A Jess Bridges Mystery
Black River
JOSS STIRLING
One More Chapter
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020
Copyright © Joss Stirling 2020
Cover design by Lucy Bennett © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020
Cover photograph © Nature Photographers Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo
Joss Stirling asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008422585
Ebook Edition © October 2020 ISBN: 9780008422578
Version: 2020-09-16
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
About the Author
Also by Joss Stirling
About the Publisher
To my friends in my real book club based in my home city of Oxford. Thank you for the years of food, wine and conversation, and a wide range of book choices that have stretched my reading habits. There have been some mountain tops – and some boggy reads – but they’ve always been fun. We’ve not yet taken it as far as a swim in the Cherwell, but maybe one day …
Chapter 1
Jess
I don’t know what your book club is like, but mine is the sort that ends up with me stranded naked in the river with a dead man and a murderer on the loose.
Or maybe that is just me?
How did this happen? I suppose you could say it started when Cory told me it would be a great idea for me to join her group.
‘Just a few of us mums – our night away from the husband slash partner and the kids. Bring-and-share supper. Lots to drink. Lots of gossip. A bit of discussion about the book – eventually.’
‘And if I don’t qualify as a mum?’ I watched Cory push her three-year-old in the swing in the back garden of her Summertown house in north Oxford. It was a minute patch of lawn edged with lots of planters that Cory confessed to restocking each year as she suffered from an incurable case of black finger. Nothing survived in her care over winter. My hopes weren’t high for her scented geraniums. We were both sipping our evening glass of white, a congratulations for getting through another shitty day.
‘God, Jessica, you don’t need kids to come along! In fact, you’d be our exotic alternative, the one living the life innocent of NCT classes or PTA politics. I bet you don’t even know what a traybake is – or pelvic floor exercises?’
That was when I realised that reproducing brought with it almost as many acronyms and codewords as the army. Then again, from what I’d seen, maybe parenthood was a bit like entering enemy territory and you needed some discipline to get through?
I still wasn’t sure I wanted to enter this contested area that appeared to belong to professional mothers. What did I have in common with them? I didn’t have kids, a husband (or ex-husband), a house or career prospects. On the other hand, almost all the women I knew were in this life stage, what choice did I have if I didn’t want to embarrass myself angling for friendships with those years younger than me? ‘But you do talk about the books you read?’
‘Oh yes. Most of us went to uni. Except for Jasmine. She opted for modelling and has ended up earning more than the rest of us put together.’
I wasn’t sure I was destined to like Jasmine and told Cory so.
Cory drained her glass and handed it to me to hold so she could launch Leah more vigorously. ‘We all agreed to hate the bitch naturally, but she’s so sweet we couldn’t keep it up. She’ll win you round too.’ Leah squealed as the swing hit the point where it made the frame judder; Cory slacked off a little. ‘The point is, Jess, we all have dormant brain cells that need stimulating at a minimum once a month. Stave off Alzheimer’s. You can never start too soon.’
‘Well, that’s an optimistic outlook, Cory.’
She ignored my dry tone. ‘Believe me, you can only get so far on Disney Princesses and the Marvel Universe.’ Cory had Leah and Benji, a boy of five who currently wanted to be Spider-Man when he grew up, so considered herself the expert in both topics. ‘I really think you’ll like it. Adult conversation and culture.’
Standing by the swing set with the munchkin trying to launch herself into space, I discovered that I’d do anything to please Cory. Even risk an evening of book talk with fecund thirty-somethings. And as real friends do, I agreed to join the book club to keep Cory company. That was why I was now hiding in the bushes without a stitch on trying to work out how I could get home without anyone seeing.
Conclusion? It was not possible and I had the horrible creeping feeling that things were going to get much worse.
Cory said she’d come back once she’d caught up with the dog that had run off with my rolled-up clothes. I’d hoped at least for knickers and bra, but the bundle had kept together surprisingly well in the big jaws of a flat-coated Retriever. I suppose the name was a bit of a clue, though I was not sure what the owner was going to do with his mutt’s offering of a Primark polka dot sundress and scanty panties.
