Michael Dibdin - Dirty Tricks

But the most striking evidence came from an Oriel Eight out training. As we drifted across the river, their cox first shouted a warning, then ordered the crew to angle their oars to avoid fouling the punt. As a result their practice run had to be aborted, and we thus had their full and indignant attention as we came alongside. This happened to be the very moment when I dropped the punt-pole into the water, the idea being that Dennis could grab hold of it and I would then pull him in. Unfortunately the pole was heavier than I had thought, I misjudged the angle and the thing came down on Dennis’s head. This incident has since been described, by the tabloid whose lurid prose I regaled you with earlier, as ‘a pitiless and cynical coup de grace’ . One hesitates to dispute this judgement, coming as it does from a source with such impeccable credentials in pitiless cynicism, but the fact remains that the young men of Oriel didn’t see it quite that way. Not that my character emerged unscathed from their testimony. ‘Frenzied and totally ineffective bumbling’, ‘drunken hysteria’ and ‘blind panic’ were some of the less offensive phrases mentioned in the coroner’s court. Out on the river, their language was less guarded, and we were treated to a variety of epithets which no Merton man, I hope, would have allowed past his lips in mixed company. But the vital point is what was not said. I may have been called a pillock and a dickhead, but no one asked why I had tried to brain my companion. It is also noteworthy that the Oriel crew — who may be presumed to have known a thing or two about rowing, given their record in recent years — also failed to remark on the fact that I or Karen were allegedly paddling away from the drowning man. What they saw, as one put it, were two people who weren’t up to boating in the bath, never mind on the Thames in spate.

A more substantial objection is why neither Karen nor I had dived in to try and save Dennis. At the time this criticism was directed at her rather than at me. Karen was not only Dennis’s wife but also a physical education instructor who could, as the coroner facetiously remarked, have swum to her husband’s rescue using either the crawl, breast-stroke, back-stroke or butterfly. This betrays a complete lack of understanding of the actual circumstances. The very newspapers which subsequently pilloried our ‘cowardice — or worse’ are constantly bemoaning the deaths of people who rashly attempt to rescue swimmers in distress, only to perish themselves as well. Dennis was thrashing about so vigorously that even a trained lifeguard would have had difficulty in retrieving him. To throw ourselves into those turbulent waters and then be unable to regain the punt would have put paid to any hope of rescuing Dennis. Of course it is easy to argue now, with the benefit of hindsight, that Dennis was doomed anyway, but it didn’t appear like that at the time. When he first fell in, I remember shouting at him impatiently to stop fooling about. It seemed inconceivable that a mere punt trip could end in death. Even after the pole struck Dennis on the head and he disappeared from sight, I remember thinking that he would pop up at any moment alongside the boat, like a coot. If either Karen or I had had any idea that it was possible for someone to drown so quickly, we would no doubt have thrown caution to the wind and dived in. Not that this would have made the slightest difference to the outcome. The simple fact of the matter is that we should never have been there in the first place.

The coroner concurred. In his verdict, he called for consideration to be given to regulations restricting punts to the relatively safe waters of the Cherwell and to review the conditions under which they could be hired. ‘It is striking,’ he concluded, ‘that while strict laws govern the use of motor vehicles, anyone may hire a marine craft and then, with no experience whatsoever, without a life-jacket, unable to swim and in a state of advanced inebriation, attempt to navigate a busy and treacherous public waterway. As long as this state of affairs continues, tragedies such as this will necessarily recur.’

No policemen leapt to their feet, protesting at this travesty of justice. Indeed, the police treated us both with the greatest sympathy and consideration from the moment I rang them from a callbox on the Abingdon Road. The river authorities contacted the lock-keeper at Iffley and it was there that Dennis’s body was eventually recovered later that evening. Karen was at home by then, under sedation.

The next time I saw her was at the crematorium. Thomas and Lynn were there too, to say nothing of Roger and Marina, if that’s her name, and the rest of them. Clive also attended, visibly gleeful that he had spared the school any undesirable publicity by unloading me in the nick of time. The only other person I recognized was Alison Kraemer. She expressed her condolences briefly and tactfully, in marked contrast to some of those present, who couldn’t quite bring themselves to approach the grieving widow but were quite prepared to quiz me at length about the details of Dennis’s last hours. To keep them at bay, I engaged Alison in close conversation. It turned out that she was a freelance editor for OUP, with a daughter in her early teens and a seven-year-old son for whom she had been caring single-handedly since her husband’s untimely death. I found it supremely restful to talk to her, and when we finally parted I told her I hoped we might see each other again some time. A lanky cleric oozing good intentions and bad faith then launched into an address that was squirmingly anxious to avoid giving offence to persons of any or no belief while still suggesting that, who knows, there might after all be, you know, something out there. While we all coughed and looked at our shoes in embarrassment, the gleaming casket containing Dennis’s mortal remains was spirited away to the nether regions of the crematorium.

Afterwards we trooped outside and stood awkwardly saying our good-byes. I sniffed deeply. There seemed to be a new aroma in the air. A sweaty, gamey, meaty nose, I thought, drying out a touch at the finish, not much body to it.

It was probably my imagination.

The media were later to make much of the discovery that a few weeks after Dennis Parsons’s death, Karen and I had spent a weekend at the same hotel in mid-Wales. ‘Nights of Passion in Rhayader’ remains my favourite headline, although ‘Drowning Duo’s Dirty Welsh Weekend’ runs it close. When journalists resort to this sort of thing you can be sure that the facts are drab in the extreme, and believe me, they don’t come much drabber than our Bargain Weekend Break at the Elan Valley Lodge. The only interesting thing about it is that it happened at all.

When I say that I saw Karen at the funeral, I mean that quite literally. I saw her. She saw me too, no doubt, but that was it. We didn’t exchange a word, or even a glance. With Dennis’s demise our intercourse, as they say in the classics, had become problematic. Not that it seriously occurred to either of us that anyone might think we had murdered Dennis. It’s difficult to get across to those who didn’t know him just how outlandish this idea seemed. Dennis Parsons was so deeply and intrinsically boring that it was almost impossible to imagine anything as exciting as being murdered ever happening to him. Nevertheless, it clearly wouldn’t do for Karen and I to be seen together immediately afterwards. If I’d been seen popping in and out of Ramillies Drive, tongues would inevitably have begun to wag. Legally, though, we were in the clear. Even the insurance adjusters, who proved infinitely more assiduous than the police, finally agreed that Dennis’s death fell into one of the approved categories listed in the small print.