Dirty Tricks Page 8

  On exceptionally fine days I used to prefer Oxford’s other river. The Cherwell is quite different from the Thames, a toy stream winding through stately parks and bucolic meadows miraculously unencroached upon by the dreary outskirts of the city. Shy and secretive, not quite real and very safe, it is an apt setting for the young enthusiasts who flock thither on summer afternoons to recreate scenes from Brideshead Revisited. Striking is the contrast between their artfully-poled craft, laden with wind-up gramophones, teddy bears and pints of Pimms, and the aquatic dodgems of your average punter, bearing ghetto-blasters, squealing skirt and six-packs of Australian lager. Numerous collisions result, yet — such is the nature of class conflict in Britain — no damage is done, and the respective crews pass on their way as though oblivious of each other, hiding in silence and averted eyes the embarrassment of foreigners with no common language.

  Despite the sunshine, there were more ducks than punts on the river that Saturday. It was brilliantly sunny, but with an autumnal edge, perfect walking weather. I strolled along the narrow path with the anticipatory exhilaration a fine morning bestows, that quids-in glow of youth, confident that there is more and better to come. But the wisdom of age told me that this parabola of promise would not be maintained indefinitely, but would peak and then decline. A psychological astronomer, I calculated its apogee at approximately 2 to 3 o’clock, unless of course I stopped for a drink. In that case I would peak earlier and higher and then feel like hell for the rest of the day. If I wanted to be happy I should have avoided the pub altogether, or at least had nothing stronger than mineral water. I knew that. So I ordered a pint of bitter, and then another. What it comes down to is that I can’t handle happiness. I don’t know what to do with it.

  As I walked back from the bar with my second pint I caught sight of Karen and Dennis at a table in the corner. We all made much of the coincidence, though not as much as the police, for whom it amounts to damning evidence of collusion, malice aforethought, cold-blooded premeditation and goodness knows what else. Is it likely, they argue, that both the Parsons and I should have decided, quite independently, to visit that particular pub on that particular day at that particular time? If they had bothered to get off their bums and ask some questions, they would have discovered that the pub in question was a regular haunt of the Parsons, who went there for lunch every Saturday on their way back from the supermarket. As it also happens to be the only drinker on the Cherwell until you get to Islip, the murderous conspiracies and dark plots which so excite the Kidlington Kops amount to nothing more than the fact that when I opened my curtains that morning I saw the sun shining in a cloudless blue sky and decided to go for the longest and most pleasant of the river walks open to me.

  The same fact was responsible for Dennis’s insistence that we should take to the water. Here the police’s version of events is not merely contentious but downright absurd. To believe them, Karen and I shanghaied the shrinking Dennis on to a punt by some underhand ruse worthy of a ‘once-aboard-the-lugger-and-the-maid-is-mine’ melodrama. It seems almost a pity to subject these lively fancies to the stern test of verisimilitude, but I feel constrained to point out three facts. The first is that the?20 deposit required on hiring the punt was secured by means of a personal cheque drawn on Dennis’s account and duly signed by him. The second is that from the Cherwell boathouse to the point where the tragedy occurred is a distance of over two and a half miles, including a strenuous portage, and took us nearly an hour. And lastly, when we reached Magdalen Bridge, Dennis insisted on coming alongside so that he could visit an off-licence at the Plain and buy a bottle of champagne, the sale being recorded in his credit card records. If you combine these three facts with another, namely that Dennis’s fortieth birthday had fallen on the previous Thursday, an alternative explanation presents itself.

  As soon as I joined the Parsons, I sensed something odd about Dennis. There was a manic air to the way he ate his steak and kidney pie. He stabbed his chips like a killer and poured beer down his throat as though his guts were on fire. Christ, he’s sussed, I thought. Had I left some clue behind, a stray sock not his, an unfamiliar scent on the pillow? Or had Karen fessed up? She avoided my eye. Yes, that must be it. How much had she told him? Did he know that she’d revealed his habit of farting as he came, or that I had once worn his pyjamas while she blew me? The knife in Dennis’s paw was sharp and serrated, with a sturdy wooden handle. I calculated angles and distances and located the nearest exit.

