UNLUCKY FOR SOME : Extract

Freddie had let them take the body away, and Judy was watching the white-suited scene-of-crime officers remove the pathetic collection of odds and ends that constituted the worldly goods of Davy Guthrie, the vagrant whose life had been ended, not by the cheap alcohol which he had consumed at a frightening rate, not by the many bitter winters that he had endured on the streets of Barton, not by the tobacco that he rolled into the thin, foul-smelling cigarettes that he smoked continually, but by someone with a knife and a desire to kill.

It had occurred to no one that someone like Davy would be a target, least of all, Judy imagined, to Davy himself. But a target he had been, and the small change that he had begged in order to buy his next day’s supply of cheap booze had been left on his body, sorted into piles of differing coins.

He had been found by the two police officers part of whose duties included moving on the derelicts who took up residence on the side-streets of Mafeking Road at night, most of them having begged money during the day and evening from the people going into the clubs and bars on Mafeking Road itself. Davy was a regular, and this had been his spot. The police would let him sleep off the alcohol and move him on at around two in the morning, to forestall the complaints of those who had to service the streets at night.

Knowing that he would be wakened at this early hour, Davy, in common with the other street-dwellers, had always settled down early. The officers had checked that area at intervals during the night, but by the light of sodium streetlamps Davy dead was indistinguishable from Davy asleep, and it wasn’t until they had tried to rouse him that they had realised what had happened.

It was entirely understandable if you had ever walked the beat in a city where homeless drifters slept in the street; a tolerant attitude to them meant that they weren’t harried and shifted when there was no need, because they weren’t actively begging, and they were getting in no one’s way. Compassion rather than a lack of concern had prompted them to leave Davy alone. But the newspapers wouldn’t see it that way; already the TV crews were unpacking their equipment to film the mean little street in which Davy had made his home. The police had passed by as this man lay dying, that’s what they would say.