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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?
* * *
