by Louise Voss
She was beautiful now, though, albeit still a bit plump and with traces of the old goofy teeth. All his long-forgotten feelings of lust for her came flooding back, reminding him of the times he used to lean against the wall outside the science lab, not having the nerve to go and speak to her, while she would clown around, giggling with her mates further along the same wall. She used to smile at him in class but otherwise mostly ignored him; apart from that one glorious time she’d played him ‘Lose Yourself’ on her iPod, sharing her earphones with him because she’d made some tenuous comment about Eminem and Emad being similar names.
‘Emad Khan! Look at you all grown up. I didn’t know you were one of us. Small world. Are you working here?’ Gemma gave him a hug, beaming. Then she sniffed his shoulder, in a far more familiar way than she ever had when they were doing their A levels.
‘New uniform, if I’m not mistaken? I remember that smell so well.’
He nodded, embarrassed and proud. ‘Only passed out of basic training three weeks ago. Better late than never, eh? Turns out I wasn’t cut out to be a photocopier salesman. Best decision I ever made … Well, I hope it was anyway. Bit early to tell yet. You’re a cop too? I don’t believe it…’
‘Detective, for the last five years,’ Gemma said, clearly unable to hide the note of pride in her voice. ‘DC. Maybe DS soon.’
‘Wow,’ he said with reverence. ‘That’s so cool. What are you working on at the moment?’
‘Gang-related murder in Farnham,’ she said. ‘We got the guy two days ago. Right evil bastard, he is. Hope they throw away the key.’
Emad tried to look at her ring finger, but she had her left hand hooked around the strap of her handbag and he couldn’t see it. She pressed a button on the Fitbit on her wrist.
‘I’ve got to run. I’m due in court at ten. Great to see you, Emad! I’m sure we’ll bump into each other again, now you’re based here too. It’ll be good to have an ally here.’
She clapped him affectionately on the shoulder and bounded down the steps, waving over her head at him without looking back.
Emad carried on into the station, his heart pounding with pleasure. He was already insanely proud to be a police officer. And now the job had just got a whole lot more appealing.
They did not cross paths again for another week, even though Emad’s eyes were out on stalks, looking for Gemma’s curly blonde hair in every corridor. Perhaps she’d been tied up with her court case, he thought, and anyway he was kept busy out on calls and arrests, buddied up with more senior officers while he was still on probation. He asked around after her, just casually, saying how she was an old schoolfriend and he’d heard she worked here; but nobody else had heard of her – it was a big station.
Then, one Thursday morning he was making a tray of teas in the third-floor kitchenette when he felt soft hands cover his eyes. ‘Guess who?’ she said, and he smelled something floral and sensual in his nostrils.
‘Hi!’ He turned and grinned at her, then nodded at the eight mugs in front of him. ‘You can tell I’m the newbie, eh?’
Gemma laughed. She looked even more gorgeous today, he thought, the dark shadows under her eyes a little less pronounced.
She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.
‘We’ve all been there,’ she said. ‘Rite of passage…’
‘I’m an expert already.’ Emad busied himself pouring boiling water onto each teabag, and forced himself to keep his voice casual. ‘What time is your shift finishing today? Want to grab a drink and have a catch-up? You know, one of those “do you remember so-and-so” conversations.’
She smiled, but briskly and – Emad worried – almost patronisingly. ‘Another time, maybe. I’m knackered. But thanks. Don’t you have a family to get back to?’
Could she be fishing for information? Or just being polite? Emad had no idea. ‘No family,’ he said, far too hastily. ‘Single Pringle, that’s me. What about you? You married? Kids?’
‘Nope. One long-term relationship, ended a year ago when he cheated on me.’
Emad affected a look of outrage. ‘What a moron! Sorry, though.’
‘Yup.’
There was a slightly awkward silence. Emad stirred the teas one by one, fished out the teabags and left them in a steaming pile on the draining board, then pulled out a carton of milk from the little undercounter fridge.
‘Better let you get on,’ Gemma said.
‘With my very important police work,’ he added, sloshing milk into the teas.
