Finding a body was a rare event in North Devon. Lately the police had focused on what the Chief Superintendent called ‘hate crimes’, mostly to do with race, religion or sexual orientation, that and the usual spate of burglaries. But this was different.
Just as DI Fletcher opened the file on his desk labelled Sherracombe Ford – Case 313, there was a knock at the door.
“Sergeant Jones, Sir.” A tall fresh faced officer entered and took off his cap. The Inspector could see himself standing there 20 years ago.
“Come in Sergeant; have a seat.”
Sergeant Jones sat down and put a file on the desk.
“Thanks for coming over. Anybody from the villages talking yet?”
“Not yet, Sir; we’re still checking.”
“So what do we have so far?”
“Not much, I’m afraid. We thought that someone’d know who’d be likely to ride a quad bike around Brayford, but so far we’ve drawn a blank.”
“Who’s the registered owner?” Fletcher asked.
“No registration plates, Sir. We think it may have been one of those home jobs, you know, a bike that someone built in their back shed. We’ve asked all the farmers who use them for rounding up the sheep, but all their bikes have been accounted for.”
“What about someone from outside the village?” The Inspector asked.
“If it was someone from outside the area, someone would’ve noticed if they drove through the village. No one saw anything.”
The Inspector sat back and resisted the temptation to take a swirl. A young PC brought in two mugs of tea.
“So where are we, Sergeant?” Inspector Fletcher asked as they sipped on the hot tea.
“We found no match to anyone reported as being on the missing persons list. A male about 25 years old. No marks of having been attacked or in a fight. Not short of money by the look of those new boots.”
“We’ve checked all the shops in the area and the only place that sells those particular boots around here reckons they were purchased around September of last year, Sir. The manager says that they only had a few pairs in and they all sold that month.”
“From the report, it looks like the quad bike was driven head-on into a tree in those woods above Sherracombe Ford,” The Inspector said. “The consensus is that he must have been going flat out to have caused all that damage. The Doc and the crime scene investigation team say that he must have fallen off and rolled down the hill. No crash helmet, of course. The post mortem indicates that he was probably conscious after the accident and could have crawled to that wall where he was found. Poor bugger must have been there till he died. Odd that the vehicle investigation team found nothing wrong with the braking system. You’d think that someone who could ride one of those things knew how to brake.”
The Inspector paused and reached for his pipe and then remembered that HQ was a ‘no smoking zone’.
“So, Sergeant Jones, how come someone who wears expensive leather boots and from all other indications is an experienced driver, ploughs headlong into a tree?”
The Inspector perused the file on his desk. “Post mortem found traces of a banned substance. They say that he was either a heroin user or had taken a strong dose of something called Palfium. That’s a new one on me.”
Sergeant Jones leant forward and put down his tea. “It’s a pain-killer, Sir. I went on a drugs course in January over at Taunton. It’s banned here but you can get it in Ireland and the Netherlands. It’s like morphine but three times stronger.”
“But why would a young man in his twenties take morphine and then go out on a quad bike in woody terrain?”
“It does sound odd, Sir. But on the course the lecturers explained that the drug affects reflexes and judgments. They told us about this professional cyclist back in the 1960s who was in the Tour de France. It seems that he took it to dull the pain in his calf muscles. Then when he went down this mountain road, he flipped right over a barrier and broke his back. They said that when they examined the bike, the brakes were fine. They said that the drug must have numbed his fingers so he couldn’t operate the brake calipers.”
The Inspector sat back and closed the file.
“A drug addict or heroine taker out driving around on his own, most probably a local, has a fatal accident. What surprises me is that no one’s come forward even though we had it all over the local papers and on TV.”
“We’re not sure it was a local, Sir,” Sergeant Jones said. “It could have been an outsider; maybe someone from the camp-site on the ridge behind Brayford.”
The Sergeant continued to float ideas. He knew that was why the Inspector had asked him to come over to HQ.
“Everyone around here, probably the whole country, heard about that Roman treasure they found over at Sherracombe Ford; it’s now a big tourist attraction, Sir. The body was found almost on the same spot where those two blokes found the hoard. What if our man was doing a bit of prospecting on his own and someone saw him and attacked him?”
“But that doesn’t explain the quad bike, Sergeant. Unless, as you say, someone tried to attack him or ran him off, then when he tried to get away on the bike, he hit the tree.” The Inspector leaned back in his chair.
“Lots of possibles, Sergeant Jones. I’m afraid we need more than that. We’ve got to find out who he was and what he was doing out there. If he was on his own and lived nearby, then the postman or a local
