What happened was this: Rad had driven Birdie to the pub at Half Moon Street. They had a meal in the restaurant and then at closing time went for a walk around the lake. He was surprised to find that she knew the place already; her mother had brought her there as a little girl.
The cottage was still empty and boarded up, and they had gone inside for a while. It was a warm evening and there was a bright moon on the water and Rad had suggested they go skinny-dipping, but Birdie had refused. Like me she couldn’t swim. The old boat was still tethered to the NO BOATING sign, so Rad had waded out and dragged it back to the jetty. It looked sound enough, and was dry inside, so Rad rowed Birdie out to the middle of the lake. He pulled the oars in and let the boat rotate slowly, and the two of them lay back and watched the stars and talked. The conversation had turned around to me and the two of them had started to quarrel, lazily. Rad, half-teasing, said he was going to swim back and leave her marooned in the boat. She said, fine, go ahead, I’ll row myself back, but don’t expect me to jump in and save you if you get stuck. Rad took off his jeans, shirt and shoes and dived off the boat, swimming down as deep and far as he could underwater, hoping to come up so far away that Birdie wouldn’t see him. But when he broke through the surface and shook his wet hair out of his eyes he saw that his dive from the boat had capsized it – the oars were floating on the water and Birdie was nowhere to be seen. He had called her until he was hoarse, and then for the next fifteen minutes he dived under the boat, threshing the reeds at the bottom with his arms, coming up only for a gasped breath before plunging back down again, taking in wider and wider circles. The water was as black as hell and his frantic searching stirred up the mud from the lake floor so that he couldn’t even see his hand in front of his face in the soupy darkness. After what felt like hours, but was in fact minutes, when he had found nothing but a single muddy deck shoe and was on the point of expiring himself, he struggled back to shore and ran, dripping wet and nearly naked, the half-mile to the pub. His cries for help roused the landlord who came to the door holding a snarling Dobermann, to find Rad slumped on the step with blood pouring from one foot. He had trodden on a piece of broken bottle in the lane without even noticing. The landlord wrapped him in a towel and left him sitting in the dark in the bar while he phoned the police. Rad was taken to hospital where he had his foot stitched and so was not there when police divers brought Birdie’s body up at five minutes past one.