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By Root 1556 0

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