Finger 4

By Geoffrey Gaskill.

There was one thing in the whole affair that was certain. A body was found floating in the water of the marina at Yorkey’s Knob.

Someone in the vicinity of Finger 4 had gone into the water about three o’clock in the morning. Whether that someone entered of his own volition, was thrown or pushed, became the subject of investigation.

It was so mutilated that even the gender of the body was disputed for a time. That it had not there the night before was confirmed by witnesses and the coroner’s estimated time of death.

Felix, a resident on Finger 4, didn’t know whether it was the security light or the urge to get up and pee that awoke him. ‘You can set your watch by my bladder,’   he told the young constable who interviewed him the next day. ‘There wasn’t any noise,’ he added, ‘so it wouldn’t have been that. This place is like the grave after midnight.’ He remembered rubbing his eyes and felt the grittiness of the sleep on his lids and fingers. Full consciousness came a beat or two later and, as a matter of habit, he looked out through the porthole. ‘That’s when I saw them.’

‘Them?’ The cop taking notes looked up.

‘A man and a woman,’ said Felix. ‘Outside my porthole on the Finger. Both were naked.’ The cop made a note. ‘But it was the man I noticed most.’

The cop chuckled. Poof, he thought.

‘Yeah,’ Felix added, blushing. ‘He had this enormous erection.’ His embarrassment deepened. ‘I’m not in the habit of looking at men with …’

The cop grunted. ‘Go on.’

Felix’s voice turned querulous. ‘It’s not the sort of thing I’m used to seeing.’

The cop was impatient. ‘Yes. Go on.’

‘They seemed to be excited …’ He reddened again. ‘As in animated,’ he hastened to say. ‘Waving arms and stuff. The porthole was closed. It makes the cabin pretty soundproof so I couldn’t hear what they were saying.’

‘Would you be prepared to testify to what you saw?’

Felix didn’t want to get involved but it was too late now he’d opened his big mouth. Maybe he should have been like many of the others around the marina and said nothing.

Old George from Finger 2 was one exception. He said he heard a splash in the early hours of the morning. ‘Like something being thrown in.’

‘Thrown?’ asked the cop. ‘A body maybe?’

Old George rubbed his chin. ‘I suppose so. But I didn’t see what it was because it was dark. It’s not uncommon for people to use the water like a cold store.’ He shrugged. ‘Or a garbage tip. The crocs will eat anything, you know.’

The cop shuddered.

‘One bloke threw his dog in a while ago. Mad bastard. Never saw it again.’

‘Who was this?’ asked the cop.

‘Crazy Kenny. He’s an ex-Vietnam vet.’ The cop made a note. ‘He’s got a new dog now though,’ he added in case the cop needed to know.

Crazy Kenny proved to be as mad as Old George said, and as reluctant to talk as the others.

A fellow called Shufti, a man no one liked very much, saw the body floating face down in the water as he was setting off on his morning jog. ‘It was bumping between the pylons,’ Shufti said. ‘The body, or what was left of it, was beyond my help.  I figured you blokes could handle it.’

The news travelled fast around the residents. What crocs didn’t eat, they didn’t want. That was the consensus.

Those residents of the marina who were cooperative said they knew no-one who was missing. Except for someone on Finger 3. The cops searched his boat.

The constable handed Felix a photograph. ‘No one has seen this bloke for some days. Was it him you saw?’

Felix frowned. ‘It’s hard to say,’ he said. ‘It was dark. Except for the security light. And he wasn’t facing me. He was side-on, you know? The cop smiled to himself. He knew. ‘That’s how I could see his …’

The cop rolled his eyes. ‘But is it him?’

Felix stared at a smiling man. The face wasn’t familiar. As he stared, the image seemed to shimmer into life, detaching itself from its background. The picture blurred as the face gelled into the scowl of the tumescent man outside his porthole.

Felix shivered. Someone had walked over his grave. ‘Yes,’ Felix drew out the word, despite misgivings and with an increasing certainty he didn’t feel.

The cop breathed a sigh of relief. At least that bit of information would get Sergeant-Pain-In-The-Arse back at the station off his case.

