Dead in the Water

Speight twitched; his left shoulder moved up and down as if controlled by a puppeteer’s string. He licked his lips. “The . . . er . . . the photos on your phone?” Clearly he didn’t expect Mullen to stick to his word.

But Mullen had to live with himself. Deception and lying might sometimes be necessary, but that didn’t mean he felt good doing them. Without a word he bent down and deleted them one by one, right in front of Speight.

“Thank you.”

Mullen handed him his key and for a few moments their eyes met and held.

“Actually . . .” There was a long pause as Speight assembled his thoughts. Mullen waited, barely daring to breathe. “Actually, there’s something else I want to tell you—”

“Have a good evening, Charles!” Speight turned guiltily. A man in sunglasses was standing by a red VW convertible halfway across the car park. Speight waved from his seat and then watched until the car had disappeared from view. Only then did he turn back to Mullen, as if he was afraid the man might somehow overhear what he was about to say.

“Chris had rohypnol in his system too.”

The comment came as a shot of electricity arcing across Mullen’s system. He opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out. Both brain and tongue had tripped their fuse switches.

But Speight didn’t need any prompting to say more. Now that he had started, he had to get it finished.

“You see,” he continued, “there wasn’t actually that much alcohol in Chris’s system. Enough to get him tipsy, but hardly a roaring-drunk amount. At the time I thought it was a little odd that he should fall into the river and drown. But given his lifestyle . . .” Speight ground to a halt.

Mullen felt a surge of anger. “Because he was a homeless rough sleeper, what did it matter? Right?” Mullen’s decibel count was rising dramatically. “Chris wasn’t important enough for you to look any closer into his death.” He felt like grabbing Speight by the lapels and shaking him till his prejudices rattled.

Speight swallowed; his Adam’s apple bobbing furiously in his throat. But he carried on determinedly with his account. “Like anyone, I have to prioritise what I do and don’t do. But the fact is that when I had examined Janice’s body and realised that there was both alcohol and rohypnol in her, it got me thinking again about Chris. So I took some hairs from his head and found traces of exactly the same type of rohypnol in it too.”

“So when you met Dorkin the other night—”

“I told him what I had discovered. He was furious and started asking me what sort of pathologist I was to have missed it in the first place. He started making insinuations about my competence, which I didn’t take kindly to. I take great pride in my work, but in the circumstances there had been no good reason to check for rohypnol in Chris. So I pointed out to him that the fact that I had revisited my findings on Chris and thereby located the drug in him was actually a mark of my extreme competence.”

“And what did Dorkin say?”

Speight wiped his forehead again. “He was damned rude. So I just walked out. I don’t have to put up with stuff like that from people like Dorkin.”

Mullen nodded as if he agreed. But actually he didn’t. As far as he was concerned, Dorkin had every right to throw a tantrum at Speight. The pathologist seemed to him to have been seriously at fault. End of discussion.

“All of this is off the record. Dorkin won’t like it if he discovers that I’ve been talking out of school.”

Mullen smiled at the expression. Out of school. How old school was that! But he saw no reason to make life difficult for Speight. Nor indeed did he want to draw Dorkin’s attention to his own investigations. “Sure,” he said. “But I’ve just one more question if that’s OK?”

Speight exhaled. “If you must.”

“If you didn’t initially look for rohypnol in Chris, why did you do so in Janice?”

Speight scratched at his neck as he considered this. “Well, Dorkin told me he had a witness who had seen Janice walking rather unsteadily over Magdalen Bridge. So when I discovered that there wasn’t enough alcohol in her system to justify such unsteadiness, I looked around for other reasons.”

“Thanks.” Mullen stepped back and finally allowed Speight to shut his door. The pathologist needed no further prompting and within seconds he was exiting the car park as if the hounds of hell were on his tail. Mullen watched him go and wondered. He wasn’t sure he trusted Speight, but his story did pretty much hang together. As for what he had said about rohypnol; that really was a game-changer.

* * *

The departure of Speight coincided with the return of Mullen’s headache. It had been nagging away gently throughout his long wait in the car, but now it had gained momentum and was banging away like a steam hammer. Mullen was also extremely thirsty, the consequence of having only half a small bottle of water to drink in the simmering heat. His back was complaining too, so he stopped at the Co-op in Wootton to pick up a half-litre bottle of water and some Paracetamol, plus a frozen pizza because he really couldn’t face cooking anything more complicated that evening. He took three tablets, drained the bottle of water and then headed for Boars Hill.

But when he arrived back at the Cedars, he did not find the peace he craved. There were two cars pulled up in his drive. The red Punto he recognised, but the silver Rav 4 he didn’t. There was no sign of the occupants. He eased himself out of his vehicle and extricated the pizza from the back seat and the empty plastic bottle from the floor.

“Ah! There you are.” Becca Baines’ voice boomed out. She and Rose Wilby appeared from around the back of the house and advanced towards him. “About time too. We’re dying of thirst and pretty blooming hungry. But at least we had a chance to talk about you behind your back.”

She laughed and pecked him on the cheek. It was, Mullen supposed, her way of telling Rose to ‘Hands off!’

“Well, nice to see you both,’ he said, though that wasn’t entirely true. Maybe one of them, just to show him a bit of sympathy, but both of them, without warning? Apart from anything else and based on the little he knew of them, he wasn’t at all sure they would hit it off. Besides, standing there with a pizza in one hand and a plastic bottle in the other, he felt as if he had been caught with his trousers down, the archetypical man incapable of cooking anything more advanced than something straight out of the freezer.

“Sorry, this isn’t very fair of us turning up without warning.” Rose Wilby’s approach was altogether more polite and sympathetic. She patted him briefly on the forearm.