Dead in the Water

“So take a look at my car!” Mullen was half-way up on his feet when he realised what he was doing. He was losing it, playing into Dorkin’s hands. He forced himself back down into his seat. “See if you can find any damage to the bodywork.” he said. “You won’t.”

“The pathologist says she was unlucky. It was only a glancing blow. So there probably wasn’t much in the way of damage to the vehicle.” Dorkin’s almost permanent smirk had finally been replaced by a steely glare. “This is how I see it. She must have realised what was happening at the last minute. She nearly got out of the way. Only she didn’t. The vehicle clipped her and when she fell her head cracked against the curb of the pavement. Good night, Vienna.”

Mullen was confused. His thoughts were scrambled egg. Maybe he was entering some sort of shock. He had seen Janice in church only on Sunday, full of life and bitterness, desperate for his help. How could she be dead?

“So tell me how you know Janice.” Dorkin had changed gear, his voice calm and reasonable.

Mullen didn’t reply immediately. He didn’t want to say anything and yet he knew he had to. Otherwise Dorkin would interpret it as refusing to co-operate and he would become the prime suspect. So keep it simple and straightforward, he told himself, or you’ll end up tripping yourself up. “She hired me to find out if her husband was having an affair.”

“And was he?”

“Yes.”

“Who with?”

Again Mullen hesitated. But again he knew he had no choice. “A woman called Becca Baines.”

“You have her address?”

“No,” he lied.

“You didn’t follow her home ever?”

“No. They always met at a hotel, that new one off the northern ring road. Why don’t you ask Paul Atkinson? He must know.”

“And I know how to do my job, thank you Mullen.” Dorkin wasn’t exactly cuddly in his manner, but now that he was in control and Mullen was co-operating, he was almost human.

“If this interview is going to continue any longer, I want a lawyer,” Mullen said. It was a bit late in the day to say it, but he realised he had been stupid not to insist on it sooner. He was in danger of getting out of his depth.

“No need,” Dorkin said. “You’re free to go. We’ve finished talking — for now.”

* * *

Mullen may have been free to go, but that still meant he was in Cowley, the best part of four miles from home — and from his car. It was on his car that his thoughts focused initially as he began the long walk which led into the city. No doubt Dorkin and Fargo had taken a good look at it before they hammered on his door, checking it for any signs of hit-and-run damage. They wouldn’t have found any, of course. But even so, they had pulled him in. He didn’t entirely blame them. Dorkin’s assumption that Janice had come to the Iffley Road because she had wanted to speak to him seemed spot on. When Mullen thought about it that was the only conclusion he could come to himself, because he had never told Janice he had moved or was intending to. Rose knew, of course, and so did Derek Stanley, but unless one of them had told Janice, she almost certainly wouldn’t have done.

Poor Janice. He wished he had been nicer to her. He wished he hadn’t left her drinking on her own in the pub that day. He hadn’t even bought her a drink! It wasn’t as if he had to sleep with her, just be some sort of friend. Sit and listen for as long as it took. Still at least they had had a conversation in church. That was something. She hadn’t seemed to hold any grudge.

Mullen paused, waiting as a supermarket home delivery van tried to exit Howard Street onto the Cowley Road. As he stood there another thought bubbled to the surface: if Janice didn’t know he had moved, how come the police had found out so quickly? Someone must have told them. He hadn’t told them he was moving either. He had given them his Iffley Road address the day he had found Chris in the river and he hadn’t told Dorkin any different when he came to the Meeting Place. The police might have gone round to his Iffley Road address and found him gone, but he hadn’t left a forwarding address there because he didn’t see the point. He had no idea how long his arrangement with the professor would last. It was meant to be for nine months, but he found it hard to visualise that actually happening. When had he last lived in one place for that long?

