Murder in the Alley?....Another true story

We discovered the body just after 6am lying face down in the narrow alleyway between the two houses. The gate leading to the alleyway had been closed when we had arrived, and there was nothing about the scene that suggested that a struggle had taken place. There was no apparent blood seeping from the body, no obvious bruising, and no immediate clues as to how it had arrived in its final resting place. It just looked old and grey.

We also knew that in a potential "crime scene" the body shouldn't be moved until the police arrive, but surely we should check to see if there were any signs of life? Proper forensic analysis, if necessary, could take place later, but one small check surely couldn't hurt now? Placing two fingers on the victim's neck T felt for a pulse, but as she had expected there wasn't one, and whilst the body felt cold, (as though it had lain there for several hours), it felt curiously soft. Had rigor come and gone, or had death occurred more recently than we had at first thought. If so, was the perpetrator of the crime - if in fact there had been a crime - still in the vicinity.

As we looked down at the body a noise made us look up at one of the buildings. One of the upstairs windows of the house to the right was open about 9 inches wide and a curtain was flapping in the early morning breeze. Could the body have fallen, or been pushed, from the window above? If so, given that it was no more than about 10 feet above the ground, surely such a fall wouldn't have proved fatal? And from ground level it didn't look as though the window could be opened much wider than it currently was.

The morning was a cold crisp one, and a faint dusting of frost had formed on the concrete slabs of the alleyway and also on the few leaves that had fallen from trees in the nearby gardens. Leaves which would soon greatly increase in number as summer quickly receded and autumn breezed in to take its place.

However, there were no footprints to be seen in the frost other than the faint trail that we had created ourselves. In fact the only signs of anybody other than the victim being there would point back to us; our footprints, our finger prints on the handle of the gate, our traces of DNA on the body itself.

Many questions would follow, about why we had been there at that time in the morning and what had made us look in the alleyway? Had we seen anything or heard anything that had led us there? (Answers to both these questions being an unhelpful no)

What had led us there? Did we need an alibi? How was this going to look?

Everyone had heard of miscarriages of justices, but were we now about to be caught up in one ourselves?

As question after question started to invade our minds we both looked back down at the body. Although it lay face down with it's hands tucked in under its chest, and although difficult to see in the early morning gloom, it appeared as though it was holding something. Something that was large enough for it to have needed two hands to hold it. As we looked closer we saw it was a sign, a sign which simply read "MUM".....

Or to put it another way

One of T's teddies fell off the windowsill in the night and she found it in on the pavement by the side of the house as she was about to drive me to the station first thing this morning....