Chapter 7: The Station Sings Colonel Bogey

He cut Lewis’s stitches out and examined the sutures inside where the testicles had been amputated. He stitched the ends up with dissolving stitches, then removed Lewis’s. Checking all was well inside the scrotum he sewed it up again with hospital stitches. He sprayed the cut with a special sealer to stop infection and sent him out into a side ward.

By now the police car that had responded to Brian’s emergency call had arrived at the hospital. They had already taken a statement from the receptionist about the caller. The Doctor told them what he had found. ‘He’s been castrated,’ he said. ‘I would say it was by a gifted amateur who is without access to medical supplies.’

That seemed to tie in with the gist of the phone call, so the policemen called control on the landline. Control had been alerted by the Super, so they were told to stay with him until he was discharged then bring him to the station. ‘Make it clear to him that you have orders to arrest him if he doesn’t cooperate.’ they were told.

Half an hour later Tyrone came round to find a uniformed police constable sitting in the room. He went to the door and his colleague fetched the doctor. He told him what he had found and what he had done. In response to Tyrones question the doctor told him, ‘You will find it extremely difficult if not impossible to get an erection ever again.’

‘There’s nothing we can do about it,’ he said, ‘So I will discharge you shortly.’ After that bombshell, the doctor left, and the constable returned. Tyrone asked him why he was there. ‘I have instructions to take you back to the station to see the Super,’ he told him. ‘If you don’t come voluntarily, I am to arrest you.’ ‘On what charge?’ Tyrone blustered. ‘Rape.’ he replied.

By now it was three thirty in the morning. It wasn’t until seven o’clock that the Doctor had time to return and decide Tyrone could be discharged. He prescribed him some antibiotics in case of infection and told him to take some paracetamol if he felt any pain.

‘You’re very lucky,’ he said, ‘Whoever castrated you knew what he was doing and appears to have made a good job of it. If it had been my daughter, I would have chopped your cock and your balls off and left you to bleed.’

It was another hour before the prescription had been filled in the hospital pharmacy and returned to Tyrone. He got dressed and was escorted out to the police car. They travelled back in silence, all attempts by Tyrone to start a conversation met with a stony silence.

At the station he was taken to the office the Super was using. From the looks he got from colleagues as he passed, he realised the story was already circulating.

The Super just told him to sit and pointed to a chair. ‘You are a disgrace to the force,’ he said. ‘I have a bundle of statements alleging you raped women violently and twice. There is absolutely no connection between any of your victims,’ he told him, ‘Yet their tales are almost identical. You picked them all up whilst on duty on a false pretext that their back light was out on their vehicle.’

‘Apparently one of the fathers has been following you for months. His evidence puts you at all the scenes. I understand that when he unexpectedly found you unconscious outside one of your victim’s homes yesterday evening, he had you dealt with. I can tell you now that I have no intention of following that up. Also, the knife all your victims described in detail was found on your person.’

‘You will be arrested and charged. With the evidence there is no doubt the magistrate will send you to prison. At which point you would be discharged from the force in disgrace. You thoroughly deserve what has been done to you, it’s a drastic yet fair punishment. I don’t approve of people taking the law into their own hands even so. That plus the disgrace your prosecution will bring on the force is the only reason I’m going to make you this offer.’

‘If you resign from the force immediately, there will be no charges and you will be free to go. You would leave without a criminal record and there would be no publicity. I’m quite sure that when I tell the victims what has happened to you, they will agree that you have been punished enough.’

‘You have one hour to decide. In that time, I will contact all of the victims we know about and get their agreement to what I am offering you. You can go and sit in an interview room or go to the canteen as you wish. You will be escorted at all times. In the meantime, I will take your warrant card and handcuffs.’ The Super held his hand out and Tyrone handed them both over.

The Super called his escort in and told him to take him to either an interview room or the canteen but to stay with him at all times. Tyrone opted for the canteen. When they walked in the hub bub of conversation ceased like a switch had been thrown. Twenty pairs of eyes watched him get served then take a seat over in the far corner.

Then a very quiet hum of conversation resumed. Tyrone knew they were talking about him. The looks coming his way made it very clear to him he wouldn’t be able to work with any of them in future.

As people came and went there were fresh outbursts of conversation plus more stares in his direction. When his hour was nearly up, his escort stood up. As Tyrone stood, everyone else stared at him. Then as he moved from the table someone started whistling the theme from the film, ‘The Bridge over the River Kwai,’ a song called ‘Colonel Bogey.’

It was taken up by several others and before he was halfway to the door someone started singing the words. The entire canteen joined in the unofficial words that took the micky out of Germany’s wartime leaders. The old song from WW11 was sung with gusto. ‘Hitler has only got one ball, Himmler has two but very small, Goring has something similar but poor old Goebbels has no balls at all.’ Many changed Goebbels to Tyrone.

The song echoed throughout the station. Returning to the Supers office Tyrone found a letter of resignation already typed out ready for him to sign. He had already decided it was the easiest way out. He signed it.

Lewis got a message from the Super soon after. ‘Tyrone has resigned. Good result, thank you.’

Friday evening saw Lewis and Ella knocking on Jenny Winters door. When she saw who it was her face lit up, ‘Come in,’ she said, ‘It’s lovely to see you again.’

They went in and she offered them a coffee right away. As they sat and sipped, Lewis told her, ‘I have some news for you. Ella is going to tell you, but first let me give you some lead up.’

‘Since we spoke, Tryone has picked up some more ladies. We have no way of knowing if they succumbed to his advances happily or not. It had become very clear that with no one prepared to lodge a complaint very little could be done to stop him.’

‘Yesterday,’ Lewis told her, ‘He took his latest victim out for a meal. What he didn’t know was that she was ex-military. When he tried to drag her into her bedroom, she resisted, so he showed her his knife.’

‘She reacted as she had been trained to. She disarmed him and sent him flying across the room. His head hit the bedroom wall and knocked him out.’

‘She tied him up and dumped him outside her front door. She didn’t want any publicity either and was planning on putting him in her car and dumping him somewhere further away.’

‘When she got dressed, she went out the back way and brought her car round to the front, but he had gone. She was very surprised he had got free and assumed someone must have found and released him. As far as she was concerned, that was that.’

Ella took over then. ‘Since then,’ she said, ‘We had a call from an older man. He told us that since Tyrone attacked his daughter a while ago, he had been following him. When he saw him being dumped outside all tied up, he moved his car close and with a struggle got Tyrone into the boot.’

‘He took him to someone he knew who removed Tyrones testicles.’ ‘That’s terrible.’ Jenny said looking horrified, then a beam lit her face up. ‘But he deserves it.’ she said happily.

‘There’s more,’ Lewis said. ‘He was then dumped at the roadside, unconscious. He was found and taken to hospital. As a result of that and the message the hospital received from the father, he was taken back to the police station under guard. As there was still no actual evidence to secure any conviction, he was offered a choice between being arrested or resigning.’