A LIKENESS IN STONE

j wallis martin

Chapter 1

Vaughan didn't know precisely what it was that attracted him to diving, but, whatever it was, he never seemed to tire of it. Maybe that was because his stint with the navy had enabled him to experience some of the most impressive diving environments the world had to offer, or maybe it was just that he was addicted to the rush of adrenalin that pumped through him when water closed over his head.

    He had felt the familiar rush a few moments ago when he and Saunders had entered the reservoir at Marshfield, but he had felt something else, too – a sinking sensation that wasn't entirely due to the tanks pulling him down. It was more an instinct than a feeling, a sixth sense that came to him whenever he was working in a stretch of water notorious for its ability to extinguish human life.

His first reaction was to wonder whether to junk the dive – but, not unreasonably, once they hit the surface, Saunders would want to know why. Like himself, he was an ex-navy man, so Vaughan didn't really want to have to say he just felt there was something wrong. He was hardly likely to be impressed and Vaughan didn't want him thinking that maybe he was losing his bottle; but the feeling, the instinct, was strong, and, although there was nothing to suggest that this reservoir was any more dangerous than many they had dived in, there was a peculiar stillness to the water, a certain gloom that couldn't entirely be explained by the lack of light.

Above them, the skin of the water was broken by rain, and the sky producing it was doing little to penetrate the depths and light their way. It was oppressive, but at first Vaughan couldn't quite put his finger on why. And then it came to him: the thing that was strange about this particular reservoir was the lack of fish. No dark, slow carp gliding like shadows into even darker shadows and becoming one with them.

An instructor had once told him to let an absence of fish serve as a warning. It was unnatural, and could usually be attributed to pollution or predator. Consequently, when he had once been diving for pleasure off the coast of Mozambique, the realisation that, quite suddenly, the fish had disappeared had frozen him to immobility. He had tried to sense from the feel of the water what it was that had frightened them, and when a Bull shark had loomed towards him everything he had ever heard about them flashed instantly to mind. He knew, for instance, that they rarely attacked with the ferocity of the Great White but cruised round their victim, taking a foot, and then perhaps a hand, and possibly severing a leg just below the knee before losing interest, leaving the limbs to rot and the victim a torso.

He had panicked then and had thrashed for the shore, certain that at any moment he would feel the mouth closing on one of his limbs; but the terrible pain had never come. Instead, he had felt a dull thud against his right leg and had collapsed on the beach, sobbing with fear and afraid to look at what he was certain would be a stump.

There had been blood, but no stump – just shredded skin where the shark had brushed against him, its skin like glass paper.

Vaughan had been deeply ashamed then, ashamed that people on the beach had heard him crying like a woman, and he had tried to block the memory out. But the stillness of the water had logged itself into his memory, under 'useful information', and he felt it now as the house came into view. It was marked on records kept by Thames Water as having been submerged when Marshfield became a reservoir. With luck it would produce some saleable items and make the dive worthwhile.

They circled it slowly, each of them noticing that the door frames and windows had rotted away, the glass having fallen to become covered by silt, and, in his search for a suitable entrance, Vaughan looked up, the weight of the water making what should have been a quick, automatic movement a heavy, thoughtful process. He reached out to touch the walls and feel how the lichen had given a soft covering to the brick, and then he pushed upwards, Saunders behind him.

As they swam over the roof, he looked down and, in seeing the tiles pass beneath him, he had a feeling that was the nearest he could come to describing an out-of-body experience. It was something he had felt before, but never quite so strongly, and was the sort of sensation a person might have in a dream: that of rising out of the material body and wondering whether death would be like this.

The weight of the tanks pulled them down at the back of the house, and, after pausing for a moment to consider their options, they dived through a window, the gentlest of efforts easing them through and into a kitchen that had been left partly furnished. There was an old oven still plugged into the wall, a cupboard containing tins minus their labels, and clothes left rotting in a washing machine.

At some point, the kitchen had been modernised with Formica-topped units that had warped in the water. The sink was stainless steel, the greyness of the metal melting into the greyness of a wallpaper that rubbed away to the touch. Flimsy net curtains billowed with their every movement, and Vaughan touched one gently. It fell from the runner and draped on his arm, falling apart and drifting to the floor even as he tried to free himself from it.

He was afraid. He didn't know why, but there had been occasions when he had dived to sunken vessels, and once in the living quarters he had experienced the same unease, as though the former occupants might materialise, ethereal things, no more than an imprint on the water.

He got a grip on himself, and after signalling to Saunders he led the way to a room off the kitchen, finding it fully furnished. A Bakelite clock on a brick mantelpiece led his eye to a cheap framed print still hanging over the fireplace: a doe-eyed woman leaning against a tree, the water distorting the scene so that tendrils of her hair appeared to float through the glass towards him.

He pushed away and swam over an armchair to reach a long narrow hall. At the far end, a watery light showed where the door had been and it lit their way to stairs that disappeared into darkness. He hesitated, and now came something that made him feel that he really was in the middle of some bizarre dream – he swam up the stairs.

On the landing, he paused to get his bearings before flipping his way slowly into the first of several rooms. It was empty and he backed out, signalling that they should try the next. This one yielded a mattress dumped by a far wall, a clock radio beside it and a pile of what might have been blankets.

Unwilling to be left there alone, he followed Saunders into a bathroom that was small and tiled, the cupboard over the sink having nothing to offer but a pack of razors, a toothbrush.

They left it together, flipping effortlessly into the master bedroom, a pair of ghosts whose presence moved the water, which in turn lifted the sheets from the bed so that they rose in a childhood fantasy of horror. He saw them out of the corner of his eye but couldn't bring himself to turn his head a fraction, afraid of what he might see in the way that a child is afraid of looking into a mirror as he runs past.

He fixed his attention on a tall fitted wardrobe, reached it in a few slow strokes and tried the knob. Tarnished to blackness with time, it fitted into his hand neatly, the brass having oxidised to a roughness that brought the shark's skin to mind. There was a knack to it and he struggled with it before the latch lifted, but finally he managed to open the door, the weight of the water making hard work of what should have been a simple task. He stepped back as it fell from hinges that had rusted through, and when the silt had settled, he stared at what it concealed, Saunders directly behind him, his view of the wardrobe obscured.

It wasn't real. He decided that almost instantly. It had been left there for a joke, and if he were to touch it his hands would confirm what his mind knew to be true: that the face was one of those masks people wear to parties at Halloween. It would be plastic, stiff and unyielding, not flesh, soft and rotting as his eyes would have him believe.

He reached out, took hold of the lower jaw as if to pull the mask from a stuffed-stocking head, and wanted to deny that it had come away in his hand; that what he was holding was a piece of corpse, long dead. And then came the rush of bubbles, a yell carried to Saunders' ears by water that distorted the sound, but did nothing to diminish the horror it conveyed.

