Swimming with the Dead

by Peter Guttridge

  ‘Why did you make up that story about telephoning Roland Gulliver when he was with someone else?’

  ‘Well, I did telephone him, just as I said.’

  ‘When you were actually with him?’ Heap said.

  She nodded as the kettle boiled. ‘From his bathroom.’

  ‘Why?’ Heap said.

  ‘To give myself an alibi. I read a lot of Peter James so I know how these things work.’

  ‘An alibi for what, Mrs Medavoy?’ Heap continued.

  ‘April,’ Medavoy whispered. ‘I wasn’t sure for what but I thought I might need one.’

  ‘You thought you might do him harm?’

  ‘I didn’t know what I was going to do.’

  ‘Mrs Medavoy, we’re a bit in the dark here,’ Gilchrist said. ‘Was it because of the petition?’

  She put a spoonful of instant coffee into a flowered mug and poured the hot water in. She sat down at the table and started stirring her coffee.

  ‘The petition?’ she said blankly. ‘Why the petition?’

  ‘What then? Why might you do Roland Gulliver harm?’

  Medavoy continued stirring, the spoon scraping around the inside of the mug, the coffee starting to slop over. Wade reached out a hand and covered hers to stop her. She looked down at Wade’s big hand and smiled a wide, cheerless smile.

  ‘Hell hath no fury, Detective Inspector, hell hath no fury.’

  ‘Roland Gulliver scorned you?’ Gilchrist said, watching Wade’s hand as she withdrew it. Medavoy let go of the spoon and laid her hand on the table.

  ‘He said he was going to leave that stupid wife for me and then he tells me he’s in love but not with me. How humiliated do you think I felt?’

  ‘Very, I would imagine,’ Gilchrist said, totally sideswiped by this news. ‘How long had you and he …’

  ‘Since we first met. I got him involved, with Save Salthaven Lido so we had an excuse to be together.’

  ‘And you had no idea about him and—’

  ‘He said they were just friends!’

  ‘And you and he …?’

  ‘Often.’

  Gilchrist sat back. She didn’t dare look at Heap.

  ‘So what happened on the evening you went round?’

  ‘I brought the bottle of wine. I wanted it to be civilized although I wasn’t sure if I was going to smash it over his head before we were finished.’

  ‘Hence the alibi,’ Heap said.

  She ignored that.

  ‘We talked and drank and the next thing I knew I was back at my house.’

  ‘You seemed to have jumped quite a lot there, Mrs Medavoy,’ Heap said.

  ‘I know. But that’s how I remember it. One minute I’m sitting at the table with him, the next I’m lying on my sofa in my sitting room.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where was your car?’

  ‘In my drive. I had walked to his house.’

  ‘You didn’t phone him to find out what had happened?’

  ‘I was bewildered. And scared. Had I blacked out and done something terrible? So when you came and told me he had been murdered it was quite a shock, I can tell you.’

  ‘Did you really think you might have murdered him?’

  ‘I had no idea. But when you told me where he had been found I knew it couldn’t have been me.’

  ‘We’ll have to do a forensic search of your house.’

  ‘To be sure he wasn’t here? But I’ve told you.’

  ‘You look panicked, Mrs Medavoy.’

  ‘Well, of course there will be his fingerprints and DNA all over the house from his visits.’

  ‘What about your husband, Mrs Medavoy?’

  ‘I don’t have one. I say I’m married just to keep nosey-parkers away from my business.’

  ‘Is there nothing else you remember about that night?’

  ‘Only the towels, of course.’

  ‘Towels?’ Gilchrist said sharply.

  ‘When I went into the bathroom here there were two of my towels in the bathtub, both soaking wet. I don’t know how they got there. The only thing I could think is that I’d been sick when I got home and used them to clean up the bathroom.’

  Heap nodded to Wade and she left the room. Gilchrist heard her summoning SOCO as a matter of urgency.

  ‘Do you have somewhere you can stay for the next couple of days, Mrs Medavoy? Friends?’

  ‘Not really. Why?’

  ‘I’m afraid your home is now a crime scene.’

  ‘What crime? You said Roland had been found on the steps of the lido.’

