Free Amagansett by Mark Mills

last night.’
    ‘And didn’t come back? Stayed out? With someone?’
    ‘You know how the young people are these days.’
    It bugged him that she chose to include him with her in the ranks of the elderly.
    ‘I went home,’ she continued, ‘I made lunch for my family. Then I couldn’t stop thinking…’ She broke off, gathering herself. ‘Maybe she never came back from her swim.’
    ‘So you headed back here.’
    ‘She always leaves her swimsuit there, with the bathrobe.’ She pointed to a hook on the back of the bathroom door. ‘I should have looked earlier, I wasn’t thinking, I should have looked…’ She started to cry again.
    ‘It wouldn’t have made any difference,’ said Hollis gently. He made to rest a hand on her shoulder, but she hurried away, across the bedroom and out of the door, deep sobs resounding in the corridor. He didn’t blame her for evading his touch; he had brought her to tears again with his persistent questioning, the mildly accusatory tone designed to unsettle, to dislodge the truth.
    Well, at least he was able to throw out the theory of a missing suicide note. The deep affection Rosa clearly felt for her young mistress wouldn’t have allowed her to return home to make lunch for her family if she’d discovered such a note that morning. He couldn’t see it, it just didn’t fit.
    He turned back and surveyed the bathroom. Everything in order, as it should be, nothing that might lend weight to his gut feeling that Lillian Wallace’s death wasn’t an accident.
    Feeling foolish, his heart already going out of the matter, he crossed to the sink, filled his cupped hands with cold water from the faucet and drank, splashing his face as he did so. He caught sight of himself in the mirror, and disliked what he saw staring back at him—a nondescript man, brown hair, brown eyes, average height—no distinguishing features besides a strong inclination to see the very worst in situations and in people. To question what most were happy to take in good faith. To doubt where others trusted.
    And to what end? Not in the name of Justice; that was a lofty notion he had abandoned within a year of leaving the Academy.He knew that the true injustices in life lay far beyond the scope and remit of the police. They were merely flies buzzing around the dung heap, giving some semblance of order and activity.
    No, he was as he was because he was good at it, because that’s what he did best. And for the first time in his career he’d seen with blinding clarity that it was no longer enough of a reason to carry on doing it.
    Casting his mind back to Lillian Wallace’s bathroom, it occurred to Hollis that he wouldn’t even be there, seated at Hobbs’ desk in the morgue, if he hadn’t wet his face with water at her sink. It was in the nature of destiny that you could trace your own back to the very smallest events.
    Searching for a towel, he had spotted one hanging from a rail in the recess that housed the bath. Wandering over, he saw that there was also a toilet in the recess.
    Only after he had dried his face and replaced the towel did it leap out at him: the wooden seat of the toilet was raised, suggesting that the last person to use it had been a man.
    Hollis finally opened the autopsy report and started to read. He made notes; to ask for a copy would only alert others to his interest in the affair.
    The first section dealt with the external examination. In describing the general appearance of the corpse, Hobbs began by stating that rigor mortis was well established, suggesting a time of death somewhere between six and twenty-four hours previously. Starting at the head and working his way down the body, he noted small conjunctival hemorrhages in the eyes (green, as Hollis had guessed). These were evidence of asphyxiation, though not necessarily by water. The pinkish foam exuding from the mouth and nostrils, however, was strongly indicative of drowning, and led Hobbs to opine that the victim had been