River Deep

by Priscilla Masters

  “Fine,” she said, hearing the lift in her own voice. “Lovely. I’ll see you in ten minutes? On the English Bridge?” She lifted her handbag from the hook on the back of the door, slipped her jacket on and made her excuses to Jericho.

  He arrived in a marked car which surprised her. She always imagined detectives preferred to work incognito. But the Panda car had the advantage of a driver who dropped him off right in the middle of the English Bridge whereas she had had to park in Gay Meadows, the Shrewsbury Town football ground, and walk. She crossed the English Bridge, now open to traffic and met him in the centre. They both looked down at the swirling waters, mud-stained but quieter. “It’s a relief to see the waters recede,” she said.

  “Even if it’s only so we can gain access to the crime scene.”

  “Quite. Did you find the knife?”

  “Not yet.”

  They walked. “So have you found the real Mr Humphreys?”

  He nodded. “I suppose that’s the main headway.”

  “How did you track him down?”

  “Surprisingly easy, really. We took Cressida round to the garage and there was a touching reunion.”

  “Where had he been?”

  “Says he’d caught the flu and was bedridden for a couple of days.”

  “Where? He certainly wasn’t at Marine Terrace.”

  Randall’s eyes sparkled. “Apparently staying with a friend.”

  “So why didn’t he ring his wife?”

  “Said he didn’t think she’d worry, that he’d felt too rotten and, besides, that she’d told him she was going away for the weekend and probably would have her mobile switched off for most of the time.”

  “And was she away?”

  Randall nodded.

  “He didn’t even ring work?”

  “No. Said he felt too ill.”

  “What’s he like?” she asked curiously.

  “Just what you’d expect. Slightly paunchy, well-dressed, plausible.”

  “And can he shed any light on our dead man?”

  “Nope.”

  They descended the steps, still gritty with river-debris, and though she had been told there was no longer any danger, and that the waters were receding, Martha still felt apprehensive as they paddled along the narrow pathway to the row of cottages. Unidentified objects swept past them in the river, impossible to identify. The flow was too fast and in the dwindling light they looked like brown icebergs, indistinct, while the water was murky and mud-stained. The town was still quiet, even the traffic somehow subdued. No one was driving fast. And as they crossed the bridge motorists were glancing down at the river as though they still didn’t trust it. They reached number seven.

  Apart from the police tape threaded through spikes around the front door, rattling in the wind, Marine Terrace looked innocent, nothing like a murder scene, masquerading again as a pretty, seaside cottage. But from the moment Alex Randall pushed the front door open the illusion was gone and she breathed in the murky scent of a river bed and its foul secrets. Which, had it not been for the invasion of the River Severn, might have been preserved a little longer.

  So she pushed aside the image of seaside towns, Whitby or Tenby, Lyme Regis, Scarborough or Skegness, and instead toyed again with the thought: When would Humphreys have discovered his visitor?

  When the scent became too strong? When Calliphora’s thousand and one eggs hatched, filling the cottage with bluebottles?

  What was down there to draw him down into the cellar? A bottle of wine? A fuse box? Nothing? Or had it been a place to hide the victim of his crime? Would anyone be so crass as to hide a body in their own cellar?

  Randall flashed a torch around the room. And this afternoon, more powerfully than before, in the cold and the wet, she was even more conscious of flood damage. She put her hand over her nose and mouth to try and block the stench but she could still taste it through her fingers. Something dead, something rotting. From beneath the ground. This must be the scent of a grave. She felt bound say something. “Unpleasant, isn’t it?” He agreed with a nod, reluctant to open his mouth and taste what he too could smell.

