The lane DS Stanley had described to Robin was really just a track. It fronted two houses with red-tiled roofs and made a neat incision between the fields. Exactly the width of a tractor, it bore ruts from tyres and along its centre ran a vein of grass. Barbed-wire fencing on either side of the track served to enclose the fields, all of them cultivated and all of them verdant with approximately twelve inches’ growth of wheat.
Robin’s car lurched along the track, in and out of the ruts. It was more than a mile to the bridge. He babied the Escort along and hoped its suspension wasn’t suffering any permanent damage from yet another exposure to a country thoroughfare.
Up ahead, he saw the track make the slight rise that indicated it was passing over the hump of the Allington Bridge. On either side of this bridge, vehicles were drawn over to the strip of white dead nettle that served as the verge. Three of them were panda cars. One was a van. The other was a blue Ariel Square-Four motorcycle, DS Stanley’s preferred mode of transportation.
Robin pulled up behind one of the panda cars. To the west of the bridge, uniformed constables—of which group he’d so recently been a part—were pacing along either side of the canal, one set with eyes cast down upon the footpath edging the south bank of the canal, the other set meticulously making their way through the thick vegetation on the opposite side, five metres away. A photographer was just completing his work beyond a thick growth of reeds while the forensic pathologist waited patiently nearby, white gloves on his hands and black leather case at his feet. Aside from the clucking of mallards and teals who paddled on the canal, no one was making a sound. Robin wondered if this was a reverence for death or merely the concentration of professionals on the job. He pressed his palms against his trousers to rid his hands of the sweat of anticipation. He swallowed, ordered his stomach to settle, and got out of the car to confront his first murder. Although no one had called it a murder yet, he reminded himself. All DS Stanley had said was “We’ve got a child’s body,” and whether it would be classified as a murder or not remained in the hands of the medical examiners.
DS Stanley, Robin saw, was at work on the bridge. He was talking to a young couple who huddled together, arms round each other’s waist as if they needed to keep warm. As well they might do, since neither one of them was wearing much more than a stitch of clothing. The woman had on three palm-sized black triangles posing as a swimsuit. The man was wearing a pair of white shorts. The couple had obviously come from a narrow-boat that was moored in the canal east of the reeds. The words Just Married rendered in shaving cream on the windows of that boat indicated what they’d been doing in the area. Sailing the canal was a popular spring and summer activity. As were hiking the towpath, visiting the locks, and sleeping rough from Reading all the way to Bath.
DS Stanley looked up as Robin approached. He flipped his notebook closed, said to the couple, “Stay right here, won’t you?” and shoved the notebook into the back pocket of his jeans. He fished in his leather motorcycle jacket and brought out a packet of Embassys, which he offered to Robin. They both lit up.
“Over here,” DS Stanley said. He directed Robin to the slope leading down to the towpath. He used his thumb and index finger to hold his cigarette and he spoke as he always did, out of the side of his mouth, as if his every disclosure were a secret between his listener and himself. “Honeymooners.” He gave a snort and used his cigarette to indicate their narrow-boat. “Hired that, they did. And considering it’s a bit too early to be docking for the evening, and considering there i’n’t a hell of a lot of scenery in the immediate environs for them to have a gaze at, I can guess what was on their minds when they decided to stop, can’t you?” He kept his eyes on the narrow-boat and said, “Just have a look at her, sprat. The girl, I mean. Not the boat. The girl.”
Robin did what he was told. The girl’s bikini, he saw, had no back at all to its bottom, just an indecent inch-wide strip of material that disappeared between her firm golden buttocks. On one of these two buttocks the young man’s left hand rested with a proprietary air. Robin heard DS Stanley take in breath between his teeth.
“Time for exercising one’s marital prerogatives, I should guess. And I wouldn’t mind having a nice little bite of that crumpet myself. Jaysus have mercy. The arse on that woman. You, sprat?”
“Me?”
“If you could do her.”