Mullen pushed on. The Oxford Road had become the Cowley Road. He had just passed the Christian Life Centre and was approaching the beginning of the shops and restaurants that make Cowley Road the melting pot that it is. He was starving. His sandwich was lying on the kitchen table in Boars Hill — he had only managed one bite. He was also dying for a coffee. It didn’t take long to find a place that suited his mood and had Wi-Fi. He decided on a ham and cheese panini and a skinny cappuccino and he sat at the back, out of the way. At first he concentrated on eating, but after that he wiped his hands carefully and got out his mobile. He went to the Oxford Mail website. It didn’t take long to find what he wanted, a report on the hit and run. Janice had not been named — it was too soon for that — but the reporter had jammed plenty of information into a ten-line article. The incident had happened round about ten p.m. The driver had not stopped. It had been raining hard at the time. The police were appealing for witnesses.

But what was not in the article was of most interest to Mullen. It did not say that the police were looking for any particular model or colour of car. In fact, Mullen realised suddenly, the article used the word ‘vehicle’ not ‘car,’ which suggested that they had no idea what they were looking for and so, presumably, they had no witness of the moment of impact. Was it really likely that no-one had seen it? Maybe so, given the weather conditions. But Mullen nevertheless felt uneasy. Was it paranoid of him to be suspicious? Chris dies in a river, his bloodstream full of alcohol when he had supposedly given it up. Janice is killed in a hit-and-run. Janice knew Chris, as did her husband Paul, not to mention Rose Wilby and Derek Stanley and plenty of other people from St Mark’s. And why had Janice tried to find him at ten p.m. on a dreadfully wet evening when half the world was tuned into the World Cup and the other half were desperately flicking channels to find a programme that didn’t involve an inflated pig’s bladder. She must have had a pressing reason to do so, something she needed to tell him. Mullen didn’t believe in coincidences. It would have to be one heck of a coincidence for Janice to just happen to be accidentally killed outside the building where he had been living. That didn’t make him a conspiracy theorist as far as he knew. And he was pretty sure he wasn’t paranoid, though now he came to think about it most paranoid people were probably unaware of it. All he knew was that something stank to high heaven.

* * *

Mullen took his time over a second cappuccino — followed by a second trip to the loo — before he finally headed off to look for witnesses. It wasn’t that he was reluctant to do so, more a question of timing. He wanted to give himself the best opportunity of finding people in, which meant, he reckoned, not starting until six p.m.

He began with the terrace of old town houses in which he himself had temporarily stayed. They were all split into tiny bedsits and although a surprising number of people were in, he drew a total blank. Even Pavel, with whom Mullen had gone out for a drink a few times when he was living there, could only shrug his shoulders in sympathy. What with the foul weather, the prevalence of double glazing and the manifold a

ttractions of the TV on such a night, no-one had apparently noticed when death had come careering down the Iffley Road the previous evening. One elderly couple thought they had heard a bang, but when the man had looked out of the window, he hadn’t seen anything. One or two people had noticed the arrival of the police car and ambulance a few minutes afterwards, but that was all.

By seven thirty, Mullen was resigned to failure as he reached the top floor of a block of tired-looking flats named after a writer Mullen had never heard of. There were two doors there, as there had been on each floor below. After this, Mullen resolved, he would give up and go home. He rang the bell of the one on the right, but no-one answered even though there was light visible underneath the door and sound coming from a TV turned up very loud. He tried the door opposite. This opened immediately.

Mullen found himself looking at a curious-faced old woman, and he embarked on his spiel, explaining who he was and why he was there. He was expecting her at any moment to make her excuses and shut the door in his face, because that was the sort of evening he had been having. But on the contrary she beckoned silently, inviting him in as if this was something she did every night. She was notably thin, with a sharply pointed nose, a gentle voice and clothes that suggested a love of Scotland. “Do take a seat.”

Mullen sat down in an armchair, while she manoeuvred herself into the one opposite him. Like her, the upholstery looked as though it could do with a few repairs.

“So,” she said brightly. “You’re looking for witnesses?”