  There is a false image conjured up by the word ‘flood’, of sparkling, clean blue river-water rinsing out one’s home. Reality is quite different. The wall was marked two feet up – inside as well as out. The carpet squelched underneath their feet, making a sucking noise and sticking to their feet as they walked through sludge. It reminded her of Irish bogs her mother had told her folk tales about, featuring will-o’-the-wisps and leprechauns, pixies and fairies who lured small girls into the sucking, drowning mud. But while her father had told her mother off for telling such stories he had had tales of his own, of Druids and Bards, of babies who were left on mountains to die and wolves who lived in the forests and preyed on the unwary and weak, the children and old people, dragging their bones to their lairs. Martha shook herself. But the air still stroked her face with ice-fingers and she felt an echo of a little girl’s fear – of the cold, the dark, the unknown. It was a terror adults rarely experience.

  Even the windows were coated in green slime, as were the few items of furniture, the three piece suite, a small coffee table. The atmosphere was as fetid as a river bed. “What a shame,” she murmured. “What a terrible shame. Who would have thought it would be so very awful? And these are such pretty cottages in the summer.”

  Not only the summer. She had walked this way late one Christmas Eve, seen holly wreaths dangling from the door, spied into a cosy, Dickensian interior, with an oak dresser hung with gaudy Welsh mugs, a log fire, chintz sofa, Christmas tree spangling in the corner. It had been the last Christmas she had shared with Martin and she had known it would be. Maybe it was that that had seared the Greetings Card picture into her brain. A lost idealism. A tragedy about to happen. Giving warning.

  Closing her eyes for no more than a fraction of a second, only a long blink, she recaptured the terrible longing of that moment, that Martin would somehow, miraculously, not die.

  “What a difference a couple of feet of water makes,” Alex said, smashing into her thoughts with an observation. “And we don’t even know when it’ll be safe for the inhabitants to return.” He sighed. “Despite today’s sunshine more rain is threatened – particularly over the Welsh hills. And we all know where that ends up.”

  Martha cleared her throat. “So where exactly was the body lying when Coleman first saw it?”

  He covered the space to a door in the corner in three giant steps and pulled it open. Instantly the dank smell rolled up like a London smog. “These steps lead to the cellar,” he said, flashing his torch downwards. “The body had been dumped down there. It moved up when the waters rose and pushed the door open. The door opens inwards. Poor Coleman. He won’t recover from that in a hurry.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  How quickly normality descends.

  She was at the top of the cellar steps now, peering down. “So what was in there?”

  “Nothing. We’ve scoured it. No knife. No wallet. No mobile phone.”

  “No wine, no fuse box?”

  He flashed the torch on her face.

  “There would have been no reason for Humphreys to go down there,” she explained. “Did he even know there was a cellar?”

  “Yes. He admitted it.”

  “Hmm. And was there anything else to find?”

  “Nothing down here.”

  “And in the rest of the house?” She was anxious to leave the cellar, close the door.

  “Various belongings. A smart suit laid out on the upstairs bed, as though Mr Humphreys was planning on going somewhere.

  “Or had just arrived in from work and got changed.”

  Randall agreed.

  “And I suppose he wouldn’t have realised the implication of the river rising.”

  “Possibly not, not being a native of Shrewsbury.”

  “Have you any idea who the dead man is yet?”

  “Not a clue. No one else has been missi
ng from the garage. We even took Humphreys down to the morgue to view the body but he couldn’t enlighten us.” A brief pause. “Or at least that’s what he said.”

  “Oh? Should I be reading something more into this?”

  Alex half turned back towards the light. New lines were engraved between nose and mouth. Joined by recent frown lines. “You know me, Martha. Everyone lies.”

  Maybe it was a hint towards his personal life. But if it was she could not interpret it.

  Tacitly moving together they emerged outside, in the fresh, chilled air. Alex locked the door behind him.

  “And where is Mrs Humphreys now?”

  “They’re booked in to the Prince Rupert. It’s not really anything to do with us after that. A domestic.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Randall laughed – almost coyly – and she caught sight of very white, very healthy teeth. “The friend he’s been staying with is a female, a receptionist from the garage.”

