Dead in the Water

by Peter Tickler

Dorkin nodded. He deserved this. It served him right for standing out here on the roadside while his colleagues did all the work inside the house.

  “You know who Derek Stanley is?” she pressed.

  Dorkin nodded. “From your church.”

  “He’s my mother’s special friend. That’s what she calls him anyway.”

  Dorkin dropped his cigarette on the ground and crushed it with his left foot. “It’s not a criminal offence to park in a pub car-park.” He regretted the remark as soon as he had made it. It was hardly going to calm the woman down.

  “I’ve just spoken to my mother. According to her, Derek Stanley has gone to the south coast for the weekend to sail with his friend, Archie. So the question is, what on earth is his car doing parked here in Boars Hill?”

  “Are you sure it is his car?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s probably a simple explanation.”

  It was a bland, patronising statement and it proved to be the last straw. Rose’s red face turned deep crimson. “Do I look like a fool, Inspector? Do you think all women are fools? Do you think your rank confers on you a superior intellect above all others?”

  Dorkin flinched.

  “Derek Stanley has lied to my mother. He has parked his car here in Boars Hill, not more than a mile away from Mullen’s house, where a woman has been seriously drugged and from which Mullen has disappeared. Maybe you should consider the possibility that these various facts are interconnected.”

  Dorkin ran his hand over his thinning hair as he prepared his reply. He knew Rose wouldn’t like it. “The most obvious connection is—” But Dorkin never completed his sentence.

  “Sir!” A panting Fargo had come jogging down the drive. He was in his white overalls, but his face, like Rose’s, was puce. “We’ve found something.”

  “What?”

  “Two sets of footprints in the garden where the vegetables are. Fresh ones. Almost certainly this morning we reckon.” Fargo paused, panting.

  “What size?” Dorkin snapped.

  “One is size ten and the other size eight.”

  “Does either match Becca Baines?”

  “I’ve just rung the hospital. She’s a six.”

  “What is Mullen’s foot size?” Dorkin demanded of Fargo. The sergeant wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and shrugged. Dorkin turned his gaze to Rose. “Would you happen to know?”

  “Ten sounds about right, I’d say. But if you check his bedroom upstairs . . .”

  Dorkin swung back to face Fargo, infuriated by the woman’s common sense. “Haven’t you checked that already, Sergeant? Mullen lives in the house. He must have shoes there unless he has taken them all with him.”

  Fargo shook his head.

  “Then do so.”

  Dorkin watched Fargo lumber back up the slope towards the house. He could feel Rose Wilby’s presence next to him, ready to smile patronisingly and tell him how stupid the police were. If that was what was in her head, he wouldn’t blame her. He turned towards her, but there was merely a deep frown that creased her forehead. “My mother bought Derek a pair of shoes for his last birthday. She asked me for my advice.” She paused, as if she was making sure of her facts. “I’m almost certain they were size eights.”

  * * *

  Mullen’s first conscious thought was that at least he was not dead. His second one, however, was that maybe it wouldn’t be long before he was. The fact was he couldn’t see a thing. His eyes were open — or at least he thought they were — but everything was black. He listened, searching for clues to where he might be. There was nothing beyond his own breathing.

  He tried to remember what had happened. He recalled blundering round the garden, feeling more and more like an elephant on ice. Something had been wrong. He had seen something that was seriously wrong. But then nothing. The word rohypnol floated around his brain. Rohypnol and Chris. Rohypnol and Janice. Rohypnol which knocked you out and expunged your memory. He shut his eyes — or were they already shut? — and drifted back into sleep.

  * * *

  The depression that had hung over Dorkin like a Thames Valley fog had disappeared, blown gently away by a woman with a round face, dark curly hair and a determination not to go home. He had suggested to Rose that she might like to leave it to them — the ‘professionals’ was the word he had stupidly used — but her disbelieving look almost made him apologise for the suggestion. He didn’t blame her for a moment. He hadn’t wanted her to contaminate the scene, so he had taken her away from the Cedars, crossing the main road and entering the grass field opposite. There was a new bench some fifty metres from the gateway and he had led her there. They had sat down and his hand had started feeling in his pocket before he realised that he had no urge to light up another cigarette.

