Hestia has a fertile imagination

image from babble.com

I had just started my *cough* jog through the woods the other day, when I spotted a fallen section of fencing at the side of the path.  The path is cut into a hillside, so it's quite a drop on one side.  Over the years, various Councils have hammered in staves and stretched sagging bits of wire to stop the dog-walking and jogging fraternity from meeting a hideous death down in the rhododendrons.  Now a bit had been damaged.

Now, whereas most people might think of some mindless teenagers unearthing the staves on a drunken walk from one end of town to the other, for Hestia, years of mindless TV hours spent watching CSI, the Sweeney and The Rockford Files all snapped to life in the synapses and I stopped to examine the damage more closely.


The fence posts had not snapped, but been hauled out of the ground.  The holes in the ground were devoid of leaves....'This has just happened recently,' I deduced, aloud (to my imaginary TV audience).

As I mentally prepared myself to recommence jogging.....What do you MEAN I only stopped in the first place because my lungs were already feeling embarassingly firy and my liver felt like it had been kicked by a mule?!....I noticed a rolled up duvet wedged against a tree trunk quite far down the slope, the other side of the fallen hand-rail.

In that split second I *knew* that there was a body in that duvet and that the fencing had been knocked down as a result of the the murderers (there had to be more than one) tossing the rolled-up body down the slope.

I thought about descending the perilous incline to check it out.

And then thought again.

It's been really hot the past few days and a body would be almost certainly fly-blown and wiffy.  That was guaranteed to put me off my breakfast later.  Heck, I might not even get breakfast!  When I rocked up to report it at the local station, the pigs might roll me into the interview room and give me a lengthy grilling as to what I'd seen, what I'd touched, when I found The Body.

I was pretty hungry at this point (probably brought on by the thoughts of pigs and grilling), so I decided to complete my jog and THEN check out the corpse.  as I jogged off, I wondered how that would sound when it all went to the High Court in Glasgow:....

I could see the Prosecution lawyer walking towards me, dust motes floating around his powdered wig, dandruff on his dark-suited shoulders...

'And so, Hestia, I put it to YOU that you were sufficiently unconcerned by what you saw that you carried on with your jogging.'

'No sir, that's not how it was at all....  I was sufficiently ALARMED that I decided to postpone the inevitable encounter with the victim's body for as long as possible.'

Shit.  That made me sound like a non-credible witness.

I jogged on, replaying lots of potential High Court encounters in my mind as I went.

then, I heard the definite audible snap of a twig.  Were the murderers keeping watch over their body?  Was I in imminent danger of being attacked and turfed down the slope in another swathe of hideous 70's bed linen?

I started jogging again.  The wood is full of deer and dog walkers.  Murderers are a bit thin on the ground here.

But still......

I recalled that two men had just been sentenced at the High Court in Glasgow for murdering a woman (from the island) who was about to report them for sexually abusing her son.  Her body has never been found and when we're out in the Sailing Club dinghies and feel a bump, we darkly joke about how it is this poor soul's body banging against the hull.

What if there was a THIRD character, currently not under suspicion who has been given the nod to dispose of this poor woman's body now, after 10 years of being missing?! What if it's her long-dead remains wrapped in the floral duvet cover?!

By this time I had covered the length of the wood and was pleasantly suprised to find that I was now on the return leg of the journey and almost back at the Disposal of The Body Scene.

As I approached the fallen fence, I steeled my nerves and began a long, circuitous descent to come around to the body without contaminating the direct line that it took through the undergrowth.

I told you.  I watch a LOT of these crime scene investigation things.

By this time my heart was hammering in my chest - and not entirely due to the frantic path-pounding I'd just done.

I reached up to the lurid purple bed sheet and twitched back a corner.  Bottles.  Loads of empty lager bottles in carrier bags...and the obligatory heap of neatly tied off used condoms.

I scrambled back up the banking onto the path, marvelling at my complete and utter stupidity! What was more likely - a couple of teenagers having a bit of a furtive drunken sex session somewhere quiet and out of sight? Or a team of murderers with access to lurid bed linen?

I jogged home, feeling like a complete tit.

Later that day, I typed an e-mail to hubby, still languishing in the Gulf of Mexico, and explained my Oscar performance of a morning.  He typed back: 'Did you drink  pear cider yesterday and fall asleep in the sun again, because I think something has affected your brain.'

Hestia considered his point of view for a moment and then dismissed it.  All this over active imagination stuff, one day it will be good for something......