‘Would it have made any difference if she had?’ asked the foreman hoarsely. ‘You’d have still gone on pouring.’
‘Well, how did she get down there in the first place?’ said the driver, to change the subject.
‘How the fuck would I know. She must have fallen…’
‘And pulled that plywood sheet over her, I suppose,’ said Barney, who clearly had a practical turn of mind. ‘She was bloody murdered.’
‘We all know that,’ squawked the foreman. ‘By Chris here. I told him to stop pouring. You heard me. Everyone for half a mile must have heard me but not Chris. Oh, no, he has to go on–’
‘She was murdered before she was put down the hole,’ said Barney. ‘That wooden cover wouldn’t have been there if she had fallen down herself.’
The foreman wiped his face with a handkerchief and looked at the square of plywood. ‘There is that to it,’ he muttered. ‘No one can say we didn’t take proper safety precautions. You’re right. She must have been murdered. Oh, my God!’
‘Sex crime, like as not,’ said Barney. ‘Raped and strangled her. That or someone’s missus. You mark my words. She was all crumpled up and that hand…I’ll never forget that hand, not if I live to be a hundred.’
The foreman stared at him lividly. He seemed incapable of expressing, his feelings. So was Wilt. He went back to his desk and sat with his head in his hands while the class gaped out of the window and tried to catch what was being said. Presently sirens sounded in the distance and grew louder. A police car arrived, four fire engines hurtled into the car park and an ambulance followed. As more and more uniformed men gathered around what had once been a hole in the ground it became apparent that getting the doll down there had been a damned sight easier than getting it out.
‘That concrete starts setting in twenty minutes.’ the driver explained when a pump was suggested for the umpteenth time. An Inspector of Police and the Fire Chief stared down at the hole.
‘Are you sure you saw a woman’s body down there?’ the Inspector asked. ‘You’re positive about it?’
‘Positive?’ squeaked the foreman. ‘Course I’m positive. You don’t think…Tell them, Barney. He saw her too.’
Barney told the Inspector even more graphically than before. ‘She had this hair see and her hand was reaching up like it was asking for help and there were these fingers…I tell you it was horrible. It didn’t look natural.’
‘No, well, it wouldn’t,’ said the Inspector sympathetically. ‘And you say there was a board on top of the hole when you arrived this morning.’
The foreman gesticulated silently and Barney showed them the board. ‘I was standing on it at one time,’ he said. ‘It was here all right so help me God.’
‘The thing is, how are we to get her out?’ said the Fire Chief. It was a point that was put to the manager of the construction company when he finally arrived on the scene. ‘God alone, knows,’ he said. ‘There’s no easy way of getting that concrete out now. We’d have to use drills to get down thirty feet’
At the end of the hour they were no nearer a solution to the problem. As the Motor Mechanics dragged themselves away from this fascinating situation to go to Technical Drawing, Wilt collected the unread copies of Shane and walked across to the Staff Room in a state of shock. The only consolation he could think of was that it would take them at least two or three days to dig down and discover that what had all the appearances of being the body of a murdered woman was in fact an inflatable doll. Or had been once. Wilt rather doubted if it would be inflated now. There had been something horribly intractable about that liquid concrete.
Chapter 8
There was something horribly intractable about the mudbank on which the cabin cruiser had grounded. To add to their troubles the engine had gone wrong. Gaskell said it was a broken con rod.
‘Is that serious?’ asked Sally.
‘It just means we’ll have to be towed to a boatyard.’
‘By what?’
‘By a passing cruiser I guess,’ said Gaskell.
Sally looked over the side at the bullrushes.
‘Passing?’ she said. ‘We’ve been here all night and half the morning and nothing has passed so far and if it did we wouldn’t be able to see it for all these fucking bullrushes.’
‘I thought bullrushes did something for you.’
‘That was yesterday,’ snapped Sally. ‘Today they just mean we’re invisible to anyone more than fifty feet away. And now you’ve screwed the motor. I told you not to rev it like that.’
‘So how was I to know it would bust a con rod,’ said Gaskell. ‘I was just trying to get us off this mudbank. You just tell me how I’m supposed to do it without revving the goddam motor.’
‘You could get out and push.’
Gaskell peered over the side. ‘I could get out and drown,’ he said.
‘So the boat would be lighter,’ said Sally. ‘We’ve all got to make sacrifices and you said the tide would float us off.’
‘Well I was mistaken. That’s fresh water down there and means the tide doesn’t reach this far.’
‘Now he tells me. First we’re in Frogwater Beach…’
‘Reach,’ said Gaskell.
‘Frogwater wherever. Then we’re in Fen Broad. Now where are we for God’s sake?’
‘On a mudbank,’ said Gaskell.
In the cabin Eva bustled about. There wasn’t much space for bustling but what there was she put to good use. She made the bunks and put the bedding away in the lockers underneath and she plumped the cushions and emptied the ashtrays. She swept the floor and polished the table and wiped the windows and dusted the shelves and generally made everything as neat and tidy as it was possible to make it. And all the time her thoughts got untidier and more muddled so that by the time she was finished and every object insight was in its right place and the whole cabin properly arranged she was quite confused and in two minds about nearly everything.
The Pringsheims were ever so sophisticated and rich and intellectual and said clever things all the time but they were always quarrelling and getting at one another about something and to be honest they were quite impractical and didn’t know the first thing about hygiene. Gaskell went to the lavatory and didn’t wash his hands afterwards and goodness only knew when he had last had a shave. And look at the way they had walked out of the house in Rossiter Grove without clearing up after the party and the living-room all over cups and things. Eva had been quite shocked. She would never have left her house in that sort of mess. She had said as much to Sally but Sally had said how nonspontaneous could you get and anyway they were only renting the house for the summer and that it was typical of a male-oriented social system to expect a woman to enter a contractual relationship based upon female domestic servitude. Eva tried to follow her and was left feeling guilty because she couldn’t and because, it was evidently infra dig to be houseproud and she was.
And then there was what Henry had been doing with that doll. It was so unlike Henry to do anything like that and the more she thought about it the more unlike Henry it became. He must have been drunk but even so…without his clothes on? And where had he found the doll? She had asked Sally and had been horrified to learn that Gaskell was mad about plastic and just adored playing games with Judy and men were like that and so to the only meaningful relationships being between women because women didn’t need to prove their virility by any overt act of extrasexual violence did they? By which time Eva was lost in a maze of words she didn’t understand but which sounded important and they had had another session of Touch Therapy.