Swimming with the Dead

by Peter Guttridge

  He looked down into the water. It was surprisingly clear and he could see the layers of shale and stone and rock at the bottom. He knew it was much deeper away from the shores, though it was by no means the deepest lake in Cumbria. That honour went to Wastwater, over in the west of the national park, at some eighty metres deep.

  He spent a moment putting that into old money – around 260 feet, he reckoned – because although he was the metric generation, the army had worked on feet and inches too during his time with it.

  Who knew what bodies had been dumped in the Wastwater depths over the years? One wife-murderer, he knew, had been found out years later when his wife’s body was recovered thanks to a shelf of rock sticking out quite some way from the shore on one side of Wastwater lake. Instead of sinking to the bottom of the lake her body had lodged on this ledge in relatively shallow water and a fisherman had snagged her remains.

  Watts remembered from his policing days that Coniston itself had been the favoured dumping ground of Manchester drug gangs in the seventies for rivals’ dead bodies. He knew too that at some point today he’d be swimming over or near the place where Donald Campbell’s Bluebird had crashed and killed him during his fatal attempt on the water speed record back in 1967.

  Many years later the boat and Campbell’s body had been found and brought to the surface. Watts had read that the boat was in a boatyard somewhere round Newcastle being slowly put back together.

  Coniston had no tide or current as it was not a sufficiently large body of water. There was a breeze that ruffled the surface of the water but it came from behind him. He’d been warned that while the water was generally warm there were cold areas where water was entering the lake from the many feeder streams that originated high in the mountains.

  Watts pulled his swimming cap down over the top part of the rubber surround of his goggles to secure them and saw Kate in the other boat do the same. Then they both dropped into the water.

  The fifty swimmers were starting at noon from a narrow spit of land. Each swimmer was supposed to be two metres from his or her boat but at the starting point it was simply a melee, with boats and swimmers all too close together. Although he and Kate were not swimming as a team both had decided to start strongly to get clear of the crush then settle down into an easy pace.

  Neither one was interested in winning; they just wanted to test their mettle in the longest swim either had so far done.

  When the whistle blew there was chaos: boats and swimmers jostling for space. After some ten minutes Watts could see ahead that there were around half a dozen swimmers pulling well away from the pack. There was something hypnotic about the sight. All were doing front crawl, as was he, which meant, when he was looking ahead every couple of minutes, all he could see were elbows rising from the water and falling back in with unvarying rhythm.

  His own rhythm was the same. Left elbow raised high close to his left ear, long arm stretching and stiff hand sliding down into the water and pushing the water behind him as he raised his right elbow to his ear. He breathed on alternate sides with his face in the water. He came up for air every four or five strokes.

  Where he was weak was in scissoring his legs and fluttering his feet. He’d never been able to get a regular rhythm back there, so his legs often trailed in the water. Still, he knew that most of the movement came from shoulders and arms.

  Watts couldn’t see Kate since her kayak was between them but as it kept level with him and his kayak he assumed she too was keeping pace with him.

  The water was warm and calm and he eased into a steady pace he felt he could keep up all day. He stopped for a quick feed after two hours. Eric reached down from the kayak with the sports flask full of energy drink and Watts downed it in one, bobbing in the water because he’d be disqualified if he steadied himself on – or even touched – the kayak. Kate’s kayak was about ten yards behind but was closing in. He handed the flask back to Eric, neither man speaking, and resumed his swim.

  He reached the beach at the north end of the lake in just over three and a half hours. He was fifteenth to finish. He looked back but Kate’s kayak was still some way out. One of the stewards assured him that her slow progress was not because of the death of another competitor halfway along the lake.

  Kate Simpson had been thrown by the opening throng of swimmers so it took her a while to find her rhythm. Then her goggles started leaking so she had to signal to Liam and have him throw her the spares. She didn’t know where Bob was as Liam’s kayak was between them but she imagined that he was way ahead of her already.

