Deborah Crombie - Leave The Grave Green

“The lock is kept empty when it’s not in operation, so first I open the sluices in the head gate to fill the lock. Then when I open the head gate for the boat to enter, up pops a body.” Smith sipped from his cup, then added disgustedly, “Silly woman on the boat started squealing like a pig going to slaughter, you’ve never heard such a racket. I came in here and dialed nine-nine-nine, just to get some relief from the noise.” The corners of Smith’s eyes crinkled in what might have been a smile. “Rescue people fished him out and tried to resuscitate the poor blighter, though if you ask me, anybody with a particle of sense could see he’d been dead for hours.”

“When did you recognize him?” asked Gemma.

“Didn’t. Not his body, anyway. But I looked at his wallet when they took it out of his pocket, and I knew the name seemed familiar. Took me a minute to place it.”

Kincaid moved to the window and looked out. “Where had you heard it?”

Smith shrugged. “Pub gossip, most likely. Everyone hereabouts knows the Ashertons and their business.”

“Do you think he could have fallen in from the top of the gate?” Kincaid asked.

“Railing’s not high enough to keep a tall man from going over if he’s drunk. Or stupid. But the concrete apron continues for a bit on the upstream side of the gate before it meets the old tow-path, and there’s no railing along it at all.”

Kincaid remembered the private homes he’d seen upstream on this side of the river. All had immaculate lawns running down to the water, some also had small docks. “What if he went in farther upstream?”

“The current’s not all that strong until you get close to the gate, so if he went in along there,”-he nodded upstream-“I’d say he’d have to have been unconscious not to have pulled himself out. Or already dead.”

“What if he went in here, by the gate? Would the current have been strong enough to hold him down?”

Smith gazed out at the lock a moment before answering. “Hard to say. The current is what holds the gate closed-it’s pretty fierce. But whether it could hold a struggling man down… unlikely, I’d say, but you can’t be sure.”

“One more thing, Mr. Smith,” Kincaid said. “Did you see or hear anything unusual during the night?”

“I go to bed early, as I’m always up by daybreak. Nothing disturbed me.”

“Would a scuffle have awakened you?”

“I’ve always been a sound sleeper, Superintendent. I can’t very well say, now can I?”

“Sleep of the innocent?” whispered Gemma as they took their leave and Smith firmly shut his door.

Kincaid stopped and stared at the lock. “If Connor Swann were unconscious or already dead when he went in the water, how in hell did someone get him here? It would be an almost impossible carry even for a strong man.”

“Boat?” ventured Gemma. “From either upstream or down. Although why someone would lift him from a boat downstream of the lock, carry him around and dump him on the upstream side, I can’t imagine.”

They walked slowly toward the path that would take them back across the weir, the wind at their backs. Moored boats rocked peacefully in the quiet water downstream. Ducks dived and bobbed, showing no concern with human activity that didn’t involve crusts of bread. “Was he already dead? That’s the question, Gemma.” He looked at her, raising an eyebrow. “Fancy a visit to the morgue?”

The smell of disinfectant always reminded Kincaid of his school infirmary, where Matron presided over the bandaging of scraped knees and wielded the power to send one home if the illness or injury proved severe enough. The inhabitants of this room, however, were beyond help from Matron’s ministrations, and the disinfectant didn’t quite mask the elusive tang of decay. He felt gooseflesh rise on his arms from the cold.

A quick call to Thames Valley CID had directed them to High Wycombe’s General Hospital, where Connor Swann’s body awaited autopsy. The hospital was old, the morgue still a place of ceramic tiles and porcelain sinks, lacking the rows of stainless-steel drawers which tucked bodies neatly away out of sight. Instead, the steel gurneys that lined the walls held humped, white-sheeted forms with toe tags peeking out.

“Who was it you wanted, now?” asked the morgue attendant, a bouncy young woman whose name tag read “Sherry” and whose demeanor seemed more suited to a nursery school.

“Connor Swann,” said Kincaid, with an amused glance at Gemma.

The girl walked along the row of gurneys, flicking toe tags with her fingers as she passed. “Here he is. Number four.” She tucked the sheet down to his waist with practiced precision. “And a nice clean one he is, too. Always makes it a bit easier, don’t you think?” She smiled brightly at them, as if they were mentally impaired, then walked back to the swinging doors and shouted “Mickey” through the gap she made with one hand. “We’ll need some help shifting him,” she added, turning back to Kincaid and Gemma.

Mickey emerged a moment later, parting the doors like a bull charging from a pen. The muscles in his arms and shoulders strained the thin fabric of his T-shirt, and he wore the short sleeves rolled up, displaying an extra inch or two of bicep.

“Can you give these people a hand with number four, Mickey?” Sherry enunciated carefully, her nursery-teacher manner now mixed with a touch of exasperation. The young man merely nodded, his acne-inflamed face impassive, and pulled a pair of thin latex gloves from his back pocket. “Take all the time you want,” she added to Kincaid and Gemma. “Just give me a shout when you’ve finished, okay? Cheerio.” She whisked past them, the tail of her white lab coat flapping, and went out through the swinging doors.

They moved the few steps to the gurney and stood. In the ensuing silence Kincaid heard the soft expulsion of Gemma’s breath. Connor Swann’s exposed neck and shoulders were lean and well formed, his thick straight hair brown with a hint of auburn. Kincaid thought it likely that in life he had been one of those high-colored men who flushed easily in anger or excitement. His body was indeed remarkably unblemished. Some bruising showed along the left upper arm and shoulder, and when Kincaid looked closely he saw faint, dark marks on either side of the throat.

“Some bruising,” Gemma said dubiously, “but not the occlusion of the face and neck you’d expect with a manual strangulation.”

Kincaid bent over for a closer look at the throat. “No sign of a ligature. Look, Gemma, across the right cheekbone. Is that a bruise?”

She peered at the smudge of darker color. “Could be. Hard to tell, though. His face could easily have banged against the gate.”

Connor Swann had been blessed with good bone structure, thought Kincaid, high, wide cheekbones and a strong nose and chin. Above his full lips lay a thick, neatly trimmed, reddish mustache, looking curiously alive against the gray pallor of his skin.

“A good-looking bloke, would you say, Gemma?”

“Probably attractive, yes… unless he was a bit too full of himself. I got the impression he was quite the ladies’ man.”

Kincaid wondered how Julia Swann felt about that-she hadn’t impressed him as a woman willing to sit home meekly while her husband played the lad. It also occurred to him to wonder how much of his desire to see Connor had to do with assessing the physical evidence, and how much to do with his personal curiosity about the man’s wife.

He turned to Mickey and raised a questioning eyebrow. “Could we have a look at the rest?”

The young man obliged wordlessly, flipping the sheet off altogether.

“He’d been on holiday, but I’d say not recently,” Gemma commented as they saw the faint demarcation of a tan against belly and upper thighs. “Or maybe just summer boating on the Thames.”