by Ann Granger
Ahead of me the river took a fork away to the left. Alerted, I kept my eyes peeled and soon came upon the stone steps. They looked solid enough but slippery and the lower ones were underwater. The boat which must once have been moored here had gone, but instead something else nestled against the bottom steps. The river caressed this object gently and the undulating current brought it momentarily up to break the surface hump-backed before descending again to be almost completely submerged, a hazy outline beneath the river’s green veil.
I stopped, took my hands from my pockets and stared down in numb disbelief. The object rose again, breaking the surface, and there was no doubt about it. A human being floated face down in the river. The water streamed away from the white glistening shoulders. The legs still trailed down in the depths. I couldn’t see the face.
I felt the blood draining from my cheeks. I couldn’t move, frozen by an ancient innate terror at the sight of death. I was in a silent world in which no birds sang and the river ran without noise. I almost seemed to be someone else, an onlooker observing both myself and the object of my paralysis.
Then the blood rushed back into my face so that it glowed with heat. The birdsong returned, unnaturally loud. The gentle river sounds seemed those of a roaring torrent. Following numbness my brain went into a frenzy of activity, sending conflicting messages until my whole thinking process was completely clogged. I struggled to disentangle them. It had to be some kind of optical illusion, a mistake. This was impossible. Surely some prankster had tossed a dummy in there as a sick practical joke. Then, after shock and incredulity, my brain told me that at least it wasn’t Lisa. She hadn’t struck me as being the suicidal type but one never knew. This, whatever it was, real or not, but increasingly I feared it was real, was both too big to be a dummy figure or to be Lisa. For that at least I felt a spurt of relief. This in turn helped to steady me and enable me to take another look.
It - he - was almost certainly a man, a big bloke at that. His legs, clad in what looked like red silk running shorts, trailed in the water, his upper body wore a sodden running vest clinging to the skin. His arms were spread out to either side of him. His face was well down in the river, only the back of his head showing, covered with wet short-cropped blond hair.
I tried to persuade myself, although instinct told me it was untrue, that he wasn’t dead. He was a swimmer. Why he should be swimming in the river in such an awkward pose, how he could breathe without snorkel apparatus, these things I thrust briefly to the back of my mind. Then reality hit and with it panic. I stumbled back and tripped over a fallen branch; my feet became entangled in it and I lost all balance, landing painfully on my backside.
The pain brought me to my senses. Pull yourself together, Fran! I ordered myself. I needed to call the police. I had Ganesh’s mobile phone on me. Dial 999, that’s all I had to do, and wait until help got here.
Then I remembered Lisa again. At any moment now she’d be walking down that riverside path towards me - and the thing in the river. She mustn’t see it. She mustn’t get involved, be a witness and have to make a statement to the police when they got here as I would have to do. Mickey would be furious and he’d blame me. Think, Fran, think! Call the cops. Then go back the way I’d come and head her off before she got near enough to see anything. I pulled out the phone and hesitated. Ought I to try and drag him to the edge, raise his head from the water? If he’d just gone in, he might yet be saved.
I descended the steps cautiously, crouched and stretched out my hand. Water lapped about my feet and suddenly, on the step’s coating of green slime, I lost my footing. I had no time to save myself and, with a resounding splash, tumbled head first into the murky green river to join the drowned man.
The mobile phone slipped from my grip and sank to the river bed almost without my realising it. I threshed about in panic. I can swim but swimming with a corpse was a new experience. Horribly I bumped against him. The body rose on the swell of the disturbed water, the face appeared briefly and I found myself staring into Ivo’s dead eyes before his features sank back out of sight in the green soup.
I struck out for the bank and as I did I became aware of an approaching sound, a creak of wood and swish of water, signifying company. A punt was approaching, a girl sitting in it, the boy standing and manipulating the pole.
Seeing me struggling in the water he stopped propelling his unwieldy craft and I saw they were my fellow guests at Beryl’s, the two young Americans.
‘Hey!’ the boy called out. ‘You all right there?’ Then he saw the partly submerged form beside me. ‘How about your friend, is he OK?’
He realised this was a foolish question even as he spoke. He turned, passed the pole to the girl and was obviously preparing to jump into the water in some sort of rescue attempt such as had hazily entered my mind and led to my present predicament.
‘Stay there!’ I yelled.
The girl had seen the body now. She let out a piercing scream which sent the river fowl flapping away in panic. The punt lurched and swung round as she stood up. ‘It’s a body!’ she shouted, pointing. ‘Ohmigod, it’s a body!’ Then pointing wildly at me she added, ‘What happened here? What have you done?’
Chapter Six
‘I haven’t done anything!’ I spluttered at her. ‘I fell in.’
‘How?’ she demanded, fixing me with a no-nonsense look.
