Dead in the Water

by Peter Tickler

  “And why exactly would a few of you good people of St Mark’s be so interested in Chris?” If Janice was going to speak her mind, then so would he. “And why indeed are you willing to spend money on me when the police will be running a case file on his death? The coroner will expect a detailed report from them.”

  “A report that says an unknown down-and-out got drunk, fell into the river and drowned. No sign of foul play. Death by misadventure. Next case please.”

  “I’m not convinced.” And he wasn’t. Not convinced that there was anything suspicious to uncover, not convinced as to the motivation of the do-gooders of St Mark’s, not convinced about anything except the £300 that he still had safely tucked away inside his wallet.

  “Darling!” It was a man’s voice. Mullen turned. He recognised both the voice and the face. Not that he had ever spoken to the guy or even met him, except via the lens of a camera. It was Paul Atkinson.

  “This is Mr Mullen, Rose’s private detective.”

  She made him sound like a favoured pet.

  “Pleased to meet you.” Paul Atkinson thrust out a hand. “Found any clues yet, then? Plenty of dodgy characters here if you ask me.” He laughed.

  Mullen wasn’t asking. Merely observing and wondering. Wondering, for instance, if Paul Atkinson was putting on an act just as much as his wife had been a few moments earlier? What did he know? Had she confronted him with the photos? Or had she stored them away as insurance for the future? If the former, did Paul Atkinson know that it was he, Mullen, who had taken them?

  “If you’re looking for sinners, what better place to start than a church?” Atkinson was clearly the sort of man who didn’t merely make a point. He battered it half to death. “Christians are obsessed with sin. ‘We have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God,’ wrote St Paul. And don’t we get reminded of it every Sunday.”

  “Paul!” Janice hissed. “That’s a gross caricature.”

  There was another laugh and a tossing of the head. “Nice to meet you, Mulligatawny,” he said. “Things to do and places to go.” And then he was gone, off to irritate some other sap.

  In another place and in other circumstances, Mullen would have succumbed to his instinctive desire to knock the man’s block off. It had been Dorkin the other day, hiding behind his detective’s badge, and now it was Paul Atkinson hiding behind the church and the fact that there were a hundred pious witnesses who would back him up. Mullen clenched his left hand into a fist and thumped himself on the thigh. It was the only way he could express his frustration. He wasn’t a man who had grown up learning to turn the other cheek and let prats get off scot free.

  Janice didn’t follow her husband. She did, however, emit a noise like a frustrated parakeet. She moved half a step forward. “Par for the course I’m afraid, Doug,” she whispered. “God only knows why I don’t throw him out.” She looked at him in appeal. “I could do now, couldn’t I?” She reached across, her hand gripping his upper arm for two or three seconds.

  Mullen flinched. He felt like he had stepped out of the shallows straight into deep water, his feet suddenly unable to touch the bottom. He took a slug of coffee while he tried to think of something appropriate to say. Whatever he had thought spying on people’s spouses might lead to, this sort of emotional complication wasn’t one of them.

  “Look, Janice,” he said, trying to extricate himself without being too brutal. “I need your help. I need to know who in the church knew Chris.”

  “We all did, pretty much.” She paused. “Not biblically of course.” She laughed. “But Chris was one of those people you couldn’t not notice. His ponytail, his insistence on wearing camouflage clothes, dare I mention his smell — not exactly a typical member of St Mark’s.”

  Mullen tried another angle. “So who in the church is funding me?”

  “I am, for one. After all, you were my idea.” She rolled her eyes. She was flirting again.

  “Jesus!” Mullen said, and then realised his faux pas.

  Janice grinned. “Naughty, naughty!”

  Mullen drained his coffee. He had had enough messing around. “You’re not exactly helping here, Janice.”

  He turned to move away, but this time her hand touched his shoulder. “Sorry, Doug,” she said, suddenly serious. “Just follow me. I’ll introduce you to Derek Stanley.”

