Dead in the Water

by Peter Tickler

  He went back to the shot he was really interested in and dwelt on it for some time until he had all the details registered in his brain. He prided himself on what he could store away; it wasn’t exactly a photographic memory, but it was pretty good nevertheless.

  After that he made himself a cup of tea and sat down again with a pad and pen. He revisited every photo, this time making a note of everyone he recognised from the church, the people they appeared to be talking to (in so far as he recognised them) and the photograph number concerned.

  By the time he had got to the end, his tea, barely touched, was cold, but he drank it anyway, not caring, because he had more important things to worry about.

  Such as where was Kevin Branston in all the photographs? The answer was nowhere. Did that mean he was the photographer? The only problem with that theory, Mullen told himself, was that it didn’t entirely fit with what he had observed of the man. Branston worked hard. He wasn’t averse to doing some of the background and menial work when required, but he wasn’t a man who avoided the limelight either. It was unquestionably odd that there wasn’t even a single photo of him in the Facebook album. He had got himself into the Oxford Mail the day after that open evening — a flattering photograph and an article that painted him and his project in glowing colours.

  And what was he to make of Paul and Janice Atkinson? No sign of marital disharmony there. But then what did he expect? If you’re having an affair and your marriage is on the verge of going down the pan, that doesn’t mean you don’t put on shows of unity. But Janice’s arm was tucked through Paul’s and there was a broad smile on her face; either it was a very brave bit of play-acting or she didn’t at that stage have a clue about his affair. Except that this took place only a week or so before she had contacted Mullen and hired him to track her husband.

  And then there was Margaret Wilby, glaring out of the background as if this was the last place on earth she wanted to be. Why was she there if that was the case? Was she there out of duty, under sufferance? Or had there been some falling out with someone earlier that evening?

  Mullen clicked the screen of his laptop down and stood up. He felt confused and frustrated, not just with the overload of thoughts, but with the attitude of DI Dorkin. He clearly thought that the anonymous threatening call which Mullen had told them about was fiction, whereas Mullen could still hear the voice of the man in his head, telling him that one of his friends would pay the price. What did he mean by that? Presumably that he was prepared to kill again if Mullen didn’t give up his investigation. Who were the friends he was threatening? He had only been in the area a few months and there were few (if any) people he could genuinely call friends. Rose? Possibly. Becca? He guessed so. Kevin Branston? Mel or Brian or Jean or any of the other volunteers at the Meeting Place? They were all nice to him and twice they had all had a drink together after the evening sessions. What about Pavel from the Iffley Road flats? Ultimately it depended on what the caller meant by ‘friend.’

  * * *

  In the end Mullen decided he had had enough and made his way into the garden. He thought he’d check the tomato plants for water, weed the vegetable patch and tidy up generally. It would help him to switch his brain off for a while and when he had finished he would take a few photographs so that the professor could see that he was looking after the place. But he had barely got his hoe out before he heard a car pull into the drive. There was a wild attention-grabbing hooting. So whoever it was, it wasn’t the police again. He straightened up and walked round the side path, carrying his hoe. It wouldn’t hurt to show he was in the middle of something.

  It was Becca Baines. She grinned. “Ah, it’s the hired gardener.” She held up two bags. “Lunch! Nice and healthy: salad and fresh rolls, plus strawberries for pudding.”

  Mullen realised with a start that he was pleased to see her — and also hungry. But he was puzzled that she hadn’t rung first. “I might have been out,” he said.

  “In that case I would have eaten solo in your lovely garden and then sunbathed until it was time to go to work.” She smiled. “I’m on the night shift today.”

  They ate at the teak garden table, half in the shade and half out. They talked easily. Or rather Becca talked while Mullen listened. Not that he minded. She was good, lively company. Eventually they finished and he went inside to make them coffee. She followed with the debris of lunch.

  “You seem distracted,” she said as she put the leftovers in the fridge.

