The Sleeping and the Dead
Read The Sleeping and the Dead Online
Authors: Ann Cleeves
Prologue
She had the lake to herself. She wasn’t given to fancies, but on a morning like this she knew the water was what she was born for. The water, then her and the canoe. Like
they were one creature, one of the strange animals out of the myths they’d had to read when they were at school. But she wasn’t half horse. She was half boat.
The spray deck was fastened so tightly round her waist that every movement she made with her upper body was reflected in the canoe, and if she capsized her legs would stay quite dry. Not that
there was any chance of that today. The sun was already burning off the last of the mist and the lake was flat. There were mirror images of mountains all the way up the valley. The blades of her
paddle sliced sharply through the water, pushing her back towards the shore.
The water level must have dropped again because the row of staithes, which had only recently appeared running out from the beach, seemed more prominent. She turned the canoe towards them, partly
out of curiosity, partly to put off the moment of her return to the school. The figure floated just under the surface, moving gently. From a distance she’d thought it a piece of polythene.
She tilted the paddle so one blade was submerged and pushed against the pressure of the water to stop the canoe. Still interested. Not scared. Waiting for the silt to clear. Then she found she was
shaking and held on to the wooden post with her free hand to steady herself. It was as if she’d stumbled into a bad horror movie. The corpse swaying below her was white, like a wax,
witchcraft effigy.
Chapter One
Peter Porteous walked to work. It was still a novelty. He liked it all, the overgrown hedges, birdsong, cow muck not dog muck on the road. Having made the decision to walk, he
walked every day. Whatever the weather. Even in this heat. He was a man of routine. On the edge of the town he went into the newsagent’s by the bridge to buy the
Independent
. He
checked the time on the church clock. In the office he would drink a mug of decaffeinated coffee and begin to sift through the overnight reports before meeting his team at the ten o’clock
briefing. And at the briefing he knew there would be nothing to cause anxiety. Cranford was a small town. The team covered a huge geographical area, but there was seldom the sense of being swamped
by uncontrollable events which he had experienced in his previous post. That was why he had transferred to Cranford and that was why he would enjoy it. He knew colleagues who functioned better
under pressure but he hated panic and chaos. Stress scared him. He had designed his working life to avoid it.
He was waiting for the kettle to boil for his coffee when the telephone rang.
‘Porteous.’ He continued to make neat, pithy notes in the margin of the report on his desk.
‘We’ve got a body, sir.’
He took a breath. ‘Where?’
‘In the lake. Only visible now because the water’s so low. It was found by an instructor at the Adventure Centre.’
‘Natural causes then?’
‘Unlikely, sir.’
‘Why?’
‘It was tied to an anchor. Weighed down.’
‘So.’ The kettle clicked off. Still holding the phone he poured water on to coffee granules. ‘Murder.’
There was a brief silence. Perhaps the sergeant was expecting a rush of orders. Instructions and queries fired one after another. None came. Instead Porteous asked calmly, ‘Any
identification?’
‘Can’t even tell the sex. It looks as if it’s been there some time.’
‘No rush then. They haven’t done anything daft like trying to lift it from the water?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Tell them to leave everything as it is. Are you clear? Exactly. I want the pathologist there. I seem to remember that water has a preservative effect. Once the corpse is lifted from the
lake it’ll start to decompose very quickly. Make sure they understand.’
‘Right, sir.’
‘Get hold of Eddie Stout. Tell him I’ll meet him there. And Sergeant?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I’ll need a car.’
Before leaving his office Peter Porteous drank his coffee and finished reading the report on his desk.
The town had its back turned to the lake, was separated from it by a small hill and a forestry plantation. There were no views. Many of the older residents could remember the
valley before it was flooded to create a vast reservoir and still disapproved. They had quite enough water. In the hills it never stopped raining. Let the city dwellers fend for themselves.
The road to the lake was signposted Cranwell Village and showed a No Through Road symbol. Beneath it was a brown tourist sign which said Cranford Water Adventure Centre. Cranwell Village was a
scattering of houses on either side of the single-track road. There was a church and a pub and a country-house hotel where, the month before, Porteous had briefly attended a colleague’s
engagement party. Then there was a bend in the road and a sudden, startling expanse of water, this morning dazzling in the sunlight. The lake had a circumference of thirty miles. The valley
twisted, so although Porteous could see across the water to the opposite bank, each end of the reservoir was invisible. The lane ended in a car park, with a grassed area to one side and a couple of
picnic tables. There was a noticeboard with a map showing a series of walks and nature trails. A gravel track followed the lake a little further north to the Adventure Centre, a wooden building of
Scandinavian design, surrounded by trees. Porteous parked by the noticeboard and studied it before walking up the track.