  Derek Stanley was the guy with the goatee to whom Rose had failed to introduce him. Nattily dressed in electric blue chinos, pale yellow shirt and stone-coloured linen jacket, he peered at Mullen over his glasses. Janice made the introductions and then withdrew, removing Mullen’s coffee mug from his hand as she did so. He felt her nail scratch the inside of his wrist and then she was gone, leaving behind both the smell of her perfume and a host of confused thoughts.

  Stanley plunged straight in. “Chris was a nice chap. Chatty, easy-going and helpful. Sorted out the disabled loo when it got blocked one Thursday. He’ll be missed.”

  “Do you remember when he first came to the church?”

  “Oh, yes. That’s an easy one. Good Friday. Of course we had a service that day, 10.30 start like today, but very different in tone: quiet and reflective. Actually I didn’t notice him until the end. That was because he was sitting at the back of the church. My first thoughts were, I fear, rather unchristian.” He frowned as if not quite sure how to express his feelings. “I found his camouflage clothes rather . . .” He took off his glasses and allowed them to hang from his neck on their chain. He rubbed at his eyes. They were moist. “Sorry. Perhaps I should explain. My sister Sarah moved to Hungerford in July 1987. A lovely little Berkshire town — or so she thought. Six weeks later Michael Ryan ran amok there and killed fourteen people before shooting himself. Perhaps you remember it? The first person he killed was a mother he came across in Savernake Forest. He let the children go, but he shot her in the back. Thirteen times. ”

  He fell silent. Mullen waited, conscious Stanley was nowhere near finished.

  “Sarah was at home that day. She was sitting in her front room when Ryan passed by, oblivious of everything that was going on outside. Ryan fired four shots through the windows. One of the bullets grazed her temple. She recovered physically, but not emotionally or mentally. One year later to the day, she hanged herself.”

  There was another long pause. For the second time Mullen felt he wasn’t just in deep water, but was in danger of drowning in it. He knew he had to say something. “I’m sorry to have brought it all up again.”

  Stanley shrugged. “Not your fault. But I suppose the first time I saw Chris standing there at the back of the church, I thought he was Michael Ryan reincarnated. A ghost.” He fell silent, and then a half-smile spread across his face. “Don’t tell the vicar. She might give me a theological telling off.” He leant forward and gripped Mullen’s forearm. Mullen tried not to wince. Was this grabbing of arms and patting of shoulders something that all the members of St Mark’s did when they got intense and serious?

  Stanley, as if sensing his discomfort, released him. “Actually, it has been very good to talk about it. Therapeutic I guess. Not that I’m into stuff like that, but . . .” He shrugged, unable to finish saying whatever it was that he was thinking. A child dressed as an angel danced past and for a moment or two both of them were distracted by the girl.

  “But the reality was that Chris was altogether different. Cheerful, sociable, chatty. Not at all like your average mass murderer.”

  Mullen took the opportunity to move the conversation on. “So when did you last see him?”

  “On the Sunday before his death. He came to the morning service and then stayed for the bring-and-share meal. Not that he would have brought any food, I dare say. But that didn’t matter. I remember he helped put away the tables at the end.”

  “What else can you tell me about Chris?”

  Stanley seemed surprised by the question. His eyes, unprotected by his glasses, blinked — a mole emerging from darkness. “Not a lot, I suppose. We passed the time of day mos
t Sundays, but how much do you get to know someone from a few chats in church?”

  Mullen considered this. It seemed very reasonable. Friendly, but hardly a deep relationship. If so, then why was Stanley one of those paying for him to make a private investigation? Was this an example of Stanley’s ‘Christian charity’? Or, the cynic inside Mullen said, was this more to do with good old-fashioned guilt that they had somehow failed Chris? Mullen had no immediate answers, but he didn’t mind.

  He tried another angle. “Do you know where Chris lived?”

  Stanley shook his head. “I’m ashamed to say I never asked him. I assumed he had a tent somewhere. There’s quite a few people that do that round here, pitch camp somewhere along the river near where the railway crosses it. Especially at this time of the year.”

  “Did he ever talk about family, where he grew up, jobs he’d done?”

  Again there was a shake of the head.

