It wasn’t a crime anyone had asked him to solve, but he was the person who had seen something strange in the water. To first notice the oddly shaped buoy bobbing near the edge of the lake. Roberto had turned left at a slight change in the wind when he saw it, being pushed by fate towards the shore. Towards him. He waded in. The body was painfully bloated. Even its black pores were stretched. As he turned her over, pink water pooled in the dips above her collarbones and he saw the twin bulbs of her breasts had swollen into one ugly lump. Her hair was ruined and looked like a claggy drain rag riddled with knots. Her fingertips were tightly shrivelled. Squishy nails, green and furry at the cuticles, steadily rotting up towards the tips. A helicopter filled with tourists chopped through the summer sky. From that high up, Roberto thought, he and the corpse must look like flies stranded in a strawberry milkshake.
Mireille looked down from her favourite dune and saw Roberto in the lake. She let the sand sift through her fingers as she watched the sun go down. The African sunset foreigners made so much of. Her watch seemed to tighten around her wrist when she saw him. She looked at its face. Two hours until their rendezvous. She hoped he wouldn’t be late. As Mireille herself had explained, she was like a car and needed to be serviced. She’d enjoyed a certain standard and frequency of sex in the thirty-four legal years that she’d been having it.
