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Ann Cleeves

The Sleeping and the Dead

© 2001

Prologue

She had the lake to herself. She wasn’t given to fancies, but on a morning like this she knew the water was what she was born for. The water, then her and the canoe. Like they were one creature, one of the strange animals out of the myths they’d had to read when they were at school. But she wasn’t half horse. She was half boat.

The spray deck was fastened so tightly round her waist that every movement she made with her upper body was reflected in the canoe, and if she capsized her legs would stay quite dry. Not that there was any chance of that today. The sun was already burning off the last of the mist and the lake was flat. There were mirror images of mountains all the way up the valley. The blades of her paddle sliced sharply through the water, pushing her back towards the shore.

The water level must have dropped again because the row of staithes, which had only recently appeared running out from the beach, seemed more prominent. She turned the canoe towards them, partly out of curiosity, partly to put off the moment of her return to the school. The figure floated just under the surface, moving gently. From a distance she’d thought it a piece of polythene. She tilted the paddle so one blade was submerged and pushed against the pressure of the water to stop the canoe. Still interested. Not scared. Waiting for the silt to clear. Then she found she was shaking and held on to the wooden post with her free hand to steady herself. It was as if she’d stumbled into a bad horror movie. The corpse swaying below her was white, like a wax, witchcraft effigy.

PART ONE

Chapter One

Peter Porteous walked to work.

It was still a novelty. He liked it all, the overgrown hedges, birdsong, cow muck not dog muck on the road. Having made the decision to walk, he walked every day. Whatever the weather. Even in this heat. He was a man of routine. On the edge of the town he went into the newsagent’s by the bridge to buy the Independent. He checked the time on the church clock. In the office he would drink a mug of decaffeinated coffee and begin to sift through the overnight reports before meeting his team at the ten o’clock briefing. And at the briefing he knew there would be nothing to cause anxiety. Cranford was a small town. The team covered a huge geographical area, but there was seldom the sense of being swamped by uncontrollable events which he had experienced in his previous post. That was why he had transferred to Cranford and that was why he would enjoy it. He knew colleagues who functioned better under pressure but he hated panic and chaos. Stress scared him. He had designed his working life to avoid it.

He was waiting for the kettle to boil for his coffee when the telephone rang.

‘Porteous. ’ He continued to make neat, pithy notes in the margin of the report on his desk.

‘We’ve got a body, sir. ’