  My fears were groundless. Dennis wasn’t jealous, he was desperate. Time’s winged chariot was sitting on his rear bumper, flashing its headlights. Where was the fun? Where was the glitter? What had happened to his youth? His mood was an explosive mixture of maudlin self-pity and forced gaiety, the latter predominating as he got drunker. He was out to reveal a spunky, sparky, spontaneous self which had in fact never existed. No idea was too off-the-wall, no scheme too madcap. He was going to have fun if it killed him, to coin a phrase. It was a shame to waste such a lovely day sitting indoors, he announced. Nothing would do but we must go out on the river. Our attempts to talk him out of this merely provoked his scorn. What was the matter with us? Had we forgotten what it was like to be young? Did everything need to be planned months ahead? Couldn’t we just throw away our Filofaxes for one afternoon and live a little? There were plenty of people in the pub, and some of them must have overheard Dennis’s vicious mockery of our suggested alternatives, a walk on Shotover or Otmoor, for example. But the police made no attempt to contact any of them, for the obvious reason that such evidence would have been a severe embarrassment to their preconceived ideas. After all, what sort of conspiracy is it when the victim has to browbeat his supposed aggressors into taking part?

  In the end we gave in. The only thing on our minds was getting it over with. Dennis had an early-evening business appointment at a client’s house. He wouldn’t be gone long, he assured us, but the look Karen and I exchanged confirmed that it would be long enough. First, however, we had to let the birthday boy have his fling. There had been heavy rain the previous week, and the river was high and running quite swiftly. As soon as we cast off from the boathouse Dennis started poling downstream like a maniac. We nipped along past college grounds, through glades of poplars, to the point where the river divides in two. Instead of turning back or taking the upper channel, a long cul-de-sac ending at a floodgate, Dennis beached the punt on the rollers forming a portage over the weir.

  ‘All hands to the ropes!’ he shouted merrily. ‘Look lively, ye lubbers!’

  He started to haul the punt up the rollers.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I called.

  He glowered at me.

  ‘Have you seen Fitzcarraldo?’

  ‘What’s this, the TV remake?’

  He single-handedly dragged the punt to the top of the portage, where it balanced precariously.

  ‘To the Thames!’

  ‘Oh Denny!’ Karen unwisely interjected.

  Her husband swung round on her.

  ‘Don’t you “Oh Denny” me! We’re going to the Thames. At least, I am.’

  The punt tipped over and started to clatter down the rollers the other side. Dennis ran down the concrete slope and leapt in as the craft relaunched itself with a loud splash, taking on quite a lot of water. He started poling furiously away. Karen and I looked at each other, half-amused, half-disturbed. We both knew he couldn’t swim.

  ‘How much has he had?’ I asked.

  ‘Lots. Champagne for breakfast, and he’s been at it ever since. He says today’s the first day of the rest of his life.’

  ‘It could be the last, the rate he’s going.’

  Pausing only for a brief tongue-twister — she did that very well, Karen, where your tongues circle each other tantalizingly, barely touching — we gave chase along the footpath which runs through the meadows bordering the river. We hadn’t gone far before we spied the punt entangled in the branches of a willow which had collapsed into the stream. By the time we worked it loose and got aboard again, Dennis’s initial fit had passed, but he was still adamant that he wanted to get as far as the Thames.

  ‘We’ll just poke our nose out into the river and then turn back. I just want to be able to say I’ve done it, that’s all.’

  I took over the poling. We drifted down past Magdalen Fellows’ Garden, borne along on the current with just the odd stroke to correct our course. I was saving my energies for the return journey. At Magdalen Bridge, Dennis went ashore for more champagne, which passed from hand to hand as we negotiated the lower reaches of the river. This stretch is attractive at first, with Christ Church Meadow on one side and a cricket pitch on the other, but as it approaches the larger river the Cherwell divides into two channels separated by a flat overgrown island, deserted except for a row of college boat-houses. The sun was low by now, obscured behind the wattle of leafless branches, and the air had a chilly edge. We took the left-hand cut, which runs into the Thames at an angle. The water was quite deep, and I was having difficulty finding the river-bed with the pole. I twice suggested that we turn back, but Dennis wouldn’t hear of it.