Robin knew he was going tomatoes to the roots of his hair, and he lowered his head to hide this fact. He poked the tip of his shoe into the ground and flicked away cigarette ash in place of a reply.
“Here’s what happened,” DS Stanley was continuing, still out of the corner of his mouth. “They pull over to have some squeeze. Fifth time today but, what the hell, they’re newlyweds. He gets out to moor the boat—his hands all a-quiver and his dick like a periscope that’s looking for the enemy. He finds a place to drive in the stake for a mooring—you can see it at the end of the line, there, can’t you?—but while he’s about it, he finds the kid’s body. He and Bronze Arse run like the dickens over to Manor Farm and put in the call to triple nines from there. Now they’re eager to be out of here, and we both know why, don’t we?”
“You don’t think they had anything to do—”
“With this?” The sergeant shook his head. “But they want plenty to do with each other. Even finding a body doesn’t douse some people’s fires, if you get my drift.” He flipped his cigarette in the direction of the mallards. It sizzled against the water. One of the ducks scooped it up. Stanley grinned, muttered “Scavengers,” and said, “C’mon, then. Have a gander at your first. You’re looking peakish, sprat. Y’aren’t going to feed the kippers on me, are you?”
No, Robin assured him. He wasn’t going to be sick. He was nervous, that was all. Setting a foot wrong in the presence of his superior officer was the very last thing he wanted to do, and fear of setting a foot wrong had put his nerves in a jangle. He wanted to explain this to Stanley, he wanted also to express his gratitude that the detective sergeant had granted his request to be assigned to a case, but he stopped himself from doing either. There was no need to cast doubt upon himself at the moment, and expressing gratitude under the circumstances did not seem the appropriate behaviour of a detective constable.
Stanley called out to the couple who had discovered the body, “You two. Don’t wander off. I’m not through with you,” and led Robin down to the towpath. “Right. So let’s see what kind of marbles you’ve got in the attic,” he said. He indicated the constables on either side of the canal. “That’s a probable exercise in futility. Why?”
Robin observed the constables. They were orderly, they were silent, they kept pace with each other. They were focused on their work and suffered no distractions. “Futility?” he repeated. To gain thinking time, he took a moment to stub out his cigarette on the sole of his shoe. He put the stub in his pocket. “Well, they’re not going to find any footprints, are they, if that’s what they’re looking for. Too much grass on the towpath, too many wildflowers and weeds on the bank. But—” He hesitated, wondering if he should seem to be correcting what appeared to be his sergeant’s hasty conclusion. He decided to take the risk. “But there are other things besides footprints that they might find. If this is a murder. Is it, sir?”
Stanley ignored the question, his eyes narrowed and another cigarette at his mouth, ready for lighting. “Such as?” he asked.
“If it’s a murder? Such as anything. Fibres, cigarette ends, a weapon, a label, a clump of hair, the wad from a shotgun shell. Anything.”
Stanley ignited his cigarette with a plastic lighter. It was shaped like a woman bent over, grasping her ankles. The flame shot out of her arse. “Nice,” Stanley said. Robin couldn’t decide if the sergeant was referring to his answer or the lighter.
Stanley tramped along the towpath. Robin followed. They headed in the direction of the reeds. There, the pathologist was in the process of climbing up the canal bank through a thickly knotted yellow skein of golden saxifrage and
cowslip, with mud and algae clinging to the sides of his Wellingtons. Above him, two forensic biologists waited, their collection cases open. Next to them, a body bag was spread out on the towpath, ready for use.
“So?” Stanley said to the pathologist. He’d apparently come to the scene directly from a tennis game because he was wearing tennis whites and a sweatband round his forehead, an incongruous accompaniment to his knee-high black boots.
“We’ve some fairly decent wrinkling on both of the hands and on the sole of one foot,” he said. “Body’s been in the water for eighteen hours. At the most, twenty-four.”