—:—

Chapter 2

By the time he left the office, the traffic nosing its way out of Oxford had come to a complete standstill. Roadworks? An accident? Gilmore didn't know. He only knew that tonight he would walk into an empty house; that what Sue had taken when she left was merely the handful of things she had brought when she had moved in less than a year ago, but that the house would echo regardless.

He hadn't loved her. He knew that. Maybe she had known it too, the observation that it was hard to live with a ghost being a conclusion she had come to within weeks of their having first met. Who is this woman, this woman you never talk about?

He could have lied to get her off his back. He could, for instance, have said it was anyone of the women who had preceded her, and he might have added that each of them had left him a note on the fridge.

Why the fridge? he wondered. Was it its position in the sparse kitchen, the certainty that if left there it would be seen? Or was it merely the fact that the magnetic snowman that clung to the enamel was ideal for securing a note?

Not that he needed one. He knew the signs. With all of them he had known, sometimes weeks in advance, that they were about to vacate his life. You never say what you feel.

Initially, she had accepted his reserve, but, as her feelings for him grew, she had started to try to get through, as she put it. He could have told her she was wasting her time, just as he could also have told her that ultimately there would come a day when he would drive home to find the house dark, cold and devoid of the Sue who had finally joined the long list of women who had given up on him.

He caught his reflection in the windscreen, the face looking unfamiliar, distorted by the glass. It was the face of a man in his prime, the kind of face that attracted women easily because it gave the impression that he had everything under his firm, unflappable control.

Ironic, really.

The traffic moved and he eased along behind the car in front, heading home, but only by degrees, taking the longer routes, shooting off down side roads he'd never seen before, reluctant to face the fridge.

Eventually, inevitably, he pulled into the drive of a semi that was identical to every other red-brick, three-bedroomed box in the crescent, and he felt, as he always felt: that it wasn't home. He had lived there for several years now, yet his attitude towards it was similar to that of his attitude towards the women who had lived there with him – he could have left at a moment's notice, and without a backward glance.

He parked in front of the garage, locked the car, and entered the house to find the door to the kitchen closed. He couldn't remember having shut it, or why he had done it. Maybe it was the look of control that peered out from the white plaster face.

In a moment of decisiveness, he pulled sharply at the thin, lined paper. It whipped from under the snowman, leaving him undisturbed, and, without reading it, Gilmore screwed it tight and threw it into a pedal bin. He knew the contents by heart in any case. It wasn't as if he'd read it over and over: merely that it would be like every other note that had ever been left on the fridge. Only the signatures differed.

Unusually for him, he poured himself a drink and took it into the sitting room. The furnishings were plain, comfortable, and now devoid of the female touch, and as he sank into the sofa he used the remote in order to catch the news.

Later, he was to have no recollection of what came before the item relating to Marshfield. He remembered only that the slate – grey water seemed, for a moment, to have risen without warning to swallow him whole, and then it was gone, a different item of news wiping it from the screen to leave him listening, without comprehension, to accounts of other catastrophes, disasters that would presumably devastate others in the way that Marshfield had devastated him.

He turned it off, sat there, and suddenly thought of Sue and her whining accusation: "Who is this woman?"

On evenings like these, wintry, cold, and typical for November, he had sometimes felt like answering that question. The trouble was, he could hardly picture her face now, but he could remember things about her. He could remember, for instance, that her hair had been short, dark, and moussed into an urchin look, and that she had been thinner than he would have liked. He could remember also that she had possessed a self-assurance that is common among women who are not only beautiful, but clever; and, since she had been reading English at Somerville, there could be little doubt that she had indeed been clever.

Why couldn't he forget her?

He didn't know, just as he didn't know why he had never been able to bring himself to go to the police and tell them what they had failed to drag out of him twenty years ago.

He had sometimes longed to do it, but the consequences would overwhelm him. And so he lived this lie, this lie that was smeared on the surface of his existence like a suffocating veneer, distorting what lay beneath it so that nobody saw the nature of what it concealed.

—:—

Chapter 3

It had come, as Driver had hoped it would, during his lifetime, the broadcast providing what his dimming vision had denied him the option of reading in the press: that a body had been found at Marshfield. And in a wardrobe, of all places.

It didn't sound right to Driver. There had been thousands of acres of marsh to bury it on, marsh that was about to be submerged by a reservoir built by the water authority – so why hide it in a wardrobe?

He went to the kitchen, looked out across a small, neat square of lawn to the retirement bungalows opposite and spoke to the memory of his late wife:

"Mary," he said, "they've found her."

There was a ghost by the sink, methodically clearing the dishes from breakfast, a ghost who didn't look up, her hair no longer crisp, her figure no longer neat. Didn't I tell you they would?

"But you'll never guess where," said Driver. "All these years, it's been down there, just waiting. He hid it in the house!"

He couldn't understand it. If he'd even suspected that Gilmore would do something as stupid as that he'd have sent divers down at the time of the investigation, but twenty years ago he had stood on the embankment to stare into the water and come to terms with the fact that the body was buried on the marsh – a marsh that, like the house, was now completely submerged. He had therefore believed his chances of finding it to be non-existent.

He went into the hall where he phoned Thames Valley Police, the number coming to him automatically.

"Put me through to the incident room."

"What's it in connection with?"

"Marshfield," said Driver.

As he waited for the connection, he recalled that he had suspected from quite early on in the investigation that Gilmore had killed her. He could see it in the way he'd shrunk away, not so much from the questioning, but from some dreaded scene that flickered continually across his field of vision.

"You killed her."

"You seem very sure."

"I'm sure."

A voice broke into his thoughts, a quick-talking, stress-filled voice that snapped, "Incident room."

"Who am I speaking to?"

In the incident room of Thames Valley Police, papers in one hand, a file in the other, the phone jammed under his chin, a detective answered, "DI Dalton. And you?"

"Driver. Formerly DCI. Thames Valley. "

The name rang a bell, and in seconds, Dalton had pulled a face from some distant memory. "Bill?" he said, and, cautiously, Driver replied: "Do we know one another?"

"You retired in 1980, or thereabouts."

"That's right."

"I'd just joined the force." There was no immediate response and Dalton pictured him scouring his memory for some recollection, so he added, "You

won't remember me, but I remember you."

Driver caught the warmth in his voice.

"I daresay I'd know you if I saw you," he said, half apologetic, and Dalton replied:

"Doesn't matter. What's the problem?"

"I heard an appeal for anyone with information about the remains found at Marshfield to contact Detective Superintendent Rigby at Thames Valley."

"He's out," said Dalton. "What have you got?"

"A probable ID on the remains." There was a pause before the inevitable, "What's your number?"

Driver gave it and Dalton added, "Give me a name and I’ll pull the case file."

"Warner," said Driver. "Helena Warner."

—:—

Chapter 4

One of the advantages of living above a newsagent's shop was the certain knowledge that the daily paper would arrive. As always, it was pushed half under the door at the top of the stairs, a door that had once led to a back bedroom but now served as the entrance to her flat, and one of the first things Joan did when she got up was tug it through gently so as not to tear it.

