Dead in the Water

by Peter Tickler

  Mullen said nothing. If he started, he might never stop.

  “You see, Mullen, the way I see it is this: either she’s a client and you’ve been doing a job for her or you were lovers and you dumped her. Only she didn’t like being dumped, did she?” Dorkin paused for as long as it took for his fingers to reach their crescendo. Then he pushed on. “So Janice came round to have it out with you. The only problem was that you weren’t there. Unless, of course, you were; sitting in your car, with nasty thoughts running amok in your head. Perhaps you had even invited her round. And when you saw her struggling across the road in the pouring rain, you saw your chance and decided to take it.”

  “So take a look at my car!” Mullen was half-way up on his feet when he realised what he was doing. He was losing it, playing into Dorkin’s hands. He forced himself back down into his seat. “See if you can find any damage to the bodywork.” he said. “You won’t.”

  “The pathologist says she was unlucky. It was only a glancing blow. So there probably wasn’t much in the way of damage to the vehicle.” Dorkin’s almost permanent smirk had finally been replaced by a steely glare. “This is how I see it. She must have realised what was happening at the last minute. She nearly got out of the way. Only she didn’t. The vehicle clipped her and when she fell her head cracked against the curb of the pavement. Good night, Vienna.”

  Mullen was confused. His thoughts were scrambled egg. Maybe he was entering some sort of shock. He had seen Janice in church only on Sunday, full of life and bitterness, desperate for his help. How could she be dead?

  “So tell me how you know Janice.” Dorkin had changed gear, his voice calm and reasonable.

  Mullen didn’t reply immediately. He didn’t want to say anything and yet he knew he had to. Otherwise Dorkin would interpret it as refusing to co-operate and he would become the prime suspect. So keep it simple and straightforward, he told himself, or you’ll end up tripping yourself up. “She hired me to find out if her husband was having an affair.”

  “And was he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who with?”

  Again Mullen hesitated. But again he knew he had no choice. “A woman called Becca Baines.”

  “You have her address?”

  “No,” he lied.

  “You didn’t follow her home ever?”

  “No. They always met at a hotel, that new one off the northern ring road. Why don’t you ask Paul Atkinson? He must know.”

  “And I know how to do my job, thank you Mullen.” Dorkin wasn’t exactly cuddly in his manner, but now that he was in control and Mullen was co-operating, he was almost human.

  “If this interview is going to continue any longer, I want a lawyer,” Mullen said. It was a bit late in the day to say it, but he realised he had been stupid not to insist on it sooner. He was in danger of getting out of his depth.

  “No need,” Dorkin said. “You’re free to go. We’ve finished talking — for now.”

  * * *

  Mullen may have been free to go, but that still meant he was in Cowley, the best part of four miles from home — and from his car. It was on his car that his thoughts focused initially as he began the long walk which led into the city. No doubt Dorkin and Fargo had taken a good look at it before they hammered on his door, checking it for any signs of hit-and-run damage. They wouldn’t have found any, of course. But even so, they had pulled him in. He didn’t entirely blame them. Dorkin’s assumption that Janice had come to the Iffley Road because she had wanted to speak to him seemed spot on. When Mullen thought about it that was the only conclusion he could come to himself, because he had never told Janice he had moved or was intending to. Rose knew, of course, and so did Derek Stanley, but unless one of them had told Janice, she almost certainly wouldn’t have done.

  Poor Janice. He wished he had been nicer to her. He wished he hadn’t left her drinking on her own in the pub that day. He hadn’t even bought her a drink! It wasn’t as if he had to sleep with her, just be some sort of friend. Sit and listen for as long as it took. Still at least they had had a conversation in church. That was something. She hadn’t seemed to hold any grudge.