Stanley nodded. He rolled his cigarette between his fingers. He said to Robin, “Have a look, then, sprat,” and to the pathologist with a smile, “Our Robbie here’s still a virgin, Bill. Want to go five pounds on him making us a technicolour rainbow?”
A look of distaste passed across the pathologist’s face. He joined them on the towpath and quietly said to Robin, “I doubt you’ll be sick. The eyes are open, which always gives one a start, but there’s no sign of decomposition yet.”
Robin nodded. He took a breath and settled his shoulders. They were watching him—both the sergeant and the pathologist, not to mention the constables, the photographer, and the biologists—but he was determined to show them nothing other than professional disinterest.
He descended the canal bank through the matting of wildflowers. The silence round him seemed to intensify, making him hypersensitive to his own body’s noise: the jet-engine sound of his breathing, the jackhammering of his heart, the timberfall of his feet as they crushed the flowers and the weeds. Mud plopped and sucked against the soles of his shoes as he came to the reeds. He skirted these.
The body lay just beyond them. Robin saw one foot first, lying out of the water and tucked into the reeds as if the child had been anchored there for some reason, then the other foot, which was in the water and wrinkled upon the sole, as the pathologist had said. His eyes travelled up the legs to the buttocks and from there to the head. This was turned on its side, the eyes open partway and heavily congested. Short brown hair floated outward from the head, undulating gently on the surface of the water, and as Robin stared at the corpse, racking his brain for the right question to ask—knowing that he knew it, knowing that it was planted firmly somewhere inside his brain, second nature to him, practically planned in advance, a question that would indicate he was on automatic pilot—he saw a quick flit of silver at the child’s partially opened mouth as a fish darted up for a taste of dead flesh.
He felt light-headed. His hands were clammy. Miraculously, however, his mind clicked into gear. He took his eyes off the body, found the right question, and asked it in a voice that didn’t quaver. “Boy or girl?”
In answer, the pathologist said, “Bring the bag,” and joined Robin at the edge of the canal. One of the constables lowered the bag’s zipper. Two others, in Wellingtons, waded into the water. With a nod from the pathologist, they flipped the body over. “Preliminarily, girl,” the pathologist said in answer as her immature hairless pubes were exposed. The constables moved the body from the canal to the bag, but before they raised its zipper, the pathologist dropped to one knee next to the child. He pressed down on her chest. A delicate froth of white bubbles—not far different from soapsuds—seeped out of one nostril. “Drowned,” he said.
Robin said to DS Stanley, “Not a murder, then?”
Stanley said with a shrug, “You tell me, sprat. What are the possibilities?”
As the body was removed and the forensic biologists descended the bank with their bottles and their bags, Robin considered the question and what answers would be reasonable. He caught sight of the honeymooners’ narrow-boat and said, “She was someone on holiday? She fell from a boat?”
Stanley nodded as if thoughtfully considering the hypothesis. “No child reported missing though.”
“Pushed from a boat, then? A quick shove wouldn’t leave marks on the body.”
“Nice possibility,” Stanley acknowledged. “That makes it murder. What else?”
“One of the children from the area? Maybe Allington? Or perhaps All Cannings? One can hike across the fields and get here from All Cannings.”
“Same problem as before.”
“No report of someone missing?”
“Right. What else?” Stanley waited. He didn’t appear the least impatient.
Robin put the final hypothesis into words, a contradiction of his preliminary conclusion. “Victim of a crime, then? Has she—” He shuffled from foot to foot and sought a euphemism. “Has she been…well, interfered with, sir?”
Stanley cocked an interested eyebrow. Robin hurried on.
“I suppose she might have been, mightn’t she? Except there didn’t seem to be…on the body…superficially…” He told himself to get a grip. He cleared his throat. He said, “It could be a rape, except there was no superficial evidence of any violence on the body.”
“Cut on the knee,” the pathologist said from the towpath. “Some bruising round the mouth and the neck. A couple of healing burns on the cheeks and the chin. First degree, those.”
“Still,” Robin began.
“There’s more than one way to rape,” Stanley pointed out.