She took it into a room that had once served as a bathroom but was now a kitchen. Boxlike and cramped, devoid of its cast-iron bath, it now contained a Baby Belling cooker, lino that was ice to un-socked feet, and a stainless-steel sink that was stained beyond redemption.

The plain plaster walls were half hidden behind cupboards that were too big for the space they occupied, and from force of habit she avoided catching her head on one as she made tea by spooning a dried tea-and-milk concoction into a cup and pouring boiling water over it. It didn't taste too bad once you got used to it and it saved her having to buy milk.

She took the tea and the paper through to the main room where the couch was also a bed, switched on a bar of the electric fire, and folded the paper into a manageable tabloid size.

The headline jerked her to full consciousness. It wasn't the horror of it – in a life spanning thirty-seven years, several of which had been spent as a reporter with the Manchester Evening News, she hadn't exactly been shielded from the horrors of life. Murders happened, and bodies were found all the time. She read about them, heard them reported on the news, thought it all a shame, but carried on in much the way most people carry on, their lives unaffected, the victim forgotten, sometimes within a matter of minutes. But this was different.

She paged through the paper, looking for a continuation of the story, and found it in the centre pages, where a picture of the reservoir dominated.

She had never seen Marshfield like that. She remembered only the still, flat land and the birds that rose from the reeds.

She put her tea down on the carpet, picked her way around soiled cups and plates that had stood on the floor for days, and pushed the curtains open. Outside, the sky was a blanket of grey, a cloudless, unbroken, colourless mass producing a barely perceptible rain. Condensation had run down the pane to settle in pools on the sill and she wiped a circle with the back of her hand, feeling it wet and cold.

A bus stop stood opposite, children in school uniform playing the fool, darting into the road in front of slow-moving cars that scattered them onto the pavement like marbles.

Thirty years ago, she had played the same game on a similar road less than a mile away, and she had known this house even then. In those days, the ground floor had been a launderette, the owner living in the flat she occupied now. But she had presumed that when she grew up she would move away.

Of course, she hadn't known then what she knew now: that she would never move away. That after university, and what had turned out to be an unsuccessful association with the Manchester Evening News, she would move back to Warrington, to within a stone's throw of where she had been born.

She hadn't always been so resigned to it though. In the days when she had lived in student accommodation she had presumed that, sooner or later, her lifestyle would change; though whether this would be as a result of a successful career or marriage she had neither known nor cared. Her main concern had been to succeed and success would have been a good job, her own house, a partner, maybe children. But none of those things had happened.

Sometimes, when she let it get to her, she had to admit that it wasn't so much the fact that none of those specific things had happened as the fact that nothing had happened – merely the passage of years, years during which she had simply grown older and less successful; years during which she had slid down the hill of a recession that had made it increasingly difficult for her to sell her work.

She moved away from the window and back to the couch, and picked up the paper. From a professional point of view, she felt that the story had been well reported. Not that she was an expert. She might have worked as a reporter for several years but she hadn't been cut out for it. She was far too slow, far too precious about what she wrote, and far too introverted to stand much of a chance of getting a scoop on a story. She had been the type of reporter who covered golden weddings and twin births, and, like a fool, she had given it up to go freelance.

The money and the work had been irregular enough to keep her on income support ever since, but now and again she filled in a form to state that she had received payment for an article and a portion was duly deducted from her giro to take account of it. She didn't know why she bothered.

Coming back to Warrington had made her feel a failure. It wasn't the town. The town itself had a lot going for it. It was just that she had hoped for more, that was all. Even just a little more, someone to share her life with, and a moderately successful career that produced enough income to live on in a place that was – she looked around her – better than this.

Her life had been virtually devoid of male company. She had to face facts. She was fat. Fat people who could accept themselves tended to find partners. Fat people who wished they were dead tended not to. But at the end of the day there were certain advantages to living alone. There was nobody to complain about the fact that the flat was unbearably hot in summer and insufferably cold in winter, that it was possible to determine the days of the week by the food she cooked on each given day, or complain that the couch was too narrow for two to sleep on in any degree of comfort.

She consoled herself with the thought that writers were often notoriously unhappy in their private lives, particularly those who were reduced to writing features for downmarket magazines, and, whenever she felt bogged down by the frustration of writing features that rarely sold, she worked on the Book, that mysterious, ethereal, pageless thing that flickered on the screen of her computer like a ghost.

Sometimes, it appeared as if of its own volition. She couldn't recall having pulled it up from the files list but it would materialise as if commanding her to work on it. And she would work on it. Adding a paragraph, wiping it out, adding another, and forgetting to save it–only she didn't forget so much as make the subconscious admission that what she had written was something she would rather delete for all sorts of complex reasons. She had intended it to be a sort of tortoise-and-hare story, the beautiful, clever antagonist eventually being totally outshone by the plain, hardworking protagonist, and, as with most first novels, great chunks of it were largely autobiographical.

The plot was of a type that was frequently used by writers of mass-market fiction: her protagonist had spent years living in the antagonist' s shadow, but had overcome almost overwhelming odds in order to build a chain of clothes shops from which she made a fortune. It was to have culminated in the protagonist's marrying the antagonist's lover, and, if Joan had been able to adhere to the general theme, it might have worked quite well; but her tendency to digress had been holding her back for some years.

The trouble was, the truth kept creeping in. Not only had she named her protagonist Joan and her antagonist Helena, but certain scenes appeared on the screen when they had no right to be there, like the scene depicting the occasion when Helena had arrived on the doorstep to tell her she'd got into Oxford. She had looked much as Joan imagined a figure from the Bible might look after experiencing a vision of Christ. Her eyes, her skin, her entire personality seemed radiant somehow, as though something had changed from within. "You'll never guess," she said. But that was just the trouble: Joan could always guess. Joan had her down to an art. "I've won a scholarship to Somerville."

Joan, who knew her every move, her every trick, had stepped aside to allow her in, and Helena had followed her into the kitchen, dodging the cat as it shot through her legs and made for a flap in the door. "Well?" said Helena.

"Well what?"

"Aren't you going to congratulate me?"

Joan had felt a peculiar ache at the back of her throat, as if someone were pressing their thumbs against her oesophagus and trying to strangle her from the inside out, and it occurred to her, not for the first time, that to be in any way associated with Helena was rather like submitting oneself to an ongoing and particularly agonising torture. This demon who came in the guise of a friend was there to torment her for the sins of unattractiveness, poverty and intellectual dullness, and she came to the conclusion that she had neither the strength nor the knowledge to perform whatever ritual was necessary to exorcise it.

From the dim-lit hovel adjoining the kitchen, her mother had called, "Who's that?" and Joan had replied, "Helena."

"Come in, love."

Helena had poked her nose into the only downstairs room, the stale air within keeping her in the doorway. "I was just telling Joan I've won a scholarship to Somerville. "

Her mother said, "Did you hear that, Len?"