  For a minute or even two they sat in silence, looking across towards Oxford, each lost in their own thoughts. And the one thought which kept surfacing at the top of Dorkin’s brain was a simple one: I need this woman.

  Eventually he broke the silence. “Tell me about Derek Stanley.”

  “Can you be more precise?”

  “What does he do for a living? What does he spend his time doing when he’s not working? Where does he live? What I’m trying to work out is where he might be now. He’s parked his car at the Fox. He’s made his way to the Cedars on foot. Let’s suppose that somehow he has drugged both Becca Baines and Doug Mullen. Mullen’s car is missing. I am guessing Stanley wants us to assume what we did assume, namely that it was Mullen that drugged Becca — and Chris and Janice too of course — and that now Mullen has done a runner. So what is Stanley going to do next?”

  Dorkin paused briefly. It wasn’t a proper question, more a case of him thinking out loud, but Rose Wilby answered it anyway. She spoke quietly. “He’s going to kill Doug and bury him somewhere he won’t be found . . .”

  “Or maybe make it look like suicide,” Dorkin said. “If he did that, he wouldn’t have to worry about disposing of the car. It’s harder to make a car disappear without trace than a body.”

  Rose began to cry. Silent sobs shook her body.

  “We can save Mullen if we can find him.” Dorkin held out a hope that he didn’t feel. “Time is against us, but he’s only been missing an hour or two. So I need you to think. The chances are that they are not far away. Stanley will know that if he drives Mullen’s car too far, he is at risk of being caught on camera and picked up by us. We will be looking for Mullen’s car because we’ll be looking for Mullen. Unless Stanley intends to disappear himself, he needs to return for his car so he can drive back home as if nothing had happened. So what I want you to tell me is did Stanley have any favourite places he used to go? A wood maybe. A cottage in the countryside.” Dorkin dribbled to a halt. He had run out of suggestions. There was plenty of woodland up here on Boars Hill, he told himself, but there were plenty of big houses too. It was hardly an ideal place for Stanley to hold and kill Mullen. But if they were going to lay on a search, they had to start somewhere — assuming, of course, that he was given the manpower to do so.

  Rose Wilby stood up very suddenly and clapped her hands together. “Of course! Savernake Forest. He goes there two or three times a year.”

  Dorkin looked at her. His first reaction was negative: Savernake Forest was a heck of a long way away if Stanley was intending to make his way back to Boars Hill to collect his own car.

  “You remember the Hungerford massacre?” Rose pinioned Dorkin with her intense gaze. “Michael Ryan ran amok in Hungerford. But the first killing took place in Savernake Forest. Stanley’s sister was living in Hungerford at the time. She was injured by a shot through her window. Nothing critical, but she was so traumatised that she committed suicide a year later. Anyway Derek goes back there every anniversary of her death. It’s like a pilgrimage. He goes other times too. Sometimes he camps out in the woods.”

  “So he’ll know it really well.”

  “I would have thought so.”

  Dorkin
stood up. “That’s where we’ll start then. Unless the team have turned up anything else that points towards another direction.”

  They strode side by side back to the little swing gate, across the road and along the pavement to the Cedars. Not for the first time that day, a red-faced Fargo came hurrying down the drive. This time there was a grin on his face. “Mullen’s car, Guv. The guys have got a fix on it. It went down the A34 and then west along the M4. We’ve got only one sighting on the M4, so they may have exited before they got as far as Swindon.”

  “Get out of those overalls,” Dorkin snapped. “They’ve gone to Savernake Forest. And we need to organise some back-up.”

  Fargo stared at him. “Savernake?”

  “Don’t stand there gawping, Sergeant. We’ve got a killer to catch.”

