by Tom Sharpe
‘A woman?’ he said. ‘What? Down that hole? What’s she doing down there?’
The foreman stared at him demonically. ‘Doing?’ he bellowed, ‘what do you think she’s doing? What would you be doing if you’d just had twenty tons of liquid concrete dumped on top of you? Fucking drowning, that’s what.’
The driver scratched his head. ‘Well I didn’t know she was down there. How was I to know? You should have told me.’
‘Told you?’ shrieked the foreman. ‘I told you. I told you to stop. You weren’t listening.’
‘I thought you wanted me to pour faster. I couldn’t hear what you were saying.’
‘Well, every other bugger could,’ yelled the foreman. Certainly Wilt in Room 593 could. He stared wild-eyed out of the window as the panic spread. Beside him Motor Mechanics Three had lost all interest in Shane. They clustered at the window and watched.
‘Are you quite sure?’ asked the driver.
‘Sure? Course I’m sure,’ yelled the foreman. ‘Ask Barney.’
The other workman, evidently Barney, nodded. ‘She was down there all right. I’ll vouch for that. All crumpled up she was. She had one hand up in the air and her legs was …’
‘Jesus,’ said the driver, visibly shaken. ‘What the hell are we going to do now?’
It was a question that had been bothering Wilt. Call the police, presumably. The foreman confirmed his opinion. ‘Get the cops. Get an ambulance. Get the Fire Brigade and get a pump. For God’s sake get a pump.’
‘Pump’s no good,’ said the driver, ‘you’ll never pump that concrete out of there, not in a month of Sundays. Anyway it wouldn’t do any good. She’ll be dead by now. Crushed to death. Wouldn’t drown with twenty tons on her. Why didn’t she say something?’
‘Would it have made any difference If she had?’ asked the foreman hoarsely. ‘You’d have still gone on pouring.’
‘Well, how did she get down there in the first place?’ said the driver, to change the subject.
‘How the fuck would I know. She must have fallen …’
‘And pulled that plywood sheet over her, I suppose,’ said Barney, who clearly had a practical turn of mind. ‘She was bloody murdered.’
‘We all know that,’ squawked the foreman. ‘By Chris here. I told him to stop pouring. You heard me. Everyone for half a mile must have heard me but not Chris. Oh, no, he has to go on—’
‘She was murdered before she was put down the hole,’ said Barney. ‘That wooden cover wouldn’t have been there if she had fallen down herself.’
The foreman wiped his face with a handkerchief and looked at the square of plywood. ‘There is that to it,’ he muttered. ‘No one can say we didn’t take proper safety precautions. You’re right. She must have been murdered. Oh, my God!’
‘Sex crime, like as not,’ said Barney. ‘Raped and strangled her. That or someone’s missus. You mark my words. She was all crumpled up and that hand … I’ll never forget that hand, not if I live to be a hundred.’
The foreman stared at him lividly. He seemed incapable of expressing his feelings. So was Wilt. He went back to his desk and sat with his head in his hands while the class gaped out of the window and tried to catch what was being said. Presently sirens sounded in the distance and grew louder. A police car arrived, four fire engines hurtled into the car park and an ambulance followed. As more and more uniformed men gathered around what had once been a hole in the ground it became apparent that getting the doll down there had been a damned sight easier than getting it out.
‘That concrete starts setting in twenty minutes,’ the driver explained when a pump was suggested for the umpteenth time. An Inspector of Police and the Fire Chief stared down at the hole.
‘Are you sure you saw a woman’s body down there?’ the Inspector asked. ‘You’re positive about it?’
‘Positive?’ squeaked the foreman. ‘Course I’m positive. You don’t think … Tell them, Barney. He saw her too.’
Barney told the Inspector even more graphically than before. ‘She had this hair see and her hand was reaching up like it was asking for help and there were these fingers … I tell you it was horrible. It didn’t look natural.’
‘No, well, it wouldn’t,’ said the Inspector sympathetically. ‘And you say there was a board on top of the hole when you arrived this morning.’