  Mullen paused, waiting as a supermarket home delivery van tried to exit Howard Street onto the Cowley Road. As he stood there another thought bubbled to the surface: if Janice didn’t know he had moved, how come the police had found out so quickly? Someone must have told them. He hadn’t told them he was moving either. He had given them his Iffley Road address the day he had found Chris in the river and he hadn’t told Dorkin any different when he came to the Meeting Place. The police might have gone round to his Iffley Road address and found him gone, but he hadn’t left a forwarding address there because he didn’t see the point. He had no idea how long his arrangement with the professor would last. It was meant to be for nine months, but he found it hard to visualise that actually happening. When had he last lived in one place for that long?

  Mullen pushed on. The Oxford Road had become the Cowley Road. He had just passed the Christian Life Centre and was approaching the beginning of the shops and restaurants that make Cowley Road the melting pot that it is. He was starving. His sandwich was lying on the kitchen table in Boars Hill — he had only managed one bite. He was also dying for a coffee. It didn’t take long to find a place that suited his mood and had Wi-Fi. He decided on a ham and cheese panini and a skinny cappuccino and he sat at the back, out of the way. At first he concentrated on eating, but after that he wiped his hands carefully and got out his mobile. He went to the Oxford Mail website. It didn’t take long to find what he wanted, a report on the hit and run. Janice had not been named — it was too soon for that — but the reporter had jammed plenty of information into a ten-line article. The incident had happened round about ten p.m. The driver had not stopped. It had been raining hard at the time. The police were appealing for witnesses.

  But what was not in the article was of most interest to Mullen. It did not say that the police were looking for any particular model or colour of car. In fact, Mullen realised suddenly, the article used the word ‘vehicle’ not ‘car,’ which suggested that they had no idea what they were looking for and so, presumably, they had no witness of the moment of impact. Was it really likely that no-one had seen it? Maybe so, given the weather conditions. But Mullen nevertheless felt uneasy. Was it paranoid of him to be suspicious? Chris dies in a river, his bloodstream full of alcohol when he had supposedly given it up. Janice is killed in a hit-and-run. Janice knew Chris, as did her husband Paul, not to mention Rose Wilby and Derek Stanley and plenty of other people from St Mark’s. And why had Janice tried to find him at ten p.m. on a dreadfully wet evening when half the world was tuned into the World Cup and the other half were desperately flicking channels to find a programme that didn’t involve an inflated pig’s bladder. She must have had a pressing reason to do so, something she needed to tell him. Mullen didn’t believe in coincidences. It would have to be one heck of a coincidence for Janice to just happen to be accidentally killed outside the building where he had been living. That didn’t make him a conspiracy theorist as far as he knew. And he was pretty sure he wasn’t paranoid, though now he came to think about it most paranoid people were probably unaware of it. All he knew was that something stank to high heaven.

  * * *

  Mullen took his time over a second cappuccino — followed by a second trip to the loo — before he finally headed off to look for witnesses. It wasn’t that he was reluctant to do so, more a question of timing. He wanted to give himself the best opportunity of finding people in, which meant, he reckoned, not starting until six p.m.

  He began with the terrace of old town houses in which he himself had temporarily stayed. They were all split into tiny bedsits and although a surprising number of people were in, he drew a total blank. Even Pavel, with whom Mullen had gone out for a drink a few times when he was living there, could only shrug his shoulders in sympathy. What with the foul weather, the prevalence of double glazing and the manifold a
ttractions of the TV on such a night, no-one had apparently noticed when death had come careering down the Iffley Road the previous evening. One elderly couple thought they had heard a bang, but when the man had looked out of the window, he hadn’t seen anything. One or two people had noticed the arrival of the police car and ambulance a few minutes afterwards, but that was all.

  By seven thirty, Mullen was resigned to failure as he reached the top floor of a block of tired-looking flats named after a writer Mullen had never heard of. There were two doors there, as there had been on each floor below. After this, Mullen resolved, he would give up and go home. He rang the bell of the one on the right, but no-one answered even though there was light visible underneath the door and sound coming from a TV turned up very loud. He tried the door opposite. This opened immediately.