  Over Stanley’s shoulder Mullen noticed Rose making her way through a scrum of small children who had materialised from somewhere in the parish centre. He took it as a sign and pulled a business card out of his wallet. “In case you think of anything else,” he said, handing it to Stanley.

  * * *

  “How is it all going?” Rose engulfed him with her smile. “Not too much of an ordeal, I hope?”

  Mullen wasn’t sure if she was referring to Derek Stanley in particular or the whole experience of coming to church.

  “Your Chris seems to be a bit of a blank canvas,” he said. “Mr Stanley claims to have spoken to him several times, yet he can’t really tell me anything substantial, not even where he lived.”

  Rose frowned as she considered this. The corners of her mouth puckered. Mullen found this absurdly distracting. She was wearing a summer jersey dress, white with yellow and blue flowers, a navy blue linen jacket and a silver chain with a cross round her neck, altogether smarter than when they had met the previous day. He wondered if she had plans for lunch. He wondered too how much — or how little — she knew about Chris. “Do you know where he lived?”

  She shook her head. “I assumed he was homeless. In this good weather, a lot of down and outs choose to sleep rough. Or there’s O’Hanlon House in Luther Street.”

  Mullen felt a flash of anger from somewhere deep within him. This wasn’t just because of her dismissal of Chris and others like him as ‘down and outs,’ though he did hate the expression. It was a neat way of consigning people, real flesh and blood people, to a place where they could be forgotten. You could humour them, feed them with a sandwich and a cup of tea, and then ignore the rest of their lives. He had known someone like Chris once, a man named Bill. He had bumped into him near Kings Cross when, aged fifteen, he had decided to leave the misery of home for the bright lights of London. Bill had looked after him and after a while persuaded him to get on a train back home. Bill had been a ‘down and out’ and Bill had saved his life.

  “So you didn’t ask Chris where he lived either?” He heard the sharpness in his own voice and, as he saw her face crumple, he immediately regretted it. She looked down, as if studying the stained church carpet, then raised her eyes until they met his. “I thought,” she said, “it was kinder not to ask.”

  There were still seventy or eighty adults and children filling the church with chatter and laughter and (in one case) tears, but the silence that now fell between Mullen and Rose was as thick and unremitting as the Berlin wall in the Cold War days.

  “Perhaps it was,” Mullen said, trying to undo the damage he had done. In vain.

  “My mother has invited you for lunch.” A sudden switch of direction.

  “Your mother?” he said, trying to ignore the hostility in her voice.

  “Surprising though it may seem to you, I have a mother.” The temperature between them had plunged way below zero. “Would you like to come or not?”

  “I would,” he said.

  “Come on then.” And she turned on her heel, heading for the exit. Mullen followed, conscious that he couldn’t have handled things worse if he had tried.

  But he didn’t make it outside. The Reverend Diana Downey, doing a meet and greet routine by the double doors, stepped forward, hand outstretched. “Mr Mullen, I presume.”

  “Doug.”

  “Very nice to have you along today, Doug. I do hope we haven’t put you off coming again?” Diana Downey’s face crinkled round the edges. Mullen wasn’t an expert on perfumes, but she had undoubtedly applied plenty that morning. Her ear-rings were respectively a sun and moon. More New Age than Christian, Mullen thought — though what did he know about either?

  “It was a nice service.” It was a feeble response; but it wasn’t as if he had attended many in his time.

  “It was such a shame about Chris,” she continued.

  Mullen nodded. So she knew why he was here. “Maybe I could talk to you about him?”

  “Of course. I don’t know how much help I can be, but give me a ring. My number is on the bottom of the service sheet.”

  “I will.”

  “Good.” Mullen had had his turn. She turned to greet another parishioner who wanted her attention. Mullen took his cue and went outside to catch up with Rose. She was across the other side of the road, talking to Janice and Paul Atkinson. Their heads turned as one towards him and then they broke up, the Atkinsons hurrying off down a path that ran between the houses.

  “There you are,” Rose said as Mullen reached her. “I thought maybe you had changed your mind.”