The foreman gesticulated silently and Barney showed them the board. ‘I was standing on it at one time,’ he said. ‘It was here all right so help me God.’
‘The thing is, how are we to get her out?’ said the Fire Chief. It was a point that was put to the manager of the construction company when he finally arrived on the scene. ‘God alone knows,’ he said. ‘There’s no easy way of getting that concrete out now. We’d have to use drills to get down thirty feet.’
At the end of the hour they were no nearer a solution to the problem. As the Motor Mechanics dragged themselves away from this fascinating situation to go to Technical Drawing, Wilt collected the unread copies of Shane and walked across to the Staff Room in a state of shock. The only consolation he could think of was that it would take them at least two or three days to dig down and discover that what had all the appearances of being the body of a murdered woman was in fact an inflatable doll. Or had been once. Wilt rather doubted if it would be inflated now. There had been something horribly intractable about that liquid concrete.
8
There was something horribly intractable about the mudbank on which the cabin cruiser had grounded. To add to their troubles the engine had gone wrong. Gaskell said it was a broken con rod.
‘Is that serious?’ asked Sally.
‘It just means we’ll have to be towed to a boatyard.’
‘By what?’
‘By a passing cruiser I guess,’ said Gaskell.
Sally looked over the side at the bullrushes.
‘Passing?’ she said. ‘We’ve been here all night and half the morning and nothing has passed so far and if it did we wouldn’t be able to see it for all these fucking bullrushes.’
‘I thought bullrushes did something for you.’
‘That was yesterday,’ snapped Sally. ‘Today they just mean we’re invisible to anyone more than fifty feet away. And now you’ve screwed the motor. I told you not to rev it like that.’
‘So how was I to know it would bust a con rod,’ said Gaskell. ‘I was just trying to get us off this mudbank. You just tell me how I’m supposed to do it without revving the goddam motor.’
‘You could get out and push.’
Gaskell peered over the side. ‘I could get out and drown,’ he said.
‘So the boat would be lighter,’ said Sally. ‘We’ve all got to make sacrifices and you said the tide would float us off.’
‘Well I was mistaken. That’s fresh water down there and means the tide doesn’t reach this far.’
‘Now he tells me. First we’re in Frogwater Beach …’
‘Reach,’ said Gaskell.
‘Frogwater wherever. Then we’re in Fen Broad. Now where are we for God’s sake?’
‘On a mudbank,’ said Gaskell.
*
In the cabin Eva bustled about. There wasn’t much space for bustling but what there was she put to good use. She made the bunks and put the bedding away in the lockers underneath and she plumped the cushions and emptied the ashtrays. She swept the floor and polished the table and wiped the windows and dusted the shelves and generally made everything as neat and tidy as it was possible to make it. And all the time her thoughts got untidier and more muddled so that by the time she was finished and every object in sight was in its right place and the whole cabin properly arranged she was quite confused and in two minds about nearly everything.
The Pringsheims were ever so sophisticated and rich and intellectual and said clever things all the time but they were always quarrelling and getting at one another about something and to be honest they were quite impractical and didn’t know the first thing about hygiene. Gaskell w
ent to the lavatory and didn’t wash his hands afterwards and goodness only knew when he had last had a shave. And look at the way they had walked out of the house in Rossiter Grove without clearing up after the party and the living-room all over cups and things. Eva had been quite shocked. She would never have left her house in that sort of mess. She had said as much to Sally but Sally had said how nonspontaneous could you get and anyway they were only renting the house for the summer and that it was typical of a male-oriented social system to expect a woman to enter a contractual relationship based upon female domestic servitude. Eva tried to follow her and was left feeling guilty because she couldn’t and because it was evidently infra dig to be houseproud and she was.
And then there was what Henry had been doing with that doll. It was so unlike Henry to do anything like that and the more she thought about it the more unlike Henry it became. He must have been drunk but even so … without his clothes on? And where had he found the doll? She had asked Sally and had been horrified to learn that Gaskell was mad about plastic and just adored playing games with Judy and men were like that and so to the only meaningful relationships being between women because women didn’t need to prove their virility by any overt act of extrasexual violence did they? By which time Eva was lost in a maze of words she didn’t understand but which sounded important and they had had another session of Touch Therapy.