  The new goggles didn’t leak but nor did they keep the sun from blinding her. Now she couldn’t settle because she couldn’t see where she was going. She could dimly hear through her ear plugs that Liam was calling to her when she went off course. She was startled when his head suddenly appeared almost next to hers. She stopped swimming and looked at him. He had brought the kayak up close and was leaning over one side to get his face near to hers. He sat straight again as the kayak tipped.

  He pointed at her ears and mimed taking her ear plugs out. She fumbled with her ears, irritated at the hold-up.

  ‘It’s warm enough that you don’t need the plugs,’ he shouted. ‘And I need you to hear me because you’re zigzagging all over the place.’

  She nodded and dropped the silicone plugs in his open hand.

  ‘I’m zigzagging because the sun is blinding me – these goggles don’t have filters.’

  ‘Just listen to me and watch my signals when you do diverge. You’re pulling more powerfully with your right arm – try to even it out more.’

  She nodded and glanced at her watch. ‘Feed in seventy-five minutes.’

  He nodded. ‘Get going.’

  She set off and established a kind of rhythm. She knew she was a powerful swimmer when she wanted to be and she hoped to make up lost ground. She wasn’t interested in beating Bob but she quite liked swimming alongside him on the occasions they had swum together.

  She liked to plan and remember and work through things when she swam. She’d come up to Coniston pissed off about Simon, with whom she worked at Southern Shores, Brighton’s local radio station. Her powder puff job had changed little after the successful documentary she’d done about the Brighton Trunk Murder. She was still producing and acting as the on-air foil for Simon Says, the station’s popular but moronic breakfast show.

  Simon was a bright guy and very quick-witted but he was irredeemably trivial. That was fine for the breakfast show but she’d tried to get him to do other stuff and he just wasn’t interested. It was so frustrating.

  She’d pitched an idea for a piece about homophobic gays, specifically gays who were homophobic when it came to camp. She’d heard a very camp TV celebrity say that he got the most homophobic comments from other gays. Simon said no to the piece – although, to be fair, so did the station.

  She was in a dilemma. She wanted to do harder news but realistically that meant working for the BBC at a national level. And that raised the possibility people would assume she’d got there through nepotism.

  She loathed nepotism. That was why she’d chosen to work for Southern Shores rather than allow her father, former spin doctor William Simpson, to use his influence to get her a job at a national station or on the television.

  That wasn’t so much of an issue now since his fall from political grace with the change of government several years earlier but he was still seen as some sinister Machiavellian figure.

  Which he was. William Simpson, arch-manipulator. He was in international public relations now but his links seemed to be with dodgy regimes that were all about war and suppressing their own citizens. Are you an autocrat and want to gloss over cynically invading some neighbouring state or handing over billion-dollar industries to your cronies? William Simpson is your man.

  She avoided seeing him and when she did they argued. It wasn’t much better with her mother. She knew that as a daughter she was supposed to have issues with her mother
but her mother was something else. There was no warmth in her at all. Especially since she had split from Kate’s father.

  Kate’s mother lived in Brighton now, which made things more complicated. It was easy for Kate not to see her father since he was jetting all over the world but she had to make at least a token effort to see her mother. Not that her mother took any interest in anything she did – except how much she was eating.

  Perhaps that was why Kate had decided to swim the Channel. She was fed up with being nagged about her weight. Because the unique thing about athletes who signed up to swim the Channel is that they had to put on weight – fat, that is – to be able to achieve this incredible endurance feat in chilly water.

  Kate wondered if she should be talking to someone about her utterly conflicted emotions about her parents. Someone other than Bellamy. She’d read enough popular psychology books and articles in trash women’s magazines to recognize that bringing Bellamy so quickly into her life was because she had never got the love she needed from her parents. Or maybe it was because he was so sweet.

  She looked up and Liam was making the five-minute gesture with his open hand. She looked at her watch. Five minutes to her feed.

