Dead if You Don’t

35

Saturday 12 August

18.30–19.30

Just when Keith Ellis thought his shift couldn’t get any more hectic, it did.

It began with another FLUM, flashing in red on his screen. An emergency that one of the call-takers here would handle. Many of these 999s turned out to be time-wasters — drunks or children misdialling or some idiot whose pet parrot had gone AWOL. But, equally, often the emergency was real. He would never forget one that had been given to him to handle, a distraught young woman telling him her boyfriend owed money for drugs and that he would have his kneecaps done if he didn’t pay.

Followed by the screams of both of them as the threat had been carried out.

‘Sir!’

He turned to his deputy for the shift, Matt Johns, a former Chief Petty Officer who had been a civilian call-handler for the past twenty-one years, and one of the most experienced members of staff here.

‘Yes?’

‘Got a paramedic from the ambulance service attending an accident at Shoreham Harbour. He’s just called in to say that he’s seen a suspected human body part in the bucket of a JCB digger.’

‘Oh yes?’ Ellis said, a tad cynical. He’d dispatched a unit two weeks ago to a construction site where a suspected human arm bone — a humerus — had been discovered. Subsequently, on examination, forensic archaeologist Lucy Sibun had informed him it was the leg bone — tibia — of a sheep.

‘It looks like a human arm, sir.’

‘Never did anyone any ’arm, did he?’ Ellis replied.

His gallows humour fell on deaf ears.

‘Armless, eh?’ he tried again.

To be greeted by more silence.

‘Before I send an on-call SIO, can you give me a good reason for the paramedic’s suspicion? That it’s not just the bone of a cow or a pig or a sheep?’

‘Yes, sir. None of those animals wear wristwatches. Not as a general rule.’