Maggots, Murder, and Men by Zakaria Erzinçlioglu

Author:Zakaria Erzinçlioglu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

CHAPTER 7

Cases of Identity

I cannot tell what the dickens his name is.

Shakespeare, Merry Wives of Windsor Act III, Scene 2

The crab and the prawn met on the ocean floor; they merged together, lost their distinctive shapes and identities, re-formed and became a sea anemone. The tentacles of the sea anemone grew longer and longer and fewer and fewer, until it was not a sea anemone any more, but an octopus, whose legs increased in number and became a coral reef, upon which crabs and prawns met and merged … My temperature was 105° F. and showed no sign of dropping. My delirious dream of marine life was doubtless the result of my having assisted my colleagues at some practical classes at Cambridge University a few days earlier. Now, the animals had come into my feverish dreams, swirling in a hot sea, appearing and disappearing … In the middle of this delirium I heard my wife’s voice. Professor Bernard Knight was on the telephone and would like to speak to me about a suspected murder case in Cardiff – did I feel well enough to talk to him? I took the receiver but remember little of the conversation, apart from the fact that a skeleton had been discovered buried in a garden and that the police would like to know whether I could assist them. I said I would do what I could and Professor Knight told me that a Detective Constable James from Cardiff would come to see me the following day.

I was feeling much better when D.C. James arrived, bringing several large specimen bags of samples with him. Over a cup of tea, he told me about the macabre discovery at Number 29, Fitzhamon Embankment in Cardiff. The street consisted of a row of terraced houses on one side with the River Taff flowing past it on the other. Number 29 had been neglected for some years and workmen had been engaged in some restoration works. They had dug a trench in the garden to instal a sewer pipe but found that it was too shallow. As they dug deeper, one of the workmen’s pickaxes struck a soft object lying in the soil at the bottom of the trench. Pulling it out of the moist soil and scraping off the mud with their hands, the workmen were astonished to find that the object was a rolled-up carpet, bound with a strong cord. Undoing the cord and unrolling the carpet, they discovered a complete human skeleton.

Whose skeleton was it? When did the person die? Why and how were they killed? There were many questions to answer but, as yet, there were very few clues to help the police to answer any of them. However there were some: around the skull was a mass of long blonde hair and a pair of ear-rings; taken together with the small size of the skeleton, it seemed that the remains might have been those of a young woman, but this evidence was not conclusive. The South Wales Police, in the person of D.

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