Dead in the Water

  DEAD IN THE WATER

  A gripping detective thriller full of suspense

  Peter Tickler

  First published 2015

  Joffe Books, London

  www.joffebooks.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The spelling used is British English except where fidelity to the author’s rendering of accent or dialect supersedes this.

  ©Peter Tickler

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  Shocking family secrets come to light when a young woman is murdered

  Amy Hill, a nineteen-year-old student, is strangled and her body dumped on open ground in the city. New police partners, D.I. Jim Neal and D.S. Ava Merry are called in to investigate this brutal crime. The last person to see Amy alive was Simon, the son of a family friend, but before he can be properly questioned he disappears.

  Detectives Neal and Merry are led on a trail of shocking family secrets and crimes. Can this duo track down the murderer before anyone else dies? Stopping this tragic cycle of violence will put D.S. Merry’s life at risk in a thrilling and heart-stopping finale.

  If you like Angela Marsons, Rachel Abbott, Ruth Rendell, or Mark Billingham you will be gripped by this exciting new crime fiction writer.

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  A bag of severed fingers is found in a playground. . .

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1

  It was barely 6 a.m. The cloudless sky promised another scorching day. A slight breeze ruffled the tops of the trees dotted along the Thames. It was long after dawn, but the birds were still chorusing as if their lives depended on it. Not that Doug Mullen noticed. His heart and head were both pounding so hard that he felt as though they might explode at any moment and he would slip ingloriously into oblivion. The sprightly jog with which he had departed his Iffley Road flat had long since become a laboured movement of reluctant legs. He cursed himself for allowing his fitness levels to decline so far. The only benefit of inflicting this torture on himself at such a ridiculous hour — he was, after all, too far gone to enjoy this blissful post-dawn period of the day — was that there were no people around to observe his embarrassing performance. He was heading back towards the city of Oxford, having reached Sandford lock in record time. Not that his record time was anything which your average forty-year-old would have been proud of, but it had taken its toll on Mullen and as he stumbled under the ring-road his legs finally refused to obey any more orders from his brain. He stopped and bent down gasping, hands on his knees, and wondered whether he was going to be sick.

  To his right the River Thames ran smooth and untroubled. To his left, dense foliage had given way to a tree-fringed grass field. And in front of him lay an uprooted oak tree, sprawled across the path and into the river. A minute passed before he raised himself upright. He grabbed a branch of the oak, conscious of the unsteadiness in his legs. And then, quite suddenly, he saw the body.

  He had seen dead bodies before, but only in places where you expect to see them, which was why (presumably) he now vomited forth what little food there was in his stomach. However, if his short spell in the army had taught him anything, it was not to freeze in a crisis. He pulled his mobile out of his pocket, rang 999 and reported the body. As soon as that was done, he made his way along the horizontal trunk of the oak in order to get a closer look.

  Part of him knew that he should leave the woman there, floating face down in the water, long hair extended across the surface. The tree was effectively holding her prisoner and there was no doubt that she was dead. But another part of Mullen argued otherwise and so he lowered himself over the woman, laced his hands under her shoulders and dragged at her. Initially she resisted. Mullen tugged harder. Without warning the resistance disappeared and Mullen stumbled backwards. His right foot slipped and for a moment he thought he was going to fall in. Desperately he searched for a purchase and found one. Then, step by cautious step, he reversed himself back along the trunk towards the riverbank, conscious of the woman’s weight in his arms. Her hair brushed against his lips. Instinctively he spat and lifted his head higher, twisting around to check his position. Three or four steps later he reached the bank, where he flopped gratefully down onto the baked soil.

  The woman flopped down beside him, twisting and landing on her back. That was when Mullen realised his mistake. The woman was a man — a man with long hair but otherwise unquestionably male. His eyes were wide open and they stared accusingly into Mullen’s own, as if to ask him why on earth hadn’t he come sooner.

  Not that sooner would have been much use. Mullen wasn’t a pathologist, but he knew enough about death to recognise that the guy hadn’t been alive for some hours. Despite the promise of a hot day to come, Mullen shivered. His t-shirt was pretty much soaked through. As he sat there on the bank, he asked himself the obvious question: why on earth (you plonker!) did you do that when he was so obviously, patently, irrefutably dead? Mullen had no answer for himself, beyond a sense that there had been no other option. You don’t leave a woman — or indeed a man — face down in the river, even if she is undeniably a corpse. That was Mullen’s view, even if it wasn’t the police’s. Detective Inspector Dorkin informed him of this in the bluntest of terms as soon as he arrived on the scene.

  Dorkin was suffering from low blood sugar, Mullen concluded, before very quickly changing his mind. Maybe he was always like this. Certainly the two uniformed officers treated Dorkin with the exaggerated respect people give to self-important celebrities and dangerous dogs. He might as well have had a label in bright red letters stapled on his forehead: ‘Highly unstable explosive. Handle with extreme care!’

