A Case of Mistaken Identity

A Case of Mistaken Identity

by

Austin Mitchell

           The woman issued a torrent of tears. She looked at the dead man again and burst into another stream.

                “What happened?” I asked a man standing near to me.

                “Her husband was drunk. He staggered out of the bar and got hit by that bus.”

              He pointed at a bus parked nearby.

                I and three of my friends on our way to a party, had stopped to find out what was going on.

                Several women came to help hold the dead man’s wife. Apparently they were her neighbors.

                As far as I could see there were no policemen on the scene.

                “I told him to stop drinking, and he wouldn’t hear,” she wailed.

                Then the woman’s daughters came. They bored through the crown to have a look at their father.

`               “Mummy, that’s not daddy!” one of the daughters shouted. She was short and fat.

                “Mummy, it’s true Sanya’s telling. That dead man isn’t our father,” the other daughter said.

                “That’s not Neville, oh thank the Lord. He has heard my prayers,” the woman shouted. She hugged her two daughters and they left the scene faster than they’d come.

                There was relief on everybody’s face after the women left. The crowd began to disperse.

                “A man is lying on the ground dead,” I said. But nobody heard me. Soon it was only myself, the bus driver and my three friends left on the scene.

                “I can’t believe that people would be so heartless,”I remarked.

                “The man they thought was dead, lived nearby and most of them know him. Nobody knows this man,” Jimmy, my friend said to me.

                The police were now on the scene, red taping up the area, taking pictures and seeking witnesses.

                Sally, my girlfriend, pointed out the dead man’s car to me. It was parked near the bar.

                “Do you think he was really drunk? If he was, how was he going to handle the car on the road?” I asked Debra, Jimmy’s girlfriend.

                “I don’t know, maybe when they do the autopsy, they’ll find out,” she replied.

                Then a car stopped and two women came out, followed by a small girl and a man.

                They tried to get around the tape, but the police warned them off.

                “Keep away from the tape,” the Sergeant leading the investigations warned them.

                “Sergeant, I’m sure it’s my son,” a middle-aged woman cried.

                “Lady, we’re about to take the body to the hospital. You can come and identify him down there,”he replied.

                The woman shouted out the dead man’s name and positively identified the car. We left the scene before the police had finished. I sincerely hoped that this time this was really the man’s name and that  at same point they would have closure.

                I had written down the man’s name and was surprised to see him in the death columns of one of our Sunday papers a few weeks later. The End. (From the collection of short stories-I'm Back From the Hills Now by Austin Mitchell) For a look at my books please visit the Austin G Mitchell pages at Amazon.