  ‘He was found on the lido steps but he was murdered elsewhere,’ Gilchrist said. ‘And it looks like that elsewhere might have been your bathroom.’

  Bob Watts opened the door to Derek Neill.

  ‘Mind if I come in, sport?’ Neill said.

  ‘Not at all. I’m working on a bottle of Malbec if you want to give me some help.’

  Neill walked over to the window, turned back. ‘Pretty much the same configuration as mine. Coppers must earn well.’

  ‘So must swimming tour people,’ Watts said, handing him a glass of wine. ‘Mine was an inheritance. My dad. Big name crime writer back in the day.’

  ‘I’m not much of a reader,’ Neill said. ‘But I’ve always been good at business. Not cutthroat, just charging a fair price for what I provide.’

  ‘I’ve heard about Rasa. I’m sorry. You’re in the thick of it.’

  Neill smiled sadly.

  ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’

  ‘Is that where we’re headed now?’

  Neill nodded. ‘In a while, perhaps, when we’ve got through your bottle.’

  ‘Am I the one you should be sharing things with?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not a confession. More an explanation. And I was hoping you might invite your friend Sarah Gilchrist and that alert young man, Bellamy Heap, over to hear it with you.’ He held up his free hand. ‘I am in the middle of it. And no doubt a major suspect. I just want to make a few things clear.’

  Watts raised his glass in a toast. ‘Let me make the call.’

  Gilchrist and Heap found Neill and Bob Watts sitting companionably on a long sofa, an empty wine bottle on the low table in front of them. Watts went to the kitchen to get another bottle.

  Neill stood and smiled wanly at Gilchrist, nodded to Heap.

  ‘Should I be cautioning you?’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘Well, I’m not confessing to killing any of my friends and loved ones, if that’s what you mean. But I realize that I’ve been holding information back and by doing so I might have got Rasa killed. And I guess I’m responsible for the deaths of the others. Which is something I have to live with.’

  ‘That is starting to sound like a confession,’ Gilchrist said. She continued: ‘The argument you had with Roland Gulliver. It was over Lesley White who is buried in Woodvale with that lovely inscription on the gravestone?’

  ‘“So we beat on”,’ said Heap, ‘“boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”’

  Watts looked up sharply at that as he was pouring the wine.

  ‘Lesley loved The Great Gatsby but to put that on her gravestone was a desecration,’ Neill said.

  ‘The man who paid cash for it to be done claimed he was you,’ Gilchrist said. ‘A paunchy man. Do you know who that might be?’

  ‘Nobody immediately springs to mind but if it was someone from my past, people can put on weight.’

  ‘Lesley was a “she”?’ Heap said.

  ‘Yes. Oh, I see, you thought Roland and I were arguing over a man – more of that gay stuff you’ve been imagining.’

  ‘Why a desecration?’

  ‘It was a warning to me, I realize now. The past can’t be forgiven or forgotten.’

  Watts handed out glasses as Gilchrist and Heap sat down in the chairs facing the sofa. Watts resumed his seat. All three looked at Neill. He took a s
wig of the wine, set the glass down and took a deep breath.

  ‘Let’s begin then, shall we? Christine and I got together on a yoga retreat about eight years ago. Rasa was running it. That’s how I met them both. Christine was there to relax. She was already driven by her focus on the family company. I didn’t know what a big deal the company was and she didn’t say – made it sound like some ma-and-pa grocery store or something.

  ‘I’d been making good money organizing rock and roll tours along the south coast for a few years. I’d been quietly salting it away and putting it into property. But I saw a big opportunity with this yoga lark. Everywhere I looked, yoga was booming. Rasa had a good following but she was rubbish at the business. So I proposed we go into business together. And that worked out for both of us.

  ‘I was looking at related possibilities and we messed about a bit with free diving because of the breath being at the core of both that and yoga. Then it was just a hop and a skip into wild-water swimming. About six years ago, we started working on Dolphin Smile.

  ‘I had the idea for a swimming centre somewhere warm and then special trips to different parts of the world for swimming holidays. By then, Christine was going off in her own direction, although I don’t think even she knew what that direction was.

