Pulse(49)

‘Which station?’ I asked.

‘That doesn’t matter,’ he said, his anger again rising. ‘We searched Jason Conway on your say-so and you made us look foolish when we found nothing sinister.’

‘What about my tyres?’ I asked. ‘Did you ask him about those?’

‘Indeed we did,’ replied the detective, the sarcasm still thick in his voice. ‘Are you aware that Jason Conway’s horse won the sixth race yesterday?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I watched it.’ I remembered back to the man who had staked too much on him and was in danger of not being able to pay his hotel bill.

‘But are you also aware that the horse kicked Conway on the knee as he was removing his saddle? He was in the jockeys’ medical room receiving treatment from the physiotherapist until nearly seven o’clock last night. He could not have let your tyres down.’

‘Then it must have been Dick McGee or Mike Sheraton. Did you ask them?’

‘Both denied any knowledge of the incident. They also were adamant that neither of them even knows what your car looks like.’

‘They’re lying,’ I said again. ‘It has to be one of them. No one else knew I’d been asking questions about the dead man.’ But I could tell from their demeanour that neither of the detectives believed me.

‘Do you think I put that note on my windscreen myself?’ I asked in exasperation. ‘What about fingerprints on it? Did you test for them?’

For some reason they were uneasy about it, which probably meant no, they hadn’t.

‘We can’t just fingerprint anyone we want, you know, not unless we’ve arrested them first.’

‘You haven’t even taken mine to eliminate them,’ I said with resignation. ‘Anyone would think you don’t want to know who the nameless man was or why he died.’

‘Our enquiries are ongoing,’ said the detective sergeant in true police-speak.

‘What enquiries?’ I asked, my tone rather mocking. ‘You don’t even rate the man’s death as suspicious.’

‘We are treating it as unexplained. That means we still have an open mind as to the full circumstances of his death. However, we do know that the man died of a cocaine overdose that was most likely consumed from a contaminated bottle of whisky that had his fingerprints all over it. He was found in a lavatory cubicle that had been locked from the inside and there were no obvious signs of a struggle. Our inference from the facts is that the man died either by suicide or by an accidental overdose.’

‘But the very fact that he had no means of identification and you still can’t find out his name is surely suspicious.’

‘You might be surprised how many unidentified dead people we have on our files.’

‘How many?’ I asked. ‘Three? Four? Five, maybe?’

‘Nationwide, well over a thousand.’

I must have sat there with my mouth hanging open for several seconds.

‘A thousand!’

‘There were one hundred and fifty unidentified human remains found last year alone,’ DS Merryweather said. ‘The man in the Cheltenham Grandstand toilet was just one of those.’

‘That’s incredible.’

‘Many are decomposed but a sizable number are, like our man, alive when first found or, at least, have only just died. And only about one in ten of those turns out to be suspicious.’

‘Don’t people contact you when a family member fails to come home?’

‘We get those calls all the time. We’ve had nearly forty about this particular man but none of them have delivered a credible name. There’ve even been two visits to the morgue by families claiming the man was theirs but both have been excluded by DNA testing.’

I felt slightly ashamed that I thought the police had done nothing.

‘Many of the unidentified are completely estranged from families, while others are foreigners who die while over in the UK. Quite a lot are suicides. About half will have a name put to them eventually, but the others will simply remain on file as unknown.’

‘What happens to them?’ I asked.

‘There is no national agreed protocol. Some councils provide basic burials, but many are stored in morgues for years.’

I shuddered slightly. My medical career had always been concerned with the living, not least because of my parents’ infatuation with the dead. I’d never had any wish to move into pathology, even though I could appreciate the excitement of uncovering the mystery of the causes of sudden death.

‘So where do we go from here?’ I asked.

‘You go nowhere,’ DS Merryweather said firmly. ‘We will continue our enquiries. We’re trying a new technique called isotope analysis, which looks at the make-up of a body in terms of its chemical isotopes. On the basis that you are what you eat, we hope it can reveal where in the world our man had been living.’

‘So you think he was foreign?’ I asked.

‘It is an open line of enquiry.’

‘Any news from India?’

‘Not as yet, but it’s early days.’

‘Do you have any idea how he travelled to the racecourse in the first place?’ I asked. ‘You surely don’t believe that nonsense about him parking his car in the jockeys’ reserved section?’