Without taking his eyes from the television set, her father had said, "Where's that then?"

"Oxford. "

Joan had remained in the kitchen where the smell of gas from a cooker lit by matches was almost inviting. She filled the kettle, put it on the hob, and heard Helena say, "I'll write. We mustn't lose touch."

I'll bet you will, thought Joan, bright, chatty letters, full of your own success.

The letters had come, crammed full of happiness, and Joan had written back: 'Dear Helena, you can't imagine how glad I am that you love your accommodation, adore your college, find the work easy to cope with and have met some fantastic men – I too am having a wonderful time.”

A wonderful time, thought Joan.

The loneliness of those three years would stay with her forever. The miserable digs. The way she gained weight. Masses and masses of weight. It hung on her still, the shame of it, the heat of it, the soul-destroying fact of it. All food is fat. She knew that now. A truth she would take to the grave.

She had expected Helena to forget her. Soon, the letters would stop coming, she was sure of it. But on the contrary, it was as though Helena knew, intuitively, that every time Joan received one of her letters, she screwed it up with rage, so she kept them coming, the elegant writing depicting a life that was hopelessly closed to lesser mortals.

It was some time after the first half-term that she mentioned a lover, somebody she had met through a friend. At first, Joan took little notice, but, when Helena began to mention him in every letter, she took a greater interest. This man of hers sounded so very like the type she wanted for herself, and she built a fantasy around him. They would be introduced, their eyes would meet, and they would know that each was meant for the other.

She held, of course, not the slightest hope that this fantasy would ever become a reality; and yet, when Helena invited her to a party in Oxford saying that he would be there, she decided to go.

In the book, she had written that, at the party, Helena's lover and Jo had fallen in love, but that, for a variety of (largely implausible) reasons, they couldn't let the fact become public knowledge. In reality, it had been a little more complex than that.

Joan was under no illusion about Helena's reason for having invited her. She had just wanted to show her what she was missing, stuffed away in Southampton. Even so, she went. She wasn't sure why. Maybe she just wanted to flagellate herself one last time. She didn't know. Whatever the reason, she went to the party.

The party where Helena died.

—:—

Chapter 5

It was late afternoon by the time Rigby returned to the station, and one of the first things he saw when he walked into his office was the message relating to Driver. It had been pinned to a file pulled by Dalton, a file that was inches thick and bound into submission by thin blue tape, the name Helena Warner in the top left-hand corner.

After reading the message, Rigby had mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it was useful to have ex-coppers coming forward with information. On the other, he knew from experience that they could make real nuisances of themselves if you let them. He left his office and poked his head round the door to the incident room, finding the blinds, like the windows, tight-closed against an afternoon that was both grey and bitterly cold.

"John," he said. "This message." Dalton looked up from a mass of paperwork scattered in what appeared

to be total disarray on the desk he had chosen to work at. "Which one?"

"Driver," said Rigby. "Former DCI."

"What about it?"

"Should his name mean anything to me?"

"Before your time," replied Dalton, and the words carried an edge that wasn't lost on Rigby. He was young for a DS, a product of the Accelerated Promotion Scheme, and sometimes resented by men who had put in the number of years people like Dalton had served. But there was no edge to Dalton's voice, and Rigby merely replied: "I take it he handled the investigation into her disappearance."

"So he says. And it's his name in the file."

Rigby hovered in the doorway and more to himself than to Dalton, he added, "And he thinks we've found her at Marshfield."

"He thinks there's a pretty good chance."

"Did you look at the file?"

"Glanced at it," replied Dalton. "He was convinced she was murdered and buried at Marshfield before the house was submerged." As an afterthought, he added, "He was also convinced he knew who the killer was."

"How likely is it that he was right?" Dalton cast his mind back to the few occasions on which he had met Driver. He wasn't a man given to jumping to conclusions or bending the facts to get a result. "If Driver thinks he had his man, chances are he did."

"So what went wrong?" said Rigby. "Phone him," said Dalton. "Find out." Rigby returned to his office, picked up the phone, and dialled Driver's number. It was answered almost instantly, and he got the uncomfortable impression that Driver had been standing there, waiting for the call.

"Detective Superintendent Rigby, Thames Valley," said Rigby. "Mr Driver?"

"Speaking," said Driver.

"You phoned with information."

"The remains found at Marshfield," he replied.

"What about them?" Rigby asked.

"Helena Warner."

Rigby picked up a pen and started to rite as he spoke. "Dalton pulled the case file. It looks extensive."

"Let me save you time," said Driver.

"When?"

"How about now?"

Rigby, who hadn't eaten since breakfast, felt home beckoning. He let it beckon. "Six do you?"

Driver merely replied, "Forty-seven, River Walk, Riverview Estate. Know it?"

"No problem," said Rigby. "Six."

—:—

Chapter 6

Riverview Estate was one that Rigby was not familiar with. The rows of neat retirement bungalows housed the elderly, and, as far as he was aware, there were few incidences of joyriding, hooliganism, or vandalism reported anywhere in the vicinity. There was no river either, the nearest being the Thames, and that was several miles away.

He parked outside a bungalow identical to those that surrounded it in every respect but one: Driver was clearly no gardener, and the patch of lawn that fronted the house stood out by having no border.

There were medium-sized pots standing by the front door, terracotta and devoid of soil. They had no doubt been bought with every intention of there being geraniums to follow, but the geraniums had never been planted, and at some point one of the pots had cracked as a result of frost.

He rang the bell, but the door was opened before he took his finger from the push. "Rigby," he said, showing his ID.

He looked like a kid, thought Driver, but then, anyone under fifty probably looked young when you were knocking on seventy. Well-dressed, intelligent-looking; no doubt the product of one of these new-fangled schemes that sends graduates shooting up a ladder Driver had to climb rung by painful rung, year after frustrating year. His voice held a tinge of resignation as he checked the ID, stepped aside, and said, "Come in."

The voice, thought Rigby, held traces of a northern accent, much softened by years of living in the south, but there was nothing soft about Driver. Dalton had mentioned he must be getting on, but he looked fitter than Rigby had imagined.

He stepped over the threshold and followed him into a room where Driver indicated the couch, leaving the armchair free for himself. "Sit down."

Rigby sat, and as he did so noticed shelves that were fixed above a sideboard. They were crammed with books of a type that would once have been essential to

the work of a copper of senior rank, most of them out-dated, and he wondered why Driver hadn't thrown them out. A reminder that he had once served a useful purpose in a life that was as good as over, perhaps?

"That's a fair collection."

Lowering himself into the armchair, Driver replied, "Tools of the trade, once." And Rigby suddenly saw himself at some point in the future, sitting in a bungalow, long retired and probably long forgotten. It was a worrying apparition. "Good of you to phone."

"Least I could do," replied Driver. "You'd have done the same."

True, thought Rigby, particularly if I had nothing but the past to occupy my mind. "You read it in the paper?"