She still hadn’t returned. I shivered. My head was swimming with too much white wine – and my body from the real dip it had just taken. Our summer book club meeting – a picnic by the swimming spot called Parson’s Pleasure, in University Parks, it’ll be fun! Our chosen good read, Wild Swim, a trendy book by the improbably named Jago Jackson. This travelogue-cum-social-commentary featured him leaping up each day from his lodgings in an Oxford college to discover another hidden treasure in the upper reaches of the Thames, ranging from Port Meadow to Cheese Wharf. Even the swimming places around Oxford sounded like something served in the Senior Common Room. Parson’s Pleasure was the oldest spot, famous for its male nude bathing and featured in Oxford folklore, until it was officially shut in 1991. Closure was just a challenge to people like me. Parson’s Pleasure lay on a bend in the Cherwell where the water dithered for a while under the overhanging willows and washed against the punt rollers that allowed the flat bottomed boats to progress upstream. By day, it felt a place for Brideshead Revisited student picnics with college scarves, champagne and teddy bears. At night, the black waters enticed you to join the desperate and the drunken who had ended their days here.
Jago had now adopted it as his own place for a daily dip. Cory’s ex, Brendan, made the documentary that accompanied the book – another reason for us all to come down hard on it. Jago only stopped in his praise of swimming to make acerbic comments about the various new tribes now living in his city, of which Yummy Mummies were, of course, one. His pen did not spare the people who dared to enjoy the same places as him and introduced such abominations as kale smoothies and oat-milk cappuccinos to staid Oxford cafés. My book club friends howled at his caricature of them, calling out his thinly veiled disdain for their life choices.
‘Hey, Jago!’ Cory had roared at the picnic, waving a celery stick like a machete, ‘I may drive an Audi, job-share and have an au pair, but I also have a degree in international development, get paid a pittance at DfID to go on project assessment visits to Syrian refugee camps, and you still dismiss me?’ Cory was a civil servant working part-time for the Department for International Development in London.
‘I don’t think he means you,’ said Jasmine. She absolutely was the epitome of the term ‘yummy’: coffee-coloured hair, big dark eyes, svelte figure. Where her little boy Reuben came from, I’d no idea, but I was voting ‘stork’ because there was no way that midriff ever housed a baby.
‘You mean I’m not young, attractive and still sexy?’ asked Cory, ready to rumble even though her wine intake had been modest as befits our designated driver.
To be honest, Cory wasn’t really the poster girl for the Yummy Mummies, more the Over-Stretch-Marked Mums.
‘No! What I mean is that Jago hasn’t bothered to talk to a real woman,’ said Jasmine, deftly avoiding a fight. ‘All the fellow wild swimmers he interviews about the life are either hoary old men or eccentric lady artist types. The sort who have long grey hair, an allotment and make pots.’
‘Or smoke pot,’ added Frances, our one-liner expert. An acerbic forty-something with family back in Hong Kong, she now ran the HR department in a law firm – another part-time job-share mum burning the scented candle at both ends.
‘And we wouldn’t know anything about that,’ I said archly.
Their faces were blank.
‘You mean, you don’t?’
‘Not since college,’ said Frances.
‘Not even then,’ said Cory.
Jasmine kept silent.
Right. OK.
‘So Jago doesn’t like empowered women,’ I said, hoping to deflect the conversation from drug taking.
‘Exactly!’ said Cory.
‘Then I say we should claim the riverbank here as our own. We can’t let media darlings like him steal our identity as women.’ I’d had my fill of media darlings when living with my ex, Michael, TV’s favourite psychologist. ‘We have a right to the same water Jago swims in. Parson’s Pleasure is not just for naked dons!’
‘Actually, there’s a traditional spot on the river for women, called Dame’s Delight,’ said Jasmine helpfully, pointing upstream.
‘I want to be a Parson not a Dame.’ Maybe there’s something wrong with that statement? ‘Whatever: I’m going in!’
‘But you can’t!’ protested Jasmine. ‘The park’s about to close. Even if you swim out, your stuff will be stuck on inside the railings.’
‘Just watch me.’
‘Oh God, I don’t want anything to do with this. Jess is going to do one of her crazy things.’ Frances was already gathering up her blanket and picnic bag. This was my third book club and she already had my number. ‘I’ve got to get back to pay the babysitter. No time to be arrested for public indecency.’
The others decamped with her, leaving just Cory and me.
‘Jess, this isn’t a good idea,’ said Cory plaintively.
None of my ideas are good. ‘I’m committed now. I’m like Eddie the Eagle having left the top of the High Jump at the whatever Olympics.’ I rolled up my underwear in my polka dot dress and put it at the bottom of a tree. If I’d thought about that a little more, I would’ve realised that wasn’t a good place because you know who else liked tree-trunks …? I pushed my way through the undergrowth – not so funny, naked – and kicked off my sandals before entering the icy water.
Ah, Jago, now I understood why you bother to get up for this. It felt sensual and might’ve been the closest I’d come to orgasm for a while now. I waded in past my lady bits and squeaked when the water reached my waist.