  Mullen found himself looking at a curious-faced old woman, and he embarked on his spiel, explaining who he was and why he was there. He was expecting her at any moment to make her excuses and shut the door in his face, because that was the sort of evening he had been having. But on the contrary she beckoned silently, inviting him in as if this was something she did every night. She was notably thin, with a sharply pointed nose, a gentle voice and clothes that suggested a love of Scotland. “Do take a seat.”

  Mullen sat down in an armchair, while she manoeuvred herself into the one opposite him. Like her, the upholstery looked as though it could do with a few repairs.

  “So,” she said brightly. “You’re looking for witnesses?”

  Mullen nodded. “So far, no-one has seen anything.” He didn’t think it was going to be any different this time. The fact that she had asked him in signified nothing. He guessed she didn’t get many visitors. She was lonely and she had dragged him in for some company and a chat. Not that Mullen minded. He was almost relieved.

  “Well,” she said, “of course I didn’t see anything.”

  Mullen tried not to let his disappointment show. “Not to worry. Maybe—”

  The old woman exploded into laughter, rocking back and forth with glee. “Haven’t you noticed?”

  Mullen looked at her, nonplussed. What was so funny? And then the penny dropped. “You’re blind!” It was suddenly glaringly obvious.

  “And you claim to be a private eye!” She laughed again, delighted with the situation, but abruptly switched it off. When she spoke again, it was with the utmost seriousness. “I heard the collision, you know.”

  “You heard it?” Mullen parroted, unconvinced.

  “I may be blind, but I’m not deaf.” She spoke without any sign of the irritation that she might reasonably have felt at Mullen’s response. “Quite the contrary, I have very good hearing.”

  “Of course.” Mullen felt chastised.

  “I imagine it’s a nice smooth ride. A quiet engine, but not so quiet I couldn’t hear it.”

  Mullen frowned and then immediately wondered if she could hear a frown — or at least sense it. He hoped not.

  Sitting there, in this slightly shabby flat, Mullen saw the old woman in a new light. He was pretty sure he must have seen her before. Maybe they had passed in the street and he had walked past her without even noticing. They had lived within 50 metres of each other, yet they might as well have been living in parallel universes. Mullen felt a sense of shame, but he also, for the first time that day, felt the beginnings of something like optimism. He leant forward, as if leaning forward might help him to grasp the importance of whatever it was she might say.

  “You said you heard the collision,” he said. “Can I ask you just to talk me through exactly what you heard? Was the car going fast? Did it brake sharply? Did the driver stop and get out of his or her vehicle? All the details.”

  She leant back in her chair, and drew in a deep breath, as if trying to recollect. “It was just after ten o’clock. Maybe five past. I know because I had just finished listening to the radio. I turned it off, and opened the window. The rain was falling, but the wind had dropped. I like to listen to the city. I remember hearing some of the city bells striking the hour. Christchurch is always the last to finish. And I remember thinking how quiet it was. Not silent, you understand, it is never silent, but for Oxford it was very quiet. Then I became aware of someone in a hurry. She must have been a woman, because her heels were beating a tattoo on the pavement. As she got closer, she suddenly stopped, and then after a pause I heard her heels again, only the sound was slightly different. I think she must have been crossing the road, from the far side to the near side. Then I heard the car. I hadn’t noticed it before, but the engine growled sharply as if the driver had rammed his foot on the accelerator. Then there was a thud. That must have been the poor woman being hit, though I wasn’t sure at the time exactly what was happening. The car slowed down, but only briefly, and then it drove off away from town as if nothing had happened.”

  Mullen felt a spike of excitement. “I want you to think very carefully. Are you saying that the car didn’t brake before it hit the woman?”

  She replied without delay. “Oh no, I’m quite sure of that.”

  They both fell silent. Mullen shivered and looked across to the window. It was partially open. He tried to listen to the noise outside, as she must listen to it from her small secluded world — vehicles accelerating and braking, someone hooting in the distance, young women giggling, shoes clicking on the pavements, a male voice arguing violently with itself.