“So I suppose…” He thought about what direction to head in and settled on saying, “We don’t seem to have much to go on, do we?”
“And when we don’t have much to go on?”
The answer was so obvious. “We wait for the postmortem.”
Stanley tipped him a salute, finger to eyebrow. He said to the pathologist, “When?”
“I’ll have preliminaries tomorrow. Mid-morning. Providing I get no more calls before then.” He nodded at Robin and DS Stanley both, said to the constables, “Let’s load her,” and followed the body up to the van.
Robin followed their progress with his gaze. On the bridge the young couple still waited. As the small corpse was carried past them, the girl turned her head into her husband’s chest. He drew her closer, one hand in her hair, one on her buttock. Robin looked away.
“What’s next?” Stanley asked him.
Robin considered the question. “We need to know who she was.”
“Before that.”
“Before? We take formal statements from the couple and get their signatures on them. And then we look at the PNC. If no one’s gone missing locally, perhaps she’s been reported missing from somewhere else and already listed on the computer.”
Stanley zipped his leather jacket and patted the pockets of his jeans. He brought out a key ring and jiggled it in his hand. “And before that?” he said.
Robin puzzled over this. He looked back at the canal for inspiration. He supposed he could suggest that they drag it, but for what?
Stanley took mercy on him. “Before the statement and before the PNC, we deal with that lot.” He jerked his thumb upward in the direction of the bridge.
A dusty car had just pulled up. Out of it were climbing a woman with a notebook and a man with a camera. Robin saw them hurry to the honeymooners. They exchanged a few words that the woman jotted down. The photographer began clicking pictures.
Robin said, “Newspapers? How the hell could they have found out so fast?”
“At least it’s not television,” Stanley replied. “Yet.” And he walked off to deal with them.
Dennis Luxford touched his fingers to Leo’s flushed cheek. It was damp with tears. He adjusted the blankets round his son’s shoulders and felt a twinge that was one part guilt and one part impatience. Why did the boy always have to make everything so bloody difficult? he wondered.
Luxford murmured his name. He smoothed Leo’s bright hair and sat on the edge of his bed. Leo didn’t stir. He was either deeply asleep or more adept at faking it than Luxford would have guessed. In either case, he was unavailable for further discussion with his father. Which was probably just as well, considering where every discussion between them kept ending up.
Luxford sighe
d. He thought of the word son and everything that single syllable implied about responsibility, guidance, blind love, and guarded hope. He wondered why he had ever supposed he might make a success of fatherhood. He wondered why he had ever thought of fatherhood in terms of its rewards. More often than not, being a father seemed like an endless obligation. It was a lifelong duty that expected him to possess a reservoir of perspicacity as it did interminable battle with his personal desires and tried his meagre reserves of forbearance. It was just too much for one man to bear. How, Luxford asked himself, did other men do it?
He knew at least one part of the answer. Other men did not have sons like Leo. One glance round Leo’s bedroom—in combination with a dip into the past to recall what his own room and that of his brother had been like at Leo’s age—told Luxford that much. Black-and-white movie stills on the walls: everyone from Fred and Ginger in formal attire to Gene, Debbie, and Donald tapping away in the rain. A stack of art books on a plain pine desk, next to them a drawing pad with a sketch of a kneeling angel, its perfect head-encompassing halo and demure folded wings marking it as an example of fourteenth-century fresco. A cage of finches: fresh water, fresh seed, fresh paper on its floor. A bookcase with hardcovers arranged by author, from Dahl to Dickens. And in one corner a wooden trunk with black iron hinges in which, Luxford knew, went completely disregarded a cricket bat, a tennis racket, a football, Rollerblades, a chemistry set, a collection of toy soldiers, and a miniature pair of those pyjama-things worn by karate experts.
“Leo,” he said quietly, “what’s to be done about you?”
Nothing, Fiona would have told him in firm reply. Nothing at all. He’s fine. He’s perfect. The problem is yours.