‘Is he dead?’ Simmy asked the question with the merest scrap of hope. The water might be shallow, but the face had been immersed in it, and the whole aspect of the body screamed lifelessness. The uncaring lake and the sky above it had quite given up on him. He was an inert unthreatening mass of meat and nothing more.
Melanie shook her head and said nothing. Then she put two fingers on a place at the side of his head, where the hairline was. Simmy leant down to see, wincing with the horror of it, her throat stinging with bile.
‘The bone’s broken,’ she realised. ‘That’s terrible. That must be what killed him.’ She looked steadily at the handsome face and the wet hair. The skin was oddly loose on the bones, the mouth and eyes open. ‘Get up, Mel. You don’t have to do that any more.’
But Melanie was immobilised. Gradually it dawned on Simmy that there was nothing to be gained from dragging the girl away. Mixed with the horror and grief was a kind of wonder. Mel traced the dead features with gentle fingertips, forcing Simmy to understand how a dead face is no more alarming or repellent than a live one. Why in the world should it be? She had known, for a few minutes, the same truth when her baby had died. But it was a slippery truth, and no two bodies were the same. Shivers of disgust and fear were slicing through her, as she formed part of the unhappy tableau on the edge of the lake.
Again, years seemed to pass. Simmy knew they were breaking rules, that they ought to be doing it all differently, but she felt weak and incompetent. Slowly the gears of her mind began to engage again until her head was almost bursting with questions, memories, implications. Twice before in the past year she had encountered the savage danger of water. A young man at a wedding had been deliberately drowned in Lake Windermere, and she herself had been pitched into water with malicious intent. It would seem that in an area known for its multiplicity of lakes and rivers, those intent on murder saw them as a convenient means of killing.
‘What happened, do you think?’ she ventured. ‘Somebody hit him with a hard object and then threw him into the lake as a way of hiding him? But when would they have done that? Ben saw the body under the trees.’ Her heart flinched. ‘He must have seen them do it. They must have needed to keep him quiet. He’s a witness to the whole thing.’ Desperation made her jiggle on the grass, and throw wild looks up towards the hotel from where help should be coming, and yet strangely wasn’t.
Melanie merely shook her head. Her tears had slowed, but she continued to sit straight-legged in a few inches of water, Dan’s head and shoulders were on top of her at an angle. Simmy began to wonder at the level of emotion shown over the man who had been the girl’s superior, and who she had shown very little sign of liking much. Was it no more than a natural human response to the pity of a sudden death, a young man’s life cut off so horribly? Her own emotions were stubbornly fixed on Ben and the acute need to find him before a similar fate could befall him.
‘Hey, hey,’ she soothed. ‘You don’t have to sit there with him. The police and everybody will be here in a minute. They won’t want you getting in their way.’
‘I can’t move,’ whimpered the girl. ‘He’s so heavy.’
Simmy was not eager to help. They had succeeded in swivelling the body around, so the legs were still in the lake, while the head and shoulders were in Melanie’s lap, on a slimy, semi-dry piece of ground. Esthwaite did not have proper banks – at least on its western side. The water merely lapped at the edge of the field, its boundary never the same from one week to the next. Their efforts had created a muddy cloud in the shallows, slippery and sludgy. She looked all around. Why hadn’t one of those darned fishermen taken more notice and come to their aid? How could they have missed the fact of something ghastly going on? Perhaps if she shouted to them, they would respond.
But the idea of more people splashing about, asking questions, saying stupid things, was repellent. If the men in the little boats had actually witnessed the slaughter of Dan Yates and the dumping of his body in the lake, then surely they would have flown into action, phoning police and rushing to the shore to do their best to help? As it was, they must have missed the whole thing and thereby rendered themselves useless.
At last – and it was probably well under ten minutes in reality – there was authoritative assistance in the shape of two policemen, the hotel manager and someone wearing a white outfit, who presumably worked in the kitchen. Stupidly, Simmy searched the little group for Ben Harkness, who would always have turned up for the excitement if he possibly could.
The sudden manifestation of a dead body threw everyone into a far more concentrated mode. The policemen had thought they’d been summoned to a smoke-and-mirrors scene, involving nothing more than a dropped mobile phone. Now they had a whole long list of procedures to follow, for which they had not been prepared at all. Their attention was directed for a minute or two to the intervening wire fence, separating them from the tableau in the water. ‘We’d better pull it down,’ said one.