  The training was also helping her to deal with something that had happened pretty recently when she had made a pre-work pilgrimage to the part of Brighton cemetery where the remains of the victim of the first Brighton Trunk Murder were buried. This part of the graveyard had been allowed to grow back. The victim was in a grid of unmarked graves under long grass and thistles.

  Nearby there were two dogs fornicating, stuck together post-sex, bum to bum. There was what looked horribly like a raven stalking across the graves. And magpies. Lots of magpies.

  The male dog uncoupled from the bitch and ran off chasing another, yelping and barking. Kate heard jeering young voices and saw a half a dozen teenagers, boys and girls around fourteen, in a kind of shelter about twenty yards away. They were all smoking.

  One of the boys, in a crumpled grey hoodie, grabbed one of the girls by her left breast and squeezed. ‘Do you think that bitch was taking it up the arse like you do, the way they were stuck together?’

  ‘Piss off,’ the girl said, trying to wriggle free. As she did she saw Kate watching them. ‘What’s she frigging looking at?’

  They all turned and the boy released her breast, spying fresh meat. Kate saw them start towards her. She was frozen to the spot. There was no one else anywhere near her. She took out her phone and speed-dialled the first number that came up.

  She held it to her ear and waited for it to ring. Nothing. As the teenagers came close she said into the mouthpiece, ‘Hi, is that Detective Inspector Gilchrist at police HQ?’

  The boy in the hoodie circled round her. As she half turned the girl he’d assaulted grabbed Kate’s shoulder bag. Kate was trying to wrestle it back when she felt a stiff hand go up her skirt from behind and thrust hard between her legs. She heard the boy’s jeering laugh. Another boy, who looked about twelve, grabbed at her skirt and pulled it up. Kate tried to hold it down with her free hand.

  She could hear the phone start to ring but someone grabbed it from her. The girl had her bag now as Kate reached back to get the boy’s wrist and move his hand away. She was conscious she was only wearing a thong as the person who’d taken her phone started to take photos of the hoodie boy’s fingers rummaging between her legs.

  She tugged herself free but fell as she did so. They stood over her, screeching and yelling, dragging at her clothes and filming her. Two girls were tearing at her blouse and somebody must have had a knife because suddenly the boy in the hoodie was waving her thong in the air and her legs were being forced apart.

  She thought they were going to gang rape her and it might have been in their minds but first they were thrusting their camera phones between her legs. And then she heard two men bellowing from the path below.

  ‘You lot – what the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  And the girl grabbed her purse and address book from her bag then dropped the bag and they all ran off up the hill, whooping and yelling, as the two men came near and she tugged her skirt down for at least some decency.

  Kate spluttered and came up for air, swiping her goggles off her head and turning on her back to catch her breath.

  ‘What are you doing? What’s wrong?’ Liam called.

  She waved a vague arm at him. Nothing, she thought but probably didn’t say. ‘Just need a moment,’ she called. She gasped for breath and then waved again. Took her time regulating her breathing, ignoring Liam’s shouts.

  She turned onto her front again. She was back on track. More or less.

  Kate’s longest swim so far had been three hours but the following weekend she was aiming to do six hours in another Dolphin Smile event in Brighton Bay. The rules of the Channel swimming governing body – the Channel Swimming & Pilot’s Federation – required a six-hour swim in water with a maximum temperature of 16°C to qualify for swimming the channel. Relay swimmers had to swim two hours in the same conditions.

  Six hours in cold water. Reluctantly she had committed to putting on more weight. One of the experienced swimmers, Dan, had explained it to her as she stood shivering on the beach in Dover.

  ‘The ratio of surface area to volume is crucial. The bigger your body the more heat you retain. But if you have a big frame but are skinny, heat is gained and lost quickly. There is lots of surface area to gain heat but not much volume to retain it.’ He pointed at her. ‘You’re a bit on the short side so you’re going to have to put on a bit of weight if hypothermia isn’t going to be a massive problem for you.’