  ‘We’d never talked about commitment or fidelity. Rasa was a no-commitments kind of woman too, although she had some kind of thing with Christine’s old school friend, Philip Coates. At the time he was a senior planner for the council, which makes him sound more boring than he ever was.

  ‘Dolphin Smile was going to need some big upfront costs. Rasa and I both had money but not nearly enough. Christine and I never talked money and I never dreamed of asking her for backing, although by then I’d realized what a big deal the company was.

  ‘I found a site in Crete that might work – beautiful little bay with an abandoned taverna with a few rooms and a proper taverna just down the track a couple of hundred yards. I put together a small party of friends and acquaintances to go and check it out with me and do some swimming and to see if they might be potential investors.

  ‘Aside from me they included Rasa, Christine, Rasa’s pal Philip Coates, Roland Gulliver and Tamsin Stanhope. Lesley White was there too, with her then partner, David Blue.’

  ‘The Lesley White buried in Woodvale Cemetery.’

  Neill nodded. ‘Remember I talked about the roads un-travelled and the women I would have travelled with had they invited me? Well, she was the one, before Christine came along. In fact, without in any way speaking ill of the dead, Christine was a rebound for me, as I think I was for her. That had become obvious long before this trip to Crete.’

  ‘Can I just interrupt there,’ Gilchrist said. ‘Did Christine never confide in you who raped her?’

  ‘Never. I told you, we were living separate lives long before then.’

  ‘What about her relationship with her brother, Bernard?’

  ‘What about it?’ Neill said.

  Neill looked from one to the other of them.

  ‘Bernard’s dead, you know,’ Heap said. ‘In Thailand.’

  ‘Is he?’ He gave a little shake of his head. ‘Is he?’

  ‘Dolphin Smile does a swimming retreat on one of the Thai islands,’ Heap said. ‘The same island Bernard died on. In the same hotel you block book actually.’

  ‘It’s about the only hotel on the island,’ Neill said, his face impassive.

  ‘Apparently, he turned up for his flight from Gatwick looking the worse for wear.’

  Neill nodded. ‘Bernard liked a drink.’

  ‘As if he’d been beaten up.’

  ‘Really.’ Neill took a glug of his wine.

  ‘Indications are that when he was found dead his face and body showed bruising a couple of days old from such a beating. The Thai authorities did some kind of half-hearted autopsy and decided cause of death was internal bleeding. He’d ruptured something inside. He’d been haemorrhaging blood into his stomach for those couple of days. Coughed up a lot too, at the end.’

  ‘So he suffered,’ Neill said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Heap said. ‘A lot.’

  Neill sat quietly, looking from one to the other of them.

  ‘Carry on with your story, Mr Neill,’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘Well, things were pretty open on that trip. There were others there who came and went for odd days while we were there. Friends of friends kind of stuff. There was a gay friend of Christine’s who turned out not to be quite so gay after all. David Blue kind of stuck out as being more conventional but the rest of us were pretty free.’

  ‘And this David Blue was with Lesley – the woman you had really liked?’

  ‘Yeah, he was with Lesley. But by then I realized it was Rasa I wanted. OK, look, I was a bit of an emotional mess at the time. Maybe I always am. Christine and I were on the downside of our marriage and she wasn’t exactly faithful to me there. Lesley I’d adored and still thought I loved, until it dawned on me that it was Rasa I wanted.’ He caught Gilchrist’s look. ‘I know, I know but behind all that front she has there is somebody else. Was somebody else. Anyway, the whole time there got pretty emotional all round and then it turned very bad.’

  ‘How emotional?’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘How bad?’ Heap said.

  ‘What happened?’ Watts said.

  Neill smiled.

  ‘Well, the emotion, short version. It was like Le Ronde.’

  That passed Gilchrist by but Heap gave a small smile. He would.

  ‘Roland lusted for Christine’s gay friend – I can’t for the life of me remember his name – who in fact wasn’t gay but gender fluid or gender curious or whatever the modern expression is. That guy pined for Christine, who was oblivious to that as I think she had always hankered for Philip, who was happy with Rasa who I was infatuated with. I was ignoring Lesley, who was now realizing she should have stuck with me but instead she was miserable with David Blue, who was obsessed with her but also abused her. And I was using Tamsin for sex because I couldn’t have Rasa.’

