June the fourth, 1973, was much like any other summer’s day in Peterborough and Ralph Mellish, a file clerk at an insurance company, was on his way to work as usual when - nothing happened!

Scarcely able to believe his eyes, Ralph Mellish looked down, but one glance confirmed his suspicions: behind a bush, on the side of the road, there was no severed arm; no dismembered trunk of a man in his late fifties; no head in a bag – nothing, not a sausage!

For Ralph Mellish this was not to be the start of any trail of events which would not, in no time at all, involve him in neither a tangled knot of suspicion nor any web of lies, which would - had he been not uninvolved - surely have led him to no other place than the Central Criminal Court of the Old Bailey. But it was not to be!

Ralph Mellish reached his office in Dalsels Street, Peterborough, at 9.05 a.m.., exactly the same time he usually got in.

“Morning, Mr. Mellish”
“Morning, Enid”

Enid, a sharp-eyed, clever young girl, who had been with the firm for only 4 weeks, couldn’t help noticing the complete absence of tiny but tell-tale blood stains on Mr. Mellish’s clothing. Nor did she notice anything strange in Mr. Mellish’s behaviour that whole morning. Nor the next morning. Nor at any time before or since the entire period she worked for that firm.

“Have the new paper clips arrived, Enid?”
“Yes, they’re over there, Mr. Mellish.”
“Oh…”

But for the lack of any untoward circumstances for this secretary to notice, and the total non-involvement of Mr. Mellish in anything illegal, the full weight of the law would insure that Ralph Aldus Mellish would have ended up like all who challenge the fundamental laws of our society -

In an iron coffin, with spikes on the inside.

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