It occurred to me she was a person who concentrated on details and managed to miss the big picture. Why did it matter how? There must have been a dozen possible ways and any one of them would do. In the meantime, I was floundering in the river with a corpse. But now the girl moved on with inexorable logic to how Ivo had fallen in. That was of interest to me, too. I’d be doing a lot of thinking about that. But later, not right now.
‘Were you with him?’ she pursued in her one-track way. ‘How did he get there? What were you two doing, fooling around? You shouldn’t do that, close to water. Don’t you know an adult can drown in four inches of water? All you need to be is face down.’
I suppose I could have stayed there until I drowned too, just to satisfy her with a practical demonstration. But I couldn’t be bothered with all these questions at a time like this and I didn’t need their help to get myself to safety. I struggled to the steps and crawled out, soaking wet, smelling less than fragrant and feeling sick. I’d swallowed a pint of river water and I’d been sharing my unwanted bath with a drowned man. I staggered towards the trees and threw up violently.
By the time I was able to pay attention to what was going on behind me, the American boy had managed to get his punt to the bank. He climbed out and secured it and was talking crisply into a mobile phone. That made me realise I’d lost Ganesh’s. It was down there in the water beneath Ivo and if the police searched the area of the river, as they well might, they’d find it and they’d trace it back to Ganesh. The girl had also managed to get ashore and was standing well back from the river edge, arms folded. Her look of dismay had been replaced by one of suspicious reproach, like my old headmistress when I was called up before her yet again for some misdemeanour.
You again, Francesca . . .
Yes, me again.
‘Hey,’ said the boy. ‘You’ll catch cold. Take off that shirt. You can have my jacket. Just a moment.’ He knelt on the bank, reached down into his punt and pulled out a blue cotton top, handing it to me. She was all theory but he was a practical type.
I struggled out of my wet shirt, while he averted his eyes in a gentlemanly manner, and pulled on the jacket. It improved the situation but not much. The girl gave him a look which clearly said, ‘You won’t see that jacket again or, if you do, it will be unwearable.’
‘I called the police,’ he said. ‘My name is Tom, by the way. I know you’re also staying at our guest house. This is Maryann.’ He indicated the girl.
Maryann was standing there, arms folded and still in inquisitorial mode. ‘How did he fall in?’ she demanded again.
She wasn’t going to let it
go. She had me tagged as prime suspect, that was clear. I decided that either she belonged to some fundamentalist sect which believed in public confession or she was a student of psychiatry and believed you should dig your secrets out of the closet and face them. What she’d be good at was playing one of those interrogators in thrillers who shine lights in captives’ faces. It would be the sort of thing, I felt, which would come naturally to her.
‘How the hell should I know?’ I snapped back. ‘He was in there when I found him.’ I turned from her to her boyfriend, who at least had spared me stupid questions. ‘My name’s Fran,’ I told him.
‘What we have to do now, Fran,’ said Tom with what seemed to me ill-placed confidence, ‘is to secure the scene. We apparently have here an unexplained fatality.’
‘Tom’s dad is in homicide,’ chimed in Maryann, fixing me with a grim eye. She said it as she might have said Beryl was in the guest-house business and Mr Filigrew in office supplies. Did she mean he was a hit man?
No, it turned out he was a detective in the NYPD, one of New York’s finest. And yes, Tom knew all about keeping people from trampling the area and destroying evidence.
‘Although,’ he said, ‘it’s probably an accident.’
‘Perhaps he was mugged,’ said Maryann, still staring at me.
Now I had it worked out. These two were playing a version of good cop, bad cop. But even Tom had had enough of her techniques.
‘Heck, Maryann, who mugs a guy in running shorts? Where’d he keep his wallet? He probably had a heart attack and toppled over. These guys who work all day in an office, they suddenly think they’ll get fit and start a running regime. They don’t monitor their pulse or anything. One day they’re jogging along and—’ Tom clicked his fingers. ‘Over they go.’
‘He looks kind of fit already,’ said Maryann, peering towards the floating body with an expression of distaste. ‘I think he was mugged. Probably the attacker was on drugs. He could be a homicidal maniac. Maybe a serial killer. Have they had any other unexplained deaths lately around here?’
‘Maryann, listen to me, willya? These guys drop dead in Central Park all the time.’
While all this was going on, I was keeping a nervous eye open for the approach of Lisa and the police, though preferably not in that order. If the police got here first, they wouldn’t let her get near the scene. Tom was right about that. This was an unexplained death and they’d secure the area as a first procedure. But I’d also been through this before. I realised everything would be frozen as they found it. Nobody in. Nobody out. That meant that if Lisa was already in the vicinity when the police turned up, they wouldn’t let her leave. They would put yards of blue tape round everything, crawl all over the ground looking for clues and signs of a struggle and take statements until their little notebooks were all filled up.