  “So has that been any help?” the old woman asked eagerly.

  “Help?” Mullen said. He had been miles away, as the hamsters powering the treadmill inside his brain struggled to get up to speed. “I should say so. Do you realise what you have just described?” But that was a rhetorical question and Mullen pressed on with his own answer. “You’ve described a car suddenly accelerating as the woman started to cross the road. A car that doesn’t brake until after it has hit the person. What you’ve described isn’t an accident. It’s murder.”

  “Gosh! I suppose it is.”

  But it wasn’t only Lorna Gordon — for that was her name — who was bubbling with excitement. Mullen stood up, unable to contain himself in the armchair. He strode over to the windows and looked down to where Janice Atkinson had died. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine it as it must have been for Lorna listening to it all happen: high heels clacking, an engine roaring into life, a dull thud as the car hit Janice’s vulnerable bodywork. Mullen felt giddy and grabbed at the window frame, steadying himself.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” Lorna Gordon asked.

  And Mullen, much to his own surprise, said he would.

  * * *

  Mullen delayed his departure from Lorna Gordon’s flat for as long as he reasonably could, stringing out the mug of tea and accepting two chocolate digestives to go with it. While she chatted away, first about the hit-and-run and then about her grandson, Mullen’s thoughts drifted. They centred initially on the prosaic task of getting home: he would have to walk into the city centre to get a bus out to Boars Hill. He wondered how frequent they were. But soon his ruminations moved on to Chris. Mullen realised with a start how little he had achieved in his investigation, though the word investigation seemed rather overblown for what he was doing. What exactly had he found out? Very little, except to establish that someone had been so annoyed by his attempts to track down where Chris had been living that they had slugged him over the head with something blunt and heavy. Mullen felt his bandaged head and resolved to take the thing off when he got home.

  “Would you like another one?” Lorna Gordon leant down to pick up his empty mug.

  “I really must be going.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  Mullen stood up, but she hadn’t finished yet.

  “Are you going to tell the police?”

  Mullen hesitated. He didn’t like lying, especially to a woman as nice as Lorna. It went against all his instincts. And yet there were other moral imperatives by which he lived, such as protecting the weak. The last thing he wanted t
o do was to cause the police to come round and question her. The whole scenario made him feel uneasy.

  “Well?” The old woman wanted an answer.

  “Yes, of course I am. Don’t you worry, I will tell them everything.”

  Mullen shook her hand and left, promising to come back and tell her all about it when they had caught Janice’s killer. And when he said that, he really did mean it. One lie was enough.

  * * *

  Outside on the pavement, it was pleasantly warm. A gaggle of students in shorts and t-shirts walked past, heading out of town, talking animatedly. Mullen didn’t take in what it was that had so caught their imagination because his eyes and attention were fixed on two figures who had, like him, just exited a building some 50 metres away, nearer town. The light was beginning to fade, but Mullen’s eyes were keen enough to recognise the profiles — one tall, heavily muscled man in a suit and another shorter one, also in a suit, with untidy hair and an aquiline nose. Fargo and Dorkin. Mullen slipped into the shadows. On another day and in another place, he might have carried on walking right past them with a cheery greeting. But not tonight, not when they had just walked out of the building in which he had lived. What were they doing there? Checking his room? It seemed unlikely. Asking questions about him? It was much more likely that they had been checking him out. When exactly he had moved in and moved out, who he had socialised with, what visitors he had had.

  The two detectives started walking towards town, little and large, still talking, to judge from the hand movements, though whether they were discussing work or the World Cup was anyone’s guess. Across the road a couple walked arm in arm in the same direction, hurrying as fast as the woman’s heels allowed. Mullen crossed over and settled in a few metres behind, using them as a protective screen. Not that he needed it. Fargo turned right at the next side street while Dorkin continued straight on without so much as a backward glance. He was walking faster now, a man on a mission to get home maybe.