  Liam was holding out her flask with an anxious expression on his face.

  ‘What?’ she said as she took it and peered into it.

  ‘When I opened your big flask to pour into this all the glass inside was broken.’

  ‘But I only bought it yesterday from that mountaineering shop!’ Kate held the flask up to the sun, looking for fragments of glass.

  ‘I don’t have a sieve or even a thin cloth so I’ve picked the glass out as best I can.’

  Kate took a sip of her energy drink – blackcurrant mixed with Maxim. As it went down she felt something catch at her throat but she didn’t know if she was imagining it. She took another cautious sip and held the warm liquid in her mouth, swirling it around, trying to feel any bits of glass. There didn’t seem to be any but all the same she spat it out into the lake and handed the flask back to him.

  ‘You didn’t bring anything yourself?’ she said.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ he said. ‘You said you’d provide your own feed. I have some water.’

  ‘I like something warm.’ She shook her head. ‘OK, I’m going to have to do the whole swim without a feed.’

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ he said.

  ‘Sure,’ she said. But didn’t believe it.

  She spent the next ten minutes oscillating between telling herself she could do it without the feed and telling herself she couldn’t. She spent a little time blaming Liam for the broken flask, deciding he must have thrown it into the bottom of the kayak and broken it.

  Then she thought about what Dan, the experienced distance swimmer in the shop she’d bought the drinks from, had said about energy drinks when he handed over a plastic storage box full of the stuff.

  ‘Maltodrextrin is the important bit of the Maxim. It’s a polymer of glucose – glucose is the monomer unit and on its own is rapidly absorbed.’

  ‘Hang on,’ Kate said. ‘There are a couple of things I don’t quite understand in that.’

  ‘Which things?’

  ‘All of it.’

  Dan showed his teeth and waved his hand.

  ‘All glucose quickly enters glycolysis which just means it allows quick energy production. That’s why glucose is the favourite carbohydrate source for athletes doing intense, short activities. But it is a short-term fix. Long-distance swimmers like you need something else. If you can polymerize
glucose it slows everything down – rate of absorption, metabolism – which gives you longer, sustained energy.’

  ‘And that’s Maxim?’

  ‘It is and I think it’s the best. The molecules of glucose are smaller than in other drinks so dissolve easier in your drink of choice.’

  Kate didn’t feel she needed to admit she didn’t really know what a molecule was. And certainly not ‘polymerize’.

  ‘Mixing the complex carbohydrates in Maxim with a sugary fruit drink – which comprises simple carbohydrates – gives you an instant hit from the sugar but then longer energy too. The mixture also helps a swimmer keep the food down. If swimmers can handle nothing but complex carbs in the course of a long swim good for them but if keeping food down is a problem the simple carbohydrate in the mix at least gives fast nutrition so they don’t bonk.’

  ‘Bonk?’ Kate said, smiling.

  ‘Different meaning,’ Dan said. ‘Conk out. And you’re still going to do it if you miss your feeds but at least it will be later rather than sooner.’

  Kate didn’t feel she was going to conk out but after another hour she was zigzagging more, if Liam’s shouting was anything to go by. She knew that was partly because she was swimming with her eyes closed on account of the sun, partly because when she got tired her strokes got choppy and uneven.

  She went through a cold stretch of water that really chilled her so she tried to go faster to keep her body heated. That just tired her even more.

  She realized she was focusing on her physical discomfort to the detriment of her progress. She forced herself to think about something else. She’d seen two white-tailed deer that morning in the grounds of the posh house Bob had rented an apartment in for the weekend. A doe and her fawn, the fawn scampering across the grass then skittering back to her mother when rabbits came out to play.

  Kate always thought of the lakes in terms of quaint old cottages and pubs – low wooden beams and log fires and creaky floorboards. Bob had insisted on paying for their accommodation and she had let him, on the grounds he was rolling in it. And instead of a cottage he had chosen an apartment in a converted Georgian house on a hilltop.