Читать книгу A Fatal Mistake - Faith Martin - Страница 9

Summer 1960

Jimmy Roper stopped to let Tyke, his ageing but still inquisitive black-and-white mongrel, cock his leg against the wall overlooking Port Meadow. It was a glorious morning in mid-June and, overhead, the sun shone with an intensity that warned him the temperature would skyrocket come noon.

It was not the sort of day, you’d have thought, when anything bad could possibly happen.

The village of Wolvercote lay mostly behind him now, but from someone’s open window a wireless was playing the latest pop tune that all the youngsters nowadays seemed to find so enthralling. An obliging DJ told him he’d been listening to the Everly Brothers’ April hit, ‘Cathy’s Clown’.

As he approached the large expanse of Port Meadow, he paused to observe a really fine view of the legendary ‘dreaming spires’ of Oxford. In front of him, the river wound its way through the water meadow, which was just now ridding itself of its spring blaze of buttercups. Tyke happily sniffed about among the thistles.

As he approached the riverbank, he noticed that two fishermen had set themselves up for a day’s sport. One, sitting at the top of the bank with his legs dangling over the side, had on an old, floppy, wide-brimmed hat. This served not only to keep the direct sun off his head, but no doubt helped stop the garish sunlight reflecting off the water and into his eyes. It was festooned with colourful fishing flies. He had his head down and was watching his float intently. After a second or two, Jimmy also spotted it – a red spot making its way gently downstream.

His companion also wore a hat and, for added measure, was wearing a pair of large sunglasses. He’d elected to sit closer to the river’s edge, at a spot where the rather steep bank had given way, and the previous tenants (a herd of Friesian cows) had trampled down a path in order to drink. He seemed to be dozing, though, rather than watching his float, for Jimmy noticed it had been allowed to catch in a patch of river weed.

He wished them both a courteous but quiet ‘good morning’ and, not wanting to disturb the fish, walked with a lighter tread as he passed them.

He hadn’t gone much further, following the course of the river absently upstream, when he became aware of a gaggle of voices. Youthful and bantering, they sounded like something you’d hear at a party, and were thus oddly out of place in the peaceful country setting.

Rounding an oxbow in the river, he suddenly noticed a gay crowd congregating on the banks in front of him and had no problem identifying them as students, intent on enjoying the end of their exams.

Some of the young women in the group – at least twenty strong, Jimmy estimated – had already laid down gaily striped beach towels on the grass and were setting out the beginnings of a picnic. At barely eleven o’clock in the morning, Jimmy wondered whether it was supposed to be a late breakfast or a really early lunch. Then he supposed that, to these bright young things, it hardly made much difference. He noticed that strawberries, boxes of chocolates, fruit and bottles of wine featured predominantly.

Which was very nice for some, he thought, a shade enviously.

Clearly no dark thoughts could have been passing through the minds of these happy young things. They were out to enjoy their youth, the sunshine of the day, and the delights of an alfresco party. To them, death was a foreign concept, something that wouldn’t have to be considered for many decades yet.

Besides, on a day such as this what could possibly happen?

One young woman, with a mane of silvery fair hair, patted the place beside her on a towel and a young lad, who looked barely eighteen, hastened to join her.

Jimmy was pretty sure the fishermen downstream wouldn’t be best pleased by all the noise and frolicking about. Every self-respecting pike, chub, dace, roach and perch within a quarter mile must have heard them thumping about and skedaddled for quieter waters!

One or two of the young men were quickly stripping down to their bathing trunks, obviously intent on cooling off in the water.

He meandered on, smiling as one of the (rather pretty) girls shrieked as a lad scooped water over the side of the bank and splashed her. As he went past the group, however, he noticed a tall, freckle-faced man with a head of shockingly vibrant red hair, standing a little bit away and on the outskirts of the scene, watching with an expression of disdain on his face. This, and the fact that he looked to be in his mid-twenties at least – and thus a few years older than the average student – made him look out of place.

Jimmy was too intent on reaching the shade of some nearby trees to stop and pay any attention to the strangers and their doings. But as he walked on, he suddenly saw, up ahead, a plethora of disembodied heads floating along in what seemed to be the middle of the river. For a moment it brought him up short, but then, as they came better into sight, he realised they were just yet more revellers, arriving via two large punts.

Punts, he noticed with a look of mixed alarm and amusement, that looked vastly overloaded and were lying very low in the water. Surely there shouldn’t be that many of them crammed onto each craft? What was more, both of the lads who were standing on the rear platforms and wielding long punting sticks looked a little the worse for wear!

And even as he watched, the punting youth on the lead boat called out some request to one of his passengers, who was sprawling dangerously close to the waterline. Thus admonished, the very slender youth, dressed casually in white slacks and shirt, and with a head of hair so fair it was almost white, reached obligingly underneath him and produced what looked suspiciously like an open bottle of champagne, which he handed up to his friend.