  When we finally emerged from the mouth of the tributary it was evident that the Thames was in flood. The surface was grooved with the tumult of adversarial currents, the turbid water lapping high at the trunks of willows and alders on the banks. I thrust the pole into the water until my arms were submerged, but in vain. The only hope was to try and paddle to the bank, then work our way back into the safe waters of the Cherwell by pulling on the branches of the shrubs and trees that overhung the river. I accordingly shipped the pole and went forward to get the paddle. Then Dennis got up.

  ‘Why aren’t you poling?’

  ‘It’s too deep.’

  ‘Let me have a
go.’

  The current had already sucked us out into the centre of the river, and we were gathering speed downstream. I elbowed Karen unceremoniously aside and grabbed the paddle. Behind me, Dennis had erected the punt-pole and was now drunkenly trying to lower it into the water. As I turned, my shoulder struck the pole, pushing it sharply to one side and knocking him off-balance. Karen instinctively got up to try and help, which made the punt wobble even more wildly. Clasping the pole to his chest, Dennis teetered back and forth, then slowly fell over backwards into the water.

  At least, that’s our story. If you believe the Thames Valley CID — not the account they gave at the inquest, when the events were still fresh in everyone’s minds, but the one they came up with in the months following my return to this country — then having lured Dennis on to the river and dosed him with draughts of spiked bubbly, Karen and I went ‘One, two, three’ and heaved him overboard. We then hit him over the head with the punt-pole and paddled off out of range of his piteously outstretched hands, cackling demonically as he went down for the third time.

  I have made it a point of honour to spare you moral blackmail of the ‘Do you honestly suppose for a single moment that I would be capable of stooping to such beastliness?’ variety, and I shall not waver even at this supreme moment. Nor shall I again urge the objections cited above to the ‘murderous conspiracy’ theory. I simply wish to point out that if it is supposed that Karen Parsons and I embarked that afternoon with the intention of drowning her husband, why did we wait till we had reached a point where our criminal acts were overlooked by at least fifteen witnesses? We had already negotiated long stretches of the Cherwell where we were completely hidden from view. Why didn’t we do the foul deed there, rather than risk facing a rugby team of accusing fingers at the inquest? Which in turn brings us to the most remarkable fact of all, namely that so far from corroborating the police’s recent claims, the witnesses they located and interviewed at the time signally failed to mention any suspicious behaviour whatsoever. Five of them, consisting of a family and friends out for a walk along the towpath, described only a scene of ‘noisy confusion’ which they ascribed to high-spirited students horsing about. An elderly man bird-watching in Iffley Fields recognized that we were all drunk, and that when Dennis fell overboard Karen and I panicked with tragic results. Despite being equipped with an excellent pair of binoculars, however, he made no reference to any signs of murderous intent on our part.

  But the most striking evidence came from an Oriel Eight out training. As we drifted across the river, their cox first shouted a warning, then ordered the crew to angle their oars to avoid fouling the punt. As a result their practice run had to be aborted, and we thus had their full and indignant attention as we came alongside. This happened to be the very moment when I dropped the punt-pole into the water, the idea being that Dennis could grab hold of it and I would then pull him in. Unfortunately the pole was heavier than I had thought, I misjudged the angle and the thing came down on Dennis’s head. This incident has since been described, by the tabloid whose lurid prose I regaled you with earlier, as ‘a pitiless and cynical coup de grace’. One hesitates to dispute this judgement, coming as it does from a source with such impeccable credentials in pitiless cynicism, but the fact remains that the young men of Oriel didn’t see it quite that way. Not that my character emerged unscathed from their testimony. ‘Frenzied and totally ineffective bumbling’, ‘drunken hysteria’ and ‘blind panic’ were some of the less offensive phrases mentioned in the coroner’s court. Out on the river, their language was less guarded, and we were treated to a variety of epithets which no Merton man, I hope, would have allowed past his lips in mixed company. But the vital point is what was not said. I may have been called a pillock and a dickhead, but no one asked why I had tried to brain my companion. It is also noteworthy that the Oriel crew — who may be presumed to have known a thing or two about rowing, given their record in recent years — also failed to remark on the fact that I or Karen were allegedly paddling away from the drowning man. What they saw, as one put it, were two people who weren’t up to boating in the bath, never mind on the Thames in spate.

