Chapter 19 Sweet Dreams
When Simon Crook got going with his work as a Pathologist he certainly came up with a detailed report. He wasn’t one to leave a stone unturned, which sometimes made boring reading until you reached the nitty-gritty grisly parts of the report. “Thomas Burgess was drugged first before being placed in the coffin, however, not sufficiently enough not to know what was happening to him.” He was in the chief’s office and Wragg liked to read the report first.
“He suffered a heavy blow somewhere along his travels and his nose was broken.”
‘How do you think he sustained those injuries and what was the point of it all?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Simon, ‘he was tortured first, one never knows to be sure. He might have come round momentarily from his knock on the head and struggled and his assailant pushed him into the coffin with such force so his nose could have hit the side edge. The coffin he was in was made of the heaviest wood.’
‘Why was that then?’
‘I can only surmise chief, that he wanted the victim to burn very slowly. Anyway it didn’t do any good.’
‘Why!’
‘He died of a heart attack! Anyone knowing that they are going to be burnt alive and if they had a weak heart – zap! The only good thing is that he never suffered.’
‘Is that all?’
‘A few cuts and bruising and oh I almost forgot his torturer took out three of his teeth with a pair of pliers.’
‘How do you know this?’
‘The pliers were in his jacket pocket stained with blood with the three missing teeth.’
Wragg handed the report over to Simon Crook. A look of triumph reflected in his eyes. Since that first time with the barbaric murder of Colin Steal who was nailed to a desk and with so much blood which made him retch uncontrollably, he had felt such a fool and the chief made a remark that he thought that Simon was in the wrong job. It wasn’t that at all – he had caught a sickness bug and he was about to go on sick leave when the call came for him to assist Wragg on a gruesome murder and the person who was supposed to be standing in for him hadn’t arrived.
It was all water under the bridge and Simon never mentioned that he was ill at the time. It was the chief who inquired about the Pathologist and received the true facts of the situation of that fateful morning and it was the chief who insisted that Simon Crook be elevated to be in charge of that department.
The Directors of the Funeral Parlour “Sweet Dreams” sent the chief an invoice for the coffin used and were hoping that the Police Commission were able to foot the bill as this was their only ‘sample coffin’ – then the splurge went on to state that coffins made of this type of hard wood were a one off and had to be made as a showroom piece. Chief Superintendent Wragg smiled to himself and thought what kind of letter he needed to write back to them. He needed to be tactful and not state that they had no intention of paying for the burnt coffin and that the said item had to remain in their hands for forensic tests, as these could show some DNA results of the identity of the killer. Of course there wouldn’t be. He already knew that, because the killer always wore gloves.