‘Right,’ said the other uncertainly. ‘Just a bit, right?’ Together they pulled up two vertical wooden posts and laid them flat. The fence had been wobbly from the start, and Melanie’s assault on it had already accomplished half the job. The wire obligingly lay flat and the policemen walked over it.
‘Who is it?’ demanded the manager, trying not to look too closely. ‘Is it your friend?’
Melanie raised her grubby face to his. ‘It’s Dan,’ she said.
‘What?’ The manager turned green. ‘It can’t be. How can it be?’
Nobody spoke. The policemen were both eyeing their glossy black footwear and equally pristine trousers, knowing they would have to get them wet. They also knew that they ought not to disturb the scene of a sudden death. But beyond that, they knew almost nothing. Accident, suicide, heart attack – anything was possible. Distressed colleagues and unidentified women had to be sorted out. One of them put out a hand to Melanie. ‘Come on, miss. Let’s have you out of there for a start.’
He planted his feet securely and exerted enough force to lever her out of the water. She came slowly, reluctantly, and then stood with bowed shoulders, shivering. The officer looked around the group for something to throw over her, but nothing was identified. ‘You need to get indoors and take those wet things off,’ he said. But words were not enough to achieve this, and Melanie stayed as she was.
Simmy lost patience, surprising herself as much as anyone. ‘There’s a boy missing,’ she said. ‘He’s seventeen. He found this body, over an hour ago. He phoned me. Now he’s gone. His phone was here, abandoned. We must find him before something terrible happens to him.’ Her voice rose to a shout. ‘We have to look for him.’
To their credit, the officers took her seriously, at least to the extent of looking at her and then looking at each other. ‘All right, madam,’ said one. ‘You’re telling us that this young man found the deceased and called you. What happened then?’
‘I didn’t hear the call. It was on my voicemail. When I found it, I came down here with Melanie and Mrs Bod— I mean the manager’s wife.’ She ignored Melanie’s alarmed gasp at the narrow escape from using the disrespectful nickname, other than to note that the girl was not entirely traumatised if she could worry about such a detail. ‘But he said the body was under the trees, not in the lake. The killer must have moved it, and then taken Ben away. Ben’s been kidnapped.’ This time she wasn’t shouting, but choking out the word, unable to confront all the implications it carried.
‘Killer?’ repeated the policeman. His face was paler than before, as if the concept of deliberate murder was far beyond his scope. Perhaps it was, Simmy realised. Perhaps she had more experience of it over the past year than this young constable had. Perhaps, like Melanie, he hadn’t yet seen a dead body in all its fresh and gruesome reality.
‘And kidnapper,’ Simmy insisted.
A connection had apparently been taking place in the mind of the other officer. ‘We’re not talking about young Ben Harkness, are we?’ he said slowly. ‘You said the lad’s name was Ben.’
‘Yes!’ Simmy’s relief was entirely irrational, but somehow the fact that Ben was already known to this man made a huge difference. ‘You’ll have to call DI Moxon. He’ll understand.’
But she had gone too far. The hotel manager squared his shoulders and laid a hand on a uniformed arm. ‘We have a body here,’ he said thickly. ‘My employee is lying here dead. I think that ought to be your primary concern right now.’
‘I agree with you, sir. But if there is any suggestion of foul play, we are not permitted to move him. We need a police doctor, a senior officer, photographer …’ He was removing a device from his belt and frowningly trying to recall correct procedure. ‘Excuse me,’ he added, and walked a few steps away from the bewildered group. His colleague, belatedly following protocol, made ushering motions. ‘Please move away now,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing more you can do here.’ He produced a device of his own. ‘If we could just have an identity for the deceased.’ He looked from face to face.
‘It’s Dan Yates,’ said the lad from the kitchen, speaking for the first time.
‘Actually, his name is Aidan,’ said Melanie. ‘Dan for short.’
‘Do you have details of his next of kin? Is he married?’
The manager took over. ‘Divorced. No children. Parents in East Anglia somewhere. I’ve got it on record in the office.’
Simmy acknowledged to herself that she actually cared quite little for Dan and his horrible fate. She cared about Ben, primarily because he had been under her care when he disappeared. What will his mother say? became her dominant thought, followed rapidly by and Bonnie!
She groaned aloud.