  * * *

  Mullen was buried deep underground. He had to be. It was so silent and so dark. He began to feel panic crawling over him, like a giant spider. Oh God! He tried to thrust his head upwards, as far as his bonds would allow, dreading the moment when his head made contact with the lid of the coffin and confirmed his worst fears. Nothing. He tried again, straining even harder to stretch his neck that bit further, but again all he encountered was air. Stale air, but air nevertheless. Air! If he was entombed in a coffin underground, there wouldn’t be any air worth speaking of and he would surely have used it all up by now. He would be dead, whereas he most certainly wasn’t. He felt an absurd sense of relief, absurd because he knew with certainty that his chances of getting out were virtually nil. He lay back and listened to his own breathing as it returned to normal after his exertions.

  He heard another noise. It was a mechanical noise, a scraping sound, a key in a lock he thought. There was another noise, of an unoiled door squeaking open. A light flashed into his face. He shut his eyes and tried to turn away.

  “Awake at last.”

  Mullen said nothing, largely because he couldn’t. There was a gag digging into his mouth.

  “Thought I had overdone it. Thought I had lost you. The problem was I didn’t have a clue how much you’d drink, so I had to put plenty of rohypnol in the bottle.”

  Stanley giggled. “It was bloody neat the way you both drank it. Couldn’t have worked out better! You leave her dosed up on the floor and you disappear. A day or two later a walker finds you here in the woods, hanging from a tree. Your last text message is a single word: ‘Sorry.’ But it’s a word that says it all: sorry for Becca, sorry for Chris, sorry for Janice. As far as the police are concerned, it’s case closed.”

  Stanley moved closer to him and began to loosen the ropes that were holding Mullen captive. “I’ve got a Taser, so one wrong move and I let you have it in the neck.”

  Mullen couldn’t make any moves, let alone a wrong one. When Stanley told him to get up, his ankles were still hobbled and his hands tied behind his back. He would have to bide his time. There would come a moment when he could make a move. He had to be ready for that split-second opportunity. He had to believe that his chance would come. And yet Stanley’s professionalism told him differently. There were no real clues as to where he had been held all this time — nor did Mullen have any idea how long he had been there. All he knew was that he was aching worse than he could ever recall aching before.

  Stanley had put a noose round his neck and was leading him by the rope through a door. “If you try anything stupid, I’ll burn you alive. Got it? So it’s your choice. What sort of death do you want?”

  It was dark outside. Not pitch dark, but dark enough. Half-nine or ten Mullen reckoned. So not much chance of running into any dog walkers. He was on his own.

  They stopped after Mullen had shuffled maybe a hundred metres. Stanley began to wrap the rope around the branch of a tree. Mullen struggled to understand at first. How could Stanley hang him from there? And then he noticed through the darkness what was on the other side of the tree. Nothing. Empty space. The tree was on the edge of a cliff. Not a Cornish-style coastal cliff, but there was enough of a drop for what Stanley was planning. Perhaps twenty metres. After that there would be only oblivion.

  “Do you know why I did it?” Stanley seemed to want an answer. He stood in front of Mullen, keeping his distance, and demanded a response. “Well?”

  Mullen thought he knew, but he shook his head. It was a case of anything to delay the end, to gain a bit of time. If Stanley was busy talking, he might let his guard down and make a mistake. If Mullen could get him close enough, maybe he could head-butt him — knock him down and kick him over the edge, though how easy it would be to kick with two feet bound close together and his hands tied behind his back was something Mullen tried not to think about too deeply.

  “Chris was a bastard.” Stanley spoke clearly and precisely. “He turned up at the church and played us all for fools. A down and out. Fallen on hard times. Disowned by his family. Not that he talked about his family because that would have given the game away. Even so I think Margaret recognised him quite early on. And he knew her all right. That was why he had come to Oxford, to apply a bit of pressure on her. In a word, blackmail. You see, Margaret had had an affair with Chris’s father, James, and Rose was the result of that liaison. They kept it secret, but James died six months ago and before he died he told Chris. Perhaps he thought it would be nice if Chris and Rose met up. Or maybe not. Anyway, the fact is that James was a wastrel and by the time his debts had been paid, there wasn’t much left over for Chris.”