  “Sorry.”

  “Well are you going to tell me about it or do I have to apply Chinese burns to extract the information?”

  So Mullen started to talk. About Chris, about Janice, about the police’s questioning that morning and about what he had seen on Facebook. The only thing he didn’t mention was the anonymous caller.

  “Show me,” she said. So he did.

  He took her through each photograph, telling her who he knew in each one. She was silent now, murmuring occasionally, sipping her coffee, taking it all in. When he got to the end, he turned and looked at her. “Any thoughts?”

  “There are more shots of your glamorous vicar friend than anyone,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “And no wedding ring on her finger.”

  “No.”

  “Is she gay?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I bet she isn’t.” Becca had taken over the laptop. She moved back to one of the photographs of Diana Downey, mouth open, laughing, surrounded by punters. “Look at her. She likes to be the centre of male attention. A bit of a prick-teaser, if you ask me. Hiding behind her clerical robes.”

  Mullen almost pointed out that she didn’t seem to wear ‘clerical’ clothes even in church, but managed not to.

  “Who took the photos?” Becca said.

  “Sorry?” Mullen was taken off guard by the change of direction. “I don’t know.”

  “A man, I bet. Probably fancies her something rotten.”

  It was a light bulb in the brain moment for Mullen. Of course! It was so obvious. Kevin Branston! It all made sense. Branston was conspicuously absent from the photographs, so the chances were that it was him taking the photos. And it was Branston who had been leaving Diana Downey’s house in something of a hurry before Mullen’s own appointment with her. He was probably in charge of the Facebook account too, making sure there were plenty of photos of their open evening on display — not to mention Reverend Downey in all her glamour. He was besotted with her. The question was: did she feel the same way about him?

  “Well?” Becca was looking at him impatiently. “What’s going on in that tiny little brain of yours? Because I can hear the cogs clicking, albeit rather slowly.”

  Mullen explained. Becca listened with a brow so furrowed it might have been a freshly ploughed field. He thought he found her even more attractive when she was in serious mode. When he had finished, he waited for her to respond. He needed help and he reckoned that she — being a woman and detached — might be the person to provide it.

  “I suppose the question is: does the vicar getting up to a bit of hanky-panky with your boss have any relevance to the two deaths?”

  “It’s possible, I suppose. If someone was trying to blackmail them, maybe . . .” Mullen dribbled to a halt. Just putting his thinking into words seemed to highlight how flimsy it was.

  Becca was looking at him inscrutably. “You don’t seem very certain.”

  “No.” He scratched his head. “Well, these days it wouldn’t be the end of the world if such a relationship came to light would it?”

  “Is Kevin Branston married?”

  Mullen felt very stupid. He hadn’t thought of that. But he knew the answer to her question. “He wears a wedding ring.”

  “So put yourself in the Reverend’s shoes. She’s fallen for a married guy. They are sleeping together. Every Sunday she stands up in the pulpit and preaches the ten commandments and all that jazz. Then Chris and Janice find out and they decide to apply a bit of
blackmail. ’Woman Vicar is a Marriage Wrecker!’ You can imagine the headlines in the Daily Trash, can’t you? So Reverend Downey tells Kevin it’s all over and she tells him why. But Kevin is obsessed with her. No way is he going to let her finish with him. He’s going to sort the two of them out permanently. So he arranges two very different ‘accidents.’ Maybe he doesn’t even tell Diana.”

  She downed the last of her coffee and put her mug on the side. “Well?”

  “OK,” Mullen said. “You’ve made a good case. But where’s the hard evidence?”

  “You’re the private eye, buster.”

  * * *

  Mullen’s intention had been to get to the Meeting Place early and in some way or other confront Kevin Branston. He hadn’t worked out the details in his head when he left Boars Hill. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, as the saying goes, especially on the Oxford ring road system on a Friday, when the rush hour begins midway through the afternoon and lasts forever — or so it seemed to Mullen as he sat fuming in his car on the slow drag towards the Heyford Hill roundabout.