  ‘I’m glad I asked,’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘What happened?’ Watts repeated.

  ‘Headline or long version?’

  ‘Why bury your lead?’ Heap said.

  ‘Lesley died.’

  Neill stood and started pacing. ‘The jellyfish arrived in the night. Thousands of them blown in by strong winds on fierce tides. Jellyfish are see-through but none are totally colourless, you know. In their pink and their purple and their turquoise tints they actually are quite beautiful. But, as with many beautiful things, they are deadly.’

  He stopped pacing and stood by the window.

  ‘I remember it all so vividly. When I came down, it was not yet seven in the morning but already the sun was burning brightly in a clear blue sky. The storm had blown itself out and now the bay was calm. I was about to swim when I looked into the water and saw them. It was only in daylight you could see these translucent discs, big as hubcaps, closely packed on the surface of the water and beneath them the iridescent ones, dangling and hanging in the water with their long beads.

  ‘David Blue came down to the beach raving. It must still have been dark when Lesley had slipped from the room she’d been sharing unhappily with David and gone for an early morning swim. He always went crazy when he didn’t know where Lesley was. He went crazy when he did. It turned out later that the previous night he’d slapped her around.’

  Neill came and sat back down.

  ‘We found her in a grotto in the rocks at the near end of the beach. It was almost a tunnel, hollowed out over the millennia by the action of the sea. It went in to a depth of some twenty yards and at its furthest extreme there was a sandy shelf, some twelve yards across by five yards deep. Rasa liked to do her yoga there. Light splashed down on this hidden beach through a funnel in the rock above it.

  ‘The acoustics were such that when the wind blew you heard groans and strange noises. I’d read that the Delphic oracle
had been nothing more than an odd acoustic effect from a curious rock formation.

  ‘Anyway, I ducked down to get into the cave and led the way, shuffling forward along a three-foot-wide walkway beside the lagoon. It was cool in the grotto and I was relieved to get out of the sun. It was beautiful in there. The turquoise water slapped idly against the walls, sucked at the sand at the far end of the cave.

  ‘Sunlight streamed down the funnel almost like a spotlight onto the sand bar. And what it illuminated was Lesley’s body lying still, arms and legs akimbo.

  ‘She was covered in huge wheals and welts and rashes, her face and limbs swollen. She was groaning.

  ‘David Blue came in, rushing so much he almost brained himself on the low ceiling. He grabbed at my arm. “Do something!”

  ‘It took twenty minutes to get her out of the grotto and across the beach, David dashing around us getting more and more agitated. “She’s in anaphylactic shock,” I said. “Haven’t you got something for it in your medicine chest?” he said. Of course I didn’t, back in those days. “There is nothing for it you can buy over the counter,” I explained.

  ‘But he wouldn’t accept that. He got up close. “Why haven’t you got stuff that would help?” I stared him out. Truth is, I wanted to punch him for treating Lesley badly. “Because I’m not a doctor and only a doctor can use this stuff.”

  ‘He backed off then and dropped down beside Lesley. “Jesus,” he said. “Lesley, stay with me, stay with me.” Lesley was panting now. Her eyes were rolled up into their sockets. If she could hear, she didn’t respond.

  ‘Well, we drove her to the nearest clinic but it was a two-hour drive. All the time David screeching at me to do something. “Like what? I’m driving as fast as I can.” But he wouldn’t let it go. “What kind of shit medical chest was that?”’

  Neill swirled the wine round in his glass.

  ‘She died an hour away from the hospital. Rasa knew she had died but didn’t say anything. David realized when we got her out of the van. Shoulders slumped, head down, his eyes rolled up in his head so that he could glare at me, a look of utter hatred on his face. I affected not to notice but I did.’

  ‘So Lesley died of anaphylactic shock,’ Gilchrist said. ‘She swam into an armada of jellyfish. She got stung dozens of times and had an allergic reaction.’