  A more substantial objection is why neither Karen nor I had dived in to try and save Dennis. At the time this criticism was directed at her rather than at me. Karen was not only Dennis’s wife but also a physical education instructor who could, as the coroner facetiously remarked, have swum to her husband’s rescue using either the crawl, breast-stroke, back-stroke or butterfly. This betrays a complete lack of understanding of the actual circumstances. The very newspapers which subsequently pilloried our ‘cowardice — or worse’ are constantly bemoaning the deaths of people who rashly attempt to rescue swimmers in distress, only to perish themselves as well. Dennis was thrashing about so vigorously that even a trained lifeguard would have had difficulty in retrieving him. To throw ourselves into those turbulent waters and then be unable to regain the punt would have put paid to any hope of rescuing Dennis. Of course it is easy to argue now, with the benefit of hindsight, that Dennis was doomed anyway, but it didn’t appear like that at the time. When he first fell in, I remember shouting at him impatiently to stop fooling about. It seemed inconceivable that a mere punt trip could end in death. Even after the pole struck Dennis on the head and he disappeared from sight, I remember thinking that he would pop up at any moment alongside the boat, like a coot. If either Karen or I had had any idea that it was possible for someone to drown so quickly, we would no doubt have thrown caution to the wind and dived in. Not that this would have made the slightest difference to the outcome. The simple fact of the matter is that we should never have been there in the first place.

  The coroner concurred. In his verdict, he called for consideration to be given to regulations restricting punts to the relatively safe waters of the Cherwell and to review the conditions under which they could be hired. ‘It is striking,’ he concluded, ‘that while strict laws govern the use of motor vehicles, anyone may hire a marine craft and then, with no experience whatsoever, without a life-jacket, unable to swim and in a state of advanced inebriation, attempt to navigate a busy and treacherous public waterway. As long as this state of affairs continues, tragedies such as this will necessarily recur.’

  No policemen leapt to their feet, protesting at this travesty of justice. Indeed, the police treated us both with the greatest sympathy and consideration from the moment I rang them from a callbox on the Abingdon Road. The river authorities contacted the lock-keeper at Iffley and it was there that Dennis’s body was eventually recovered later that evening. Karen was at home by then, under sedation.

  The next time I saw her was at the crematorium. Thomas and Lynn were there too, to say nothing of Roger and Marina, if that’s her name, and the rest of them. Clive also attended, visibly gleeful that he had spared the school any undesirable publicity by unloading me in the nick of time. The only other person I recognized was Alison Kraemer. She expressed her condolences briefly and tactfully, in marked contrast to some of those present, who couldn’t quite bring themselves to approach the grieving widow but were quite prepared to quiz me at length about the details of Dennis’s last hours. To keep them at bay, I engaged Alison in close conversation. It turned out that she was a freelance editor for OUP, with a daughter in her early teens and a seven-year-old son for whom she had been caring single-handedly since her husband’s untimely death. I found it supremely restful to talk to her, and when we finally parted I told her I hoped we might see each other again some time. A lanky cleric oozing good intentions and bad faith then launched into an address that was squirmingly anxious to avoid giving offence to persons of any or no belief while still suggesting that, who knows, there might after all be, you know, something out there. While we all coughed and looked at our shoes in embarrassment, the gleaming casket containing Dennis’s mortal remains was spirited away to the nether regions of the crematorium.