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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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.