Jeremy Latham had always enjoyed walking his springer spaniel, Toby, along the towpath in the early morning. The unseasonably warm weather added to his pleasure as he strode along, briskly enough to get his heart rate up but not fast enough to break into a sweat. The dog trotted gaily along at his side as if he shared the mood.

But all at once the dog hesitated, the fur along his back forming a ridge, and a deep growl curled in his throat. He stared down at the water in the canal, his teeth shining red as they caught the light of the rising sun. Latham cautiously neared the edge of the canal and peered down. A body floated there.

She looked to be about twelve. Detective Sergeant James Hathaway watched from a bit of a distance as the forensics officers worked around her. He heard the crunch of car tires on gravel and shifted his view to see his boss, Detective Inspector Robert Lewis climb from his car and approach the scene. Lewis's face fell when he recognized Doctor Cook as the pathologist.

"Where's Doctor Hobson?"

Hathaway knew of Lewis's dislike of Cook. "He says she has the day off."

Lewis rolled his eyes. "Just our luck."

Hearing voices, Doctor Cook glanced up. "Ah, Inspector, good morning."

"Not for her, surely."

Cook ignored that. "Looks like she drowned, probably sometime around midnight. I'll know more after the post mortem."

Hathaway turned to the inspector. "Her name is Lynette Peters. It seems her parents had called in a missing person report earlier this morning. Said she had gone to her room around nine and then in the morning she was gone and her bedroom window was standing open."

"Right. And we get to deliver the bad news. Y'know, Hathaway, there are some parts of this job I could really do without." He scanned the scene. "You're doing a search of the area, right?"

"Yeah, they've only just started."

"Well, let's go see the parents."

It was a nice little cottage, with a small barn in the back, starting to crumble into ruin. Roses climbed the wall by the front door, though it was too early for them to be in bloom. Both men had to duck to get through the doorway and into the front hall.

Lynette's parents were hit hard by the news. They both started crying and the mother wailed loudly: "Lyn! Lyn! My little girl!" Hathaway saw Lewis flinch every time Mrs. Peters called her daughter by that name. It was the same as that of Lewis's own daughter, and he clearly found her cries disconcerting.

They were shown her room, which was neat and dainty, with pink walls, a tidily made bed, and a dresser with half-filled drawers. Mr. Peters explained that the family had moved to Oxford three months ago from Plymouth. But Lynette had trouble fitting in, and fell in with a bunch of kids that were into some bad practices. She started acting out and drinking wine coolers. "We had a row last night about her drinking. I thought she had already had one and I told her she had to stop. I'm pretty sure I smelled it on her breath when we argued. Then she slammed her door and we didn't hear anything else from her all night."

They collected her laptop, but that was the only thing they could see that might provide any clues about what happened. There was no phone, no rucksack. Mrs. Peters gave them the names she knew of Lynette's friends.

As Hathaway drove the two detectives back to the canal, Lewis stared at the passing landscape. "What did you think about all that back there? The crying? The girl's bedroom? No piles of soiled clothes, no posters, no clutter."

"No phone."

"Yeah, well, maybe she took it with her. Let's see what SOCOs have found while we were gone."

The crew on site had found an empty wine cooler bottle on the bank near where her body was found. And very little else. No personal effects at all.

As the crew were wrapping up their search, Lewis turned to his junior officer. "Hathaway, why don't you get back and see what you can get off the laptop. I'm going to go interview as many of her friends as I can find. Call if you find anything useful."

Lewis could not locate most of the people on the list. But the girl whom Lynette's mother had identified as her best friend, 'Toria, was home and more willing to talk to a policeman than Lewis had expected.

"She was unhappy, had been ever since I met her. Wouldn't say why. Right away she started drinking, not all the time but pretty often. Those fruit-flavored, wine cooler things."

"How did she get them? She's not old enough to buy them."

The girl rolled her eyes. "Everybody can get them, it's easy."

"Was she depressed enough to take her own life?"

"I don't think so. She had just met some older guy and she was so excited about that. She had this idea that he was going to change her life, take her away from her parents."

"Any idea of what his name is?"

"She never told me. She said they had to keep their relationship a secret. But he was nineteen, she told me that."

"Didn't she like her home life?"

"No, she hated her parents. Said they were too mean, too strict. But what kid doesn't think that?"

Lewis made his way back to the office. Hathaway explained that he had checked most of the computer with nothing interesting being revealed.

"But there's a locked file called 'Keep Out' that I'm stuck on. Can't guess at the password. I'll keep trying. If I could have that list of friends, maybe she used some combination of their names."

Lewis handed him the list and sighed. He began to write on the whiteboard. "What do we have here, Hathaway? Suicide? There's no evidence of that but we can't rule it out. Accident? That's most likely, especially if she'd had too much to drink. Or is it murder? Someone pushed her in?"

"There's no evidence of that, either, no known enemies or anyone with a motive."

"And no sign of a criminal force involved. But I have a bad feeling about this case I can't shake." Lewis stared out the window.

o - o - o