  Dorkin hurled a few direct questions at Mullen — “What time did you find the body? Do you often come jogging here at such an ungodly time in the morning? Did you see anyone else?” — and then lost interest. Mullen, who just wanted to get back to his flat for a hot shower and dry clothes, found himself passing his personal details to the uniformed sergeant, who was altogether more friendly.

  “I just need some contact information then you can get home.” He ran his eyes up and down Mullen’s drenched profile. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any ID on you?”

  “It’s at home.”

  “And home is where?”

  Mullen gave him his address in Iffley Road. It was only temporary, but he decided not to mention that. It would only complicate matters.

  “Your mobile number?”

  Mullen told him.

  The sergeant wrote it down. Then he punched it into his own mobile. He waited for the one in Mullen’s hand to ring. He smiled. “It’s so easy to write numbers down wrong.”

  Mullen smiled back, unconvinced. The guy wanted to check he hadn’t given him a dud number. Not that he blamed him. He would have done t
he same in the circumstances.

  “Do you have a work number?”

  “I’m self-employed.”

  Again the sergeant smiled. “And what does ‘self-employed’ mean in your case?”

  “I’m a private investigator.”

  The smile disappeared. “Really?”

  “Yeah,” Mullen replied. He felt a jolt of irritation. He thought he preferred the blunt Dorkin after all. “Really.”

  The sergeant scowled.

  “There’s no ID on him at all.” It was Dorkin, snarling the information out to no-one in particular. He was standing over the body, a black wallet in his hands. “It’s been cleaned out. Not a dicky bird.”

  “Off you go, then,” the sergeant said to Mullen. He thrust a card into his hand. “If you think of anything else, give me a bell.”

  Mullen nodded and turned away. For the briefest of moments, he had been tempted to say something more, but neither policeman had earned his co-operation. Why should he make their life easier?

  * * *

  Mullen had been calling himself a private detective for less than a month. It wasn’t something he felt called to. It wasn’t even something he had particularly wanted to do. It was essentially the result of desperation and chance. The desperation had grown like a cancer for several weeks, at precisely the same rate as the money in his bank account had shrunk. As for chance, that had been a conversation overheard in a coffee shop on the Cowley Road. It had been pouring down outside and Mullen had been seeing how long he could eke out a single Americano while he read the free newspaper which he had commandeered from the rack. The conversation had been taking place between two women at the table next to him and the topic had been their husbands. One husband, it appeared, was the model of conjugal loyalty and reliability, his only drawback apparently being a liking for Arnold Schwarzenegger films. His wife was trim and blonde and rather pleased with herself. It was the other woman that Mullen felt rather sorry for. She was the plain Jane of the pair, with a pinched face, large eyes and misery writ large across her features. Her husband, she was telling her friend, was cheating on her. At least, she thought he was. All she needed was proof. And she was pretty darned sure that it wasn’t the first time.

  “Why don’t you hire someone?” the smug friend had suggested. “Catch him in flagrante delicto!” The idea seemed to excite her.

  “But suppose he is cheating on me,” came the reply. “What do I do then?”

  At that intriguing point the fire alarm sounded. Mullen had dutifully exited the café, making sure he took his coffee cup with him. Everyone, it seemed, had assumed it was a false alarm because there was no sign of panic, just as there was no sign of smoke or flames. Out on the pavement he had looked around for the women, eager to continue his eavesdropping, but they had disappeared from view.

  Though they were gone, the thought patterns which their conversation had sparked remained behind, like wisps of smoke. So much so that after four cans of cheap lager that evening and a third-rate Bruce Willis film, Mullen had conceded defeat and set about reinventing himself on the internet. This had consisted of setting up a one-page website on which he described himself as ‘Doug Mullen, Private Investigator. Discretion assured.’ He had ruminated over this for some time, before eventually adding a hostage to fortune: ‘Fee payable only if job completed successfully.’ It was, he knew instinctively, a daft thing to promise. But anything that gave him an edge seemed worth a try. Besides, he could always turn down anything that wasn’t straightforward.

  But putting yourself out there on the internet doesn’t mean thousands of suspicious spouses are suddenly scanning your website. For a week Mullen waited for something to happen. Nothing did. So he went on-line and ordered himself some business cards. Matt finish one side, blank on the reverse, again offering a ‘no win, no fee’ service. It was amazing how cheap a thousand cards could be if you ignored all the tempting extras the website tried to entice you into. When they arrived two days later neatly packaged in a box, Mullen felt a brief surge of excitement followed by a lurch of desperation as reality hit home; how on earth, he asked himself, was he going to get rid of them? Pubs, cafes, takeaways, community noticeboards, libraries — there were plenty of places to leave your business cards lying about or pinned up, but it would take a heck of a lot of pavement pounding to distribute them effectively. And how long would they survive before being cleared away by officious proprietors, zealous waiting staff or overworked cleaners? A thousand cards was, frankly, a lot. Nevertheless, Mullen was not a man to throw in the towel, at least not this early in an enterprise. So on the Tuesday he covered East Oxford, on the Wednesday Jericho and North Oxford and on the Thursday Headington. On the Friday morning, with over 500 cards still left and not a single in-coming phone call received, he decided to head to Abingdon. He took the bus, dropping a card on the seat at the front of the bus as he pretended to wrestle with his bus ticket. He took up position half-way back, curious to see the reaction of whoever it was who picked the card up. Almost immediately an overweight man with a red sweating face eased his body onto the seat, oblivious of the invitation beneath his buttocks. Mullen shut his eyes. It was going to be a long day.

