Daniel Martin Read Online Free PDF

work.’
    ‘How revoltingly plebby of you both.’
    They grin. Daniel waves and poles on. After a few yards Jane bites her lips.
    ‘Now it’ll be all round Oxford we’re having an affiuire.’
    ‘Bet you it won’t. He’ll be too scared it’ll be all round the Bullingdon we saw him swotting.’
    ‘Poor Andrew.’
    ‘Rich Andrew.’
    ‘I always wonder what really goes on in that tiny head.’
    ‘He’s not such a fool as he sounds.’
    ‘Just a flawless imitation?’
    He laughs, as he steers the punt through the encroaching paddles of water lilies, the flowering sheets of water dropwort. The wind shakes a little shower of white petals from a thorn-tree on the bank. The girl lifts a skein of dropwort and holds it up, so that a chain of drips slides beside the punt. Then she lets it fall.
    ‘Won’t this do?’
    ‘There’s a sort of pond a bit further up. Or there was last year. Nell and I used to come here.’ She gives him a studied look over the tops of her dark glasses. He shrugs and smiles. ‘Just for a quiet alfresco snog.’
    ‘How revoltingly pastoral of you both.’
    He smirks. A sedge-warbler chatters ahead in the reeds, he swings the punt round a first projecting screen. Beyond, a much denser curtain of reeds and bulrushes stretches across the water.
    ‘Damn. It’s got overgrown. I’ll just have one bash.’
    He sinks the pole and thrusts with all his weight at where there seems most water between the barring stems. The girl gives a little scream as they crash into the first green barrier, bows her head protectively in her hands. The flat prow pushes some three yards in, then hits a soft obstruction, rises slightly, stops.
    ‘Bugger.’
    Jane turns and looks forward over the side. And then as he tries to extract his pole from the mud her head flashes round, her mouth open, incredulous, horror-struck.
    ‘Daniel!’
    She buries her face in her hands.
    ‘Jane?’
    ‘Go back, go back.’
    ‘What’s up?’
    She twists away to the far side of the punt, her hand over her nose and mouth.
    ‘Oh I can smell it. Please go back.’
    But he leaves the pole, steps forward over the slatted seatback, cranes beside her; and sees.
    Just beneath the surface of the water, pushed down by the punt’s nose, a naked human buttock, greyish-white. There is an opening in the reeds where the back and head must lie. The bottoms of the legs are in the water, invisible beneath the punt.
    Christ.
    ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’
    He turns hastily, forces her head forward, down to her knees; then scrambles back to the rear of the punt, frantically jerks the pole out of the mud, nearly overbalances, recovers, begins levering back. The punt hesitates, then slides back free of the reeds. He sees the hideous, obscure shape bob slowly to the surface.
    ‘Jane, are you all right?’
    She stays with her head down, but gives a small nod. He manoeuvres the punt awkwardly round, then thrusts it violently away back towards the river, round the first stand of reeds, then alongside the bank, jamming it secure with the pole. He kneels beside the girl.
    ‘Are you all right?’
    She nods, then slowly looks up at him, and in a strange gesture takes off her dark glasses, and stares at him.
    Oh Dan.
    ‘How bloody horrible.’
    ‘It…’
    ‘I know.’
    For a moment they stare at each other’s death-riven incomprehension; their shattered morning world. He presses her hands, then looks back towards the mouth of the cut. ‘I’d better tell Andrew.’
    ‘Yes, okay. I’m all right now.’
    He stares at her anxiously a moment more, then stands and jumps ashore. He runs through the long grass towards the river; looks back once. The girls sits with her head bowed on her drawn-up knees, as if to shut out sight.
    ‘Andrew! Andrew!’
    Their two faces through the willow-leaves; he stands on the bank above them.
    ‘We’ve just found a body in the water.’
    ‘A what!’
    ‘A body. A dead body. I think it’s a woman. In the