  Martha felt her eyebrows lift. “And what exactly was his story?” They were walking through the gloom, up the steps, back towards the orange lights of the lamp-posts which lined the English Bridge.

  “He said he’d been advised to leave Marine Terrace on Sunday – about five in the evening – by our boys who were putting out the warning that the river was rising. Interestingly this is exactly true. We were warning people then. Marine Terrace is one of the first places to get flooded. However the two officers in charge of the area near the English Bridge -”

  “Roberts and Coleman.”

  “Exactly. They don’t remember anyone being in number seven. According to them they banged and banged on the door but no one answered. They assumed it was empty.”

  “How does he explain that?”

  “First of all he said he’d answered the door to them. When I confronted him with the fact that the officers had not seen him he changed his story, said he was upstairs, changing, and just heard them.” He gave her a sharp look. “It didn’t exactly inspire confidence.”

  “Had he been at work on Sunday?”

  “Until four. It’s a busy day for the garage.”

  “Sunday night was the extreme earliest time our corpse could have met with his death, according to Doctor Sullivan,” she mused. They leaned over the parapet. The river was difficult to ignore.

  “And Humphreys was with his friend from late Sunday afternoon because of the floods. So he says.”

  She turned to face him, square on. “Are all policemen so cynical, Alex?”

  Deep in his eyes she caught a flicker of hurt, a wounding that she had not meant. It caught her off-balance so that she wished she could have pulled the words back. But they had been said. And could not now be unsaid.

  “Umm.” His voice was hesitant. “After a couple of years on the job.” He cleared his throat noisily. “We start off – I started off – idealistic.” He gave a vague grin. “I think I probably started off even more idealistic than most.”

  It was hard to imagine. It must have been a long time ago. How old was he now? Forties? So – a rookie cop with an Adam’s apple and a skinny neck?

  “Things happen.” His eyes flickered away, back towards the threatening river. “It changes you. Forever. Once you’ve lost it, the idealism I mean. Once it’s gone you can’t recapture it. It goes for ever. Sometimes I think …”

  She waited, wondering whether now he had begun to talk, he might continue.

  “I believe…” He cleared his throat again, rasping and dry. “It’s what marks the young from the old, Martha.” A hint of a smile, “Cynicism engraves lines of doubt and disbelief on our faces. Lines that mean we will never take people at face value ever again.”

  She was sure there was some personal deep suffering behind the words. But just as instinctively she also knew that the time for exploration had passed over. His controlled, regular face was back again, the one she recognised. The shutters had dropped and erased the character lines.

  She smiled a vague response, which he returned in the form of a tight grin. “The alibi we finally squeezed out of him is that this woman who is a part-time receptionist at the garage offered him a place to stay because of the floods. Her husband is conveniently away from home four nights a week, driving lorries up to Scotland for a road haulier’s. Seems like Humphreys availed himself of her hospitality. She says he was with her from about five o’clock on Sunday evening. She said he seemed unwell on Monday and Tuesday and stayed with her on the other side of the town – right up until this morning when he went back to work.”

  “How truthful is she?”

  Alex shrugged, heaved a deep sigh and shifted his weight to the other leg. His profile, in silhouette, picked out by the orange light, looked sharp and grim. “Difficult to say. I mean she strikes me as a bit of a liar. Sheelagh, her name is. S-H-E-E-L-A-G-H.” He spelled it out. “Sheelagh Mandershall. Peroxide blonde. Apparently she and Humphreys ‘hit if off straight away’, wouldn’t you know? When she heard about the flooding of the properties she offered him a bed straight away.” A sudden, mischievous smile. “And who knows what else.”

  She mirrored his smile. He suddenly reminded her of Sam, catching her eyes after a particularly spectacular tackle. Muddy and triumphant. Bloody but unbowed. And somehow thoroughly masculine.

  “So what explanation does Mr Humphreys have for a dead man being found in his house?”

