The Mystery of Christopher Topper's Head

The police were almost certain that the package contained the remains of Christopher Topper.

Almost certain, because they never found his head and without that, the identification always had to remain slightly hazy. It was 1959 and there was no such thing as DNA testing, no means of linking one Topper with another, so they did the best they could with what they had, which proved to be a pair of legs, a torso, and a pair of arms, all dismembered and neatly arranged in a package that was then wrapped in brown paper and left at Warrington train station.

Despite the difficulty in identifying Mr Topper, who was a banker in his mid-thirties, his wife and his brother were both convicted of the crime. Benjamin Topper was swiftly hanged. Florence Topper spent twenty-five years in prison, before being released and disappearing from the public eye.

That was the way of things.

Mrs Topper and Benjamin Topper both protested their innocence, but they had no alibi for the night Christopher disappeared and since the banker never reappeared alive, only one assumption remained.

The whole affair might have been left to history, except that on a sunny Saturday afternoon in 2020, Detective Inspector Langley received an urgent telephone call summoning him to a house in a quiet suburban road where something unpleasant had been discovered.

Langley was recently promoted. A good-looking man, a few years short of his fortieth birthday, though a rapidly diminishing hairline tended to make people think he was older, he was popular with women and had had more than one young constable tailing after him, hoping to impress (or seduce) the great detective. Langley had not the heart to tell them his interests lay elsewhere and that his love life remained strictly private and outside of the police force.

He arrived in his slightly batter Ford Focus (the most inconspicuous of cop cars) at the address he had been given and found himself looking at a smart semi-detached terrace house. Four bedrooms, spacious garden, attached garage and nice bay windows. The sort of house you expect solicitors and middle-class managers to live in.

There was police tape across the gateway into the front garden, and a constable was guarding it. This did not deter the local gawkers who were watching proceedings from a distance with curiosity.

Langley flashed his ID at the constable and was allowed in, being instructed to go through the house to the garage. That was where everything was occurring.

Langley obeyed the directions and swiftly found himself in a typical garage, complete with tools on the wall, an old lawnmower stationed in one corner and a fridge freezer that hummed to itself. There was no sign of a car, or any indication there had been one there recently.

In the middle of the garage stood a forensics team in the plastic suits and shoe coverings that made them look far less glamorous than their counterparts on television.

“Hello Langley,” called out Butlin, the head of the forensics team. “This is a curious one.”

Langley stepped towards their little huddle, noting they were clustered around what appeared to be a decades old cardboard box. It had once contained tins of shoe polish, according to the faded words on the side.

“It’s full of concrete,” he said, glimpsing past the forensics team.

“I must correct you,” Butlin grinned at him. “It was full of concrete. So full in fact, that it could not be moved by the unfortunate soul who discovered it here. He decided the only way to move the box would be to break up the concrete, which he started to do until he saw what it was encasing.”

Butlin shuffled Langley around the scene carefully until he was facing the far side of the box. He had not been able to see this side before. Now he saw where the concrete had been artlessly hacked at, the side of the box ripped and torn in the process. A fault had been found in the lump and a big chunk had fallen away to reveal the grimacing features of a severed head within.

“Is it real?” Langley asked, crouching down to see better.

“Most certainly,” Butlin chuckled at Langley’s question. “This is not some competent waxwork, this is a real man’s head. A head that has been sealed in concrete for, I would say, the last sixty years.”

Langley gave him a look that suggested he wanted Butlin to elaborate.

“The shoe polish,” Butlin pointed at the box. “It was discontinued in 1959. I googled it.”

“The box could have been used to contain the head at any time,” Langley remarked.

“Good point,” Butlin grinned. “But there is only one case I know of locally of a cadaver with a missing head and it matches the dating of the box.”

Langley raised an eyebrow at him, waiting for more.

“You should study some cold cases,” Butlin grumbled. “In 1959, the torso and severed limbs of a man were discovered in a brown paper parcel at Warrington train station. The police believed they were the remains of Christopher Topper who had disappeared the week before. His wife and brother claimed to have no idea where he had gone. The head was missing, which police believed was an attempt to prevent identification. Even so, they convicted Mrs Topper and her brother-in-law for the murder of Christopher.”

“And you think we finally have the head of Christopher Topper,” Langley went back to studying the severed head. “Can you do a DNA match to see if the body and the head belong together?”

“We will need to get permission to exhume the remains of Mr Topper, but all being well there is a good chance we could. It will finally resolve this matter.”

Langley looked around the garage thoughtfully.

“Except, it does not explain how Mr Topper’s head ended up here. I need to talk to the person who discovered him.”

***

George Shareef was an older man who had suffered the shock of his life that day. He was in the sitting room of the house, being plied with hot tea by a police constable when Langley arrived.

