Then again, the whole place might be more at home in the 1330s. Midsummer Common is to this day still a common, where local residents have the right to graze their animals.
There was a woman drowned in the Lido that November. Officially it was closed for the year, but it had been specially refilled for a private event hosted by someone with more money than sense. And one woman had died in the unheated water. I actually heard about this case even before The Cop told me, because it was on the local news one evening.
The next day, when The Cop and I met to get lunch at Gardies after her shift, I asked her if we could go over to the Lido. So we plodded there with hot white-paper parcels of chips in our navy-fingerless-gloved hands—I’d shamelessly bought a cheap pair from the market to copy hers—and as we walked she filled me in on the details of the case.
It looked as though a group of young people—“possibly intoxicated,” The Cop said through a mouthful of grease and steam—had broken in to the Lido in the dead of the night, after the private party had ended. It wasn’t hard to break in there if you could climb a fence. And it seemed likely that this poor woman had got into difficulties after her friends had left, since nobody had raised the alarm. An attendant, arriving to clean, had found her body in the morning.
As we approached, I could see there was police tape across the main entrance, but everything else looked intensely normal. Chillingly normal. The Cop’s face didn’t change as she told me the woman who’d drowned was probably killed by her own heavy clothing—an all-over-sequined ballgown which flared out from the waist. She was still wearing it when she was found.
“It would have been more or less impossible to swim in that garment, even sober.”
“Doesn’t that make you feel…I don’t know, heavy?” I asked.
But she shook her head. “I don’t get emotionally involved. It’s my job. Training,” she said.
I thought of Pierre, and of that rumour about the medical students taking their corpse out to party. To become a doctor you have to be able to desensitize yourself. Ignore certain things, pretend they aren’t there, until you’re not pretending anymore. It’s sink or swim.
“What colour sequins?” I asked. I had spotted something twinkling in the grass a few feet away.
“Blue and green,” said The Cop.
Suddenly I imagined a dead mermaid, her shimmering tail lying bloated and listless against the surface of the water. I shook my head vigorously. This image was horrible and I wanted it gone.
“Deb wore pink,” I said.
“Oh yeah. I think you mentioned that before.”
I had mentioned it several times, in fact. It was a sea blue sequin that had caught my eye, but I said nothing about it.
The Cop asked if I wanted to go inside the Lido itself. We could check the place out, she said, see if any officers were still around, if they had any updates. But I said I didn’t need to. I knew this could not be Deb. So we kept on walking. When we finished our chips, she collected my paper and scrunched all the rubbish together into a tight ball. Then she threw the ball into a park bin from a good ten feet away, taking a casual aim then popping it straight in through the middle of the open lid.
“Shot!” I said. I was impressed and wanted to cuddle her, but there were lots of people around.
The Cop grinned at me. “Training.”
Later that day, I went back on my own and found the sequin. I don’t know why, but I wanted it. The little green-blue spangle. When I got it back to my room, I washed it in my basin, then threaded it onto my leather choker beside the silver skull. I had to make the hole in the middle of the sequin a little bigger, but it was easy enough to push a wool needle from my sewing kit through and wiggle it around until it fit.
I wondered if any of the other students knew I had a sewing kit. Once, a student from Professor Bell’s ethics lecture tore his shirt sleeve while gesticulating excitedly outside the lecture hall, explaining the lecture to two nearby women (who had also been in the lecture). He took the shirt off, and threw it in the next rubbish bin they passed. It was a perfectly good shirt that would have taken thirty seconds to mend. I thought about going back later to take it out, but if anybody had ever noticed me wearing it, the humiliation would have been more than I could bear.
—
The next week, after a morning shift, The Cop told me about a hang-gliding accident. A woman had been tow-launched out of Sutton Meadows with a hang-gliding club. She had soared for hours. At some point during those hours—I guess we’ll never know how long she’d been going—she lost control, and eventually landed near Steeple Bumpstead.
That’s thirty-five miles away, and the most stupidly named place on Earth to crash down in. But The Cop relayed all the details straight-faced.
“It’s