"Heard it on the radio," said Driver.

"Looks like the divers got more than they bargained for."

Casting his mind back to the look that had been on Vaughan's face as he described what he'd found, Rigby merely nodded. "He won't forget that in a hurry."

"Why were they diving?"

"Trying their luck," replied Rigby, and he recalled that if he hadn't already been aware that it was Vaughan who had found the body, he would have known anyway. Of the two men, he looked the colder, and he looked deeply shaken, as though the water had drained more than mere heat from him.

"Did they have permission?"

"They're employed by the water authority. "

"They were on a job?"

"No," said Rigby. "Day off."

"They must like diving a hell of a lot to want to do it on their day off," said Driver. "What were they looking for?"

"Anything they could sell."

"And there's no chance they were mistaken? It was a body, down there?"

Rigby replied, "Vaughan only recently retired from the navy. He's seen bodies before. Besides—"

"Besides?"

"We sent a couple of our divers down. They confirmed it. We're planning to bring it to the surface."

"When?"

"Tomorrow."

The knowledge that police divers had confirmed it satisfied Driver. He said, "I've always thought the chances of that body ever coming to light were next to nil. Seems I was wrong."

"What's the background?" said Rigby, and strangely, now that it came to it, Driver wasn't sure where to start. He had thought that, if ever it came to it, he would know precisely what to say to the person heading the investigation if the case were ever reopened, but now the moment was here he wasn't too sure.

Eventually he said: "In 1975, I investigated the disappearance of a student from Somerville College, Helena Warner." Rigby made no response. He knew that already. "Over the years, I'd investigated the disappearance of quite a few students. You know how it is. Girlfriend trouble. Boyfriend trouble. Worry about exams." Rigby nodded. He knew. "But the minute I started to piece her last movements together, I knew she was dead."

Rigby didn't ask how. Some men could sort, instinctively, the runaways from the murder victims. It was a gift, of sorts.

A sixth sense. "Did you have a prime suspect?"

"Gilmore," said Driver, softly. "A first-year student at Worcester College."

Driver fell silent, and Rigby prompted him. "What made you go for him?"

Casting his mind back to the way in which Gilmore had gradually disintegrated as the investigation progressed, Driver replied, "He nearly had a breakdown. Touch and go. Not because of anything we did, you understand, but because of something he'd done. Big difference."

"How old was he at the time?"

"Nineteen. "

Rigby knew well enough how some people reacted if they were repeatedly questioned by the police on a serious matter, especially if they were young and they had no previous convictions. "Some people can't take it," he suggested.

"It wasn't that," replied Driver. "Given time—

"What happened to time?" said Rigby.

"We ran out of it. Nothing concrete, and all lines of enquiry exhausted. We had to drop it."

"Frustrating," said Rigby, quietly. "How convinced were you that he'd done it?"

"Totally. "

"Why?"

"Call it instinct – call it what you like.

Whatever it was, it told me something else . . . " He leaned forward, the springs of the chair old and fighting him every inch. "She died a brutal death."

—:—

Chapter 7

Before the 1939-45 war virtually destroyed the whole system of domestic service, Chaggfords had been staffed by a cook, three housemaids, a chauffeur, a groom, a footman and a butler. These days, Cora Bowerman made do with the help of a paid companion/help, although it would still have been within her financial means to keep the house fully staffed.

She had been born there in 1921 at a time when the kitchen garden had looked out onto fields, but gradually suburbia had encircled the house so that she could hardly remember what it had been like to walk out of the gates and find herself in a country lane. It seemed to her that a row of terraced houses had always stood opposite, and behind them, a Sainsbury's superstore. Beyond that was the A40 and beyond that Cora had no idea. She was lost now, the suburbs surrounding Oxford having changed beyond all recognition.

Only the house seemed familiar, and safe, and even that was because most of it had been shut up for years. Not that there had been any conscious decision to close various parts of it off. On the contrary, the closing of so many doors had been a gradual thing: a process that had taken place over a period of seventy years, a natural consequence of realising that certain rooms had been left unused for some weeks and then months and it dawning on one that they would never be used again.

It was time to leave. To go away.

Forever. So much of what was said about elderly people wanting to cling to the houses they had lived and loved and borne children in was rubbish. Cora knew of too many who couldn't wait to move to a smart new bungalow that took a fraction of the time to clean. Not that she felt that way about Chaggfords. She would be sorry to leave it. Of course she would. But it was time to go. In her younger days, it had seemed bright and full of life. Now, it was a cold, echoing place full of dark corners, groaning water

pipes, creaking floorboards and draughts that defied all efforts to eradicate or redirect them, and, since her companion was nearing retirement age, Cora had decided to throw in the towel and spend what remained of her life living somewhere small, warm and alone.

The problem had been what to do with Chaggfords. She was an only child who had never married, and she had managed to outlive all but the most distant of her relations. Consequently, the job of deciding whom to leave it to had proved tricky.

She wasn't sure what drew her to the decision to donate it to Churchill House. Perhaps it was because the consultant psychiatrist, Dr Thurston, had become a friend, or perhaps it was because, as a girl, she had accompanied her parents when they had called on the family who owned it before the war. Whatever the case, it had somehow seemed an appropriate course of action, and she had made the gift on condition that Chaggfords would be used to house patients who were being eased back into the community – a sort of halfway house, she supposed.

There was a catch, of course. There had to be a catch. Nobody could expect to receive a highly valuable property without there being a catch.

She walked with the hesitancy of the frail from the sitting room to a hall of such vast proportions that it was conceivable that it might one day house the bones of a large dinosaur. But it would never house a dinosaur. Not if her wishes were respected, for standing in the corner furthest from the door was a stone plinth. It had once supported a statue of her late father, Group Captain Richard Bowerman, DSO, DFC. Pillar of the community. Captain of industry. Destroyer of dreams.

She plucked a bottle from its hiding place in a rosewood cabinet and returned to her room with it, sitting down and feeling the chair she had left only moments before still warm on her back.

Arranging for the statue to be demolished had given her a certain satisfaction, but it was going to give her even more satisfaction to erect a statue of the man her father had prevented her from marrying, a statue that had been commissioned several months ago, and was now complete.

It had been sculpted by a patient of Dr Thurston's, and in a modest – some might say almost self-effacing – way she felt herself to be qualified to choose a sculptor, her education and background having prompted one of the more prominent auction houses to employ her for a period after the war. But it was not that fact alone that persuaded her to commission him: it was the fact that Wachmann might once have managed to capture her heart in the days before it was given to the man whose statue he then went on to sculpt.

She had told him what she had never been able to impress upon her father: that James had come from a respectable, working-class family; a quiet man, a thoughtful man, and the rather shy product of a local grammar school. What he had not been, despite what Cora's father had insisted to the contrary, was a fortune hunter. He was merely what his obituary had said he was, a young RAF pilot who had given his life for his country.

