Cold Case

The terracotta skirt billowed gently in the wind, the fruit and veg man bellowed his offers to the passers by, a middle-aged man stumbled on the uneven paving stones and a policeman crumpled into a heap on the floor.  The collapse was almost comical, one minute he was strolling, patrolling the beat, the next he slumped, dumped on the street. A pool of dark blood gathered around him.

‘He’s been shot,’ the greengrocer shouted. The middle-aged man looked decidedly pale while the lady in the terracotta skirt declared she was a doctor and bent down to look at the stricken policeman, the skirt drawing up the blood like blotting paper.

Blue lights flashed and sirens wailed. Cordons were erected and heads shaken. A sheet was placed over the policeman’s head and strangers tears dropped to the pavement.

What happens when a policeman dies? You get the force grouping together to ensure they catch who did this to one of their own, and of course you get the eulogies and the public funeral, the sombreness and the hurt. And this time was no different except…somehow no one’s heart was really in it. The eulogies were made but there was no passion or emotion, the funeral felt like people were going through the motions, doing what they should do, what they were meant to do, not what they wanted to do. No one wanted to admit it, but no one was that sad to see PC Eric Morgan dead.

Okay they all would have preferred it if he had retired and gone to live up a mountain rather than dying in a pool of his own blood on a Cardiff street, but the fact that he was out of the way was a blessing in disguise; he would not be missed. Even his own wife, who had loved him between the fists, felt a sense of relief entwined with the grief.  You see Morgan was a bully, his body was as large as his brain was small, he had huge arms, a massive head and a tiny IQ.  Just last week he’d picked up the small, spindly Lewis by his lapels and threatened to throw him out of the window and just because Lewis had used Morgan’s mug; and they were meant to be friends, image what he did if you crossed him.  People were scared of PC Eric Morgan and when he died it wasn’t exactly a chorus of Thank You Very Much from Scrooge but it wasn’t exactly Chopin’s Funeral March either.

Very few Police murders become cold cases; even if the puzzle is as tough as an Araucaria crossword someone would solve it, no one will let it lie, someone will find the answers, provide closure for the family. But as it became obvious that this was not the start of a series of police murders, and with the case proving harder to crack than a brazil nut with a fork, when police chiefs decided resources would be best spent elsewhere, there wasn’t the expected outcry from colleagues, the murder of PC Eric Morgan just quietly went cold.