Detective Sergeant Stout had arrived before him. His car was parked in one of the residents’ marked spaces next to the building. He wore, as he always did, a suit and a tie, and looked out
of place in the clearing, surrounded by trees, with pine needles underfoot. An officious garden gnome. Next to him stood a fit, middle-aged man in shorts, a black T-shirt with the Adventure Centre
logo on the front in scarlet, and the rubber sandals used by climbers. Porteous always treated Stout carefully. The older man had been expected to get the promotion which had brought Porteous to
the team. He was well liked but too close to retirement now to move further.
‘Thank you for getting here so quickly, Eddie.’ As soon as the words were spoken he thought they sounded sychophantic, insincere. Stout only nodded. ‘Perhaps you could
introduce us.’
Stout nodded again. He was a small, squat man with the knack of speaking without appearing to move his mouth. He would have made a brilliant ventriloquist, though Porteous had never passed on
the compliment. ‘This is Daniel Duncan. He’s director of the Adventure Centre. One of his instructors found the body.’
Porteous held out his hand. Duncan took it reluctantly.
‘Perhaps I could talk to him,’ Porteous said.
‘Her,’ Duncan said. ‘Helen Blake. She’s a bit upset.’
‘We should give her a few minutes then. Is there anything we can see from the shore?’
From where they were standing the view of the lake was obscured by trees. Duncan led them along a path to the back of the building, to a dinghy park, where there were half a dozen Mirror
dinghies and a rack of canoes. A concrete slipway sloped gently into the water. He walked very quickly, bouncing away from them on the balls of his feet, as if he hoped the matter could be dealt
with immediately.
‘This is the last thing we need,’ he said crossly. ‘We’ve only been going three years and this is the first season we’ve shown any profit.’
‘But the building must have been here longer than that.’ It looked weathered. Lichen was growing on the roof.
‘It’s nearly ten years old. It used to be run by the council but in the last round of cuts they had to sell it off. I took it over then.’
‘What was here before that?’
Duncan shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘It was a caravan site,’ Stout volunteered. ‘A sort of holiday centre. I think the people who owned it went bust. The wooden building wasn’t here then, though, and the
trees have grown a lot. There was the reception and a bar nearer the lane. Brick and concrete. An ugly place. I remember it being demolished.’
Porteous leaned against the stone wall which separated the dinghy park from the shore. There was the smell of baked mud. A slight breeze moved the water but seemed not to reach him.
‘Where did Ms Blake find the body?’
Duncan pointed to a rotting wooden staithe which jutted out from the water about thirty yards from the wall.
‘This is the driest summer since the reservoir was built. The water’s never been so low. Those posts haven’t been exposed since I’ve been here. Not until a couple of
weeks ago. I think they formed part of a jetty or a pier when the lake was first flooded. The body’s near that far post.’
‘So it was probably weighted and thrown from the jetty? Before it collapsed?’
Duncan shrugged again as if he wanted to disassociate himself from the enquiry.
Porteous gave up on him and turned to Stout. ‘I don’t suppose you remember when the jetty fell into disuse. That might help us date the body.’
‘I don’t think it fell down. I think the council knocked it down when the Adventure Centre was built. They didn’t want the kids drowning themselves.’
Porteous pursed his lips in a soundless whistle. ‘So we’re talking a ten-year-old body. At least. When was the reservoir completed?’
‘1968. The year Bet and I moved here.’
‘So, a twenty-odd-year window of opportunity, if we accept the body’s been in for ten years. It’ll be a nightmare just sorting through the missing-person records.’ He
didn’t talk as if it would be a nightmare. His voice was suddenly more cheerful. ‘I don’t suppose anyone obvious comes to mind? As a candidate for the victim.’ He’d
learned already that Eddie was famous for his memory and his local knowledge. According to the desk sergeant he went to bed reading the ‘Hatches, Matches and Dispatches’ column of the
local paper.
‘Give us a break, sir. We’ve no age or sex. I’m not a miracle worker.’
‘That’s not what I was told.’
Duncan had wandered away from them and was pulling one of the dinghies on to a trolley. Porteous joined him but didn’t offer to help.
‘How deep is the water there?’
‘The bank’s steep at this point so usually it’s very deep. The post must have snapped off sometime because the jetty would have been higher than that. It’s silty there
too. This year? You’d probably be able to walk out in thigh waders.’
‘Thanks. We’ll see how the forensic team want to play it.’
He found it hard to imagine Carver, the pathologist, in thigh waders. He was a dapper man given to flamboyant ties and waistcoats. His hair was a deep oily black, which could only have come out
of a bottle. Even in the Teletubby paper suit he put on to enter a crime scene he gave the impression of neatness and vanity.