foot stretch of lawn sloped down towards the river, ending at a wooden walkway that formed a towpath along the front of the property. The lawn was planted with shrubs and flower beds, curving in to give a framed perspective across the water, and Deacon wondered if this had been Amanda's vision when she drew up the plans for the conversion.
He noticed her suddenly, dressed in black, standing slightly apart with a prison officer and staring as intently at the river as the policemen were. She turned to look in Deacon's direction as he approached across the grass, a faint smile of recognition lifting the corners of her mouth. She raised a hand in greeting, then let it drop, afraid perhaps that she'd put herself beyond the pale of human sympathy. He raised his own hand in acknowledgment.
DS Harrison peeled off from the group to steer him away from contact with Amanda. He glanced at the camera in Deacon's hand and shook his head. 'No photographs this time, old son,' he said.
'Just one?' murmured Deacon, nodding towards the woman. 'For my personal collection and not for publication. She looks great in black.'
'She would,' said the sergeant. 'She kills her lovers after copulation.'
'Is that a yes or a no?''
He shrugged. 'It's a 'be it on your own head.' She's trouble, Mike.'
Deacon grinned. 'You're a red-blooded male, for Christ's sake. Haven't you ever wanted to live a little? Don't you think the quid pro quo for the male black widow getting eaten is the best fucking sex he's ever had in his life?'
'It'll be the
A wet-suited diver lifted a glistening seal-like head above the surface of the river, and made a thumbs-down gesture to the watchers on shore. The scene was both colorless and beautiful. Grey sky over grey water, with the black silhouette of the dinghy against a white winter sun. Before Harrison could stop him, Deacon raised his camera and recorded the moment for posterity. 'Nothing in life is ugly,' he said, swiveling the lens towards Amanda and using the zoom to bring her close, 'unless you choose to see it that way.'
'Wait till we pull James out. You'll think differently then.' He offered Deacon a cigarette. 'You were right about de Vriess tipping her off,' he said, cupping his hands around a match, 'except that at the time she didn't know where the information had come from. He sent her a photocopy of the original brief for the bank's in-house investigation with James mentioned as a suspect. It arrived on the morning of Friday, the twenty-seventh of April, and she spent the day in a panic.' He broke off to light his own cigarette. 'She was due at her mother's that evening, but she rang James at his office and asked him to meet her here at the school at six o'clock, ostensibly to discuss one or two problems that had arisen over the conversion plans. She says her only intention was to find out the truth, but it turned into a fight when James started boasting about how clever he'd been. They were inside the school, and she pushed him down a flight of stairs. She thinks he must have broken his neck on the way down.'
He paused as a second diver surfaced. 'According to her, the body's wedged under the boardwalk. That was the obligatory first phase of the construction. Rebuilding the dilapidated towpath in return for the right to convert the school. Supports were driven in to carry the pathway, and she put James in behind them.'
'At six o'clock on an April evening?' said Deacon in disbelief. 'It would have been broad daylight.'
'She didn't do it then.' Harrison drew heavily on his cigarette, sheltering it from the wind with his coat lapel. 'She left James dead at the bottom of the stairs and drove to Kent in a state of shock, expecting the police to be waiting for her when she got there. When they weren't, she began to calm down and realized she'd either have to confess to the murder or get rid of the body. She came back at two o'clock in the morning while her mother was asleep and disposed of it then.'
Deacon was watching Amanda while Harrison spoke. 'How? She's no Arnold Schwarzenegger, and she must have been working in the dark.'
'She's a resourceful woman,' said Harrison, 'and she brought a flashlight with her from her mother's house. As far as I can make out, she rolled him onto an old door and used the lever principle and a pile of breeze blocks to raise the door high enough to slide him into a wheelbarrow. The plan was to tip him off the boardwalk into the river and hope that when his body washed up further down, his death would be put down to a tragic accident. But she was tired, couldn't control the barrow properly and the whole thing tipped over this side of the walkway.' He gestured towards the shrubs on the left-hand side. 'Six years ago there was a two-yard gap where the bank had eroded, so rather than go through the whole palaver with the door and the breeze blocks again, she launched the body headfirst through the gap, assuming it would be sucked out into the main stream.'
'But it wasn't?' asked Deacon when he didn't go on.
Harrison shrugged. 'He never surfaced, so she thinks he must have got snagged on one of the supports, and was then buried under the ballast and cement that the builders tipped in to fill the gaps along the boardwalk.'
'Wouldn't they have seen the body?'
'She says she came back on the Monday morning to check, and there was no sign of it. After that, she thought it was just a matter of time before one of us knocked on her door and told her that, far from absconding, James had been dead for weeks.'
'But it never happened?'
'No. She's a jammy bitch.'
'If he's under a ton of ballast, what are the divers expecting to find?'
'Anything to indicate she's telling the truth. They're looking for metallic objects, his Rolex watch, belt buckle, shoe studs, buttons, even his fly. If they find them, we start digging out the ballast looking for the poor sod's skeleton.'
Deacon glanced across at Amanda again. 'Why wouldn't she be telling the truth?''
'No one understands why she's suddenly decided to come clean. She has every chance of walking away from the de Vriess murder because Barry's evidence of rape means she can plead self-defense. We're still working on proof of premeditation but we're having very little success. There's no record of any phone calls, no trace of her car in Dover, and if Nigel ever visited Sway then no one saw him here.' He jerked his chin towards the river. 'So why give us this for free? What does she expect to achieve by it?''
