Langdale and Pike Investigate
Written by Richard W. Straw
Illustrated by Andy Paciorek
They found the body a little after nine o’clock on the evening of November 17th, in the year of our Lord 1904. A young couple, walking home from an evening out, hurrying to escape the cold, took the short cut along the back of Lowther Street. And so they came across the body, lying in a puddle of gradually freezing water and blood.
They had to call in the big boys for this one. Murder was unheard of in Penrith. Violence was rare, save the occasional bruise-up outside the Druids’ Arms when spirits were both flowing and high. The local police station was not equipped for such things. Constable Whitehead, junior at the office by virtue of being the most recent recruit, had been sent careering off on the road to Kendal on the station bicycle, and from there, a telephone call had gone to Carlisle.
By the time the message got to Detective Inspector Langdale, via a healthy knock on the door from Sergeant Pike, it was well past midnight. Langdale was trying against all the odds to get a decent night’s sleep, his first for a long time. Cursing the world and all its iniquities, he stumbled to the front door, swaddled in blankets and sheets. The sight of Pike, big, bluff, enthusiastic, was almost enough to make him slam it shut without a word, but duty overrode annoyance just enough to restrain him. He stared at the sergeant questioningly.
“Bad one, sir,” Pike said. That was enough for Langdale. “Body, very messed up, Penrith.”
Langdale suppressed a groan of despair. Thirty-one years in the force, and still these cases seemed to find him. Another long, cold journey to look at a corpse. Wonderful fun for a November weekend. He ushered Pike into the sitting room. The fire had long since died, and the room was morgue-like in its frigidity, but this didn’t seem to bother the sergeant, who perched himself on the chaise-longue, bowler on knee, smiling stupidly, whilst Langdale swore his way back to the bedroom, and attempted, with only moderate success, to get dressed in the dark and without unwinding himself too much from his sheltering cocoon of warm bedclothes. Ten minutes later, they were in a police trap, heading for Penrith. It was about then that Langdale noticed that his boots were on the wrong feet.
They drew up to the police station at Penrith at about half past three. Langdale had attempted to sleep on the journey, but the bumps and bangs of the roads had made it impossible, so he had been reduced to huddling down into his overcoat and glaring jealously at Pike as he gently snored in the seat opposite, head buried beneath scarf and hat. There was no morgue, so a makeshift facility had been put together in one of the larger cells beneath the station. It was freezing down there, somehow even colder than in the open air. They were awaiting the county pathologist, but the messenger who had been despatched to Hamilton Gould’s house in Keswick had been told in no uncertain terms that he would not be rising before eight o’clock, and the dead could certainly be left in these temperatures. So for the moment, there seemed little to do. Langdale had sent Pike to the George Hotel to try to rustle up a couple of rooms, but the landlord was clearly more obstinate than the inspector, and no amount of banging on the door would rouse him at this time in the morning. An offer from Knowles, the local Sergeant in charge, to go and see the site where the body was found was met simply with an Anglo Saxon epithet. Langdale was sure Doctor Gould was correct. The body and the murder site could wait. He just wanted to sleep. Was that too much to ask?
