In a grim little pebble-dashed house in East London, a wheel was spinning frantically. Frank, or was it Dean, was in need of some exercise, and he ran like his life depended on it, getting nowhere of course, as if he were trying to exorcise the miserable reality of his pathetic little existence – and it was only as Terry Kingston watched him that he realised that that was all he, Terry, did too. He was no better off than a caged white rat with mean pink eyes and a long kinked tail, spinning his own metaphorical wheel – trapped between his faintly grubby detective work, his solitary obsession with painting miniature figures of Prussian fusiliers in their exact colours, and his dispiriting marriage to a woman he had nothing in common with. He sighed, but in truth he did feel a little better today. It was Sunday afternoon and the sun was shining and he had heard nothing more from the police, thank God, so maybe it was going to be OK after all. Surely if there had been a body they’d have found it by now? The whole thing had been humiliating certainly, and he was still worried he might be charged with wasting police time – he could tell they thought he was some kind of pervert, so they’d be bound to try to throw something at him – but surely that was better than a woman being dead and him having done nothing about it? Or worse, a woman being dead and him being accused of murdering her. He shuddered.
Terry Kingston was a surprisingly principled man, and in other circumstances might have led a very different life – he’d just taken a couple of wrong turns here and there, and that’s all you need to screw your life up, isn’t it? And so Terry was insightful enough to realise that despite his situation, his moral compass was still essentially intact, and that comforted him a little, even made him feel slightly superior to those braying women in the park, who despite their veneer of respectability had carried on like fishwives, and all seemed to be having affairs from what he could tell – and who were so hypocritically selfish they’d been prepared to leave a so-called friend for dead.
The telephone rang downstairs, which was unusual. No-one really called that number any more, people tended to get them on their mobiles these days, and Maria had managed somehow to get their home number delisted, so they no longer got call-centre workers haranguing them about changing their energy supplier or installing conservatory blinds or saving starving people, thank Christ. As the phone rang and rang insistently, Terry knew what it would be about, and he fretted that perhaps something had happened, after all. He couldn’t face talking to the police right now though, and Maria wouldn’t answer, as she was out – at choir as usual, he presumed. But when his mobile went a minute later Terry knew he couldn’t delay for any longer, otherwise he’d have them turning up on the doorstep before he knew it. He sighed.
‘Hello, Terry Kingston,’ he said, in his best telephone voice.
‘Mr Kingston,’ said the caller. ‘My name is Sergeant Hunter. As you may have seen on the news a body has been found in The Serpentine river in Hyde Park. We’d like you to come in for questioning.’
Terry said the right things and made the necessary arrangements. As he put down the phone and picked up his paintbrush he felt anxious again, now more than ever, as well as irrationally annoyed at Sergeant Hunter, with his chirpy manner and supercilious air of authority. Surely if he’d been down there fishing a body out of it he should have known that The Serpentine wasn’t a river, it was a sodding lake.