By continuing to use this site, you are consenting to the use of Google analytics to monitor user activity.
It was back in July 1979. I was a humble Police Constable, with aspirations to get into CID and become the sort of brilliant detective that you see in the TV dramas, but no clear idea how that dream might be achieved. A call came through to say that a body had been found on the pavement at the foot of the university's engineering tower and I attended to cordon off the area and keep the public away. I remember clearly someone from the plain clothes team that came to investigate saying that it was "just another student suicide" as if that made it unimportant, and I remember thinking that I hoped they wouldn't say anything of that sort to the parents, for whom it would have a horrible significance. I understood what he meant, though. Immediately after the summer exams there were often a few suicides or attempted suicides among those students who couldn't cope with the pressure to perform. Sometimes they were afraid of letting down their parents - who might have spent thousands of pounds on sending them to an expensive school in order that they would succeed in getting in to Oxford; sometimes they imagined that they would never get a job if they failed their exams; sometimes they felt that they couldn't face their friends or their tutor if they did not do as well as predicted; most often it wasn't clear exactly what made them feel that life was no longer worth living, and the doctors would put it down to the stress of preparing for exams simply overloading their nervous system and causing some sort of breakdown.
This case was distressingly routine. The young man in question was a mathematics student from a working class background. He was the first member of his family to go to university and his parents were inordinately proud of him - and he knew it. Not long after finishing his final examinations, he went up to the top of the engineering tower when no-one else was around and pitched himself out through a window. There was a lot of discussion afterwards about how it had been possible for him to do it. The windows were of toughened glass and were prevented from opening, but he somehow managed to smash his way through. I'm not sure of the details, but I gather he used a table and maybe some heavy equipment that he found up there to break the glass. He must have been pretty determined.
I wasn't involved in the investigation - which, in any case was over very quickly - but I was called to give evidence at the inquest, because I was the first police officer on the scene. I remember seeing the boy's parents sitting together, looking very alone and confused, and a girl sitting alongside them. I assumed that she must be their daughter. It was only years later that I learned that she was, in fact, the boy's fiancé. Fancy killing yourself only weeks before you were due to get married!
There are some full-length novels about Jonah and his colleagues available as e-books from Amazon or Kobo and some short stories, that you can download completely free from the Kobo Store.