After years of waking up early to walk his dog, retiree Mike Edwards has finally found a corpse. The grim discovery, which he suspects will be the first of many, was made early yesterday morning when he noticed a hand sticking out from beneath some leaves.
‘I’ve been walking my dog through the woods every morning since I retired fifteen years ago’, said the 67-year-old. ‘Everybody knows that all dog walkers eventually find something like this, but I’ve not once found a mangled body or a skeleton. I’ve never even come across a discarded running shoe with the foot still inside. That all changed today; it’s terribly exciting’.
When pressed for details of the gruesome find, he explained: ‘It was textbook. My black labrador ran ahead and I lost sight of him, but then I found him sniffing around a pile of leaves and saw the hand poking out. I realised it was the body of an old woman. I phoned the police straightaway and waited for them to arrive. They put a tent around the body, and then a haggard looking world-weary cop turned up to take over and wind-up the forensics team’.
The Chief Superintendent in charge of the crime scene said: ‘We thank this old man for contacting us but we will not be talking to him from now on, and even though he discovered the body, he is not a suspect and you won’t be seeing him again’.
‘At the moment we have no idea who the dead woman is but assume that the discovery of the body will be the start of a long and complex investigation. We suspect that the motive for the murder will have its roots in something that happened decades ago, possibly in a children’s home.
He concluded: ‘We would ask anyone who may know the dead person to come forward so that we may suspect them of not giving us the full story before offloading in an emotional denouement, at which point we will probably agree that the dead woman had it coming. For now I’ve passed the investigation over to a shambolic, divorced, middle-aged functioning alcoholic who deals with this sort of thing every week’.