Hours before, Sergeant-Pain-In-The-Arse had winced when he took the phone call about a body in the marina. He knew the area and had too often been called out there when he was a rookie constable. These days he could send someone else. Rank had its perks.

The marina precinct, he decided long ago, was a hotbed of low-grade criminal pinheads, well-versed in their rights because they couldn’t afford lawyers. Sergeant-Pain-In-The-Arse sniffed. If one of them knew shit from Shinola he’d have been surprised. No. It wasn’t a local. They were too dumb to die that way. What was floating in that marina was either an illegal or someone from up in the hills who’d washed in on the tide. Or maybe an idiot tourist who’d gone for a midnight swim.

‘Damned waste of time,’ he said to his young sidekick. ‘But I suppose we’ve got to investigate.’ He cursed. Thirty minutes later and he’d have been off duty and it would have been someone else’s responsibility. But now the call was logged, he had to do something about it. ‘Check it out,’ he told the young constable.

‘Are we sure it’s a body?’ the young cop asked. He didn’t like going out to the marina either.

Sergeant-Pain-In-The-Arse said someone called Shufti had reported it. ‘He wasn’t getting too close because of the crocs.’

The young constable shuddered. He hated crocs.

Sergeant-Pain-In-The-Arse laughed. ‘Don’t be wet. Go and check it out. Check out this Shufti bloke too. Can’t be too careful with people with a name like that. He sounds dodgy.’

Sergeant-Pain-In-The-Arse heard the grumbling all the way to the door. He marked the young bloke down for the graveyard shift when he made up the rosters for the next week. Teach him to complain!

Shufti said he’d seen a hessian sack tied to the body with some blue nylon string.

‘Sack?’ asked the young cop. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ This was getting weird.

Shufti shrugged. ‘Isn’t it your job to find out?’

The cop made a note about the sack and the string. He’d hand it to the plain-clothes mob. They could check out Shufti as well. That’s why they were paid big bucks and he wasn’t.

Sergeant-Pain-In-The-Arse’s advice to the young man on his first day was, ‘Don’t believe everything you hear. Especially not on Saturday nights or Sunday mornings. That’s when the drunks and the troublemakers come out to play.’

The cop thought he made a breakthrough when he found a drunk called Ivor curled up next to a capstan, asleep. Ivor often didn’t make it home after his Saturday night out. ‘Everyone knows me and I like sleeping out of doors anyway.’ The residents of the marina agreed that Ivor was part of the scenery and there was nothing unusual about him being there.

Ivor did say that sometime during the night someone kicked him.

‘Kicked?’ the cop stopped and turned.

‘Yeah. But not kicked as in kicked. He fell over me.’ He laughed. ‘And they call me the drunk. He …’

‘He?’ the cop interrupted.

Ivor pondered this. ‘It might have been a she.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘I’m trying to help but I was asleep,’ he said.

‘Was he … or she … carrying anything?’

‘Might have been.’

‘Wearing anything?’

‘Might have been.’

There seemed little point pursuing this line of questioning.

As an eye-witness, Felix was the best lead. At his second interview later in the day, he told the cop, ‘I was thinking about things after you left.’

The rookie looked up, hoping he didn’t have to tell Sergeant-Pain-In-The-Arse the only solid lead he had was a possible homosexual staring at a man with an erection.

‘About the woman …’ Felix began before stopping. He didn’t know how to continue.

‘Woman?’ Ivor’s she! At last, things seemed to be coming together.

‘She had … scales all over her.’

‘Scales?’ he checked his notes. Ivor didn’t mention scales.

‘No, not scales,’ Felix said, searching for the word. ‘Her skin glistened. Rough and bony … More like … crocodile skin. Scute. I think that’s the word. You know?’

The cop frowned. No. That was the trouble. He didn’t know.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Geoff spent thirty something years of his working life telling children how to write.

At retirement he decided to practise what he preached. Much of this output sits in his top drawer at varying stages of ‘completion’.

Otherwise he is an actor and director in the local theatre scene. After all, actors and directors are storytellers too.