm. I'm bloody freezing. Have you had a chance to check out the scene yet?”

“Inspector Hood from the Transport Police gave me a quick sight of the remains, well, most of them anyway. Our friend Doc Nugent is down there already. Apparently, he's been hard at work for over an hour and a half.”

“On his own? Where's his oppo?” Ross referred to the pathologist's regular assistant, Francis Lees, often cruelly referred to as looking more cadaver-like than some of their 'clients.'

“Seems poor Francis had a few too many at the reception. Word is he doesn't drink much, and some joker spiked his drinks liberally with vodka.”

Ross did his best to repress a smile at the thought of poor Francis Lees staggering around in a drunken stupor. He almost wished he'd stayed to see the sight of the poor fellow, staggering around in a drunken fugue, before someone kindly put him out of his misery and took him home. He was surprised when Drake informed it had been their own Tony Curtis who'd ferried the pathologist's assistant home. Ross had a feeling Curtis might have been the prankster who spiked Lees's drinks in the first place and then took pity on the man through some latent feelings of guilt when he saw the state of him. He held his tongue, however, this being neither the time nor the place to discuss the matter.

“Right, well who's he got taking his usual hundreds of photographs?”

“Some dolly bird who he called out of bed. A new assistant to his 'death squad' as Drake laughingly referred to the doctor and his assistants.

“So, let's go see what we've got,” Ross said, and Drake led the D.I. into the station proper, walked to the end of the platform and then down onto the tracks, perfectly safe as Northern Rail had already suspended all trains running through Mossley Hill.

William Nugent, wearing a blue, heavy, quilted and padded coat that appeared to double his already prodigious size, looked up at the sound of approaching footsteps and smiled ruefully as Ross and Drake drew closer to his position, beside the bushes where the majority of the victim's remains lay. Not for nothing was he privately known among Ross's team as 'Fat Willy.' To one side, a young woman, who must be his stand-in assistant was busily taking photographs, using a high-powered flash. Little more than her face was visible, though Ross could tell she was in her twenties and appeared to be an attractive girl, from what he could see. She was slightly built, and he couldn't help thinking that next to Doctor Nugent, almost any member of the human race would appear slim.

“Ah, the good Inspector Ross and the delectable Sergeant Drake,” he spoke in a quiet voice. Here, in the dead of night, following the incident that had brought them together, a whisper could have been heard ten yards away. “Not the best way to follow on from the festivities of Detective Constable McLennan's nuptials, is it?”

“You can say that again, Doc. I've been told it's a bad one.” Ross spoke in an equally soft, almost reverential tone.

“Aye, you could say that, alright. Poor chap has been virtually chopped and pulped into little pieces and spread all over the tracks. Mind you, that's hardly surprising when ye consider he was struck by about seventy tons of train travelling, so I'm told, at about 40 m.p.h.”

“And where did you get such precise information about the weight of the train and its speed?” Izzie Drake asked, and before the pathologist could reply, a voice from behind the little gathering answered the question for her.

“From me,” said Inspector Hood, who had been with his men, marking and cataloguing each identifiable item of the body to the best of their ability in the dark, aided by torches and a couple of arc lights that had quickly been supplied and erected by the local track maintenance depot, which was luckily manned 24 hours a day, in case of any and all contingencies that might arise on a busy rail network. “I was given the weight and speed by the driver himself before I sent him home. Poor bugger was as pale as a ghost, kept throwing up, so I had my sergeant take statements from him and the conductor and sent them home in one of our cars. They'll be available in the morning if you want to speak to them.”

Hood walked the last few feet to offer his hand to Andy Ross, who shook it and Hood then performed the same introduction with Drake.

“Not the best way to spend your night eh?” the inspector asked Ross, who shook his head solemnly.

“Definitely not my preferred place to be at this time on a Saturday night c*m Sunday morning,” Ross replied. “What are your thoughts?”

“Poor bastard was murdered, no doubt about it, and that's confirmed by Doctor Nugent here, correct, Doc?”

“Aye, that's a yes for sure,” Nugent replied, his Glasgow accent creeping into his speech as it often did when the rotund pathologist was working under pressure. “It's nay likely your victim stripped himself, hid his clothes somewhere, and then cut his throat from ear to ear before somehow finding the strength to mount the parapet of yon bridge before throwing himself in front of a conveniently passing train.”