  * * *

  Margaret Wilby lived in Grandpont Grange, an elegant stone-faced retirement complex built around a pair of quadrangles in imitation of the archetypical Oxford college. She greeted her daughter rather coolly, Mullen thought, barely allowing herself to be pecked on the cheek. As for him, she nodded curtly and ran her eyes up and down his clothing as if assessing whether he was appropriately dressed for Sunday lunch. Mullen suspected he failed on that score.

  “My daughter will offer you a drink,” she said, retreating to the kitchen at the end of the large living space they had just entered. Mullen took in the detail. A small dining table (mahogany he guessed) was laid for three. There was a two-seater settee and a pair of matching armchairs grouped around a low oak table. A flat-screen TV stood on a matching oak cabinet in the corner. A tablet device of some sort lay on a side-table (also oak) next to one of the armchairs. The carpet was deep red with a slight fleck.

  “There’s wine, if you like. We’re having red with the lamb,” Rose said. “Or my mother has a plentiful supply of dry sherry and gin and tonic.”

  “Or apple juice or water if you don’t drink on duty,” her mother said.

  Mullen shrugged. “I’m not a policeman. Red wine would be nice.”

  Margaret Wilby made a guttural noise that might have meant several things, though Mullen doubted if any of them were complimentary. He wondered how soon after they had eaten he could leave without giving offence. It didn’t seem to be the happiest mother-daughter relationship and he wasn’t sure either of them wanted him there. Which rather begged the question: why had he been asked?

  By the time they were sitting down at the table some ten minutes later, Mullen was feeling slightly less jaundiced. He had almost emptied his wine glass and the smell from the food (roast lamb, roast potatoes, vegetables, gravy and mint jelly) was making him realise how hungry he was. He made the faux pas of picking up his knife and fork just as Margaret plunged into a prolonged grace which covered thanks for the food, a request for divine wisdom and regret for the ‘passing of poor Chris,’ but neither woman appeared to hold it against him. For that he felt truly thankful.

  “I would like to make something clear, Mr Mullen.” Margaret Wilby spoke as if addressing a meeting of the town council. Mullen was about to lift a forkful of lamb and potato into his mouth. Reluctantly he laid it back on the plate. He paused, waiting for her pronouncement. “I think Rose and her coterie are wasting their money. I cannot see the point of hiring a priva
te detective when the police with all their resources can do a much better job.” Mullen looked across at her, but her attention had transferred to her plate: she speared two pieces of carrot and raised them to her mouth. “Well? Haven’t you anything to say for yourself?”

  “Rose says that Chris did not drink alcohol,” Mullen said. “My understanding is that the police pathologist found a high concentration of alcohol in his blood. I see it as my task to investigate this apparent discrepancy.”

  “I see.” Margaret Wilby considered Mullen’s answer for several seconds. She took a sip of wine and swilled it round her mouth as if trying to decide if it passed muster. Eventually she swallowed.

  Mullen felt he had to say more. “If Chris went on a bender after a period of abstinence, as the police think, then the chances are there will be some evidence somewhere. Someone will have been there at the time, maybe drinking with him. A shop-keeper may remember him buying the booze. Or there might be a stack of empties wherever it was that he slept at night.”

  “And what happens if you draw a blank? Do you give Rose all the money back? Like it says on your website?”

  Mullen wondered what Mrs Wilby had done in her earlier life. She would have made a formidable barrister he reckoned.

  “If I draw a blank, your daughter has kindly told me she and her colleagues will not be asking for the £300 back.”

  Margaret Wilby assembled another forkful of food. “In that case, all I can say is you had better make sure you give them good value for their money. Otherwise I shall make life very difficult for you.”

  Mullen felt a sudden shiver of something close to fear, even though (he told himself) it was ridiculous to be scared of an older lady with pretensions of grandeur and a sharp tongue. But there was no doubting the menace behind her words. Who did she know who could make life difficult for Mullen? Someone high up in the police? The Chief Constable?

  “Mother!” Rose said. Her face had turned a deep red and her hands were gripped tightly round her fork and knife, as if she might be about to use them as weapons. “I think it’s time we changed the subject.”