Page 3 of The Fall

3

SATURDAY

Olly

Olly wades into the pool and swims towards the body, which is bobbing in the deep end, face down. The water drags at Olly’s clothes. He’s a poor swimmer.

It’s a natural pool, beautifully landscaped, the edges planted with iris and reeds alive with iridescent dragonflies. If circumstances were different, it would be like wading into paradise, which is how Olly felt last week when he and Tom sat on the deck out here drinking beers and taking a dip whenever they got too hot, or just for the hell of it. They didn’t have much in common, it turned out, but who needs to when a pink sunset and alcohol soften the edges of an evening? You just put your head back, close your eyes and life feels good, even if your companion is talking about the smart features of his swimming pool lighting and how the engine of his car was tuned based ondata from motorsport races and all you want to discuss is Hemingway’s prose.

Olly reaches Tom and tries to flip him onto his back, but it’s too difficult while he’s out of his depth, so he takes the sleeve of Tom’s polo shirt and swims then walks, pulling the body towards the steps, where he drags Tom partially out of the water, twisting him so that he’s face up, before collapsing exhausted. He reaches to feel for a pulse in Tom’s neck, noticing how mushy and white Tom’s skin looks, like toes that have been in bathwater too long; he looks closely at a wound on Tom’s hairline, a small bump, the skin damaged but not broken enough to bleed. He isn’t surprised to feel nothing. Tom has well and truly gone. There’s no trace of the man left in this soggy lump of flesh and clothing.

Olly sits on the steps beside the body, feeling the sun beating down onto his head and warming his wet clothes. He pushes his dripping hair back off his face and thinks of Sartre’s words about the death of Camus, the ‘unbearable absurdity’ of it. This feels like a perfect illustration of that. The luxury of this place, the beauty of the setting, and at the centre of it all, a pudgy corpse in overpriced, ugly designer clothing. It makes Olly feel strangely powerful to witness this and to think these thoughts. It’s profound, he thinks. He wasn’t expecting that.

Sasha arrives, panting. Standing at the edge of the pool she casts a shadow over him. ‘He’s dead,’ he says, and notices Tom’s body looks like it might drift back into the pool. ‘Help me.’

They take a side each, put their hands under Tom’s armpits and drag him to a more secure position. His head lolls and Sasha straightens it. As if he’s a doll, Olly thinks.

‘How did you find him?’ she asks.

‘Over there.’ He points to the deep end of the pool.

‘What do we do?’ Sasha is very solution focused, sometimes to a tiring extent. Olly prefers to have time to consider things, to muse.

‘We wait,’ he says. ‘As if for Godot.’

‘What?’ she asks, and he says, ‘We wait for the ambulance.’

She sits on the side of the pool, hugging her knees. Olly notices Tom’s shoes lying beside the pool. He gets out and his clothes drip, forming a puddle around his feet. He wants to take his T-shirt off, but he’s embarrassed by his scrawny figure and doesn’t want to be judged by the paramedics when they arrive. He considers borrowing something of Tom’s before realising that it’s not a good idea to be wearing the dead man’s clothes.

The sound of an approaching vehicle cuts through the birdsong and the drone of insects. Olly nods at Sasha and walks around the side of the house. A police car pulls in as he gets there, which surprises him. He understood that Nicole had called for an ambulance, but perhaps the emergency services operator sent both. He wonders what Nicole said, to trigger that. Perhaps it’s just protocol.

The driver cuts the ignition, and Olly takes a breath. He’s surprised to find he’s a little nervous about answering their questions correctly. I guess, he thinks, this is where I find out if I’m a good witness, or not. A writer should be, he believes, because a writer observes.

A female and a male officer get out of the car. Both put on hats. They look as if they’re going to overheat quickly in their uniforms.

‘I’m the neighbour,’ Olly says before they’ve even spoken. ‘Olly Palmer. I live in Lancaut Manor, the house just up the lane. This is Sasha, my partner. Nicole, who called you, she’s the wife of Tom, the guy in the pool, Tom Booth. She ran to our house when she discovered him, and we came here to see if we could help but he was already dead.’

They look at his wet trousers and T-shirt, which are clinging to his body. He might as well be naked. He feels acutely self-conscious and plucks his T-shirt away from his skin. ‘I tried to pull him out of the pool,’ he says. ‘In case, you know, he wasn’t dead. But he was.’ Neither of them replies; they look up at the house. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘It’s amazing.’ He laughs. They don’t. Shut up, Olly tells himself. You sound like a jerk.

The female officer is about his own age, Olly reckons, average height, slim as a whippet, much like himself, and too young for her blonde hair to be thinning as much as it is. Her partner is a big lad, older, way older. Olly feels intimidated by male authority figures and this guy is no exception. ‘Lead the way?’ the man asks, nicely enough but his eyes look dead, and instead of feeling important, as he was beginning to, Olly feels small and put in his place.

He shows them around the side of the house. Sasha has moved away from the pool and is standing by a pot blooming with fuchsia, popping the flowers between finger and thumb. She looks stressed as she introduces herself and Olly feels for her. He thinks that he needs to remind himself sometimes that she’s not as well read or educated as him, not as accustomed to considering the darker, more complex things in life like he is when he’s writing. He should have sent her home and dealt with this alone.

The police look at the body. The female officer pulls on a plastic glove and checks Tom’s pulse. She shakes her head.

‘The ambulance is coming,’ Sasha says.

‘Too late for that,’ the male officer says. ‘Did you find him like this?’

Olly explains what happened, how he pulled the body from the deep end to the steps. ‘I wanted to get his head out of the water,’ he adds because he’d like them to know he didn’t move Tom thoughtlessly.

‘Did you see any signs of life?’

‘Zilch.’ Zip, nada, niente, the words run on in his head. A quote from a film. What was it now? No, don’t try to think of it. Focus.

The female officer strips off her glove with a snap. The male officer stares at the body dispassionately. Olly wonders how many corpses the officers have seen. The male officer steps away and mutters into his radio. Olly feels empowered to talk to the female. He approaches her beside the pool. She’s staring intently at it. ‘What happens now?’ he asks.

‘Step away, sir, please,’ she says, pointing to a spot beside Sasha where she wants him to stand.

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