  * * *

  Life, Janice Atkinson had come to realise, was a series of ifs. Not as in Kipling’s imperialist poem: ‘If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs.’ That was the level of advice her father had handed out to her on the rare occasions when he had been (a) present and (b) sober, ignoring — or possibly ignorant of — the last line of the poem, which was ‘you’ll be a man, my son.’ Or maybe that was his way of dealing with the disappointment of her being female — pretending that she wasn’t.

  If!

  If she hadn’t happened to be in the loo when her mother-in-law rang and therefore had to leave a voice message announcing she would be ‘passing by’ later that morning and would call in for a coffee.

  If she hadn’t reacted by catching the first bus out of town, to Abingdon, and deliberately leaving her mobile at home so she couldn’t be contacted by her mother-in-law — or indeed anyone else.

  If the heavens had not happened to open as she was heading along Ock Street, causing her to duck into the coffee shop she was just passing.

  If. If. If.

  The man who sat down in the corner was wearing a brown leather jacket. She liked a man in a good leather jacket; and it was a good leather jacket. She could tell that even though he was two tables away and she could see only his back. It was, admittedly, rather worn, but if anything that made him of greater interest to her. She felt a wild urge to walk over and run her hands down his spine, to feel the softness of the leather with her finger tips, not to mention the hardness of the body underneath. But Janice Atkinson wasn’t that sort of person, so she remained exactly where she was. His hair was short — a number one cut, unless it was perhaps a shaven head that had, like her own lawn, been allowed to grow untended for too long. His ears protruded somewhat and there was a visible scar across the back of his neck, which made him all the more intriguing. She took all this in via occasional glances over the top of her Daily Telegraph. Eventually the man got up and stretched. He walked over to the notice board near the front door. Janice had herself glanced at it as she stripped off her dripping mackintosh in the doorway. It had contained an eclectic mix of stuff: from plumbers to party planners, an autism support group, two amateur dramatics groups and an invitation to come tea dancing. She lifted the Daily Telegraph higher and turned a page, but her eyes remained on the man in the brown jacket. He pulled a drawing pin out of the board, ferreted in an inside pocket and then stuck a small card up on the board. After that, he zipped up his jacket and walked out.

  Janice watched him through the window. She saw him stop on the pavement, looking right and left as if unsure where to go next, before striding off towards the town square. For several seconds she remained unmoving, her lips puckering in thought. Then she stood up and went over to the noticeboard. As she had assu
med, he had pinned up a business card. She stared at it for several seconds. Then she unpinned it, returned to her table and slipped it into her handbag.

  * * *

  Tracking Janice Atkinson’s husband had proved a very straightforward first assignment for Mullen. On three separate evenings Mullen had followed Paul Atkinson after work and on each occasion he had obtained remarkably good photos which were, by his reckoning, evidence about as watertight as any wronged wife could possibly wish for. The object of Paul Atkinson’s attentions was a surprisingly bulky redhead with a taste for loud floral patterns, a ferociously fruity laugh and an appetite to match. It was clear to Mullen that Atkinson was besotted with her. Even in the public space of the hotel bar where they met each evening, Atkinson was unable to keep his hands off her.

  The following Friday Mullen met up with Janice Atkinson in a retro coffee bar on Oxford’s Cowley Road. He got there at two twenty, ten minutes early. He was relieved to see it was sparsely occupied, and as he sat at the back, waiting for his Americano to cool, he realised with some alarm that he wasn’t looking forward to their meeting one little bit. He ran his hand across his forehead. There were beads of moisture on it. He took off his jacket and wiped his brow. He would be glad to receive his fee — of course he would — but as for giving the wretched woman the bad news and confirming her worst fears, that was something he really wasn’t ready for.

  When he saw Janice advancing across the floor, he stood up like a nervous young man on a first date. As soon as they were both sitting down, he looked for the waitress but she was already heading their way.

  Janice ordered a green tea.

  “This is on me,” Mullen said, like some big-hearted Harry. And immediately he regretted it. He was preparing her for bad news and she saw it immediately. Her face deflated like a balloon that has developed a leak and he hated himself. He felt a spurt of shame and self-disgust at the job he had chosen to do. But there was no going back. This, he realised, was where he opened Pandora’s Box. Whatever came out of the meeting, there would be no going back for Janice Atkinson. And he was going about it with all the tact of a bull elephant on the rampage.