River Deep by Priscilla Masters

was she away?”
    Randall nodded.
    “He didn’t even ring work?”
    “No. Said he felt too ill.”
    “What’s he like?” she asked curiously.
    “Just what you’d expect. Slightly paunchy, well-dressed, plausible.”
    “And can he shed any light on our dead man?”
    “Nope.”
    They descended the steps, still gritty with river-debris, and though she had been told there was no longer any danger, and that the waters were receding, Martha still felt apprehensive as they paddled along the narrow pathway to the row of cottages. Unidentified objects swept past them in the river, impossible to identify. The flow was too fast and in the dwindling light they looked like brown icebergs, indistinct, while the water was murky and mud-stained . The town was still quiet, even the traffic somehow subdued. No one was driving fast. And as they crossed the bridge motorists were glancing down at the river as though they still didn’t trust it. They reached number seven.
    Apart from the police tape threaded through spikes around the front door, rattling in the wind, Marine Terrace looked innocent, nothing like a murder scene, masquerading again as a pretty, seaside cottage. But from the moment Alex Randall pushed the front door open the illusion was gone and she breathed in the murky scent of a river bed and its foul secrets. Which, had it not been for the invasion of the River Severn, might have been preserved a little longer.
    So she pushed aside the image of seaside towns, Whitby or Tenby, Lyme Regis, Scarborough or Skegness, andinstead toyed again with the thought: When
would
Humphreys have discovered his visitor?
    When the scent became too strong? When Calliphora’s thousand and one eggs hatched, filling the cottage with bluebottles?
    What was down there to draw him down into the cellar? A bottle of wine? A fuse box? Nothing? Or had it been a place to hide the victim of
his
crime? Would
anyone
be so crass as to hide a body in their own cellar?
    Randall flashed a torch around the room. And this afternoon, more powerfully than before, in the cold and the wet, she was even more conscious of flood damage. She put her hand over her nose and mouth to try and block the stench but she could still taste it through her fingers. Something dead, something rotting. From beneath the ground. This must be the scent of a grave. She felt bound say something. “Unpleasant, isn’t it?” He agreed with a nod, reluctant to open his mouth and taste what he too could smell.
    There is a false image conjured up by the word ‘flood’, of sparkling, clean blue river-water rinsing out one’s home. Reality is quite different. The wall was marked two feet up – inside as well as out. The carpet squelched underneath their feet, making a sucking noise and sticking to their feet as they walked through sludge. It reminded her of Irish bogs her mother had told her folk tales about, featuring will-o’-the-wisps and leprechauns, pixies and fairies who lured small girls into the sucking, drowning mud. But while her father had told her mother off for telling such stories he had had tales of his own, of Druids and Bards, of babies who were left on mountains to die and wolves who lived in the forests and preyed on the unwary and weak, the children and old people, dragging their bones to their lairs. Martha shook herself. But the air still strokedher face with ice-fingers and she felt an echo of a little girl’s fear – of the cold, the dark, the unknown. It was a terror adults rarely experience.
    Even the windows were coated in green slime, as were the few items of furniture, the three piece suite, a small coffee table. The atmosphere was as fetid as a river bed. “What a shame,” she murmured. “What a terrible shame. Who would have thought it would be so very awful? And these are such pretty cottages in the summer.”
    Not only the summer.
She had walked this way late one Christmas Eve, seen holly wreaths dangling from the door, spied into a cosy,