Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 148, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 900 & 901, September/October 2016

The body had been discovered shortly after dawn, which came early in North Yorkshire at that time of year, by a van driver delivering the morning papers to the local newsagent’s shop. He, in turn, had banged on the door of Gareth Young, the local Police Community Support Officer, who had immediately called in his closest colleagues and put a call in to Eastvale Police HQ. While waiting for the Homicide and Major Crimes Squad to arrive, the officers had made themselves useful by erecting crime-scene tape around a large section of the green. Such unusual activity so early in the morning had woken a good number of the villagers, who had immediately trooped out to see what was going on, some still in their pyjamas.

After they had screened the body from the prying eyes of the onlookers, the CSIs went about searching for trace evidence in the grass around the stocks, while police photographer Peter Darby snapped away. Enough people had told him to get up to date and go digital, but he swore by the Pentax SLR, and nobody could complain about the results.

Dr. Burns, the police surgeon, arrived just after six-thirty and asked if he could remove the body from the stocks. Banks called over Stefan Nowak, Crime Scene Manager, and asked about the padlocks. Nowak nodded, asked one of his men to get some bolt cutters from the back of their van, and carefully snipped open the locks, placing them immediately into plastic bags and labelling them.

With Banks’s help, Dr. Burns laid the body out on the village green. After several minutes of squatting beside it poking and prodding, he got to his feet and said, “There’s no obvious cause of death, and I’d say the wounds were inflicted postmortem. You can see for yourself that the grass is hardly awash with blood.”

“Yes.” Banks pointed to drag marks on the green. “And it looks as if the body was dragged over the green from the road there,” he said. “Perhaps from a car.”

“He was put in the stocks pretty quickly after death,” said Burns. “You can see from the lividity, the areas where the blood has settled after the heart stopped beating. It’s consistent with his position when he was found.” He knelt by the body again and made a brief head-to-toe inspection. When Dr. Burns looked up, Banks could tell he had noticed something that bothered him.

“What is it?” he asked.

“It’s the tongue,” said Dr. Burns. “His tongue has been cut out.”

“‘Hear all, see all, say nowt,’ ” Banks muttered to himself, remembering an old Yorkshire rhyme.

Just after Dr. Burns had left, DS Winsome Jackman slipped around the screen and came to a sudden halt when she looked down and saw the man’s naked and mutilated body spread out on the grass. Winsome was a tall and beautiful black woman in her early thirties, and though most members of the Dales communities had got used to her over the years she had been working there, she still attracted a few stares from the unwary, ethnic minorities being quite rare in that part of the world. If DI Annie Cabbot, Banks’s second-in-command, drew any looks, it was more for her manner of dress than the colour of her skin, her size or beauty — though she was a fine-looking woman, long legged and lithe, with a head of chestnut hair parted in the middle, falling in elegant waves over her shoulders. She followed Winsome into the inner cordon, and today she was wearing red boots, tight jeans, and an oversize blue T-shirt with KEEP CALM AND PUT ON THE HANDCUFFS printed on the front. Area Commander Gervaise would have a thing or two to say about that, if she ever saw it, Banks thought with a smile.