  So Mullen actually arrived five minutes late, which put him at an immediate disadvantage. Branston was onto him within seconds, even though he had tried to slip in unobtrusively.

  “What time do you call this, Mullen?”

  “Sorry, the traffic was really bad.”

  “The traffic is the same for everyone,” Branston snapped. Mullen was tempted to argue the toss on that. Branston was within cycling distance, so of course queues of stationary vehicles weren’t going to affect him significantly. But he merely apologised again.

  “I’m really sorry, Kevin. It really was just a misjudgement. I’ve moved house and didn’t realise quite how long it would take me. I’ll allow more time next Friday.”

  “Good.” Branston seemed to be mollified. He switched into his more normal organisational mode. “We’re one down in the kitchen. So keep an eye on the food queues. Hungry people don’t like to be kept waiting. And of course England are pretty much down and out of the World Cup, so who knows how that will affect people’s mood.”

  “Sure.” Mullen moved off through the scrum of people. He had noticed on the BBC website that England had crashed to their second defeat the previous night. What with everything else going on in his life, it seemed totally irrelevant. But he knew from his own brief footballing career in the army how easily passions were raised and how much it hurt when your team lost.

  “See the game last night?” It was Brian. Mullen liked him. He and his wife Jean were there every Friday doing their bit. He had a pack of loo rolls under his arm. “Urgent delivery!” he laughed. And then he was gone.

  It was a subdued crowd that evening. Mullen put it down partly to depression resulting from England’s World Cup disaster. It had been a lovely day, the warmest of the week, and although that meant people were very happily smoking and chatting outside, everyone seemed rather flat. The only person who got excited about the food being slower than usual was a man called Terry who had diabetes and hence a very short fuse at meal times. Mullen got a roll off Jean and made him chew on it. He suspected that Terry was making the most of his condition to try and jump to the front of the queue. He wasn’t having that, but equally he didn’t want unnecessary trouble. He’d bring it up at the end-of-day team meeting in case there were better ways he could have handled it.

  But apart from another blockage in the gents loo — this time a combination of a pair of pants and two plastic bags — it was a pretty uneventful evening. After the punters had gone and the clearing and cleaning up had been completed, the team settled down with cups of tea and debriefed.

  Terry and Jean complained about the shortage of cloths and cleaning materials, but in general everyone seemed to be keen to get off home. Branston, who had been yawning intermittently through the meeting, called Mullen back as he prepared to leave.

  “Hey,” he said. “I understand it was you who found Chris dead in the river.”

  “Yeah.” Mullen could hardly deny it. That sort of information was bound to come out eventually, though he was surprised. No-one else at the Meeting Place had mentioned it, which meant that it surely wasn’t public knowledge. He wondered who Branston’s source was.

  “That’s quite a coincidence,” Branston continued, looking askance at Mullen. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  Mullen shook his head. “Not really. Maybe after the coroner has passed judgement.”

  Branston gave another yawn. His breath smelt of garlic and mints. But he hadn’t finished. “It must have been quite a surprise for you.”

  “Looks like you need an early night,” Mullen replied, trying to change the subject.

  Branston yawned again. “Ten out of ten for observation, Doug.” He pressed his shoulders back, flexing his arms. “Gina, my wife, wakes me up. She’s always waking up and then she turns on the lights and fusses about getting cups of tea and scanning the internet on her tablet. So I wake up too and then I can’t get back to sleep either.”

  “Can’t the doctor prescribe something for her?” A thought was flitting elusively round Mullen’s brain.

  “Of course. And they have done. But it’s a dangerous road. I don’t approve myself. You can easily become dependent on them. So Gina saves them for when she’s feeling desperate. As for me, I just move into the spare room when I need an uninterrupted night.”

