With an effort to be the policeman, he asked Miss Trenchard-Smith to tell him where to stop the car.
'Anywhere you like,' she said with an ominously nonchalant air. 'I haven't the faintest idea where we are.'
He halted where the road came to an end. They got out and started across a patch of turf, his torch probing the space ahead. The reservoir was enclosed by a low boundary fence, beyond which clumps of reeds stirred in the breeze, appearing to flicker in the torchlight. At intervals were flat stretches of shoreline.
'How exactly did you get down to the water?' he asked.
'Through one of the gates.'
'Those are for fishermen only.'
'I don't disturb them.' She gave a laugh. 'I won't tell anyone you broke the law.'
He pushed open a gate and they picked their way down to the water's edge.
'Was this the place?'
She said, 'It all looks amazingly different now.'
Containing his annoyance, he drew the torch-beam slowly across a wide angle. 'You must have some idea. How did you notice the body?'
'There was still some daylight then.'
Fifty yards along the bank was a place where the reeds grew extra tall. 'Anywhere like that?'
'I suppose there's no harm in looking,' she said.
'That's why we're here, miss.'
He stepped in and felt his foot sink into soft mud. 'You'd better stay where you are,' he told Miss Trenchard- Smith. He worked his way through to the far side. Nothing was there except a family of ducks that put up a noisy protest.
He returned.
She said, 'Just look at the state of your gym shoes!'
'We're looking for a body, miss,' PC Sedgemoor reminded her. 'We've got to do the job properly.'
'If you're going to wade through every clump of reeds, we'll be out all night,' she said blithely.
Twenty minutes' searching resulted only in Miss Trenchard-Smith becoming more flippant and PC Sedgemoor less patient. They moved steadily along the shoreline. He shone the torch on his watch, thinking bitterly of Shirley alone in the cottage with those unlikeable cats while he danced attendance on this scatty old maid. Almost 11.30. What a Saturday night! In an impatient gesture he swung the beam rapidly across the whole width of the water as if to demonstrate the futility of the task. And perversely that was the moment when Miss Trenchard-Smith said, There!'
'Where?'
'Give me the torch,' she said.
He handed it to her and watched as she held it at arm's length. The beam picked out something white in the water.
PC Sedgemoor took a short, quick breath. 'What do you know?' he said in a whisper. 'You were right.'
The body had lodged among the reeds not more than ten feet from where they stood, in a place where waterweed, bright viridian in the torchlight, grew densely. Unquestionably a woman, face upwards, her long hair splayed in the water, a strand of it across her throat. The pale flesh was flecked with seedpods. No wounds were apparent. Sedgemoor was reminded of a painting he had once seen on a school trip to London: a woman lying dead among reeds, evidently drowned. It had impressed him because the teacher had said that the model had been forced to lie for hours in a bath in the artist's studio and one day the artist had forgotten to fill the lamps that were provided to keep the water warm. As a result the girl had contracted an illness that didn't immediately kill her, but certainly shortened her life.
The story had been given to the class as an example of obsessive fidelity to the subject. Sedgemoor had stood in front of the painting until the teacher had called his name sharply from the next room, for it had been the only painting of a dead person he had seen, and death is fascinating to children. Now, faced with an actual drowned corpse, he was made acutely aware how idealized the Pre-Raphaelite image had been. It wasn't merely that the girl in the painting had been clothed. Her hands and face had lain elegandy on the surface of the water. The face of the real drowned woman was submerged, drawn under by the weight of the head. The belly was uppermost, and it was swollen. The skin on the breasts had a puckered appearance. The hands hung too low to be visible at all.
'There's a wind blowing up,' said Miss Trenchard-Smith.
'Yes,' he responded in a preoccupied way.
'If you don't do something about it, she'll drift away again.'
The duty inspector at 'F' Division in Yeovil picked out the significant word from PC Sedgemoor's call. 'Naked' meant a full alert. You can generally rule out accident or suicide if you discover a naked corpse in a lake. 'And you say you handled it? Was that necessary? All right, lad. Stay where you are. I mean that literally. Stand on the spot. Don't trample the ground. Don't touch the corpse again. Don't smoke, comb your hair, scratch your balls, anything.'
Sedgemoor was compelled to ignore the instruction. He hadn't cared to admit that he was calling in from the car, where he had stupidly left his personal radio. He set off at a trot, back to the lakeside.
Miss Trenchard-Smith stood by the body in the darkness, sublimely unconcerned. 'I switched off the torch to save your battery.'
He told her that assistance was on the way and he would see that she was taken home shortly.
'I hope not,' she said. 'I'd like to help.'
'Decent of you to offer, miss,' said Sedgemoor. 'With respect, the CID won't need any help.'
'You were glad of it, young man.'
'Yes.'
She was unstoppable. Women of her mettle had climbed the Matterhorn in long skirts and chained themselves to railings. 'They'll want to identify her,' she said with relish. 'I'm no Sherlock Holmes, but I can tell them several things already. She was married, proud of her looks and her shoes pinched. And it appears to me as if she had red hair. It looked dark brown when you first brought her out, but I would say on closer examination that it was a rather fetching shade of chestnut red, wouldn't you?' She switched on the torch and bent over the face admiringly as if it had none of the disfigurement caused by prolonged submersion. 'No wonder she let it grow.'
'Don't touch!' Sedgemoor cautioned her.
But she already had a lock of hair between finger and thumb. 'Just feel how fine it is. Don't be squeamish.'
'It isn't that – it's procedure. You don't handle anything.'
She looked up, smiling. 'Come now, you just dragged her out of the water. Touching her hair won't make a jot of difference.'
'I've had orders,' he said stiffly. 'And I must request you to co-operate.'
'As you wish.' She straightened up and used the torch to justify her deductions. 'The mark of a wedding ring on the left hand. Traces of nail polish on the toes as well as the fingernails. Cramped toes and redness on the backs of the heels. Neither a farmgirl nor a feminist, my dear Watson. Where are they? They ought to be here by now.'
It was with distinct relief that Sedgemoor spotted across the landscape the flashing light of a police vehicle. He swung the torch in a wide arc above his head.
In a few bewildering minutes their sense of isolation was supplanted by activity on a scale the young constable had only ever seen in a training film. A panda car, two large vans and a minibus drove over the turf and halted and at least a dozen men got out. The area was cordoned off with white tapes and illuminated with arc- lamps. Two senior detectives approached the body and spent some time beside it. Then the scenes-of-crime officers moved in. The forensic team arrived. A photographer took pictures and a screen was erected. Miss Trenchard-Smith was led to the minibus and questioned about the finding of the body. The detectives took more interest in her green Wellingtons than her deductions about the victim. The boots were borrowed, photographed and used to make casts. Then she was driven back to PC Sedgemoor's house.
Sedgemoor was not detained much longer. He made his statement, surrendered his muddy trainers to the forensic examiners, waited for them to be returned and then left the scene and drove home. Miss Trenchard-Smith and her cats were still there when he arrived a few minutes after midnight. She was still there at 1.30 a.m., drinking
