Terry Kingston seemed like a dodgy sort of bloke to PC Ryan. What was he doing hanging about by The Serpentine cafe at this time of night? How could there possibly have been a splash but then no other noise, as he was claiming – surely if some drunk woman had gone and fallen into the water he would have heard a commotion, or seen some splashing, would have known where it had happened at least?
PC Ryan was fed up. It was his wife’s birthday the next day and they were meant to be going away, down to Ramsgate for the weekend, and he wanted to get home on time tonight of all nights, so he could get up early and not be tired and grouchy for a change. He walked up and down the river bank (was it actually a river, he wondered, does London have other rivers apart from the Thames?) although he knew there was no real point to it – if she really had fallen in at around 22:35, as Terry Kingston had said, then that was over twenty minutes ago, there was no way she’d still be alive by now. He sighed. He’d probably have to call in the frogmen, which meant he wouldn’t be getting home for at least a couple more hours. He thought he would try one last time.
‘Mr Kingston,’ he called.
‘Yes,’ said Terry, and as he came over he looked timid and frightened, his sallow face twitching, suspicion pouring out of his eyes like magician’s smoke.
There’s something not right here, thought PC Ryan. But if he’d pushed her himself, why on earth would he have called the police? Surely he’d have made a run for it?
‘Are you absolutely certain that a woman fell into the water?’ he asked.
Terry hesitated. His mind crawled across the facts as he knew them, like a beetle over dung. Six women. An annual reunion. One of them suspected by her husband of having an affair. Terry assigned to discover whether it was true. A row, a humongous one at that. Accusations flying, too numerous, too hysterical, too incoherent, too muffled mostly to understand. Someone having been raped? Someone’s husband being murdered? Just a load of hysterical nonsense, surely?
Terry knew it was better to say nothing about any of it. It could get messy. He regretted now that he’d even dialled 999, it had obviously been too late to save her if she had ended up in the water – whether she’d fallen in, or jumped deliberately, or even been pushed, whatever might have happened to the unfortunate woman. She’d be dead by now, and the thought filled him with dread. Implicating the others wasn’t going to help either – as they’d said themselves, they could simply deny they’d heard anything. Thirty seconds later, fifty yards closer to the road, and they really wouldn’t have heard it. Even if there was CCTV here, and Terry wasn’t sure about that – although it was sodding well everywhere else – no-one knew that they’d heard the splash.
Someone does. You.
Terry felt increasingly panicky. This was a mess. He’d definitely be implicated, if it turned out she had died. His client would get dragged into it, and that would go down unbelievably badly, would cause him, Terry, all sorts of problems. And conversely, what if she hadn’t fallen in at all, what if it had been a bird, like one of the women had suggested? This could all be a blinking wild-goose chase. He might even get done for wasting police time.
Terry became more furious with himself, the more he thought things through. He knew he should have turned down the job, no matter how much money he’d been offered – he could sniff trouble a mile off on this one. What the heck was he going to say to the police? What explanation was he going to give as to why he’d been in the park? He’d be the prime bloody suspect, he was sure of it, if there really was a dead body in there. Well, if it does come to that, Terry thought, I’ll have to sing, regardless of who I implicate, after all I’ve done nothing wrong. That will get me off the hook at least.
But would it? Terry knew that his client was clever, too clever to mess with, too powerful, in with the right people these days, a stitch-up could be just what he needed to keep his own nose clean – and, after all, there’d never been any love lost between them over the years.
‘I said, what were you doing in the park, Mr Kingston?’ asked PC Ryan, and his tone was definitely accusatory now.
‘Um, well … it was a nice evening,’ said Terry, his palms sweating and his heart pounding, much like at key moments during war-games conventions. ‘I … I thought I’d go for a walk.’
‘And you live where?’ asked PC Ryan. He was sounding even cockier now that his colleague, a little round Asian man (was there no minimum height for police these days, Terry thought idly), had joined him, and PC Ryan obviously fancied himself as the senior of the two.
‘In Dagenham,’ said Terry.
‘And so on a summer’s evening you come all the way from Dagenham to Hyde Park, on your own, just for a nice little stroll?’ The sarcasm was unbridled.
Terry didn’t know what to say. It was too late to admit he’d been lying, so he decided he’d just have to go with it for the moment. He felt sick. He knew he should have left it, simply followed his target as he’d started to do, made sure he got his money, kept his client off his back, and be done with silly drunk women who ran around shouting and screaming and drowning themselves.
‘Yes,’ said Terry in the end, and that one little word was the official beginning of his nightmare.