‘You go, girl!’ crowed Cory, clearly having decided that, as no policemen rushed up to arrest me, it was safe to be supportive.
‘Join me! The water’s lovely!’ I did breaststroke out into the middle of the Cherwell and lay on my back, bosoms saying a perky hello to the unscandalised sky as the current drifted south towards the punt rollers and the next bend in the river. This is the life. I might have messed everything else up but at least I still had the ability to live free and easy under the apple boughs. A wild child wild swimming.
Barking and a scream from the bank broke into my reverie.
‘Nooo! Give that back!’ wailed Cory, running off after the aforementioned Retriever retrieving my clothes. ‘I’ll get them for you, Jess!’ That was the last I saw of her. When I scrambled out, I saw that she hadn’t even thought to leave me the picnic blanket. From skinny-dipping to starkers in the shrubbery.
Welcome to my life.
It’s hard to estimate how long you’ve been waiting when you are alone in a park with no clothes, no watch, no phone.
Even a little while was too long.
Someone was bound to come along soon. A park keeper to check the public hadn’t planned on any overnight camping. A last minute jogger. Another dog walker. A creepy guy in a mac …
Oh hell, I needed something to cover up the bare minimum.
Bare minimum? God, I was even cracking jokes to myself about myself. Focus.
I spotted a punt tangled in the bushes that overhung the river. It must’ve got loose from the Cherwell boathouse upstream where you could rent them. Thinking optimistically, it might contain a tarpaulin, or a couple of cushions.
I could swim over there, check it out and then be back before Cory returned. Or huddle in it and call across the water to her.
Good plan.
I launched into the water and swam across. I couldn’t get into the boat at this angle, not without someone to haul me onboard, so I went to the bank. Somehow climbing out here made me feel even more naked.
Think beach in the south of France, I told myself. You’re surrounded by lots of Chloes and Jean-Pauls, all buff and naked. But I couldn’t help picturing grandads with rolled-up trouser legs and handkerchief hats, eyes goggling, as I climbed out. Admittedly, this was all a bit Carry-on Camping with the dog running off with my stuff like that.
A chill breeze blew away any humour. I was cold and miserable now, and the situation was giving me the creeps. I was just asking for some pervert to attack me, standing exposed like this. I had to cover up. I gave a trailing rope a tug to bring the boat a little closer. I hoped for a tarpaulin. Instead, I found another naked body.
But this one was dead – and not by natural causes.
My heartbeat went into overdrive. I really shouldn’t be here – weaponless, no clothes, and a murderer nearby.
Then the bushes on the opposite bank rustled and a man pushed his way through, coming towards me.
I screamed.
Chapter 2
Leo
No police officer welcomed this kind of call. It came through late evening on a rare day off.
‘Hello?’ Holding the phone in the crook of his shoulder, Leo wiped a hand on his gardening jeans. They were in the middle of a scorching summer, and he’d been repainting the Japanese-style bridge over the pond in his garden in the cool of the evening.
‘Detective Inspector George?’
‘Yes?’
‘Please hold for Superintendent Thaxted.’
His heart sank. He quickly reviewed all the things he might have done to warrant a call this late. He was not on duty, his paperwork was up to date and performance reviews done. He couldn’t imagine what had brought this upon him. While waiting, he shook a handful of pellets for the Koi carp, drawing it out of the shadows. The carp had come with the house when Leo moved in six years ago and he had nicknamed the fish Goldemort, giant survivor of what once had been a shoal. Charitably, he had put its solo presence down to depredations by a heron; but, as a detective in CID, he had to harbour doubts as to whether he was giving sanctuary to a killer.
‘Leo?’ Superintendent Thaxted’s voice was as forthright as ever. Leo held the phone slightly away from his ear.
‘Ma’am?’ Best not to assume this was for a bollocking, though the formidable Head of the Local Police Area was known to prefer to do her reprimands one-to-one just before Monday arrived. Clearing the decks, she called it, like she was a frigate setting up the guns to blast them all out of the water.
‘Sorry to disturb you on your day off, but we’ve got a situation.’
Ah, so not a telling off. Leo felt slightly less guilty. ‘No problem, Superintendent.’
‘A body’s been found by the river in University Parks.’
‘I see.’ Where is she going with this? A body in the river was hardly news. Suicides, drunken revellers, cyclists missing the path: he’d unfortunately seen it all. The Cherwell, which flowed into the Thames in Oxford, looked the epitome of a gentle English river, passing through meadows, willow banks and colleges, but the police could tell you that any stretch of water had the potential to be a killer. ‘How can I help?’
