D. Mitchell: The King of Terrors

‘How long do you suppose he’s been here?’ I asked, already formulating my own opinions.

‘I should say two, perhaps three months. He’s well rotted.’

It confirmed what I thought. ‘We’ll know soon enough,’ I said.

‘That’s not all,’ said Wilson. ‘There’s this over here.’ He borrowed the lamp from the officer and took me over to the stone wall of the barn. The lamplight lit up a curious symbol daubed quite carefully in black paint.

I looked closely at it. It appeared to be a circle, but in actuality it was a serpent eating its own tail, and at the circle’s centre, acting like the four thick spokes of a wheel, was a cross. At the heart of the cross was a star. ‘Do you think this is contemporary with the murder or incidental?’ I asked.

‘Hard to say,’ said Wilson. ‘The farmer hasn’t seen it before. Mind you, he says he hasn’t been to the barn for the best part of a year. He doesn’t use it anymore. But what other reason would there be? I’d say we had a ritualised murder in there and this played its part.’

‘Witchcraft?’ I said incredulously.

‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘Whatever went on here, it’s a ghastly business, make no mistake.’

‘I’m certain I’ve seen this symbol before,’ I murmured, though for the life of me I had no idea where.

‘Recently?’

‘No, in connection with another case perhaps. The thing’s like an itch on my mind and damned if I can scratch it.’ In the end I gave up trying and turned away. ‘Get it photographed along with the body. Get someone to cover this up,’ I said, nodding at the corpse, ‘and let’s see what this fellow’s scrap yard has to offer.’

It transpired Jimmy Tate kept himself pretty much to himself. A few of the locals in the village knew him by sight, a youngish man; they said he’d been running the scrap yard for eighteen months or so, but to a man confirmed they’d not seen much business actually happening. The high gates seemed to be bolted shut far more often than they’d been open. From all accounts he lived on his own, a fact confirmed on searching the house which was attached to the yard. He occupied a single room downstairs, the three upstairs rooms devoid of any furniture. It had all the appearance of being a makeshift existence, with little attempt to make this a permanent home.

Hidden beneath the floorboards under a mattress thrown onto the floor — Jimmy Tate’s bed, it seemed — we found a small wooden box. To our astonishment we discovered it to be filled with gold and silver items, but mostly gold. Rings, necklaces, pieces of gold of indeterminate origin — all told it would have kept him in reasonable comfort for some time. And yet here he was living an almost hand to mouth existence, rarely going out, locking himself behind his high wooden fence. It was almost as if he were barricading himself inside, lying low so as to attract as little attention to himself as possible. So was the gold part of this? Did it even belong to him, or was he even aware of it lying beneath the filthy mattress he slept on?

We had hoped to gain answers to some of these baffling questions by digging deeper into whom this Jimmy Tate actually was. There were documents in the house that confirmed him as the said Jimmy Tate — a birth certificate and a detailed army service record, plus one or two bills, fully paid. But just when we thought we could start to build up a fuller picture of the dead man it soon transpired that we were dealing with something far more mysterious. The man in the barn wasn’t Jimmy Tate. His papers were an elaborate deception. The real Jimmy Tate had died some twenty years previously. What we had here was the case of a dead man using a dead man’s identity.

The case was kept hush-hush, an order from on high decreeing that limited details about the circumstances of the murder were to be divulged. I was never privy to the reasons, but the results of this edict rather hobbled our investigations. I was frustrated that no matter where we searched we hit a dead end, and a full year later we were no nearer finding out who murdered Jimmy Tate, or what his real identity was.

Then I discovered what I felt was a connection to the symbol painted on the barn wall. My abiding passion is medieval history and I remembered where I had seen it before. I went to my many books and papers on the subject in my library and managed to trace the reference I had previously struggled to recall. At this juncture it was little more than a shot in the dark, and even I thought it faintly ludicrous that a murder committed in the modern age had any link to a symbol I’d seen referenced in a passage first written five hundred years ago.

At once I brought it to my superior’s attention, excited that the case had opened up an altogether different, though at that stage rather tenuous, line of investigation. I was told to keep the details under my hat, at least for the time being, until I was definite that there was a connection; we had already suffered some embarrassment over the lack of progress and another, some might say outlandish, dead end, would not be tolerated.

Less than a month later I would be fighting for my life.

I received a tip-off about a warehouse job going down in Lewisham. The information came from one Bobby Garrick, a small-time crook whose dubious services as an informer I had used on a number of occasions, and he was doubly insistent it was I that went to see him. What I did not know was that Garrick was waiting for me with a double-barrelled shotgun.

I do not remember much about that night, except walking into a darkened warehouse and hearing Garrick call out my name. I answered, and his response was to open fire on me. Both barrels, one after the other.

Later he testified that he had mistaken me for someone else, that he was in fear of his life, and that he was sorry that I had been shot. He was not half as sorry as I. I had been hit in the leg with the first shot, which blasted away my upper calf, and the second shot caught me in the stomach as I fell. I hung between life and death for two weeks. They managed to save my leg, but I would never walk without a stick, and I have been troubled by severe pains in my midriff ever since. In an instant a London low-life managed to do to me what the Kaiser’s entire army had failed to achieve for a full four years.

Worse still my career was over. I was quietly pensioned off and the case of the Body in the Barn handed over to someone else. It was a strange and bitter period for me. I am not one to feel sorry for myself, but I entered such dark months of depression that I cared not whether I lived or died, and at times I wished Bobby Garrick’s aim had been better so that he might have finished me off instead of condemning me to a painful living hell. Without my career I felt I was washed up, finished and good for nothing, a burden on my wife and family. They feared for my mental health, let alone my physical wellbeing. It did not help matters that I became haunted by the case that I had never solved, which in time eclipsed (at least in my own troubled mind) my many successes. The force no longer needed my help, though I forced myself on them for a time. In the end even they grew tired of me and slammed doors shut that previously had been open and welcoming.

At this, my darkest point, I was approached by an aspiring young author called Justin Symons who was chronicling murder cases for a book he was writing. It had the rather uninspiring title of True Crimes , but he offered a not insubstantial payment for my help. Angry at my colleagues, whom I felt had abandoned me, and largely angry at myself and the cruel twists of fate, I blurted quite willingly all manner of details to the young man about some of the cases I had worked upon. I admit I released a number of facts about the Body in the Barn that had been kept secret from the general public. Though I regretted this afterwards, I am glad to say I never saw hide or hair of the published book, and as far as I know it never saw the light of day, which rather let me off the hook.