The young man accepted it with a cry of triumph and casually stopped work to swig from it, tottering back a step. He would almost certainly have ended up in the river if someone else hadn’t reached out just in time to grab his trouser leg and haul him back again.
Naturally, this caused a load of heckling and good-hearted chaffing from the others, and Jimmy shook his head, not sure whether to laugh indulgently at the youthful shenanigans or to self-righteously wonder just what the world was coming to.
He finally reached the welcome shade of a line of trees that skirted the village road, and sat down on an old tree trunk. Tyke, glad to rest his old bones, gave a little grunt of satisfaction as he lay down at his master’s feet in the cool, shaded grass.
If some dogs actually did possess such a thing as an intuition for evil, or a sense of impending calamity,Tyke wasn’t troubled by such a gift.
And so, for about ten minutes, the retired milkman and his little dog simply sat there, listening to the drone of bees and watching yellow-brimstone and orange-tip butterflies flitting about the meadow. Then a quick glance at his watch told him that his wife would be getting his lunch on soon so, with a small sigh, he got up and began the return journey. If he didn’t miss his guess, it would be fish-paste sandwiches and a slice of her Madeira cake – one of his favourites.
As he retraced his route along the river towards the noisy and boisterous student party, he noticed a third punt was following a little way along behind him but paid it little attention. Instead, he gave them all a wide berth, returning to the river only when he was once again beyond the oxbow.
He wasn’t surprised, a little later on, to see that neither of the fishermen had remained in their places. He could well imagine how they must have cursed the students for selecting that spot for their revelries.
And so, Jimmy Roper and his dog went back to the village and to their midday meal, neither one of them giving the students so much as another passing thought.
Thus it was left to someone else to stumble upon the tragedy a capricious fate had always had in store for such a bright and beautiful day. Someone, perhaps, who was far less equipped to deal with the consequences of human darkness than an old soldier.
Barely an hour later, Miriam Jenks, a new mother to a rather large and placid baby girl, was pushing her pram down the village street, on her way to the village shop to order in a few necessities. Waiting on the pavement for old Dr Thomas’s ‘moggy’ Morris Minor to pass by, she decided it would be a good idea to get out of the fierce heat. So, she steered the pram onto the hard, flat, grassy path beside the riverbank to take advantage of the shade provided by the willow trees that lined the river course there. As she went along, she started to croon a tune to the baby, who had started to grizzle.
She was still humming the lullaby when something caught her eye, and she looked down to see a human body floating in the water just beside her. Having got caught up in the protruding roots of a particularly large willow, it was being moved gently about in a small eddy, one arm rolling up and down, for all the world as if it was waving at her.
But the young man with dark hair was lying facedown in the water, and she knew at once that he was dead. But even as she thought this, the current moved, and with what seemed to her to be a slow, dreadful and fascinating inevitability, the body turned inexorably onto its back.
Naturally, this made Miriam come over ‘all queer’, as she was to later tell her best friend. For a moment or two, however, she froze where she was.
But the sight of that face, pale and so pitifully and irrevocably beyond all human help, made her knees fold abruptly beneath her, and she found herself suddenly on the grass. She put out her hands to save herself, but even so, she was now much closer to the edge of the river and the body it cradled.
She noticed his clothes had ballooned, the trapped air helping to keep the boy afloat. She also noticed, fleetingly, that he seemed a good-looking lad and not much above twenty.
So young.
And so dead.
She heard a noise and realised it was coming from her. She was sobbing, softly.
For a second, the body seemed close enough for her to touch, if she reached out, down the bank and across the water – but, of course, she knew that wasn’t so. Nevertheless, she saw her hand moving forward, shaking uncontrollably in front of her as if to offer… What? her shocked brain demanded rather scornfully. Succour? Comfort? Help?
A cold voice in the back of her head told her she could provide none of these things.
She began to shiver violently, which made no sense to her. The sun was at the point in the sky when it was almost at its hottest. Even the birds had ceased singing, as if the heat had enervated them.
Feeling sick, she forced herself to her feet and began to run, pushing the pram wildly in front of her and bumping it roughly over the path. Naturally, this delightful motion promptly sent her daughter off to sleep more thoroughly than any lullaby.
She felt absurdly guilty – as if she was abandoning the dead boy when he needed her the most. She almost wanted to turn her head, to make sure he wasn’t watching her cowardly retreat with accusing, beseeching eyes.
But she had just enough sense, through the fog of shock, to realise this couldn’t possibly be so.
She was still sobbing softly when she emerged once more onto the street proper, frantically stopping the first person she saw, who happened to be an old man wheeling his wheelbarrow to the nearby allotments, and tearfully gasping out what she’d seen.
The old man promptly took her home with him, told his wife to look after her, called the police and then nipped off to the river to see the spectacle for himself.
Obviously, nothing as exciting as this had happened in the village in years!
Nearly one week later, Dr Clement Ryder, a coroner of the City of Oxford, sat at his bench, listening to the court proceedings getting underway at the inquest into the death of Mr Derek Chadworth, aged twenty-one, a former student of St Bede’s College, Oxford.
At the age of fifty-seven, the coroner was a tall man, standing at an inch over six foot, with healthy, abundant white hair and somewhat watery grey eyes. And if he was just beginning to have rather more meat on his bones than in his youth, he wore the extra pounds well. The role of coroner was a second career for him after having spent the majority of his adult working life as a renowned surgeon. But not liking to dwell on the reasons for his enforced change of direction, he now watched the courtroom and its denizens with some interest. As was to be expected in a case like this, the public gallery was full, with its fair share of local reporters taking up a jockeying position. The jury, looking both sheepish and self-important, had just taken their places. A police constable waited to give his evidence rather nervously. He looked young and inexperienced, and Dr Ryder hoped he wasn’t going to have any trouble keeping him to the point.
Widely known to be a man who didn’t suffer fools gladly, he was in appearance an imposing figure, and many of the members of the public (as well as some of the court officials) watched him warily. He had the look of someone who had no problems whatsoever in juggling such weighty issues as life and death in his obviously capable hands.
He displayed no signs of outward impatience as the proceedings finally got underway. And the first of the court’s functions (to assign a name or identity to the deceased) was rapidly disposed of, as Derek’s parents had already identified his body.
Having done that, the often much trickier second question