‘I’m going outside protocol because I need someone I can trust to head up the investigation.’
Alarm bells began ringing. This sounded like politics: the police officer’s nightmare.
‘I see.’
‘There are two reasons I’m calling you. First, initial reports are that the victim is well known in the university.’
Leo swore silently. Getting involved with the Oxford elite is like dancing on an ants’ nest covered in honey. ‘And the second reason?’
‘We have a witness who needs sensitive handling; I’d prefer that you, rather than the duty officer, do that interview.’
‘Who’s on call?’ Leo tried to remember who was on this weekend.
‘Harry Boston. I’ve told him already that I want a more senior officer to head the operation and am sending you to take over. He’s to stand by and preserve the scene until you arrive.’
Oh, Harry would love that. It was well known at the nick that DS Boston was under a cloud with the top brass for his treatment of students arrested in a demo the previous month. Word was that he’d been a little too handsy with a girl and complaints have been made.
‘Any more details, ma’am?’ She was being very cagey.
‘Boston’s initial report is that it looks like murder, not suicide.’
That was why she was keeping the details brief: she wanted a clean investigation with no assumptions. Leo was already in the house, picking up his keys. ‘Which entrance, ma’am?’
‘You’ll be met at the gate near Linacre College. And, Leo?’
‘Yes, ma’am?’ Putting the phone on speaker, he changed into dark trousers and grabbed a shirt from the clean laundry pile.
‘Get this right. If the initial identification is right, Thames Valley Police doesn’t want to bring the wrath of the university down on our heads. It would be career-ending stuff. And I’m not talking just about Sergeant Boston.’
And there was the ballsy threat. At least he knew it really was the Super he was talking to.
‘Yes, ma’am.’ Passing the back of the sofa, as a final thought, he snagged a jacket he’d discarded earlier. ‘I’m on it.’
Sergeant Trevor Kent, a uniform Leo knew well from Kidlington HQ, was on the watch for him. He was an older man, approaching retirement, but could be relied on to get the details right. Blue and white tape already blocked the cycle path to Marston and entrance to the park. Getting out of his car, Leo nodded to him.
‘Trevor.’
‘Sir.’ Kent came to attention. All the uniformed officers did this with him. Leo had never developed a knack for setting junior officers at their ease so had to settle for wary respect in all his dealings. It didn’t help that in his very first case in Oxford, Leo had torn a strip off an old-timer who mishandled evidence. He couldn’t abide any sloppiness; that could lead to the guilty being acquitted.
‘I take it that you’ve got someone on the other end of this path, Trevor?’ This corner of the park intersected with one of the main cycle routes between the city centre and one of Oxford’s urban villages, Marston.
‘Yes, sir. Constable Kennedy is at the Marston end.’
‘Good. Any trouble?’
‘No, sir. The park was closing when the body was called in, so it was already empty of visitors. I don’t know much but Sergeant Boston told me that we’ve got the person who found the body on the bank, the witness who called it in and a park keeper who did the final sweep for members of the public. They’re all waiting for you in there.’ He gestured to the black gates that would normally be padlocked by now. Orange light from the streetlamp barely made an impact on the darkness beyond. The leaves rustled as the breeze picked up, and branches tossed against the silver sky. Leo remembered something on the forecast about a storm approaching, which was the last thing he needed for preserving the evidence. They would have to work fast. He took a flashlight out of the boot of his car.
‘Is SOCO here yet?’ He couldn’t see any sign of their van.
‘Heading in from Kidlington. Should be here any minute. The ambulance went in a few minutes ago – not that they’re needed. Too late for our victim.’ Trevor’s radio crackled and Leo could hear Harry Boston demanding an update.
‘Sir, DI George has just arrived,’ said Kent. Leo switched on the torch and began walking away. ‘Coming your way now.’
Sergeant Boston’s response was along the lines of ‘about bloody time’ but Leo couldn’t stomach beginning a murder enquiry in a showdown with Harry about insubordination. He’d not yet got over Leo leapfrogging him to be made inspector. He’d closed his eyes to the fact that it was not Leo’s fault, but his own.
In contrast to the sports fields in the centre, this corner of the park was so densely planted that you couldn’t see what lay around the bend. If anyone was going to ambush another person, thought Leo, this would be a great spot to pick: only a short stretch to dump the body in the river and an exit that gave you a choice of directions: south down St Cross Road, east along South Parks Road, or you could even disappear into the warren of buildings in the university science area and make your escape along the alleyway past the Museum of Natural History. That was if the attack happened here and not upstream.