Since her retirement to York, Mandy had taken to walking along the towpath as soon as she woke up in the morning. It was important to keep to a routine so, regardless of the weather, she went out every day before breakfast. The walk was a pleasant one, and she enjoyed observing the changes of the seasons. The trees were beginning to turn golden and brown, and the sky was overcast more often than not. Glancing down at the river bank that morning, her attention was caught by a blue creature moving gently up and down on the water. Looking more closely, she realised that what she was looking at was not an unusually brightly coloured fish, nor even a strange bird, but an item of clothing caught in the fronds of a river weed. As she stared at it, she was shocked to see what looked like a hand protruding from one end of a blue sleeve. She closed her eyes, and let out an involuntary cry on opening them again, because she had not been mistaken. Concealed within a sodden sleeve was a human arm, perhaps still attached to a corpse hidden below the water.

Mandy looked around frantically for someone to help her but she was alone on the towpath. With trembling fingers, she pulled out her phone and called the emergency services to report what she had spotted in the river.

‘Yes, a dead body… yes, I’m sure it’s dead,’ she faltered, after giving her name and location as precisely as she could. ‘That is, I can only see one hand, but that’s definitely dead. That’s all I can see of it, a hand. Everything else is out of sight under the water… no, I haven’t touched anything… yes, I’m sure it’s dead.’ She did not need to look at the hand again to describe it in detail. ‘The skin’s kind of green and grey.’

It seemed to take a long time for the police to arrive. Meanwhile, a couple of other people had walked past along the towpath. Mandy made no attempt to detain them. She could not bear to draw attention to her horrible discovery, which might entail her having to find it and look at it again. In addition, she had a vague notion that the site ought not to be disturbed before the police had a chance to examine it for clues. There could be a significant footprint in the earth that would lead investigating detectives to the killer, assuming there had been a murder, and someone stepping forward to peer at the body might trample all over such vital evidence. So Mandy stood beside the river at the side of the towpath, like a mute sentinel guarding her hidden plunder, while pedestrians and cyclists passed by oblivious of her macabre vigil.