once it’s aired and it’s a bloody sight quieter than the Zoo.’
‘I’m not stopping you from moving in,’ James grinned. ‘At least I won’t have to put up with your snoring.’
‘Yeah, I’m so obnoxious,’ Bruce sneered. ‘What about the other night when you kept dropping your guts? My eyes were watering.’
‘It was that dodgy cheese bap Chloe got at the motorway services.’
As James said this, he unzipped the sports bag and looked at the surveillance equipment. The biggest item was a twin-tape surveillance recorder with Property of East Midlands Health Trust etched on top. There were also blank tapes, a bunch of tangled-up leads, a power drill for making holes and a selection of miniature cameras.
‘What a bunch of crap,’ Bruce said.
James shrugged. ‘There’s nothing here that would set the campus technical department drooling, but it’s enough to get the job done.’
‘Guess you’re right,’ Bruce said, as he pulled some of the wires out. ‘You work out the best place to put the cameras and I’ll start untangling this lot.’
32. BODIES
Seventeen days later
Joe Pledger and his wife had just arrived back from an Easter break at their Portuguese villa, complete with leathery tans and carrier bags of booze. Their lap pool looked unusually dark when Joe peered out through the conservatory and his heart leapt as he noticed that a section of his back fence had been knocked down.
Groggy from the flight and underdressed in short sleeves and holiday shorts, Joe slid the French door and stumbled out to the patio. The water in his pool had a brownish tint, but the shocker was the outline of a man at the bottom. The sight would have sent many souls running back to the house in shock, but Joe had been in the funeral game his whole life and his only concern was for his wife.
‘Don’t come out here,’ he yelled, as he dashed back into the house and grabbed the phone.
Inspector Hunt from the murder squad was on the scene within ten minutes, beaten only by a female constable who’d been walking her beat half a kilometre away. Hunt was knackered and about to go off-shift, but there was no chance of that now.
The ginger-haired detective crouched on the tiles at the poolside and saw that the victim had two twenty-kilo discs strapped to his chest.
‘Looks like he was alive when he was thrown in,’ Hunt said, as he looked at the nervous policewoman.
Unless they suspect that the perpetrator is still in the area, regular cops are trained to stand back and protect a crime scene until detectives arrive. The young constable had her arms behind her back and her face looking up at the sunrise.
‘Not seen one of these before?’ Hunt asked.
‘No, sir,’ the constable said apologetically. ‘I’ve only been on the force three months.’
‘Do me a favour,’ Hunt said, as he leaned further over the pool. ‘Go into the house and ask the owner if he has a long pole, or a rake that he uses to clean leaves off the water.’
While the constable stayed inside consoling his wife, Joe ambled down the garden to unlock his shed.
‘Used to hang the pole on them hooks by the poolside,’ Joe explained, as he opened the shed and retrieved a long pole with a crook on the end. ‘Trouble was my grandkids were too fond of whacking each other with it.’
Hunt gave a friendly nod as he took the pole from the elderly man. Joe stepped back, but kept his eyes fixed on the pool as the policeman guided the pole through the murky water. Joe was tired after the flight home and his wife was in a state, but he wasn’t unhappy: retirement had proved underwhelming and a dead body in the pool was a hell of a story for the golf club.
After scraping across the floor of the pool, Hunt tucked the hook under the dead man’s arm and gave him a gentle pull so that he could see his face. The motion was enough to disturb gases in the decomposing body and a string of large bubbles rose up and broke the surface of the water.
‘Maybe you should go back inside,’ Hunt said.
‘I dealt with bodies for forty-five years, man and boy,’ Joe smiled. ‘This ain’t nothing much.’
Rapid identification of the body could make a difference if the crime was recent. But the face was horribly bloated and the eyes bulged.
‘He’s been down there a while,’ Joe said knowledgably. ‘Ten or twelve days at a guess.’
‘I reckon