“Mr Shareef?”

Shareef took the hand he held out to shake.

“Are you a police detective?”

“I am. I would like to ask you a few questions.”

Shareef nodded.

“I supposed you would.”

Langley sat down in a chair opposite him.

“This is not your house?” he began.

“No. It belonged to a friend who passed away recently. He had no family, so I have been sorting out the property before it is put up for sale. I was working in the garage this morning, clearing out old junk…”

Shareef did not have to say any more for them both to know where his mind had gone.

“Your friend, he was around your age?” Langley asked.

“Gosh, no, he was considerably older,” Shareef replied. “He was ninety-four at his last birthday. We met at the golf club years ago. He was lonely. I had just got divorced and needed someone to talk to. We became friends.”

Langley did his sums, working back the age of the man and the timing of the disposal of the head.

“What was his name?”

“Terence Coe. He hated being called Terry, always had to be Terence.”

Langley made a note.

“And he lived here all alone?”

“He never married. His parents died years ago. Yes, he lived here all alone.”

Shareef was solemn a moment.

“He didn’t strike me as a man who would kill someone and cut off their head. I guess you never know a person, do you?”

***

The discovery of the severed head was distracting for a while, but as it was obviously a cold case and the culprit was apparently deceased, it was soon superseded by modern crimes. It was over a month later that Langley received a telephone call from Butlin to update him on his findings.

“The head and the body, they matched,” Butlin said without delay.

“So, at last Christopher Topper has his cranium back,” Langley said with satisfaction.

“That’s the kicker,” Butlin said, enjoying himself. “The body and the head do not belong to Christopher Topper.”

Langley paused, taking in this news.

“How can you be so sure?”

“I had to do a formal identification. I retrieved what medical files I could on Christopher and compared them to my corpse. When Christopher was fifteen, he broke his nose badly during a rugby match. My head has a perfect nose, utterly unbroken.”

Langley allowed this to sink in.

“That means that Benjamin Topper was innocent as he claimed. They hanged him over a body that was not his brother’s.”

“And Mrs Topper served a life sentence for the same deed. Yep, it is pretty grim.”

“Any chance of you working out who our mystery man really is?”

“Working on it, but don’t expect miracles when this happened sixty years ago.”

“The question remains, what was our stranger’s head doing in the house of an old man sealed in concrete?”

“That is one for you, not me,” Butlin said cheerfully as he rang off.

Langley returned to the house. He found Shareef inside picking up where he had left off a month ago, now the police tape was down.

“I thought about hiring one of those house clearance firms,” he said to Langley when the detective looked surprised to see him. “But it did not seem right. Strangers going through Terence’s things.”

“Tell me about him,” Langley asked.

“What is to tell?” Shareef asked. “He was a good man, as far as I knew. He always sported a round at the golf club bar.”

“What did he do?”

“He lived off investments. He was very clever with money and had made some shrewd deals,” Shareef replied.

“A banker, then?”

“He never said so, but he had the brain for it.”

“Got any pictures of him?” Langley asked.

Shareef frowned, confused, then he departed upstairs and returned with a shoebox.

“I found this under his bed. Must be from when he was a young man. There are no colour pictures of him. He never posed for a picture, said he hated seeing his ugly mug in a photo.”

“Ugly?” Langley asked.

“Well, he had smashed his nose in his youth, and he couldn’t get past it.”

Langley opened the shoebox and found piles of loose black and white photographs. He picked up one that showed a young woman stood with two men.

“That would be Terence,” Shareef pointed to the man in the middle with a distinctively smashed nose.

“Who are the others?”

“I don’t know,” Shareef shrugged.

Langley smiled to himself because he could guess.

The shoebox contained the remains of Christopher Topper, pictures of him and his wife and his brother, before he had disappeared and become Terence Coe. Why he had done it could only be surmised. Perhaps, as the police had originally speculated, Mrs Topper was having an affair with Benjamin and Christopher faked his death to get dramatic revenge on the pair.

Langley flicked through the photographs until one caught his eye. Terence had his arm around another man’s shoulder celebrating the end of the war at a victory party in 1945. The man, it occurred to Langley looked familiar. Younger, but familiar.

He turned over the photograph, hoping there was an inscription on the back. He was to be disappointed. Perhaps it was the man Topper had murdered and kept the head of, perhaps not.

“I shall need to take these,” he told Shareef.

Shareef had sat down on the sofa and was staring at the floor.

“I didn’t really know him at all, did I?”

Langley had no good answer.

“Do we ever know anyone?”

Shareef grimaced.

“Most people you are fairly confident don’t have a severed head in their garage.”

“Most people,” Langley agreed.