  “None. In fact he did look thoroughly shocked. Unless he’s a consummate actor. He says he left the place empty around five o’clock Sunday evening, coincidentally less than an hour after Sheelagh’s husband had departed for Glasgow, and locked the door behind him. He wasn’t expecting anyone to call. He doesn’t know anyone of that description. And he hadn’t anticipated the river flooding the property. Not really – not like that. He thought it was all dramatic talk and that it wouldn’t happen. And before you ask, Mr. Mandershall’s tachometer proves he was well away by five and we have a petrol receipt for the Lake District at a little after seven. He’s in the clear.”

  “Was the door locked or unlocked when Coleman tried it?”

  “Unlocked. In fact – ajar.”

  She dipped her head. “So who else has keys to the house?”

  “According to the estate agent, only himself. Humphreys had two.”

  “Are they both in his possession?”

  He put a hand on her arm. “Hey, Martha,” he said, grinning. “Who’s the detective?”

  “Sorry,” she said, embarrassed. “I can’t help it. I always want to ask questions. Female nosiness?”

  “Well – as it happens Humphreys does appear to have mislaid one of his keys.” He moved away from the parapet. “And now that’s an end to it.”

  “OK.”

  “Just one more thing, Alex, is your gut feeling that your man was killed in error, the killer thinking it was Humphreys?”

  “I don’t think so but I don’t really have much of a gut feeling at all yet. Nor will I until I know who he is. Then maybe I can understand what he was doing there in the first place. Then, again maybe, I can begin to work on who killed him. Identity is everything, Martha. I don’t need to point that out – especially not to you.”

  “Is there anything more?”

  “Just police stuff, really.”

  “What?”

  “The door was secured by a Yale. No deadlock. Easy to get in. Trouble is folks in Shrewsbury feel safe. They don’t expect to have their homes broken into so they don’t generally bother with unnecessary expense like burglar alarms or complicated locks. This town still lives in the idyllic sixties. Peace and freedom.” He held up two fingers in a forward-facing, sixties peace and love ‘V’ sign. “It’s a backwater, Martha, and I think many people in the UK would give their eye teeth to live in a similar backwater. Quite honestly a nicked credit card could have slipped back the Yale and got you into Marine Terrace.”

  She nodded. “Did you point out to Humphreys that the dead man could have been mistaken for him?”


  “We did.”

  She waited. “With no particular response?”

  “Not a thing. Not a flicker of an eyelid. As I said. He either knows absolutely nothing about this business and it’s pure coincidence that the dead man turned up in his cellar or he’s an accomplished actor.”

  “You must have plenty of lines of enquiry. Witnesses? Someone must have seen the man arrive there on Sunday. There were plenty of people around. Your police officers for a start.”

  “They had enough to do.”

  “But police officers are trained to observe, aren’t they? Have you put out appeals on the radio and television? Our ‘John Doe’ is someone’s husband, brother, son, father. Surely he is missed?”

  Randall gave her an amused smile. “Doctor Gunn,” he said formally. “We’re doing all we can. As you say there are plenty of lines of enquiry. And… .” He’d been stung into revealing more than he’d intended. “We do have a car.”

  “A what?”

  “Well – a Hyundai van, to be precise. Grey, two years old, left at the Friars Lane car park since Monday. Ticket issued Monday morning, ten am, valid for eight hours. The Traffic Department alerted us this afternoon.”

  “But I don’t see the connection. Our man died on Sunday night.”

  “I know but it’s something – maybe a lead.”

  “And the trace?”

  “It belongs to a Mr Haddonfield, from Oswestry.”

  He was smiling, mocking her interest. Waiting for her to prompt him.

  She couldn’t resist. “So?”

  “Mr Haddonfield of Oswestry has, it seems, disappeared.” He was still mocking her.

  “You have a description?”

  Randall nodded. “Early forties, five-eleven, dark-haired.”

  “So?”