‘Very important,’ she agreed, but her smile had fallen, and she looked bleak. In all their years at school together, he never remembered seeing that particular expression on her face. It must have been a bad break-up.
‘Catch you later, Emad.’
16
Present Day
Emad
‘Can I have a unit to deal please, immediate response, Minstead House, we have reports of an apparently lifeless male in the pond,’ came the call over the radio.
Emad, in the passenger seat, picked up the handset. ‘Control from GU22, show us assigned, ETA five minutes.’
‘Do you know the place then?’ PC Damian Jackman was driving, in a far more flashy way than Emad thought necessary.
‘Been there as a kid. Know where it is, mile or so outside Minstead Village, right?’
As they drove up the long, tree-lined driveway to Minstead House, Emad only partly registered the verdant parkland with deer nosing around tree roots and the occasional bunny hopping away in fright; the first glimpse of the white bell tower appearing at the brow of the hill, and the car park full of visitors’ cars, the sun glinting silver off their roofs.
Instead his thoughts were torn between anticipation about seeing his first real dead body and the memory of the expression on Gemma’s face that morning when she’d told him about her cheating ex.
They rounded the corner, the turrets and pale, primrose-coloured stone of Minstead House looming up ahead of him. He had a deeper flash of memory: his mum bringing him here when he was a little boy. It had been a hot, sunny day much like this one, but inside the house had been dark and cooler – and, to his nine-year-old self, boring. Apart from the kitchens, which were fascinating. Plaster deer and pig carcasses, stuffed pheasants and geese hanging from hooks in the ceiling, wax fruit in bowls, fake loaves being pushed into a real furnace by a waxwork lady in a mobcap.
Damian parked at the front of the house, ignoring the curious looks of a bottleneck of tourists congregating at the main entrance, waiting to buy their tickets, and marched up to the desk. Emad had to force his attention back to the matter in hand.
A flustered and sturdy receptionist stood up as soon as she saw them come through the glass entrance doors. ‘This way, Officers,’ she said officiously after Damian had introduced them. She lifted up the counter with an arthritic-looking hand, the flesh of her ring finger puffing over and almost obscuring a wedding band. Her name badge read ‘Angela Carruthers’.
‘Wait a second,’ Emad said, leaning over the counter so that the queuing tourists couldn’t hear. ‘Are you continuing to allow visitors inside?’ He glanced at Damian, unsure if this was acceptable protocol or not. Damian’s face looked impassive, suggesting that he didn’t have a clue either. And he’d been a PC for a year.
Angela looked simultaneously appalled and self-important. ‘Yes, until we’re told otherwise,’ she whispered. ‘The … ah … body, has been discovered in an area of the grounds that’s currently private. No member of the public has any sort of access to it, because the pond’s been cordoned off, awaiting restoration. Security is guarding the site.’
Emad straightened his hat. ‘I see. Well, you may shortly have to stop admitting visitors. It could all be a bit of a three-ring circus here soon, I’m afraid. Does the person who called us…’ He took out his notebook to check the woman’s name, feeling unprofessional that he hadn’t remembered it, or checked before going in.
‘Meredith Vincent,’ said Angela. ‘She’s o
ur shop manager. She was out there having her lunch next to Cherub Pond and she found … it.’
‘Does Ms Vincent know the identity of the body?’
‘I don’t know. She didn’t say. She just called me to say you were on your way … I thought there’d be more of you. Nothing like this has ever happened here before!’
Angela Carruthers looked out at the tourists, jostling impatiently outside the glass doors, trying to eavesdrop. ‘The trouble is,’ she said, stricken, ‘if you wanted us to close, I’d need to run it past my boss, Ralph Allerton. And he’s been missing for the last week.’
‘You don’t need to run it past anyone,’ Emad said, more firmly than he felt. ‘Shall we?’
Angela Carruthers now had an expression of mingled confusion and horror on her face, and wrung her hands with a dry scraping sound, clutching them to her ample bosom, a thought seeming to occur to her. ‘I’m just really worried that … that it’s Ralph in the pond.’
