A Toss of the Coin

They came across the body exactly where the note said it would be. Across the surface of the canal, the sun played with dappled beauty on the water, whilst moorhens and coots bobbed in and out of the banks, many would say this was a beautiful, idyllic scene, especially with the late summer sky streaked with bands of purple and orange producing an enchanting backdrop. But they would be wrong. This was far from idyllic. If only a casual observer knew what had brought anyone to this hellish place.
In a garage some hours before, they found a corpse. The smell alerted the man as he finished putting his car away after returning home from work. He closed the doors and was about to turn the key when he caught the whiff and gagged. Similar to the smell of the dead rat his wife discovered behind the pantry door some months ago, but a hundred times stronger. A thousand times perhaps. Jim Barnes fumbled for his pocket handkerchief and clamped it over his nose and mouth. He knew for sure the smell hadn’t been there when he’d left for his job at the news distribution centre early that morning, but then he had been late and was rushing. He might have missed it, but the day had been warm, the final burst of heat from a summer that had, as usual, promised much but delivered nothing more than a few miserable days of weak sunshine laced with dribbling rain here and there.
No doubt whatever heat there was speeded up the decomposition and exacerbated the stench. It came from the garage next to his. He rattled the door and found it locked. Cursing, he didn’t know who rented the garage. Certainly not his neighbour Wilf, who didn’t own a car. So he took to pounding on the peeling, flimsy woodwork, intent on forcing a kind of gap, the beginning of an entrance or even, the possibility of glimpsing what it was that caused the smell.
“What on earth are you doing, Jim?”
Glancing over his shoulder, he saw his wife, Sheila, approaching. Before he could warn her, within half a dozen paces, she reeled backwards. “Oh my sweet God,” she groaned, hand over her nose. “What in the name of Saint Francis is that stink?”
“Something has died in there,” Jim said, bending down and squinting through the crack he’d fashioned between the double doors. “Get me a torch, will you.”
With eyes squeezed shut, he waited until she returned, battling down the overwhelming urge to turn away and vomit. At last, Sheila returned, but not so close to catch the worst of the stench. Slapping the torch into his hand, she hung back as Jim pressed on the light and trained its feeble beam into the dark interior.
At first, he could see nothing, the blackness almost total. Slowly, as he trailed the beam across the back wall, from right to left, he picked out details. Tarpaulin sheets bundled together in great clumps, rusted jerry cans, an old, rotting bicycle frame. And when he centred on the far corner, he saw something wrapped up in a filthy blanket. A white, blue-veined arm, with all the appearance of having been fashioned from marble. But clearly not; thick slug trails of dried blood stained the flesh. Blood from a trussed-up corpse.
Jim whirled away and vomited. Sheila screamed as their neighbour, Wilf together with his wife Alison, appeared through their back garden door. They stood gaping, shocked at Sheila’s reaction to whatever Jim had found. Gasping, he looked up, met her startled expression and managed to say, “Call the police.”