whispering had started within hours, the gossips conducted like a WI choir by Gwendoline Owen. Everyone quickly knew each small detail.
And now they had a diversion. Bianca Rhys found drowned in a pond little larger than a child’s paddling pool. Megan chewed her sandwich thoughtfully and pictured Alun wading in to recover the body. His trousers had only been wet to the knees. Even if Bianca had fallenin she could have stood up and climbed out. Megan frowned. So it was not like the Hood poem, In she plunged boldly - no matter how coldly? Neither had it been the accidental drowning of Clementine, Hit her foot against a splinter. Fell into the foaming brine.
She smiled. Even with the most poetic imagination the Slaggy Pool could hardly be described as “foaming brine”.
She finished her sandwich and opened the packet containing her flapjack just as her mobile phone rang.
She fished around for it in her bag. “Hello?” She was never at her best responding to it when the number display read Anonymous. She liked to know to whom she would be talking and always answered with a cautious, “Hello?”
“Doctor Banesto?”
“Yes.” The voice was unknown.
“Franklin Jones-Watson here.”
The name meant nothing to her. “Yes?”
“We haven’t met before …” A soft, educated, Cardiff voice. “I’m the pathologist here at The Princess of Wales Hospital. I’ve just finished the post mortem on a patient I believe was yours who drowned earlier this week. The police said you were first on the scene.”
It was as though a stone had been thrown into the deep, dark waters; ripples forming on its surface. “We are talking about Bianca Rhys, are we?”
“Yes. I understand from the Coroner’s Office that she had a bit of a medical history.”
“She was a schizophrenic.”
A pause.
Her turn to ask a question. “How long did you think she’d been in the water for?”
“Hard to say. About twelve hours, I think.”
“But I’d have thought her body would have …”
“Floated? It was near the surface but according to the police the dress was caught in an old pushchair that had been dumped. And there was some stone thing in the pocket.”
“Her body was weighted?”
“Well - yes. No - not really, the stone wasn’t that heavy.”
“You’re telling me you think she might have drowned herself? Deliberately?”
“Hard to say. I’ve sent some serum for barbiturates. Hit her head nasty on something in the bottom of the pool too.”
Megan felt a tightening of the muscle at the back of her neck. “She had a head injury?”
“Done at round about the point of death.”
“But you’re not suspicious about it?”
“Good gracious me no. No … No I don’t think so. I mean you never know with these people what they’re going to do next. Talk about unpredictable. Gets hard for us to work it out. How can we ever know what is in the mind of someone who is psychotic?”
“So you’re saying …?”
“Balance of mind was disturbed. I can call it accidental death. Easier for the relatives, you know. No need to call it suicide. She might have collected the piece of stone out of interest or as a talisman, or even because she thought it was the currency of Llancloudy.” He laughed. “Who can know? Anyway. Poor woman. Died quickly. Dry drowning. Not a drop in the lungs at all.”
“She didn’t even draw breath?”
“No. Usual vagal inhibition. Shock really.”
Megan didn’t know whether to be relieved Bianca hadn’t drowned or concerned as she said goodbye to thepathologist. She put her phone back in bag, gathered up her things and returned to her car.
And so through tacit agreement between GP and pathologist the verdict was passed.
The coroner would not argue.
Schizophrenics can be so tantalising, sliding in and out of the truth. Fantasising with the assurance of sane fact, yet terrified of water. And yet Bianca’s most irrational delusion had turned out to be rational after all.
Chapter