“That seems a reasonably accurate and precise denial of any chance of it being an accident, thanks Doc,” Ross smiled ruefully at Nugent.

“Aye,” the pathologist agreed. Turning to his female assistant, Nugent asked, “Are you nearly finished, Sarah?”

“Just about,” she replied. “Hello, by the way, I'm Sarah Neve,” her comment directed to the two detectives.

“Och aye, I'm sorry,” Nugent interjected,” Ah didnae introduce you, did I? This is Doctor Sarah Neve, just joined my staff. Thought it would be good experience for her to help me on this one, so I dragged her away from her work on the boring old night shift at the morgue to assist me, seeing as how one of your detectives helped poor Francis into a state of blathering intoxication.”

“You mean he got drunk at the reception and can't even stand up,” Ross smiled at the pathologist.

“Drunk? The poor chap was inches away frae alcoholic poisoning the last time ah saw him,” the Glasgow accent coming out stronger as Nugent became more irritated.

“Well, never mind poor Francis,” Ross used the phrase mockingly. “What can you tell us about this poor sod?”

“Aye, well, I'd say he was a man in his late thirties to early forties, going by the appearance of the torso and other complete limbs we've found. Also, the torso allows me to guess at his height, which I'd put at around five feet, ten inches to six feet. The head is pretty badly damaged, but the neck was sufficiently intact for me to determine the poor bugger had his throat cut pre-mortem, and probably bled out and was dead before being tossed from the bridge.”

“Any blood on the bridge?” Drake asked.

“Not enough to suggest he was killed there,” Nugent replied.

The two detectives looked at each other, similar thoughts running through their minds, until Izzie Drake voiced what they both now believed.

“So, he was killed elsewhere and brought here to be dumped. Is that what you're telling us, Doc?”

“I'm afraid so,” Nugent responded. “It's just made your job a damn sight harder, hasn't it”?

“Too right it has,” Ross grumbled. “Now all we have to do is search the whole of bloody Liverpool to find out where he was killed and butchered.”

“Sorry, Andy,” Nugent said, feeling sorry for the D.I. It wasn't often the pathologist referred to Ross by his first name, despite the pair having known each other and worked together for many years.

“Not your fault, Doc. I want a full forensic team here at first light, Izzie. Miles Booker and his team will need to go over this area with a fine tooth-comb, just in case anything's been missed in the dark. What's the situation regarding keeping the line closed, Dave?” he asked the Railway Police Inspector.

“I'll make sure the tracks remain closed until you've done what you need to do. It's a murder enquiry after all. The travelling public are used to moaning about the rail service, and it's about to get whole lot worse, temporarily at any rate.”

“Thanks. I'd hate to think of one our Scenes of Crime team ending up in a state like this poor bugger. Next question we need to deal with is, of course, who the f*****g hell is he?”

“Without clothes or a wallet, credit cards, driving licence, that's going to be a herculean task, Boss,” Izzie commented.

“Ye may find his teeth helpful,” Nugent offered. “His jaws escaped most of the damage, so we may be able to trace him through dental records if he's local.”

“And if he isn't? Ross let the question hang, and Nugent could do nothing more than shrug his shoulders. He knew the task that lay before the detectives and didn't envy them. Having said that, he also knew that crimes like this were exactly what Ross's specialist squad had been set up to deal with. He knew that if anyone could solve the riddle of the nameless victim, it was Andy Ross.

With the body parts, (the ones they had managed to locate), catalogued, gathered and secured in individual body bags, William Nugent supervised their loading into a waiting ambulance which would ferry the various limbs etc to the mortuary, where his detailed examination could commence, after he'd snatched a few hours' sleep of course.

Ross made arrangements with Inspector Hood who'd agreed to place a police guard on the station, the bridge and their environs, until Ross and his team, plus Miles Booker's forensic specialists from the Crime Scenes Unit could commence their examination of the scene in daylight. Ross knew there was too much chance of the crime scene being contaminated by having a team of Crime Scene Technicians blundering around in the dark, so he thought it best to leave Booker and his people to enjoy an unbroken night's sleep. Things would look better in the morning, Ross thought.