Emad gave her a sympathetic smile. ‘Please do just point me in the right direction, Mrs Carruthers, but stay at your desk. Someone will give you further instructions in due course, but for now you can carry on selling admission tickets. And when my colleague arrives, direct him to us, please.’
He hoped they were doing the right thing. If Dark Mavis – as he’d learned to call DS Mark Davis, who Emad had been delighted to discover happened to be Gemma’s immediate superior – pitched up and immediately demanded the house be closed to the public, or even evacuated, they would look really stupid.
Angela took them out of another door to a lawned area studded with shady horse chestnut trees. An open-sided tourist bus – more like a large cart with rows of seats in it – waited to ferry tourists around the grounds, its driver slouched over the wheel. He looked to be in his mid-forties, yet he had startlingly bushy grey facial hair. He was staring into space, caressing his beard as if it was a beloved pet.
‘It’s about a five-minute walk through the cottage gardens,’ she said, ‘or you can ask Henry there to drive you.’
Emad thanked her and they approached Henry, who sat up guiltily at the sight of their uniforms. ‘Could you run us over to the Cherub Pond as fast as you can, please?’
It was far too hot to walk; he was sweating cobs inside his hi-vis jacket and hat.
They rattled along yellow gravel paths, curious visitors looking up at them from their lawn picnics and strolls. The bus/cart shuddered to a halt next to a walled garden, and Henry turned around in his seat. ‘Go through that archway,’ he said, pointing away from the garden, ‘across the open lawns, turn left at the far side, through the No Entry rope, left again by the greenhouses and you’ll come to the pond.’
They thanked him and alighted, both wiping the sweat from their foreheads as they crossed the lawns and ducked under the rope, falling silent as they prepared themselves to see a dead body.
It was floating face up in the rushes. With dulled, bulging eyes and bloated, peeling skin, it was every bit as gruesome as Emad had feared it might be. A distraught woman came over to them, and Emad had to blink himself back into sharp focus. He realised his breath was coming in sharp, shallow puffs and he felt sick.
Hold it together, dickhead, he silently and furiously urged himself. But one glance at Damian told him his colleague felt the same – the man had turned like a traffic light from red to green.
The woman approaching was wearing a baseball cap with a large label hanging down over her left ear – which was the first image that came back to Emad whenever he mentally revisited the scene. It was odd, but infinitely preferable to that of the corpse. The woman was sobbing – nose running and eyes streaming from underneath her sunglasses. She was short and slim, of indeterminate age – she could have been anything from thirty-five to fifty.
‘You must be Meredith Vincent? I’m PC Khan – call me Emad. Are you all right? I think you need to sit down for a minute. It’s a terrible shock. I don’t feel so hot myself, if I’m honest.’
Spotting the cracked, listing stone bench on the far side of the pond, weeds sprouting out from between the cracks, Emad took Meredith’s arm and led her over to it. It didn’t look appealing, but it was in the shade. The pair of them weaved through the unkempt grass and stumbled slightly over the crazy paving as Damian took a tentative step closer to the still, brackish water.
Emad realised how out of his depth he felt. Right then, despite his nerves about encountering the legendarily difficult Mavis, he’d have welcomed him there to tell him what to do. ‘Isn’t there someone you could call to be with you?’ he asked gently.
Meredith just shook her head. ‘Don’t … want … anyone to see me like this,’ she sobbed. ‘Or anyone else seeing … him.’
It was true what they said, he realised. Nothing really prepared you for your first victim of drowning. The shock of seeing the body like that was bad enough when it was a complete stranger; how much worse must it be if you knew the person?
‘I believe you identified him when you rang us?’ he prompted gently. ‘Ralph Allerton? He’s been missing since last Thursday, is that right? Are you absolutely sure it’s him?’
Meredith gave another shuddering sob, managing a nod. ‘He was my friend,’ she whispered. ‘I recognised his shirt; otherwise I wouldn’t have known, not for sure. Seeing him like that … it’s just … How did he get there? I don’t understand it. He was fine…’
The poor woman was burbling with horror.
‘When did you last see him?’