There had been plenty like him when Cora was in her twenties. Some of them as young as eighteen; others, like James, a few years their senior and staving off jokes about the reflexes slowing now they were growing old.

Old, thought Cora. What would any of them have known about growing old? So few of them got the chance to find out. Certainly not James, at any rate, who had given his life for his country but who mightn't have had to if not for her father ensuring he flew on every conceivable bombing raid. If he was awake, he flew. That was how one of James's friends had put it. Night after night, he flew and flew and flew.

Until, one night, he flew away forever. She was too old to care what people might think if they came to the house at ten in the morning and smelled drink on her breath. She toasted the ghost she had never seen but whose comforting presence she felt in every corner of the house, and as she drank she imagined herself unveiling the statue.

At first, people would be staggered in the way they so often are when confronted by a work of art that is larger than life, and it would probably take several moments for the subject matter to register. Once it did, the majority would no doubt assume that what they were looking at was a statue of her father sitting in the cockpit of a Lockheed Hudson, and then she would tell them it was a statue of the man she might have married if not for her father.

She knew it would surprise, possibly amuse, and perhaps even shock some people. And she wanted to do just that. Of course she did. But those were secondary reasons for commissioning the work. Her primary reason was far simpler.

She had one photograph. That was all.

Just one black-and-white photograph of James. And before she died she wanted the chance to run her fingers over the contours of his face and touch his lips with her own, to bury her head in the nape of his neck and weep in a way that she had not been able to weep over a mere photograph. For that, she needed his likeness. His perfect likeness in stone.

—:—

Chapter 8

Wachmann stood at the window in Dr Thurston's consulting room. From here, he had a view of the coach house that had been converted into a studio for his sole use. It stood at the back of Churchill House, itself a former stately home, its graceful, confident architecture entirely in keeping with the surrounding Oxford colleges.

Within the walls of the coach house, and hidden even from Thurston's analytical eye, was the statue commissioned by Cora. Complete now, and dreadful in its beauty, it would change his life forever. He didn't know how he knew that. It was an instinctive thing, a knowledge that, once revealed, would unleash a series of events that would prove utterly beyond his control. He would be famous, he supposed, but that wasn't what drove him. He had long since given up fantasies about making his name in favour of fantasies that revolved around fulfilling his potential. Whether dead or alive, he would be remembered for his talent. Above all, he would be remembered for the statue commissioned by Cora.

There had been many occasions during the past few months when Thurston had asked if he might be allowed to see it, but Wachmann had kept it hidden. "Not even Cora has seen it yet."

"When will you let her see it?"

"I persuaded her to wait until the day we intend to unveil it."

"And when will that be?"

"The day that Chaggfords is officially opened for multiple occupation."

He had managed to stave Thurston off, somehow persuading him that, if he were to take even the briefest look at what Wachmann had come to consider to be his greatest work to date, he would smash it, on principle. "No one must see it," said Wachmann. "Not until I'm ready."

The coach house was built from stone that was as grey as the sky that had hung over Marshfield, but the vines that crept up the walls were a blaze of crimson. It was all such a contrast to flatlands that had been devoid of any such vulgar display of colour. They had been a watercolour production, the river rising and falling in accordance with the season, the tide, and the rainfall, the reeds on its banks like the tips of so many fingers breaking through the water.

It had inspired a piece that was currently being exhibited in one of the better-known galleries, Hand of a Drowning Man. It was tasteless, he knew that, but it was also saleable, and Thurston, who found it interesting, had referred to it a moment ago.

"What made you sculpt it?" he said. Wachmann turned from the window to face a room that seemed filled with what could only be described as a golden glow. The effect was contrived, too obvious, the result of a modicum of artistic ability. Interior designers, thought Wachmann, were like the majority of modern poets: they tended to live too long.

"The hand is mine," he said.

"What are you reaching out for?" Thurston asked.

"Someone who never comes."

Thurston, his suit expensive, his manner determinedly unthreatening, replied: "The hand wouldn't happen to be drowning at Marshfield, by any chance?"

"Not that I'm aware."

"Shall we explore the possibility?"

"What's the point? We've discussed Marshfield ad infinitum over the years."

It was an evasion Thurston had no intention of allowing him to make. "You read the papers. You knew the remains had been found."

"I didn't, actually. Remains of what?" Thurston ploughed on, regardless. "A body. Probably that of a woman."

"Dangerous places, reservoirs. She must have fallen in."

Thurston couldn't help himself. He laughed. "I doubt very much she fell inside a wardrobe."

It was Wachmann's turn to smile. "I suppose not."

"So what do you make of it?"

"I find it depressing." Thurston gave him the look he reserved for patients who were being less than forthcoming. "You find everything depressing, Richard. Isn't that why you're here?"

"You tell me."

"I might be able to do just that if you tell me how you feel?"

"Feel about what?"

"About the fact that remains have been found hidden in a wardrobe at your parents' former home."

"I don't know."

"You must feel something?"

"All right," replied Wachmann. "I feel—" He searched for a word, and spoke the first that sprang to mind. "Numb."

"What kind of numbness?"

"How many different kinds of numbness are there?"

"Well," said Thurston, getting into his stride, running a hand through hair that was perfectly groomed and perfectly brown despite his fifty years. "Numbness can stem from horror, grief, shock, disbelief, fear – which do you think it is?"

Wachmann was getting the picture. "I suppose I'm shocked," he admitted. "I mean, it sort of proves she went back to

Marshfield after the party, doesn't it?"

"Does it?"

With an edge to his voice, Wachmann replied, "She left the party with Ian and Joan. I followed in my own car. I saw Ian drop them off at Somerville."

"And you're sticking to that?"

"It's the truth."

"Even though her remains have been found?"

Wachmann answered abruptly. "I think that's enough for today, Dr Thurston."

"Sit down, Richard."

"I don't want to. I'd really rather get on with some work."

Thurston stood up, walked across to him, and put a fatherly arm across his shoulder. "I'm not a policeman, Richard. I'm not here to judge or punish. I'm merely here to help, and you know that whatever is said between us is totally confidential. I couldn't go to the police even if I wanted to."

That wasn't true, and Wachmann knew it. There was certain information that a psychiatrist had a duty to tell the police if it came to light, but he wasn't about to enter into an argument about ethics.

He merely wanted to get out of there. Thurston's line of questioning had been a sharp reminder of what it had been like to be questioned by Driver, and it wasn't a memory he particularly cared to resurrect.

Trust Helena to be found. He might have known she'd never let anyone of them live in peace, not in the long term. What was the last thing she'd said? It came to him in the instant he recalled the terror that prompted the threat: "They'll find me—"

"Sit down," said Thurston, again, so Wachmann sat in the plushly upholstered room, staring at the stone-mullioned windows and seeing only the sky thickening with a mist that would cover the park like grounds by mid-afternoon.

"The police intend to bring the remains to the surface."

"I'd rather not know."