  Mullen was watching Stanley closely. He was listening because Stanley wanted him to, but at the same time he was waiting for an opportunity. If only he could induce the man to come really close.

  Now that he had started, Stanley was clearly not going to stop until he got to the end. “Chris was a charmer, as his father had been. Everyone in the church was conned, except for Margaret of course. He wanted money, you see. Lots of money. Margaret offered him a little to go away, but a little wasn’t enough for him. So he used his charm on Rose. Helping her in church, flirting politely, ever the gentleman fallen on hard times. And Rose, the silly woman, was taken in.

  That was when Margaret panicked. The idea of the two of them having sexual relations was just too much. She told me, of course. I was her confidant. She swore me to secrecy and I respected that. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t do something about it. I didn’t tell Margaret. It is better and safer to work on your own. And so I did. After I had killed Chris, Janice got suspicious and started asking questions. That was unfortunate.” He paused as he considered what he had said. “Anyway, I had no option but to silence her. And after Janice you came sniffing around.” He swallowed. There was a howling noise in the dark and he cocked his head. He smiled. “Just a fox,” he said. “It’s nothing to worry about.”

  Mullen lunged forward. It was now or never. Time was running out fast and Stanley had drifted fractionally closer. But Stanley was quick, much quicker than Mullen could be with his limbs tied. The next thing he knew Stanley had tugged at the rope around his neck and he was falling to the ground. His head cracked against something hard and almost immediately he tasted blood.

  “Stupid man!” Stanley screamed out the words. “What do you take me for? An idiot?”

  Stanley dragged at the rope again. The pain in Mullen’s neck was excruciating. “Up, damn you. Say your prayers.” Stanley was shouting and Mullen felt saliva spatter across his face. “Your time is up, Doug!”

  Stanley yanked on the rope once more. Pain jagged into his neck. Mullen wanted to cry out and say something, but the gag round his mouth was far too tight. Instead he resisted as best he could. Lying on the ground, he began to roll and jerk his body with all his remaining strength. Stanley would have to drag him to the edge. He wasn’t going to make it easy for him.

  Then out of the darkness came another noise. Not the call of a fox this time, but a sharp crack. It was followed almost immediately by two more cracks as more bullets found their mark. The pressure on Mullen’s neck slackened and Derek Stanley slump
ed to the ground, his body falling like a sack of corn across Mullen’s legs.

  Epilogue

  Mullen was halfway between sleep and wakefulness. He seemed to be sleeping a lot lately. And dreaming. He opened his eyes briefly and shut them again. It was so bright. He didn’t mind the darkness. ‘To sleep, perchance to dream.’ Mullen wasn’t exactly the world’s most literary person, but the words of Shakespeare floated up from somewhere in his past. His dreams were much nicer than they used to be. No visions of Ben. Not that he could remember his dreams, except as being pleasant, unthreatening. A nurse in a navy blue uniform was the only feature that had stuck in his mind. Or maybe she was real . . .

  When he woke next, he opened his eyes and again shut them almost immediately. He had visitors standing at the end of the bed. He didn’t feel like visitors. He didn’t want to be questioned about what had happened or how he felt. He didn’t want to be asked if he wanted anything. Not even when the visitors were Rose Wilby and Becca Baines. If anyone had interrupted his dreams to ask him who he would like to visit him, the two of them would have been top of the list, but definitely not at the same time. The two of them together was far too complicated.

  Perhaps they had noticed his change of state for he could sense them moving closer to him along the bed until they stood either side of him. Which one was Becca and which one was Rose he wasn’t sure, but he had no intention of opening his eyes to find out. He could smell their different scents. Perhaps he ought to have been able recognise which smell belonged to which of his bedside admirers, but he struggled to be the sort of man who noticed such things.

  “He looks cute doesn’t he?”

  “Like a little boy, all tucked in his bed.”

  “Bless!”

  Mullen wasn’t sure he could differentiate the voices, let alone the perfume. Which was pretty ridiculous, he told himself. Maybe this was the consequence of his ordeal — shock or concussion or something.

  “Are you sleeping with him?”

  “No. Are you?”