If I was sure of anything at this moment, and I wasn’t sure of much, it was at least that Mickey Allerton didn’t want Lisa making statements to the cops. That was why I was praying the police arrived first.
Someone was coming, not uniforms but the two academic types I’d seen earlier. They were still strolling along deep in discussion. Tom moved to intercept them by standing on the path and spreading out his arms.
‘Don’t come any further, folks, there’s been a little accident. Now it’s nothing to worry about. The police are on their way. Just stay right there. Don’t mess up the scene.’
Predictably, this didn’t have the intended effect. Neither of the men liked having their conversation interrupted by a complete stranger and neither of them, from the look of them, was used to taking orders.
‘Nonsense,’ said one of them sharply. ‘What kind of accident?’
‘Somebody drowned,’ called Maryann. ‘He’s in the river, there.’ She pointed.
The academic gentleman took off his glasses and peered in that direction. ‘Ah yes, I see. Pull him out. We should try artificial respiration.’
‘He’s dead, sir, I’m afraid.’ This from Tom the ever-confident.
‘How do you know? Are you a doctor?’ The academic type was disposed to dispute.
A couple more people arrived and wanted to know why the path was blocked. They were told there was a body in the river. Voices were raised in a well-bred English sort of way. This was Oxford, after all. Oh, how dreadful! Where was it? Ought not we to pull him out and try artificial respiration? It was remarkable how long someone could be submerged and still be resuscitated.
‘He was mugged,’ said Maryann. Presumably she had reached this conclusion by her own lurid processes of deduction.
‘We don’t know that, Maryann,’ said Tom wearily. I wondered if their relationship would survive this morning’s events.
But she had successfully stirred things up and that, I reasoned, was what she wanted to do.
More people, tourists, arrived. Cameras whirred. Voices rose in a babble of tongues. The English ones demanded, What? Had the police been called? This was a very quiet area. Muggings were almost unknown. Where was the mugger? Someone then observed me, standing damply to one side. Who was the other young woman? Had she also fallen in the water? She looked rather wet.
‘We ought to pull him out and try and resuscitate him.’ This was the first man, ignoring the questions raining in from all angles. Whatever Maryann thought of me, he obviously considered I was of no importance whatsoever. ‘There is, of course, always a possibility of brain damage after a certain time. Speed is of the essence.’
There was a murmur of agreement although no one seemed disposed to leap in the river and manhandle the body ashore. As for me, whatever passing interest I had provoked in the crowd, it had been displaced. One soggy female couldn’t be expected to hold the attention in the way a genuine corpse could.
‘He probably had a heart attack.’ Tom was sticking to his guns. I also suspected that he wasn’t going to relinquish his role of Person in Charge without a fight. The academic gent responded with alacrity.
‘Young man, you seem very fond of giving medical opinions. I ask you again, are you qualified as a doctor?’ The academic gentleman had metaphorically rolled up his sleeves. He resented Tom taking charge. That, he clearly felt, was his role in life.
‘No, sir, I’m a computer—’
‘Oh, really? Studying computers? At this university?’
‘No, sir, at—’
‘Oh, not at this university. A pity. Which university? Oh, an American one. I see.’
The crowd was increasing. Considering there had been so few people about when I’d arrived earlier, now they were coming from all directions and were growing ever more excitable and fractious. Tom, like Horatius on the bridge, kept them all back.
At that moment my searching gaze landed on Lisa. She had joined the fringe of the crowd and was standing there, her mouth open in puzzled dismay. I managed to catch her eye and frowned ferociously at her. She got the message and melted away. I heaved a sigh of relief. It wasn’t a moment too soon. The police had arrived.
There were two of them. They were surrounded in an instant by a jabbering crowd of helpful onlookers. A couple of the women in the crowd decided it was the moment to become upset. One of them burst into tears, her bosom heaving melodramatically. Her friend, clearly annoyed that she hadn’t managed to burst into tears first, led her to one side with a consoling arm round her shoulders.
‘Quite so, my dear,’ said the academic gentleman to the lady with the heaving bosom. ‘Feeling faint, I dare say. Sit down and put your head between your knees.’
She stopped sobbing long enough to give him a remarkably dirty look. I left them to it and went to sit down on a convenient log. One of the officers took off his boots and jacket and lowered himself into the water. He pulled Ivo to the bank, as I’d hoped to do, and with the help of his partner got him ashore.
An ambulance was now bouncing its way towards us across the grass. The police were trying to sort out who had been on the scene when the body was found and who had just turned
up later. They got rid of the sightseers with the exception of the academic gentlemen, the talkative one of whom insisted he was allowed to make a statement about being prevented from trying artificial respiration on the deceased by a person qualified only in computers.
They promised they’d talk to him in a minute.
‘Who found him?’ the drier of the coppers asked, staring at Tom and Maryann. ‘Was it you?’