Not Dead Yet

from a clear sky. A pair of coots paddled jerkily out of a tall screen of reeds, curious but seemingly unconcerned about the divers. He watched a water boatman, about an inch long, sculling along just beneath him. Startled by a light splash from a fish rising, he looked back towards the middle of the lake and saw the concentric ripples where it had been.
    Two divers were entering the water, one on the right and one on the left, each holding a black and red underwater recovery bag. They were in scuba outfits, with bright yellow harnesses from which a green and yellow cord trailed up to a spool held by an attendant, also in a dry suit, for each of them. A dive supervisor stood observing. Glenn, standing near him, watched as they sank below the surface in a maelstrom of bubbles.
    This was a beautiful, peaceful place, he thought. There were worse places to spend a day. A fly-fishing club – William Pitcher had explained the difference between fly fishing and coarse fishing. As Branson now understood, anglers would only cast their feather trout flies on the surface; there were no weights to drag them down to the bottom. Whatever lay beneath could remain undiscovered for years, perhaps for ever. Making this a smart choice for a deposition site?
    Behind him, he heard rubber-soled footsteps clumping along the wooden boards, then Bella’s voice. ‘This is so beautiful!’ she said.
    ‘Yeah,’ he replied, with a grimace, still very churned up from thephone call. He could understand at this moment how people could murder their spouses.
    Bella stood beside him and nodded, with a strangely sad smile. ‘Ever fished?’ she asked him.
    ‘No, not my thing. Not sure I’d have the patience. You?’
    ‘I prefer to catch mine already battered, with plenty of chips.’
    He laughed, and then they began to chat more easily, although she still seemed more distant and less responsive today than last night. Perhaps it was him who was distracted, by his troubles with Ari and his constant longing for his kids – or perhaps she was fretting about her mother?
    After some minutes, Jon Lelliott began wading out of the water towards them, holding a recovery bag with strands of weed hanging from it. He carried it across to the small SOCO tent which had been erected close by the SSU lorry.
    Watched by Glenn and several others, he unzipped the bag very carefully. It contained what looked at first like a thin, dark-coloured log. It was only when Glenn looked closer that he could see clearly exactly what it was. A black bin bag, tied with fuse wire, wrapped around a long, narrow object, with something white protruding from the end.
    A hairless human hand.
    Glenn flinched in revulsion, but Bella stared at it with professional detachment. ‘Left hand. It doesn’t look at all decomposed, I would say it’s not been in the water very long,’ she stated with certainty in her voice.
    Although he’d attended a number of grim crime scenes, Glenn had not, to his relief, had to deal with many dismembered corpses before. Even so, it didn’t require any expertise to tell that this was not the work of someone with surgical skills. The partial limb looked like it had been hacked off with a blunt blade – the bone was splintered and there were tendrils of muscle and skin hanging around the end like a ragged fringe. It could almost have been a theatre prop, he thought. Or something from a joke shop. There was no smell of decay coming from it, another indicator that Bella was probably right that it had not been long in the water.
    In which case, he thought, disappointed, it was unlikely to be connected to the torso from the chicken farm which had been there many months.
    ‘Twenty-four hours, tops,’ David Green said, joining them around the table. ‘I would say much less. Otherwise crayfish, rats, voles or pike – if there are any – would have started taking nibbles from the exposed flesh. I’m actually surprised nothing’s had a go at it already – crayfish are normally present within a couple of hours.’
    ‘Unless there are more body parts down there which are keeping them happy,’ Bella said.
    ‘Quite,’ Green agreed.
    There were indeed more down there.
    During the next hour and a half, the police divers recovered the rest of the left arm up to the shoulder, the lower right arm and hand, also severed at the elbow, and the rest of that, too. As well as both legs, each chopped into three parts. But no head.
    Each body part had been wrapped