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better call for Carter,’ said
Dan. ‘This is police business now. I stood up. The feel of Oliver’s cool, soft
flesh still haunted my fingertips. The water seemed to stir, and Oliver’s body
stirred too, still dressed in his Six-Million-Dollar Man pyjamas.
    ‘Oh, Christ,’ I said. ‘This is too
much for one day. This is all too goddamned much. Look at this poor kid.’
    Dan stood up too, and nodded. ‘I
don’t know what happened here. It sure looks like he drowned. Although how in
hell anybody managed to fill up the whole bedroom with water, I don’t have any
idea. It couldn’t have been done slowly, either. The window isn’t sealed, and
neither is the door.’
    ‘We’d better check the other rooms,’
I said, unenthusiastically. ‘Supposing Jimmy and Alison are
    - well, supposing something’s
happened to them, too?’
    ‘Okay,’ said Dan. He looked about as
keen to go searching for more bodies as I was. ‘I guess you’d better bring the
flashlight.’
    We left poor young Oliver Bodine’s
body where it was, and splashed back on to the landing. We tried the master
bedroom first, but apart from water stains on the rug where the wet had crept
in from outside, it was quite dry, and empty. The
brass colonial bed with the pink bedspread was neatly made, and nobody had
slept in it. On the dark pine dressing-table, Alison’s hairbrush and
hand-mirror and bottles of perfume remained undisturbed, and on the wall by the
carved pine closet was a colour photograph of Jimmy and Oliver on the beach at
Cape Cod. I shone the flashlight on it, and then looked at Dan, and shrugged.
    We tried the next two bedrooms. They
were both empty, both reasonably dry, both untouched.
    We gave them a nervous onceover,
opening the cupboard doors as if we expected to find monsters lurking in them,
and then retreated to the sodden landing. The water was slowly beginning to
subside, and it was clear that it hadn’t come from a burst pipe at all.
    ‘It seems to me that Oliver’s room
was filled up with water somehow, but that was all the flooding there was,’ I
said. ‘Now his room’s emptied out, that’s it. There’s no leak, no fractured
tank, no damaged faucet, nothing.’
    Dan turned towards me with an
expression on his face that made him look like an anxious Humpty Dumpty. ‘Who
did it, though?’ he asked me. ‘And what’s even more pertinent, how did they
manage it? I just don’t see how anybody could physically fill up a room with
water. It’s impossible.’
    ‘We haven’t looked at the bathroom
yet,’ I reminded him. ‘Maybe there was some kind of freak back-up in the
pipes.’
    ‘You don’t believe that any more
than I do.’
    I took out my cigarillos and offered
one to Dan. He shook his head. ‘I have to start rationalizing sometime,’ I told
him, taking out a book of matches from The Cattle Yard. ‘I might as well start
now.’
    We opened the bathroom door. It was
noticeably cold in there, not just ordinary winter-evening cold, but damply and
clammily cold. I sniffed, and even though I was smoking a cigarillo, I was sure
that I could detect that odd, unpleasant odour of metallic fish, the same smell
as the sample of water that I had brought out from the house only this
afternoon.
    ‘Do you smell that?’ I asked Dan.
    He nodded.
    ‘What does it remind you of?’ I
said.
    He had a long think. Then he said:
‘Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco, on my last vacation.
    Shellfish and diesel fuel, all mixed up.’
    ‘Me too,’ I told him.
    The shower curtain was drawn across
the tub. It was misty plastic, with pictures of turquoise fish swimming across
it. I shone the flashlight that way, but there didn’t appear to be anybody in
there. I stepped across the cork floor and pulled the shower curtain back.
    Lying in the bath was something that
looked like a thin, bony helmet. It was larger than a helmet
    - in fact,
you would have needed a head that was twice the normal size to wear it. But it
had that kind of