The young man accepted it with a cry of triumph and casually stopped work to swig from it, tottering back a step. He would almost certainly have ended up in the river if someone else hadn’t reached out just in time to grab his trouser leg and haul him back again.

Naturally, this caused a load of heckling and good-hearted chaffing from the others, and Jimmy shook his head, not sure whether to laugh indulgently at the youthful shenanigans or to self-righteously wonder just what the world was coming to.

He finally reached the welcome shade of a line of trees that skirted the village road, and sat down on an old tree trunk. Tyke, glad to rest his old bones, gave a little grunt of satisfaction as he lay down at his master’s feet in the cool, shaded grass.

If some dogs actually did possess such a thing as an intuition for evil, or a sense of impending calamity,Tyke wasn’t troubled by such a gift.

And so, for about ten minutes, the retired milkman and his little dog simply sat there, listening to the drone of bees and watching yellow-brimstone and orange-tip butterflies flitting about the meadow. Then a quick glance at his watch told him that his wife would be getting his lunch on soon so, with a small sigh, he got up and began the return journey. If he didn’t miss his guess, it would be fish-paste sandwiches and a slice of her Madeira cake – one of his favourites.

As he retraced his route along the river towards the noisy and boisterous student party, he noticed a third punt was following a little way along behind him but paid it little attention. Instead, he gave them all a wide berth, returning to the river only when he was once again beyond the oxbow.

He wasn’t surprised, a little later on, to see that neither of the fishermen had remained in their places. He could well imagine how they must have cursed the students for selecting that spot for their revelries.

And so, Jimmy Roper and his dog went back to the village and to their midday meal, neither one of them giving the students so much as another passing thought.

Thus it was left to someone else to stumble upon the tragedy a capricious fate had always had in store for such a bright and beautiful day. Someone, perhaps, who was far less equipped to deal with the consequences of human darkness than an old soldier.

Barely an hour later, Miriam Jenks, a new mother to a rather large and placid baby girl, was pushing her pram down the village street, on her way to the village shop to order in a few necessities. Waiting on the pavement for old Dr Thomas’s ‘moggy’ Morris Minor to pass by, she decided it would be a good idea to get out of the fierce heat. So, she steered the pram onto the hard, flat, grassy path beside the riverbank to take advantage of the shade provided by the willow trees that lined the river course there. As she went along, she started to croon a tune to the baby, who had started to grizzle.

She was still humming the lullaby when something caught her eye, and she looked down to see a human body floating in the water just beside her. Having got caught up in the protruding roots of a particularly large willow, it was being moved gently about in a small eddy, one arm rolling up and down, for all the world as if it was waving at her.

But the young man with dark hair was lying facedown in the water, and she knew at once that he was dead. But even as she thought this, the current moved, and with what seemed to her to be a slow, dreadful and fascinating inevitability, the body turned inexorably onto its back.

Naturally, this made Miriam come over ‘all queer’, as she was to later tell her best friend. For a moment or two, however, she froze where she was.

But the sight of that face, pale and so pitifully and irrevocably beyond all human help, made her knees fold abruptly beneath her, and she found herself suddenly on the grass. She put out her hands to save herself, but even so, she was now much closer to the edge of the river and the body it cradled.

She noticed his clothes had ballooned, the trapped air helping to keep the boy afloat. She also noticed, fleetingly, that he seemed a good-looking lad and not much above twenty.

So young.

And so dead.

She heard a noise and realised it was coming from her. She was sobbing, softly.

For a second, the body seemed close enough for her to touch, if she reached out, down the bank and across the water – but, of course, she knew that wasn’t so. Nevertheless, she saw her hand moving forward, shaking uncontrollably in front of her as if to offer… What? her shocked brain demanded rather scornfully. Succour? Comfort? Help?

A cold voice in the back of her head told her she could provide none of these things.

She began to shiver violently, which made no sense to her. The sun was at the point in the sky when it was almost at its hottest. Even the birds had ceased singing, as if the heat had enervated them.

Feeling sick, she forced herself to her feet and began to run, pushing the pram wildly in front of her and bumping it roughly over the path. Naturally, this delightful motion promptly sent her daughter off to sleep more thoroughly than any lullaby.

She felt absurdly guilty – as if she was abandoning the dead boy when he needed her the most. She almost wanted to turn her head, to make sure he wasn’t watching her cowardly retreat with accusing, beseeching eyes.

But she had just enough sense, through the fog of shock, to realise this couldn’t possibly be so.

She was still sobbing softly when she emerged once more onto the street proper, frantically stopping the first person she saw, who happened to be an old man wheeling his wheelbarrow to the nearby allotments, and tearfully gasping out what she’d seen.

The old man promptly took her home with him, told his wife to look after her, called the police and then nipped off to the river to see the spectacle for himself.

Obviously, nothing as exciting as this had happened in the village in years!