Faith Martin - A Fatal Mistake

‘Yes, sir,’ Trudy said. She knew Dr Ryder was too clever a man not to know she would be forced to do this, so didn’t feel at all treacherous in agreeing to the orders.

‘Try and rein him back from any real excesses. And watch you don’t go about upsetting any VIPs,’ he added, all but wagging a finger at her. ‘Most of the parents of the young people at that picnic party are members of the aristocracy, or the new money set. And if you go about upsetting them, they’ll get on to the top brass, and the top brass will have me roasted. And I won’t stand for that! Understood?’

At this, Trudy gulped. She wasn’t quite sure just how she was supposed to go about stopping Dr Ryder when he wanted something, and when he could be, well, perhaps a little straightforward in his speech and manner.

Seeing her hesitation, and guessing the reason for it, DI Jennings sighed heavily. Even he had to concede that it was hardly fair to ask a young girl of nineteen to handle someone like Ryder. Someone who could blister the paintwork with just a look or an acid phrase, and had been known to best the sharpest of QCs and any number of other dignitaries. ‘Oh, just do your best, Constable,’ he finished wearily.

‘Yes, sir,’ Trudy said, and, with a feeling of infinite relief, quickly left the Inspector’s office.

Once outside the station, it was just a short walk to Dr Ryder’s office in the coroner’s court and mortuary complex in Floyds Row. His secretary, recognising her from their first case six months before, smiled at her as Clement strode in, ordering ‘tea and cake, and plenty of it’ as he swept past her.

The older woman shook her head and sighed at his cavalier manner. But Trudy noticed she was smiling.

A few minutes later, Clement Ryder was eating a slice of angel cake and watching his young protégé thoughtfully as she read through the court documents on the seemingly unremarkable case of the drowned law student. He was curious to see what she made of them.

On their last case he’d come to acquire a great deal of respect for this young woman’s intelligence and backbone. She was still very green, of course, but she had plenty of potential, if steered right. Which was why, of course, he’d made damned sure Jennings assigned her to him again. Of course it helped that the buffoon of an inspector totally underestimated the girl’s qualities. Given the proper mentoring by her older and more experienced colleagues, she could really shine. Not that that was likely to happen, he thought, a shade gloomily.

Still, he’d do all he could to help her hone some skills while she was helping him get to the bottom of his latest project.

It took her half an hour to read every scrap of paper in the file, and when she’d finished she leaned back in the chair, a slight frown pulling her fine, dark brows together over her dark, pansy-brown eyes.

‘Well?’ he asked sharply.

‘On the face of it, sir, it looks rather straightforward, doesn’t it? There was a large party of drunken students, and two very overcrowded punts. There was a collision with a third punt and, as a result, a lot of people were pitched into the river. It’s quite possible Derek either couldn’t get to the surface quickly enough, or perhaps got trampled underneath someone else’s feet, expelling all the air from his lungs before he knew what was happening.’

‘Oh, yes. All of that is possible.’ The coroner surprised her slightly by agreeing at once. ‘Mind you, I still think it rather odd that nobody saw him getting into difficulties. There were at least twenty or more students in the water.’

‘Who would have been looking to save themselves, most likely,’ Trudy put in.

‘Oh, almost certainly.’

‘Perhaps he couldn’t get to the surface because of the sheer weight of numbers? Who knows, maybe somebody flailing about actually stood on him?’

‘Again, perhaps. But supposing any of that happened, with so many eyes actually in the water, and so many eyes on the bank watching it all happen, is it very likely that nobody saw the body rise to the surface at some point and float away?’

‘Perhaps it didn’t rise to the surface?’ She played devil’s advocate automatically.

‘Most bodies do,’ the coroner said, then shrugged. ‘Then again, who’s to say? Perhaps they did see a body float away but agreed among themselves to keep quiet about it.’

‘That’s rather far-fetched, isn’t it?’ Trudy said doubtfully. ‘Why would they do that?’

The coroner shrugged. ‘Who’s to say? The thing is, the reason you have an inquest in the first place is to tackle issues like the hows and whys.’

‘So you’re not convinced the court did get to the bottom of what really happened?’ she asked slowly. She’d learned a lot from her last encounter with this sometimes difficult, but always brilliant, man. And if he thought something was ‘off’, she wasn’t going to gainsay him out of hand.

‘Forget about the mechanics and facts of it for a moment, Trudy,’ Clement advised quietly, leaning back in his chair, and feeling his right leg tremble slightly.

With a scowl, he surreptitiously rubbed it under cover of his desk, quickly checking to make sure she hadn’t noticed this sign of weakness, and sighed. ‘Just run the testimony of the students over in your mind. What strikes you most about it?’

Trudy again went up a notch in his estimation when she didn’t answer straight away, but instead gave the question some thought. ‘Well… it does strike me as rather odd that the deceased had been invited to the party at all. I mean, from what I can tell, most of the partygoers were there at the invitation of this Lord Jeremy Littlejohn,’ she went on, checking the relevant pages. ‘The younger son of a duke, isn’t he?’

Clement snorted. ‘Indeed he is.’

Trudy shot him a quick look. ‘You didn’t like him?’

‘Irrelevant,’ the coroner said briskly. ‘Carry on with what you were saying.’

‘Well…’ Trudy frowned, trying to find a comfortable way of talking about social class with this professional man, while not letting her own, strictly working-class, origins get in the way. ‘It seems to me that his sort… I mean, most of his friends were wealthy and, well, upper class. But Derek Chadworth, according to his tutors and parents, was a scholarship boy. His father was merely a country solicitor. And he didn’t seem to do anything out of the ordinary to put himself on the map, so to speak, did he? He wasn’t a rowing blue, or a rugby star or anything, was he?’

‘So?’ Clement encouraged.

‘Well… he hardly seems a likely candidate to have belonged to their set,’ she concluded nervously, and immediately felt relieved when the coroner nodded approvingly.

‘No, he doesn’t. You’re quite right. And yet, when it came time to give his evidence—’ Clement nodded at the folder resting on her knees ‘—Lord Jeremy clearly stated, in an offhand manner, that he might have issued the invitation to Derek Chadworth. But that he couldn’t be sure whether or not he’d taken him up on it.’

Trudy nodded, rereading His Lordship’s evidence. ‘Yes. He says… Yes, here it is. “I knew Derek from around – I’d had a few ciders with him at the Eagle and Child and that sort of thing. I told him we were having a bash at Port Meadow and, if he wanted to come, he needed to be at the bridge and on a punt by half nine.” Hmm, he goes on to say that, on the day in question, after a couple of glasses of something called… er… Buck’s Fizz… at breakfast, he was feeling a bit tight and wasn’t sure whether or not he’d seen him among the crowd piling into the punts.’

‘Buck’s Fizz is a mixture of freshly squeezed orange juice and champagne,’ Dr Ryder informed her dryly. ‘A popular choice for indolent young pups and arrogant lordlings who like to hold breakfast parties in their rooms for their minions.’