Meredith paused and stared hard at a dandelion that had forced its way through a crack, twisting the tissue round in her fingers. She wore several big chunks of rings, Emad noticed, with a different colourful stone set in each, making the knuckles of her right hand resemble traffic lights. They seemed at odds with her otherwise conservative appearance.
‘Last Thursday afternoon. We’d had our monthly staff lunch. I went back to the shop before they’d all finished – it can drag on a bit sometimes and I don’t like to leave the volunteers on their own for too long.’
‘How was he?’
Meredith shrugged miserably. ‘He seemed absolutely fine. Happy as Larry. Full of beans … Just, he was quite drunk…’ Her voice caught, and two more fat tears rolled over her cheeks and dropped into her lap. The label from her baseball cap was still dangling, but less obtrusively now – she must have turned it round a little.
Emad realised she must have just borrowed it from the shop to wear to lunch – not very professional, or hygienic, for the shop manager, but she obviously didn’t expect to be seen by anybody.
‘Well, we’ll take a full statement in due course,’ he said. ‘But in the meantime I have to inform the duty inspector, see how he wants to proceed. Could you wait here a second while I make a call?’
Meredith nodded again, without looking up. Emad walked away, out of earshot and round the pond to the far side, where Ralph Allerton’s body floated. He rang Mavis, who picked up immediately.
‘DS Davis.’
‘Yes, hi Sarge,’ he said quietly. ‘PC Emad Khan. I’m at Minstead House. There’s a body in the pond, seems that it’s a senior member of staff who went missing last week. Pond’s in an area of the grounds not open to the public. I wasn’t sure whether to tell them to stop admitting visitors to the house. Should we get the place evacuated?’
He heard Mark take a slurp of coffee. ‘Hm. Nah. Not if it’s definitely hidden from sight. Think it’d be too much of a palaver. So is it definitely him?’
‘Seems like it. His name was Ralph Allerton. Found and ID’d by Minstead’s gift-shop manager, Meredith Vincent. He’s been in there a while. She saw him on the day he went AWOL; says he was pissed but in good spirits. Looks like he probably just fell in and drowned.’
‘Sounds like that, yeah. I’ll look up the MISPER report, hold on…’
Emad heard Mavis tap at his computer keyboard.
‘Right. Yup. His missus says the same. He wasn’t depressed or worried about anyt
hing – going missing was completely out of character. Liked a drink, etc, etc. Pretty obvious what’s happened, as you say. I’ll get everyone down there. Make sure you seal it off.’
‘OK Sarge,’ Emad said. ‘Right you are. See you shortly.’
He returned to the stone bench, where Damian was already cordoning off the pond, unscrolling a roll of police tape and wrapping it around the leg of the bench, then tree trunks nearby.
Meredith was now fanning herself with the brim of the baseball cap. She’d stopped crying but was staring wildly at Emad.
‘What happened to him? How did he get in there? It’s just not … possible.’
Emad grimaced sympathetically. ‘I know, it seems so hard to believe he’d have just fallen in and not been able to get out again. The water must be so shallow. But I suppose if he was that drunk, he might have hit his head on the side or something … we’ll know when the post-mortem comes back.’
Meredith flinched and something caught Emad’s eye. He tried not to stare, but couldn’t help his eyes being drawn back to it: the big, puckered purply-black hole in the back of Meredith’s hand, the one she was fanning herself with. She must have noticed him looking, because she hastily transferred the cap to her other hand and put the scarred one down on the bench slightly behind her, trying to hide it. Perhaps that was why she wore the rings on her other hand, he thought, to pull attention away from her left.
‘You OK to sit there for a few minutes, till our scene-of-crime officers and the paramedics arrive? I’ll take a statement once they do.’
She nodded, staring at her lap.
Emad started walking around the pond, checking the ground for anything unusual. The pond had stone edges, around which was a scrubby, balding lawn, some weed-choked flowerbeds, and the gravel path leading from the greenhouses. The soil was pretty dry after several weeks with little rain, but at the corner of path and lawn, Emad stopped and stared at a noticeable indentation.