And that was another thing she was in two minds about. Touch Therapy. Sally had said she was still inhibited and being inhibited was a sign of emotional and sensational immaturity. Eva battled with her mixed feelings about the matter. On the one hand she didn’t want to be emotionally and sensationally immature and if the revulsion she felt lying naked in the arms of another woman was anything to go by and in Eva’s view the nastier a medicine tasted the more likely it was to do you good, then she was certainly improving her psycho-sexual behaviour pattern by leaps and bounds. On the other hand she wasn’t altogether convinced that Touch Therapy was quite nice. It was only by the application of considerable will-power that she overcame her objections to it and even so there was an undertow of doubt about the propriety of being touched quite so sensationally. It was all very puzzling, and to cap it all she was on the Pill. Eva had objected very strongly and had pointed out that Henry and she had always wanted babies and she’d never had any but Sally had insisted.
‘Eva baby,’ she had said, ‘with Gaskell one just never knows. Sometimes he goes for months without so much as a twitch and then, bam, he comes all over the place. He’s totally undiscriminating.’
‘But I thought you said you had this big thing between you,’ Eva said.
‘Oh, sure. In a blue moon. Scientists sublimate and G just lives for plastic. And we wouldn’t want you to go back to Henry with G’s genes in your ovum, now would we?’
‘Certainly not,’ said Eva, horrified at the thought, and had taken the pill after breakfast before going through to the tiny galley to wash up. It was all so different from Transcendental Meditation and Pottery.
On deck Sally and Gaskell were still wrangling.
‘What the hell are you giving brainless boobs?’ Gaskell asked.
‘TT, Body Contact, Tactile Liberation,’ said Sally. ‘She’s sensually deprived.’
‘She’s mentally deprived too. I’ve met some dummies in my time but this one is the dimwittiest. Anyway. I meant those pills she takes at breakfast.’
Sally smiled. ‘Oh those,’ she said.
‘Yes those. You blowing what little mind she’s got or something?’ said Gaskell. ‘We’ve got enough troubles without Moby Dick taking a trip.’
‘Oral contraceptives, baby, just the plain old Pill.’
‘Oral contraceptives? What the hell for? I wouldn’t touch her with a sterilized stirring rod.’
‘Gaskell, honey, you’re so naïve. For authenticity, pure authenticity. It makes my relationship with her so much more real, don’t you think. Like wearing a rubber on a dildo.’
Gaskell gaped at her. ‘Jesus, you don’t mean you’ve …’
‘Not yet. Long John Silver is still in his bag, but one of these days when she’s a little more emancipated …’ She smiled wistfully over the bullrushes. ‘Perhaps it doesn’t matter all that much us being stuck here. It gives us time, so much lovely time and you can look at your ducks …’
‘Waders,’ said Gaskell, ‘and we’re going to run up one hell of a bill at the Marina if we don’t get this boat back in time.’
‘Bill?’ said Sally. ‘You’re crazy. You don’t think we’re paying for this hulk?’
‘But you hired her from the boatyard. I mean you’re not going to tell me you just took the boat,’ said Gaskell. ‘For Chrissake, that’s theft!’
Sally laughed. ‘Honestly, G, you’re so moral. I mean you’re inconsistent. You steal books from the library and chemicals from the lab but when it comes to boats you’re all up in the air.’
‘Books are different,’ said Gaskell hotly.
‘Yes,’ said Sally, ‘books you don’t go to jail for. That’s what’s different. So you want to think I stole the boat, you go on thinking that.’
Gaskell took out a handkerchief and wiped his glasses. ‘Are you telling me you didn’t?’ he asked finally.
‘I borrowed it.’
‘Borrowed it? Who from?’
‘Schei.’
‘Scheimacher?’
‘That’s right. He said we could have it whenever we wanted it so we’ve got it.’
‘Does he know we’ve got it?’
