Dead in the Water

Mullen nodded. “So far, no-one has seen anything.” He didn’t think it was going to be any different this time. The fact that she had asked him in signified nothing. He guessed she didn’t get many visitors. She was lonely and she had dragged him in for some company and a chat. Not that Mullen minded. He was almost relieved.

“Well,” she said, “of course I didn’t see anything.”

Mullen tried not to let his disappointment show. “Not to worry. Maybe—”

The old woman exploded into laughter, rocking back and forth with glee. “Haven’t you noticed?”

Mullen looked at her, nonplussed. What was so funny? And then the penny dropped. “You’re blind!” It was suddenly glaringly obvious.

“And you claim to be a private eye!” She laughed again, delighted with the situation, but abruptly switched it off. When she spoke again, it was with the utmost seriousness. “I heard the collision, you know.”

“You heard it?” Mullen parroted, unconvinced.

“I may be blind, but I’m not deaf.” She spoke without any sign of the irritation that she might reasonably have felt at Mullen’s response. “Quite the contrary, I have very good hearing.”

“Of course.” Mullen felt chastised.

“I imagine it’s a nice smooth ride. A quiet engine, but not so quiet I couldn’t hear it.”

Mullen frowned and then immediately wondered if she could hear a frown — or at least sense it. He hoped not.

Sitting there, in this slightly shabby flat, Mullen saw the old woman in a new light. He was pretty sure he must have seen her before. Maybe they had passed in the street and he had walked past her without even noticing. They had lived within 50 metres of each other, yet they might as well have been living in parallel universes. Mullen felt a sense of shame, but he also, for the first time that day, felt the beginnings of something like optimism. He leant forward, as if leaning forward might help him to grasp the importance of whatever it was she might say.

“You said you heard the collision,” he said. “Can I ask you just to talk me through exactly what you heard? Was the car going fast? Did it brake sharply? Did the driver stop and get out of his or her vehicle? All the details.”

She leant back in her chair, and drew in a deep breath, as if trying to recollect. “It was just after ten o’clock. Maybe five past. I know because I had just finished listening to the radio. I turned it off, and opened the window. The rain was falling, but the wind had dropped. I like to listen to the city. I remember hearing some of the city bells striking the hour. Christchurch is always the last to finish. And I remember thinking how quiet it was. Not silent, you understand, it is never silent, but for Oxford it was very quiet. Then I became aware of someone in a hurry. She must have been a woman, because her heels were beating a tattoo on the pavement. As she got closer, she suddenly stopped, and then after a pause I heard her heels again, only the sound was slightly different. I think she must have been crossing the road, from the far side to the near side. Then I heard the car. I hadn’t noticed it before, but the engine growled sharply as if the driver had rammed his foot on the accelerator. Then there was a thud. That must have been the poor woman being hit, though I wasn’t sure at the time exactly what was happening. The car slowed down, but only briefly, and then it drove off away from town as if nothing had happened.”

Mullen felt a spike of excitement. “I want you to think very carefully. Are you saying that the car didn’t brake before it hit the woman?”

She replied without delay. “Oh no, I’m quite sure of that.”

They both fell silent. Mullen shivered and looked across to the window. It was partially open. He tried to listen to the noise outside, as she must listen to it from her small secluded world — vehicles accelerating and braking, someone hooting in the distance, young women giggling, shoes clicking on the pavements, a male voice arguing violently with itself.

“So has that been any help?” the old woman asked eagerly.

“Help?” Mullen said. He had been miles away, as the hamsters powering the treadmill inside his brain struggled to get up to speed. “I should say so. Do you realise what you have just described?” But that was a rhetorical question and Mullen pressed on with his own answer. “You’ve described a car suddenly accelerating as the woman started to cross the road. A car that doesn’t brake until after it has hit the person. What you’ve described isn’t an accident. It’s murder.”

“Gosh! I suppose it is.”

But it wasn’t only Lorna Gordon — for that was her name — who was bubbling with excitement. Mullen stood up, unable to contain himself in the armchair. He strode over to the windows and looked down to where Janice Atkinson had died. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine it as it must have been for Lorna listening to it all happen: high heels clacking, an engine roaring into life, a dull thud as the car hit Janice’s vulnerable bodywork. Mullen felt giddy and grabbed at the window frame, steadying himself.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” Lorna Gordon asked.

And Mullen, much to his own surprise, said he would.

* * *

Mullen delayed his departure from Lorna Gordon’s flat for as long as he reasonably could, stringing out the mug of tea and accepting two chocolate digestives to go with it. While she chatted away, first about the hit-and-run and then about her grandson, Mullen’s thoughts drifted. They centred initially on the prosaic task of getting home: he would have to walk into the city centre to get a bus out to Boars Hill. He wondered how frequent they were. But soon his ruminations moved on to Chris. Mullen realised with a start how little he had achieved in his investigation, though the word investigation seemed rather overblown for what he was doing. What exactly had he found out? Very little, except to establish that someone had been so annoyed by his attempts to track down where Chris had been living that they had slugged him over the head with something blunt and heavy. Mullen felt his bandaged head and resolved to take the thing off when he got home.

“Would you like another one?” Lorna Gordon leant down to pick up his empty mug.

“I really must be going.”

“That’s a shame.”

Mullen stood up, but she hadn’t finished yet.

“Are you going to tell the police?”