  Mullen paused. He was tempted to ask what drugs the doctor had prescribed for Gina Branston, but something held him back — caution or intuition — and then the opportunity was gone.

  “Anyway, we are all done here,” Branston said with finality. “Time to go home.” He turned off the hall lights in order to drive home his point. “See you next week, Doug.”

  Mullen nodded and said goodnight. His opportunity had gone, but his suspicions remained.

  Chapter 8

  The dream began in the usual way. He was back in the army and was opening the door into Ben’s bedroom. There was a smell of joss sticks, which was strange because Ben never burned joss sticks. He was sitting at his small table. The room was dark except for where his red, blue and white angle-poise lamp cast a glaring light down onto a book over which Ben was hunched. Mullen was puzzled. He walked over to the desk to see what the book was because Ben was not a reader of books.

  “Hello, mate,” Ben said, turning his head. Mullen didn’t dare look at him because he knew what he would see. That black hole where his mouth and nose should be. He bent down and closed the book so that he could see what it was. An animal’s face stared out at him: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Then he became aware of a ringing sound. Half awake, Mullen felt for his mobile and answered the call.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Fitz,” said a thick Glaswegian accent. “You said to ring. It’s about Chris.”

  Mullen’s somnolent brain woke up, identifying the guy to whom he had given the last of his supply of cigarettes. “Yes?”

  “You promised twenty quid.”

  “OK. Where shall we meet?”

  “There’s a good café in St Giles. In half an hour.”

  “Half an hour? Not sure I can be there that soon.”

  “I’ll wait outside.” He hung up.

  * * *

  Fitz was sitting on the pavement, legs crossed, eyes cast down and a cap laid upside down in front of him. There were half a dozen coins in the bottom, but only one of them was silver.

  “Fitz?”

  As soon as Mullen spoke, the man leapt to his feet with surprising alacrity, scooping up hat and money as he did so.

  “Thought you weren’t coming.”

  “You know what thought did,” Mullen replied, quoting something that his teacher Miss King used to say to him without ever explaining further.

  “I’m hungry.”

  A full English breakfast was clearly part of the deal as far as Fitz was concerned. Mullen didn’t mind. He ordered himself one too. It was a welcome change from Muesli. And a
s long as Fitz was waiting for and then eating his breakfast and drinking his tea, he was a captive audience.

  “So, tell me about Chris.”

  “Hungry,” Fitz said.

  Doug shrugged and waited. Two mugs of tea were soon delivered, but Fitz remained sullen and silent. The teas were followed, with impressive speed, by two plates piled with the sort of fry-up a man would die for. Mullen dug in, pushing a fork piled high with bacon, egg, sausage and toast into his mouth. He shuddered with pleasure. He looked across at Fitz, who grunted rhythmically as he swallowed three mouthfuls of food in quick succession. At that rate, Mullen reckoned, he would be done and dusted within minutes and then out of the door. Maybe this was a mistake, another dead end up which he had been led. Fitz jerked his head up as if he had read Mullen’s thoughts and gave a toothy grin.

  “He was a tight bastard.”

  Fitz took another slug of tea from his mug and belched. Mullen sipped at his tea and waited.

  “Tried to borrow off me. He pretended he was skint. I was stupid enough to give him a tenner, but I never got it back.”

  “If he didn’t have any money, why do you say he was tight?”

  Fitz pushed another fork-load of food into his mouth and chewed it more slowly, maybe spinning out his pleasure. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked across at Mullen again, this time without a trace of a grin.

  “I was in Costa, the one in Queen Street. Some old lady took pity on me and bought me a coffee and a sandwich. Nice old girl. She even stopped and chatted for a while and watched my things while I went to the loo. But she said she had to catch her bus, so I sat tight for a bit longer, dragging it out for as long as I could. It was raining outside. Then I saw Chris. He was coming down the circular stairs and he paused halfway down. He had a wodge of notes in his hand. He was counting them — there were twenty at least, I’d say.”