"You may have no choice," said Thurston. "If it's established that they are indeed the remains of Helena Warner, they may want to question you. I thought it better to prepare you in case they turn up on the doorstep."

He had a point, thought Wachmann.

Driver would be long retired, but, if the police decided to reopen the case, no doubt he could expect a visit from his successor in the not too distant future.

"Tell me," said Thurston. "If it transpires that they are in fact Helena's remains, how will you feel about that?"

After a pause, Wachmann answered truthfully. "Well, assuming, for a moment, that they are . . . "

"Assuming," said Thurston, playing along.

"It won't surprise me."

It wasn't the response Thurston had expected. "Why not?"

"She wasn't the type to stay buried," said Wachmann, simply, and he found himself wondering what effect the discovery of Helena's remains was having on Gilmore. It was possible he had spent the past twenty years preparing himself for the possibility that one day the remains would be found, but personally Wachmann doubted it. Gilmore had struck him as being the type of man who wouldn't be able to face the idea. Each time it entered his head, he would push it out. He would do what he'd done from the start. He'd run away.

Joan, of course, would exhibit the kind of guts Wachmann could admire in a woman. She might still protect Gilmore, she might not. It much depended on whether she still had feelings for him, he supposed.

He cast his mind back to the weekend of the party and recalled that he had been warned before her arrival that he would find her a bit of an oddball. "Now, you have to be nice to Joan," Helena had said, and that, alone, had been enough to seal her fate. She had fitted Helena's description of her to perfection, a person who had somehow managed to turn unattractiveness into an art form, a clumsy, besotted, insensitive woman, with no sense of style or colour, her accent thick, the vowels flattened.

To do himself credit, he had at least tried to find something appealing about her, but to no avail. Joan just was, he decided.

He had found it entertaining when it had dawned on him that she had a thing about Gilmore. On the morning of the party she had padded after him, following him round the house, driving him crazy, Helena barely able to hide her amusement. Eventually, Helena and Gilmore had disappeared to escape her, and, having been deprived of the object of her desire, Joan had turned her attention to him. "What did you say you were reading?"

Wachmann had been struggling through the living room with a box of booze destined for Marshfield. "Fine art."

"Do you paint?"

He supposed it wasn't as stupid a question as it first sounded. There were students of fine art who hadn't lifted a brush in their lives and didn't intend to, but he wasn't one of them. "I have been known to make the occasional effort."

"What kind of stuff?"

Stuff? thought Wachmann. How can she refer to an artist's work as stuff? He struggled with the box and panted, "All kinds."

He made it to the door, opened it with one hand and managed to hold on to the box with the other, Joan sitting on the couch, watching him as if barely noticing he could do with some help. "What's your favourite?"

"Favourite what?"

"Painting. "

"Mine, or somebody else's?"

She thought it through for a moment and said, "Yours."

Without thinking, he replied, "I painted some butterflies a while back. I'm fairly pleased with the way they turned out."

Butterflies, he thought. She'll think I'm out of my mind. He almost explained that they weren't the kind of butterflies one might expect to find on a birthday card, but he really couldn't be bothered. Besides, he couldn't explain without showing it to her, and he didn't intend to do that.

"Show me," she said.

"Tomorrow, maybe. I'm a little busy right now."

"Go on," she pleaded. "Show me now. It won't take a minute."

"It's up in my room. You probably won't even like it . . . "

Before he could stop her, she'd made for the foot of the stairs and was climbing towards his room. "Don't go up there," he called, and, putting down the box, he plunged after her . Already, she had opened the door, and he charged in behind her, staggered by her audacity.

"What a neat room. I thought artists generally lived in chaos."

"Most artists try to make sense of the chaos they live in."

"You wouldn't think so, not with the kind of stuff most of them produce."

"I doubt you know much about what any artist produces."

The comment was either lost on her or ignored by her, he wasn't sure which. He felt violated by the way she had penetrated his room, and he stood in the doorway, willing her to leave.

She turned, and for a moment, he thought she might oblige, but she merely said, "Where is it then?"

"Where's what?"

"This painting of butterflies."

He wished he'd never mentioned it, and, more to get rid of her than to satisfy her curiosity, he walked towards the bed, pulled a canvas out from beneath it, and leaned it against the wall.

She looked at it, tipping her big fat head this way and that like an overlarge, clumsy bird. "They look like a woman's inner thighs."

"That's the intention," said Wachmann. "And you've painted butterflies right up next to her—”

She was so crude, thought Wachmann, so utterly incapable of expressing herself with anything even approaching charm. He couldn't help comparing her reaction with Helena's sultry response of 'Paint some on me.'

She had slipped out of the wrap over skirt before sitting on the bed, a slip of silk barely hiding the mass of pubic hair, and he had rooted in a drawer for coloured inks, had pulled them out, and had dipped the tip of a fine sable brush in each of the bottles in turn to produce butterflies identical to those in the painting. When they were finished, he had held a mirror to her thighs and she had looked at them in the reflection.

"Satisfied?" he said, and she pulled the slip of silk to one side. "This is the most beautiful butterfly of all," she replied, and the soft fluted lips of her vagina were wet, inviting, glittering like the wings of some exotic species.

"What are they?" said Joan.

"Red Admirals," said Wachmann, and then she did something that caught him out completely, something that surprised and disturbed him more than anything Helena could have done: she looked up at him, her eyes overlarge in the thick-lensed glasses, and said, very softly, "They're beautiful."

It was perhaps that comment alone that prompted him to sketch her from memory in the months following the party. It was not, perhaps, his most realistic piece of work, but then he hadn't sketched her as she appeared to the outside world, but as he saw her from that day on, a sensitive, feminine soul trapped by some cruel trick of fate in a body that disgusted her. He felt her pain, and portrayed it.

He had intended to send it to her as a gift, but there had been something about her obsession with Gilmore that frightened him, and he had been afraid that she might turn her attention on him if he did. If that happened, he would, at the very least, reject her, and he didn't want to hurt her. She didn't deserve that.

She looked round the room, the walls crammed with pieces of work, some of them executed on scraps of paper Sellotaped to the wall, others having been framed and thoughtfully hung. "What's it like to be you, to see things as you do and to be able to portray them so that others can see them too?"

He covered the painting, eased it back under the bed, and pulled a folio out from behind the headboard. He laid it flat on the floor, untied the strings and invited her to look.

She thumbed through the sketches, and when she came, as he knew she would come, to a sketch he'd made of Gilmore, she stopped thumbing. He hadn't known what to expect. Shock, perhaps. Helena might have laughed. Helena might have suggested that ménage a trois that Driver suspected had existed between them, but Joan merely said, "Does he know?"

"No, and neither do you. It doesn't mean I'm gay. It merely means I'm capable of appreciating a good body, male or female."

"I'd love to have it."

"I can't allow that."

"He'll never see it, I swear."

"It isn't that. It's just that I'd be encouraging you to continue longing for something that will never be yours."

