Paul Stott’s bed companion

We were passing through the countryside checking that the villages we passed through were safe.

 

This can be dangerous work, with snippers and lone gunmen able to hide anywhere they choose, but it does bring one perk. Beds.

 

It had been a matter of years rather than months since any of us had slept in a bed.

 

Not that any of us had a particularly good night’s sleep. Sudden comfort after a thousand nights of hard floor was simply too odd, and I lay awake most of the night, which is why I was awake to hear Stott’s shouting out in the middle of the night.

 

Always alert to the dangers of sleep in enemy lands, I grabbed my gun and a torch and rushed to his aid.

 

However, there was no sign of any enemy, Stott was dancing round his bed like a mad thing.

 

“What is it?” I asked him.

 

“There’s a dead body,” he said, gesturing to the bed. “I’ve been sleeping with a dead body.”

 

I checked the bed and sure enough, there was the cold corpse of an elderly woman.

 

“You must have climbed in beside her.”

 

“Of course I didn’t,” Stott protested, “It’s a single bed, I’m hardly not going to notice a dead body. She must have climbed in while I was asleep, and died during the night.”

 

“She’s stone cold, been dead for days I reckon. She must have been in the bed when you got in, corpses don’t climb into bed with you.”

 

The argument continued, indeed continues to this day, every time we call him ‘Sleeps with the Dead’, Stott protests his innocence.