1
Chapter
One
Lady
Luck
A lone fisherman
up early looking for sea trout found the first body. The fisherman
was thinking what a beautiful day it was going to be. The pinkgold
rays of a cinematic dawn were gleaming on the dark metallic surface
of the sea when he netted the unwanted catch on his little boat,
the Lucky Lady. He was not a man given to superstition and yet in the
semi-dark he thought he saw silver scales and seaweed hair and
believed for one wild, terrible moment that he had caught a
mermaid. When he hooked her and pulled her towards the boat,
however, he saw it was no mermaid but the bloated body of a woman,
draped in what remained of a silver-lamé evening dress. Seaweed was
entangled in long hair which looked dark, but by the time he had
got her to shore was already drying to a bleached-out
blond.
He grabbed hold of
her hand to help her on board the Lucky Lady but her skin peeled off
her arm like a long satin glove. The fisherman had to leave her in
the water a little longer while he retched over the side of his
boat. She drifted lazily off, she was in no hurry, she had been
dead five days now and was getting used to her watery element. She
was already beginning to suffer a sea-change, her bones were not
yet coral but her one remaining eye was an opaque pearl and flat
strands of seaweed, crimped at the edges like ribbons, adorned her
long tendrils of hair. A whole flotilla of tiny, greedy
sea-creatures had seen the early-morning mermaid into safe
harbour.
2
The woman was
finally brought to shore and logged by a pale Constable Collins at
6.32 a.m. precisely. After an undignified struggle to get her out
of the boat, the policeman finally lifted her dead-weighted body
ashore in his arms. He thought of the warm body of his wife still
asleep in their bed in their little modern house and his sky-blue
eyes clouded over. What had she meant last night when she’d rolled
over in bed and stared at him unpleasantly and said she was dying
of boredom? One thing was certain: it couldn’t be worse than death
by drowning.
Flashing blue
lights guided Inspector Gannet down to the harbour where a crowd of
holiday-makers were craning their necks to try and get a view of
the excitement. So, yes, Jack Gannet thought, this is how it begins
. .