It was their body and the River Police weren't going to let anyone else take it

MATTHEW PARRIS

Journalists are encouraged to look for recency or topicality in our stories; but the corpse of which I write was not found by me 'last night', police are not searching, there are no links to anything and this story has no legs'. The death-by-drowning happened a few years ago, I shall not be more precise, and on a stretch of the River Thames which I shall not identify, and to a man I shall not name, for even vagrants may have relations and a right to some sort of dignity in death.

I can tell the story now because it is no longer in the media sense a story, or at risk of becoming one. And the only individual named in it, Greg, does not mind.

It was my lodger Greg who hammered on my door and woke me at about 7.30 one morning. He was in a state of mild hysteria. 'Matthew, quick, quick, there's a body.'

'Where — in the flat? What have you been doing, Greg?'

'No don't joke. By the river. Outside. It's awful. Come out on the balcony and look.'

I stumbled out. To my bleary vision it was a heap of filthy rags on the muddy shingle, beached by a receding tide. 'That's not a body, at least I don't think so. You're imagining it.' Greg, who is in marketing, has a vivid imagination. Just possibly this was some kind of a Guy Fawkes dummy washed up.

'No, it is. Look harder.'

I looked harder but could not tell. Not being of very delicate sensibilities, I agreed to get dressed and walk down to the water and check. Greg was already on the phone, 999, to the police.

An early-morning, middle-aged beachcomber came prodding along the shore, eyes down on each stone before him, unaware of what he was prodding towards. Greg watched, horrified as, seconds before prodding right into whatever it was, he saw it.

The beachcomber stood for a moment, staring down. Then he diverted round it and continued on his way along the shore: prod, prod, prod. Aren't the British bizarre?

For it was a body. I could see that as soon as I reached the shore. Part of the face had been ground away by the shingle. 1 walked up to get a closer look.

'Stop! Go back! Do not approach the body!' the command came over a loudspeaker from a Thames River Police craft

now approaching the shore. Greg must have got through. I backed away from the corpse. Four (I think) policemen stood, looking to disembark but apparently uncertain how best to do so. Their powerboat had a fairly deep draught and could not get anywhere near the shallow shingle and mud shore. You would have thought that in the history of the Force they might have figured this one out and obtained a little flatbottomed landing craft of the kind we used on Desolation Island. Eventually and laboriously the men donned waders and climbed over the side. I explained my involvement to them when they reached the shore. They asked me if I would like counselling, which they would be happy to arrange. I said No, better attend to the body, and left them to it.

Returning on to the street I saw an ambulance and police car parked. It seemed the Met, too, had now arrived; indeed, they were all up in my flat and taking notes as Greg, in a state of some excitement, talked. I do not wish to seem callous, but there was nothing more I could do and I wanted to get on with the day. But the policemen, who were perfectly pleasant, stayed. They were fairly sure who the body was, or had been: a vagrant, fallen from a bridge upriver some days ago and missing since.

We watched from the balcony. A strange scene was unfolding. Incredibly, it looked as though the River Police were going to attempt to get the body into their boat, waiting out in the river. 'Why not stretcher it on to the street and take it from there?' I asked the officers with us, but answer came there none.

I have little doubt of the reason. The Thames River Police had got there first. It was their body. They were not going to let the other police have it. I rather think the River Police have a recurrent difficulty in justifying their existence as a special and separate outfit with (to some of us who live along the river) lots of sexy powerboats and an apparent shortage of useful work to do. This corpse was a helpful statistic.

But they were having the devil's own job recovering it. They had rolled it on to and into a big white sheet. Grasping this at both ends, rolled and twisted like some ghastly piece of candy, they lurched off into the river in their waders. Land police were now watching from the shore, their vehicles and the ambulance idle in the street 30 yards away.

When this amphibian cortege reached the bobbing police boat, some of the policemen clambered in over the side — tricky enough to do in three feet of water — leaving their colleagues holding the sheeted body in the water. Various unsuccessful attempts were then made to heave the thing up and over the side. Finally, most of the rest of the policemen reboarded their boat, leaning out over the side to hold the ends of their macabre package, still in the water. They then tried to pull it up, over and in over the side, with another policeman humping from underneath. This, too, was unsuccessful.

In the end they appeared to decide to hitch the ends of the sheet, which now resembled an occupied hammock, to the fore and aft of the side of their boat, so that it hung there, lifeboat-like, out over the edge. Content with this arrangement, they hit the gas, and the morbid little party powered off over the waves of what was by now an incoming tide.

As the waves struck the side of their boat and welled against it, they slapped and lifted the body from beneath — bang-bangbang — while the boat pounded over the choppy swell. Had delicate forensic inspection been required in this case, the specialist would have encountered a body further pummelled in transition.

I turned back to Greg after the police, having taken telephone numbers, left. 'And this comes at the worst possible time for me,' he said, theatrically. 'just when my boyfriend and I are breaking up.'

I pointed out to him that, sad as the break-up was for him, things had been even sadder for whomever that corpse had been.

'He's dead,' said Greg. `I'm not. I can still suffer.'

Matthew Parris is a political columnist of the Times.