Judith returned her attention to the body and saw that Oliver was wearing a watch on his left wrist. The hands on the dial were set to just after six o'clock. The fact that the second hand wasn't moving suggested to Judith that Oliver's body had gone into the river shortly after 6 p.m. the night before. Assuming that the watch had stopped when Oliver had gone into the river, of course.
Next she noticed there were deep cuts and bruising on the insides of his wrist and forearm around the watch strap.
"We should get you away from here," Judith said, turning toward Verity, which allowed her to peer over Oliver's back toward his other arm. His right wrist and forearm were similarly marked. He'd been in a fight of some sort before he died, Judith surmised. Or maybe the wounds had been administered postmortem? Looking back down at the hand nearest to her, however, she could see there was something embedded in one of the cuts across his palm. It looked like the thinnest sliver of dark red wood.
It's amazing what you can discover while comforting a grieving widow, Judith thought to herself. But before she could inspect the body any further, two police cars and an ambulance started bumping across the field and pulled up by the onlookers.
First out of the lead police car was an efficient-looking woman in a smart gray suit, her glossy black hair tied up in a tight ponytail. Her name was Detective Inspector Tanika Malik. She led her officers toward the river at speed, crisply telling her team to secure the scene, move the onlookers on, and establish a perimeter, but she slowed to a stop as she saw Judith kneeling by the dead body.
"Not you," Tanika said in disbelief.
Judith smiled an apology that both women knew wasn't remotely sincere.
CHAPTER THREE
While Tanika and her team worked the scene, Judith made sure that she joined the other witnesses so she wouldn't get in the way. It also allowed her to phone her two friends Becks Starling and Suzie Harris.
"Bloody hell," Suzie said as soon as she arrived, taking in the shocking view of the dead body.
"The poor man, just lying there like that," Becks said once Judith had explained how she'd ended up at the scene.
"Hold on," Suzie said. "His wife came to see you because her husband hadn't come home?"
Suzie was a local dog walker, and she found almost nothing alarming, least of all the revelation that under the polished exteriors of so many people, there lay black hearts capable of committing murder.
"She did," Judith said.
"Then she's the killer," Suzie said, her feet planted foursquare on the ground as she gave her ruling.
"Yes, I was wondering that myself," Judith said. "It's all rather coincidental, isn't it? She comes to get help and claims she's upset by her husband's absence. Then, when his body's later found, she can rely on me to say that she was desperately trying to find him, which rather implies she didn't know he was dead."
"I can't believe you'd think that so quickly," Becks said, appalled by her friend's cynicism. Becks was the vicar of Marlow's wife, and of the three of them, she found their brushes with murder the most challenging. "She was worried her husband had disappeared; of course she'd come to you."
"Are you kidding me?" Suzie said. "Most women I know, if their husbands didn't come home for the night, they'd be opening the champagne."
"I do think Suzie has a point," Judith said. "At the very least, it's odd that her thoughts turned so quickly to wrongdoing that she felt the need to get me involved."
"I suppose so," Becks conceded. "And the thing is, I knew Oliver Beresford a bit, and I could imagine him having any number of enemies. He was something of a force of nature," she added with a shudder. "Some would even say tyrannical."
"Was this through the church?" Judith asked.
"It was. For reasons I don't fully understand, Oliver's always been in charge of the Christmas Nativity play. But he's just not suited to it. At one point, he made Joseph cry for forgetting his lines. And, now I think about it, last year he pushed the angel Gabriel off the stage altogether. He didn't mean to— or that's what he said. Apparently he only meant to move him to the correct position, but it was still awful."
"He sounds horrible," Suzie said.
This excerpt is from the eBook edition.
