Plot
Three separate plot elements eventually come together in Body of a Girl. First, New Scotland Yard and high government officials are concerned about an alarming rise in organized gangster activities, particularly from the Crows, and, under the command of Chief Superintendent Morrissey, determine ways to combat it. One step, apparently related to this, involves promoting Inspector Bill Mercer to Chief Inspector and posting him to the small city of Stoneferry on Thames, an upriver station of Q Division of the Metropolitan Police. (Q Division, it will be recalled, was the division in which Gilbert's better-known Inspector Patrick Petrella spent most of his career.)
Not long after arriving in Stoneferry, the tough, scar-faced, and rather enigmatic Mercer becomes a drinking companion of John Bull, the one-armed but extremely rugged proprietor of the town's leading garage; somewhat to the puzzlement of his fellow policemen, Mercer takes a peculiar interest in the operations of the garage and in the history of how it came to have its predominant position on the High Street.
The third component also shows up soon after Mercer's arrival: the discovery on a small island in the Thames of the body of a young woman; she has been completely buried and been there long enough now that only her clothes and bones remain. Mercer, as a divisional detective, takes charge of the investigation, supervising the local uniformed branch. Because of a handbag found buried nearby, it becomes nearly certain that the remains are those of Sweetie Sowthistle, a teenage girl who was a well-known and very well-liked local prostitute and who had suddenly vanished two years earlier. An inquest is called to formally identity the remains but, to the chagrin of the local police (and the apparent indifference of Mercer), evidence is unexpectedly introduced to indicate that the victim was a somewhat older woman who could not have been the missing Sweetie.
A second young woman, the clerk from a local solicitor's office, who also apparently left Stoneferry two years earlier is soon brought into the picture but it proves curiously elusive to determine her actual status: Were those her bones in the sand or had she simply moved to London? While Mercer and his fellow policemen attempt to solve this riddle, Mercer's interest in John Bull's garage continues to grow and, in a sudden change in the narrative flow, the story becomes less of a procedural and more of a study in violence as it pivots back to Superintendent Morrissey and his determination to smash the criminal gang the Crows. In a final, carefully planned ambush of the Crows with a deadly shoot-out in London, Mercer plays a key role, bringing him face to face for a final time with John Bull, the one-armed garage proprietor. And then, on the final page, almost as an anti-climax, we learn the apparent story behind the disappearances of the two Stoneferry girls two years before.
As one of Gilbert's editors said after his death in 2006, "He's not a hard-boiled writer in the classic sense, but there is a hard edge to him, a feeling within his work that not all of society is rational, that virtue is not always rewarded.". [1] Such is the case here.
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He used to be the CID head of Number 1 District. Now I hear he's in charge of the Metropolitan section of the Special Crimes Squads. Ten years ago I watched him boxing in the police heavyweight finals. He didn't just knock his man down....He knocked him clean out of the ring"
Inspector Bill Mercer is a detective created by the British crime and mystery writer Michael Gilbert. He is the leading character in the 1972 novel The Body of a Girl, a somewhat hardboiled police procedural, and appears later in at least three short stories. On the first page of the novel, "Detective Inspector William Mercer received... confirmation of his promotion to chief inspector and his appointment in charge of the CID at Stoneferry on Thames, which is one of the larger upriver stations of Q Division of the Metropolitan Police."