He'd hit the nail squarely on the head, and she was embarrassed. "I didn't realise it was so obvious."

"Believe me, it's obvious."

He didn't say anything further, thinking it might be better to leave her to get used to the idea that she was making a fool of herself, and a few moments later she said, "I know I'm not attractive."

He wasn't about to try to persuade her otherwise. It would have been a lie, and she would, in any case, have seen through it. He flipped the folio closed, tied the strings, and put it behind the headboard as she added: "And I know he'll never leave Helena for me."

"He'll probably never leave Helena, full stop."

"What man in his right mind would?" Wachmann thought back to the fluted lips of her vagina, the coarse, almost vulgar smile behind those fabulous eyes and the coarse, almost vulgar sexual act that he had committed as one might commit any crime, there having been about it a sense of danger tinged with shame, self-disgust and a desire to obtain similar gratification should the opportunity to do so ever arise.

"Come on," he said, "we'd better load the car." And after she left the room he locked it behind her and followed her down the stairs.

—:—

Chapter 9

The morning after Rigby's visit, Driver stepped out of the centrally heated bungalow and breathed in air that was charged with minuscule particles of ice. Twenty years ago, he had stood on the bank of the reservoir and, despite the fact that the entire country had seemed to be at the mercy of a summer described in the press as one of the hottest since records began, Marshfield had been cold. He wasn't sure why. There was no adequate reason to explain the chill in the air, the way in which the water had seemed to absorb the heat of the day, and, if it had been cold during summer, Driver was certain of one thing: it would be bloody freezing now. He had therefore wrapped up warmly, but doubted it would make much difference on a morning spent standing on the bank to watch as the remains were brought to the surface.

There was a lot of standing around to be done on a job like this, but he thanked his lucky stars he was a spectator and not a diver. Not only would he do anything rather than submerge himself in freezing water with poor visibility, but he wouldn't much fancy handling remains that had been submerged for any length of time. Mind you, it wouldn't be the first time he had seen a body that had decomposed in water and he knew what to expect. With luck, the remains would be skeletal, but, if Vaughan's description was anything to go by, it was rather more likely they would resemble a child's worst nightmare.

He didn't want to think of Helena like that. In each of the photographs supplied by her parents, she had come over as being something of a stunner, and it didn't seem right that a body so alluring in life would be so repulsive in death.

He walked towards the car, Rigby's words coming back to him as he described what Vaughan had found: "The jaw came away in his hand. He won't forget that in a hurry."

Driver could imagine.

* * *

A mile after leaving the A40, Gilmore turned onto a tarmac road signposted for single-lane traffic only. It wound its way round what had once been the back of Marshfield, and he followed it to within sight of the copse that had sheltered the flood plain from the north. Now it sheltered the water, a vast expanse that stretched from bank to bank like so much sheet metal. Dull. Grey. Still.

From his vantage point, he could see a crowd held back by a cordon, a crowd miserable under a rain that was finer than dust, a barely perceptible, yet somehow relentless, downpour. They stood almost perfectly still, watching the police, forensic and media, and it wasn't the cold that made them stand like that, thought Gilmore: it was the air of threat that was peculiar to Marshfield.

It was this air of threat that the media had picked up on, this saleable air of threat that would line their pockets, and photos of the house as it had once been had already appeared in the papers. He . wasn't surprised to see them. Any reporter worth his salt would have made straight for the local archives, but the archives wouldn't provide evidence of what the house might look like now with its lichen walls and silt-covered floors, so readers had been forced to use their imagination and visualise, from interviews Vaughan had given to journalists, precisely what he had seen.

A flicker of light in the water drew his attention and enabled him to locate the divers' approximate position; but, unlike those who were trying to picture them moving around the interior of a house they could only imagine, he was able to visualise what they were seeing with some degree of accuracy. He had furnished that house; had spent the weekends there with Helena.

He felt a sudden pain behind the breastbone and attributed it to the memory of the way she had sometimes looked up at him. He had thought he had forgotten her face. Now he knew he would never forget it. Not really. It might escape him for years at a time, but it was there, ready to surface, to smile, to die.

He left the path and threaded his way through the trees until they thinned, the water stretching before him, devoid of translucence or any variety in shade. It was so completely still, so utterly opaque, it could have been concrete poured from hill to hill, the greyness broken only by the launch now skimming through the water.

Ultimately, the divers would bring the body to the surface and tie it to the outside of the launch, having bound it first in something resembling a white plastic sheet. He had seen it all before. Other stretches of water, other bodies, a fascination for such scenes having enticed him to stand, observe, and wonder whether the day would come when he would witness the same thing at Marshfield.

He made his way to the front of the cordon and remembered what it had looked like the last time he had stood at this spot. There had been no reservoir then, merely the wide shallow river that spread like a spilled drink over land that it rendered unfarmable for the most part, and it was the very wetness of the land that had provided a sanctuary for birds

and plants, many of them rare. They, like their habitat, were gone now. Gone for good.

Some yards to his left and on the other side of the cordon stood a man he recognised from a photo in the press: Rigby, thought Gilmore, his tall, lean frame remarkably similar to that of Driver – or, rather, Driver as he had been twenty years ago. Then his eyes were drawn back to the water as the divers surfaced. It felt to Gilmore as though they had been down there an age, but in fact the whole operation had taken less than twenty minutes, and, after they signalled the launch, he witnessed, from a distance, the way in which the remains were strapped to the side.

He stood transfixed as the launch powered its way to shore. It was as though the man at the helm had decided to land as close to the cordon as possible in order to entertain the crowd, but he stopped several yards from the bank for fear of grounding the launch, and it was left to the divers to slip into the water, untie the remains, and carry them to shore.

They laid them on the bank, and the crowd pushed forward, uniformed men holding people back as best they could.

Gilmore stayed where he was in the knowledge that, if he were to look, he would find it difficult to believe that the tangle of bones belonged to a face he had once touched with fingers that had marvelled at the texture of the skin. It would look fragile, he decided; fragile in the way that the wing of a bird looks breakable to the touch, and mentally, he dressed the bones of the face with flesh, much as a forensic scientist might dress a skull with wooden pegs and precisely the right depth of clay to reveal an identity.

He turned to leave, head bowed against the rain, and found there was someone in front of him, somebody blocking his path with the stubborn persistence that he himself used when blocking the past from his mind, and as he looked up his initial irritation was replaced by a stab of shock.

"Small world, Ian."

He wondered why it hadn't occurred to him that Driver might be there. Such had been the media attention, he should have realised the possibility existed. Their eyes met, locked together, and held for a moment, Gilmore faltering first.

He fought the urge to run, to escape, knowing, even as he experienced the momentary panic that there was no escape. Not really. However far he ran, Driver would find him, ready to make good on a prophecy made in the interview room at St Aldate's.

"I’ll break you, Ian. Maybe not today. Maybe not for many years to come. But one day—I’ll break you—"

—:—