Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Suspicious, me?

I came across this story on the BBC website this morning, about a woman's skeleton being found wrapped in a carpet on a construction site in Manchester.

Straight away something struck me as odd. It wasn't that the skeleton had been found, or even that it had been put there in the first place. What really made me blink was that initially the police treated the discovery as 'non suspicious'. It wasn't until they got the results of the post mortem that they decided to treat it as anything other than a natural death.

Now I don't know about you, but in the world I live in nothing about the above scenario is even remotely natural. Why? Because those bones were found wrapped in a carpet. I can't think of a single reason why someone would be buried in an unconsecrated site (ie, not a churchyard or cemetery), wrapped in an old piece of carpet, that doesn't involve some sort of criminal activity. At the very least it suggests someone concealed the death, because you could hardly wrap your own bones up once you were dead. At worst, it's murder.

I don't know. Is this just me? Have I been reading too many detective novels, or do I just have a very suspicious mind?

The case looks rather fascinating, in a tragic and macabre way. The clothes that were found with the body have a design that looks Victorian, yet the presence of a bra suggests something post-1920s at the earliest. I'll be watching for more details with interest - and a good deal of suspicion about that carpet...

7 comments:

Possbert said...

An attempt to emulate Cleopatra that went sadly awry? Instead of being delivered to Julius Caeser, she was put into storage?

Fiona Glass said...

LOL! The Roman equivalent of Warehouse 13. :)

Bill Kirton said...

Don't wait for the details, Fiona. Write the story yourself. It's certainly fascinating.

Fiona Glass said...

That's an idea... ::thinks::

Liz/moth said...

I remembered to sign in to Blogger!

I understand (from the local news) that the carpet was fairly rotted and they thought the whole thing was ancient until the post mortem found modern fabrics.

But the idea of you taking the story and making something new of it is great!!

Fiona Glass said...

Hiya Liz! Oooh, the local news must have had more detail than the article I saw. Even so... it's still a body wrapped in carpet... which would still make me suspicious... *grins*

Liz/moth said...

They said it didn't look like carpet and they thought it was sacking, so presumably the pattern had worn off and only the backing was left. We still thought we might have been suspicious...