Sally sighed. ‘Look, he’s in India isn’t he, currying sperm? So what does it matter what he knows? By the time he gets back we’ll be in the Land of the Free.’
‘Shit,’ said Gaskell wearily, ‘one of these days you’re going to land us in it up to the eyeballs.’
‘Gaskell honey, sometimes you bore me with your worrying so.’
‘Let me tell you something. You worry me with your goddam attitude to other people’s property.’
‘Property is theft.’
‘Oh sure. You just get the cops to see it that way when they catch up with you. The fuzz don’t go a ball on stealing in this country.’
*
The fuzz weren’t going much of a ball on the well-nourished body of a woman apparently murdered and buried under thirty feet and twenty tons of rapidly setting concrete. Barney had supplied the well-nourished bit. ‘She had big breasts too,’ he explained, in the seventh version of what he had seen. ‘And this hand reaching up—’
‘Yes, well we know all about the hand,’ said Inspector Flint. ‘We’ve been into all that before but this is the first time you’ve mentioned breasts.’
‘It was the hand that got me,’ said Barney. ‘I mean you can’t think of breasts in a situation like that.’
The Inspector turned to the foreman. ‘Did you notice the deceased’s breasts?’ he enquired. But the foreman just shook his head. He was past speech.
‘So we’ve got a well-nourished woman … What age would you say?’
Barney scratched his chin reflectively. ‘Not old,’ he said finally. ‘Definitely not old.’
‘In her twenties?’
‘Could have been.’
‘In her thirties?’
Barney shrugged. There was something he was trying to recall. Something that had seemed odd at the time.
‘But definitely not in her forties?’
‘No,’ said Barney. ‘Younger than that.’ He said it rather hesitantly.
‘You’re not being very specific,’ said Inspector Flint.
‘I can’t help it,’ said Barney plaintively. ‘You see a woman down a dirty great hole with concrete sloshing down on top of her you don’t ask her her age.’
‘Quite. I realize that but if you could just think. Was there anything peculiar about her …’
‘Peculiar? Well, there was this hand see …’
Inspector Flint sighed. ‘I mean anything out of the ordinary about her appearance. Her hair for
instance. What colour was it?’
Barney got it. ‘I knew there was something,’ he said, triumphantly. ‘Her hair. It was crooked.’
‘Well, it would be, wouldn’t it. You don’t dump a woman down a thirty-foot pile shaft without mussing up her hair in the process.’
‘No, it wasn’t like that. It was on sideways and flattened. Like she’d been hit.’
‘She probably had been hit. If what you say about the wooden cover being in place is true, she didn’t go down there of her own volition. But you still can’t give any precise indication of her age?’
‘Well,’ said Barney, ‘bits of her looked young and bits didn’t. That’s all I know.’
‘Which bits?’ asked the Inspector, hoping to hell Barney wasn’t going to start on that hand again.
‘Well, her legs didn’t look right for her teats if you see what I mean.’ Inspector Flint didn’t. ‘They were all thin and crumpled-up like.’
‘Which were? Her legs or her teats?’
‘Her legs, of course,’ said Barney. ‘I’ve told you she had these lovely great …’
*
‘We’re treating this as a case of murder,’ Inspector Flint told the Principal ten minutes later. The Principal sat behind his desk and thought despairingly about adverse publicity.
‘You’re quite convinced it couldn’t have been an accident?’
‘The evidence to date certainly doesn’t suggest accidental death,’ said the Inspector. ‘However, we’ll only be absolutely certain on that point when we manage to reach the body and I’m afraid that is going to take some time.’
‘Time?’ said the Principal. ‘Do you mean to say you can’t get her out this morning?’
Inspector Flint shook his head. ‘Out of the question, sir,’ he said. ‘We are considering two methods of reaching the body and they’ll both take several days. One is to drill down through the concrete and the other is to sink another shaft next to the original hole and try and get at her from the side.’
‘Good Lord,’ said the Principal, looking at his calendar, ‘but that means you’re going to be digging away out there for several days.’