“A course you’re teaching?” PC Schlicht said after their exchange of greetings. He’d taken St. James beyond Reception, into the station itself, and he led him to a coffee room/lunch room where a refrigerator bore a sign reading Put your *#%*# name on your lunch bag! and an old coffeemaker circa 1980 was sending forth an odour reminiscent of coal mines in the nineteenth century. Schlicht had been in the midst of eating what looked like leftover chicken pie from a plastic container. A smaller pot of raspberry fool sat next to this, awaiting consumption as his dessert.
St. James made the appropriate noises of agreement upon the mention of the putative course. He lectured frequently at University College London. Should PC Schlicht wish to do some checking up on him, everything he was claiming about his visit to Cumbria was verifiable. St. James told the PC to go on with his lunch, please, as he merely wished to confirm a few details.
“I reckon someone like you would look for a fancier case to pre sent in a lecture, if you know what I mean.” Schlicht lifted a leg over the seat of his chair to sit. He scooped up his cutlery and tucked back into his meal. “The Cresswell situation was a straightforward business from the start.”
“You must have had one or two doubts, though,” St. James said, “since you called in another officer.”
“Oh, that.” Schlicht waved his fork in acknowledgement. He then confirmed what St. James had suspected: It had been his first death scene, he didn’t want a blot on his copy book, and the family was quite well-known in the area. He added, “Not to mention rich as the dickens, if you know what I mean,” and he grinned as if the wealth of the Faircloughs demanded that a certain conclusion was in order from the local police. St. James said nothing, merely looking questioning. Schlicht said, “The rich have their ways, you know? Not like you and me, they are. You take my wife: She finds a body in our boathouse— not that we have a boathouse in the first place, mind you— and let me tell you, she’d be screaming down the walls and running in circles and no phone call to nine-nine-nine she made would even be understandable, if you get my meaning. That one”— by whom St. James concluded he was referring to Valerie Fairclough— “is cool as cream. ‘There appears to be a dead man floating in my boathouse’ is how she puts it, ’cording to the dispatch bloke who phoned up the station, and she goes right on to give the address without being asked, which is a bit odd ’cause you’d think under the circumstances she’d need to be asked or reminded or something. And when I get there, she’s not waiting on the drive or pacing in the garden or tapping her toe on the front steps or anything you’d expect in such a situation, is she? No. She’s inside the house and she comes out dressed like she’s going to some posh afternoon tea or something and I wonder, I do, what she went down to the boathouse for in the first place dressed like that. She tells me straightaway and without my asking that she was down there to go out on the lake and do a bit of fishing. Dressed like that, mind you. She says she does it all the time: two, three, perhaps four times a week. All hours, it doesn’t matter to her. She likes to be out on the water, she says. She says she didn’t expect to find a body floating there and she knows who it is: her husband’s nephew. She takes me down there to have a look. We’re walking on our way when the ambulance shows up and she waits for them to join us.”
“She knew then, for a certainty, that the man in the water was dead.”
Schlicht paused, fork midflight to his lips. “She did, that. ’Course, he was floating facedown and he’d been in the water a good long while. Those clothes of hers, though. They do say something, don’t they?”
Still, Schlicht said, it was cut-and-dried as far as he could tell when they got to the boathouse, despite any oddity in Valerie Fairclough’s attire and behaviour. The scull was capsized, the body was floating next to it, and the condition of the dock with its missing stones told the tale of what had happened. Nonetheless, he put in a call for a DI to have a look just to be on the safe side of things, and the DI in question— a woman called Dankanics— came along, had a look, and agreed with how all evidence seemed to Schlicht. The rest had been more or less routine: filling out paperwork, making reports, showing up at the inquest, et cetera.
“Did DI Dankanics go over the scene with you?”
“Right. She had a look. We all did.”
“All?”
“Ambulance crew. Mrs. Fairclough. The daughter.”
“Daughter? Where was she?” This was odd. The scene should have been secured. That it had not been was highly irregular, and St. James wondered if this irregularity was the result of Schlicht’s inexperience, DI Dankanics’s possible indifference, or something else.
“Don’t know exactly where she was when she saw the commotion,” Schlicht replied, “but what brought her down to the boathouse was the noise. The ambulance had its siren going all the way to the house— those blokes like their siren like I like my dog, let me tell you— and she heard it and came along with her zimmer.”
“Disabled, is she?”
“Looks that way. So that was that. The body got carted off for autopsy, DI Dankanics and I took statements, and…” He frowned.
“Yes?”
“Sorry. I’d forgotten the boyfriend.”
“Boyfriend?”
“Turns out the dead bloke was a poofter. His partner was working on the property. Not at that exact moment, mind you, but he came driving in as the ambulance was driving out. ’Course he wanted to know what was going on— who wouldn’t, human nature, eh?— and Mrs. Fairclough told him. Took him to one side and had a word and down he goes.”
“He fainted?”
“Face-flat onto the gravel. We didn’t know who he was at first and the fainting bit seemed off-kilter for some bloke just driving up to the house and hearing there’s been a drowning. So we asked who he was and she told us— this is Valerie— that this bloke did landscapes and the like and the other bloke, the dead one in the boathouse, was his partner. Partner as in partner, if you take my meaning. Anyway, he came round soon enough and he starts blubbing. He says it’s his fault the other bloke drowned, which we take up with some interest— this is me and Dankanics— but it turns out they’d had words on the previous evening about tying the knot. The dead bloke had wanted a civil ceremony with everything front and centre and all aboveboard while the living bloke liked things as they were. And Christ, if that bloke wasn’t howling his head off. Makes you wonder, if you know what I mean.”
St. James didn’t, exactly, although like Alice he was finding the information curiouser and curiouser. He said, “As to the boathouse itself…”
“Hmm?”
“Was everything in order? Aside from the missing stones on the dock, of course.”
“Far as Mrs. Fairclough could tell.”
“What about the boats themselves?”
“They were all inside.”
“As usual?”
Schlicht knotted his eyebrows. He’d finished with his chicken pie and was prising the lid from the raspberry fool. “Not sure I receive your meaning.”
“Were the boats always kept in the order they were in when you saw the body? Or was that order arbitrary?”
Schlicht’s lips rounded into a whistle, but he made no sound. He also gave no reply for a moment, but St. James could tell that in spite of his informal manner of address, he was not a fool. “That’s something,” he said, “that we didn’t ask. Bloody hell, Mr. St. James. I hope it doesn’t mean what I think it means.”