Originally posted by Elamarna
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If PC Mizen read, or was shown, Paul's scathing newspaper account, before learning that the main witness had been a Charles Cross, and Paul the other one [no pun intended], what would he have made of this? Not a lot, perhaps, if both men had spoken to him along similar lines, as would certainly appear to have been the case. Did Mizen only mention at the inquest what Cross had told him because he was the main informant and had found the woman first? Or could it have been because Cross was at the inquest on that day and Paul wasn't? When Mizen read that Paul felt his lack of urgency was shameful, he'd have blown a gasket if one of them had really told him a policeman was already with the woman, and if neither had even suggested she could be dead.
It gets worse if Fisherman's hunch is correct, and Cross was the only one doing the talking, while Paul was some distance away and couldn't hear him lying. Mizen would have initially assumed the spokesman was Paul from his critical newspaper account, wouldn't he? How would Mizen have reacted on finding out that it had been Cross who spoke to him, while Paul had left them to it? Would he not have wondered why Paul had given an account of a conversation he had not been present to hear, and how on earth he could have done so? And how would Paul have known that Mizen had not gone immediately to the woman's aid but finished knocking someone up first, as Mizen himself admitted, if he hadn't stayed around for the whole conversation?
I submit that if Paul's newspaper account is what obliged Mizen to give his own account of being sent to the scene by the two carmen, it would neatly explain why he claimed he was told another officer was already there and was given no reason to believe this could be a murder. Damage limitation, because he had not rushed to the scene and had then failed to report having been sent there by two men who had recently left it? The fact that PC Neil was there when he arrived and didn't question his presence made it easier for Mizen to excuse both potentially career-threatening failures.
Love,
Caz
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