When my grandfather died, back in 1979, his body was not officially discovered for several days. After no sign of him for the best part of a week, Mrs. Timms, the woman who lived next door, walked to the phone box next to the shops and called the police. They forced the door and found him cold, dead, and spread-eagled on his unmade bed.
It was early March and still cold; decomposition was minimal, but immediately obvious was the trauma to the mouth and jaw. The lips were torn and split, the lower mandible had been broken in three places, the tongue was severely lacerated, as were the gums. On further inspection of the mouth, several teeth had been extracted post mortem.
His youngest son had actually found his father a few hours after death. He’d emptied his pockets of change, liberated his bookies’ winnings and pension from his pocketbook, and wrenched the thin yellow wedding band from the finger, snapping the knuckle clean in two. He then extracted each gold tooth from his father’s stiffening mouth using pike-nosed electricians’ pliers and an adjustable spanner from the old man’s toolbox.
The grade of gold used in dentistry in the British Isles contains a high content of other metals and is not considered to be of consistent purity; it is valueless and unusable as scrap metal.
This was explained to my uncle by the local pawnbroker, Harold Lehman, as he looked, horrified, into a blood-stained, grubby handkerchief containing five gold crowns, dried clotted blood, stained enamel, and pillars attached.
My uncle Brian died in 2022. He’d broken into his ex-partner’s garage for some shelter from the winter night. He’d cooked up, shot up, and nodded out, falling asleep on the concrete floor and succumbing to hypothermia when the temperature dropped to minus nine. The coroner’s report showed that he had cocaine, benzodiazepines, a potentially toxic amount of heroin, and methadone in his system. The autopsy also reported he had advanced liver cancer, hepatitis, and pulmonary fibrosis. His possessions were recorded by the hospital mortuary clerk as: £13.62, one amber glass bottle holding 150 ml of methadone linctus (1 ml / 1 ml), foil wrap containing 0.7 grams of brown heroin, one small kitchen knife, a Motorola pay-as-you-go mobile phone, three sachets of citric acid, two aluminium single-use sterile heating vessels, four 5 ml hypodermic syringes (two used), a Barclays debit card in the name Sandra Walters, one box of Pall Mall Blue cigarettes, containing three cigarettes, one pink plastic disposable lighter, and a stained brown square of fabric in which were wrapped five gold teeth. He was my father’s youngest brother, a good-looking young man and always kind to me when I was a kid. He was shy and well known for his good nature.
Featured Image Credit: Colorblind_Kevin / Unsplash
