by Jack Benton
He took the offered folder and laid it across his lap. ‘Thanks.’
She sighed, staring out of the windscreen at the view down over the Dart valley. ‘I need to cut ties with you, Slim,’ she said. ‘I’m putting my career on the line doing this, and I can’t afford to get caught. I’m sorry. I have two young children….’
Slim nodded. ‘I understand. Do you want me to leave the house?’
Marion shook her head. ‘I can give you another week. There’s a warrant out for your arrest. Keep your head down.’
‘The misdemeanours—’
Marion put up a hand. ‘Whatever you find, take it to a higher authority. Take it direct to Cornwall and Devon Constabulary in Plymouth. It might get you an easier run.’
Slim wasn’t sure he believed that, but it sounded that he was in the clear for suspicion of murder at least. He would deal with the rest when it came to it.
‘Can I leave you here?’ Marion said, nodding at the door. ‘I fear being seen with you, and I’ve disabled radio contact long enough that my sarge might ask questions.’
‘Sure.’ Slim started to open the door, then paused. ‘One thing, please. I saw you, that first night.’
‘You saw me?’
‘I was drunk, delirious. I saw a figure dive into the water. It was you, wasn’t it?’
‘Slim….’
‘Tell me, damn you. I can’t solve anything if I’m forever drowning in secrets. I thought you must have had a boat, but you were naked, I was sure of it. It made no sense at the time, and it makes little now, but … you swam across that river, didn’t you? Somehow you swam across that river.’
Marion stared at him for several seconds. Slim expected her to brush him off, or worse, renege on her decision to help him and arrest him instead.
‘None of us are perfect,’ she said at last. ‘At least by society’s standards. But then, sometimes what we believe is a curse might actually be a gift. Your drinking, for example.’
Slim held her stare, understanding. ‘I despise it,’ he said, ‘and I despise myself every time I stumble, every time I go back to it. It’ll kill me one day, I’m sure, but sometimes … there are cases I wouldn’t have solved without the insight it gives me, that alternative train of thought. I dream of leaving it behind, but sometimes I wonder … if I would be leaving behind a part of what I am. What made me.’
Marion shifted in the seat and Slim frowned, wondering if something in his words had made her flinch. Then, as she leaned down, reaching into the foot well, he realised what she had done.
Kicked off her shoe.
‘I have my own curse,’ she said, pulling off a sock to reveal a pale white foot. ‘One which, in certain circumstances, could be considered a gift. From a great-great-grandmother, down to me.’
Slim stared. Marion flexed her toes, and there, extending between each, Slim saw perfect semi-circles of skin.
56
‘Webbed feet?’
Slim nodded. ‘I need to know if that’s some kind of hereditary condition, and anything you can find on it. Recorded medical case studies, names of people afflicted, literally anything.’
‘Slim … are you sure you’re all right down there? I mean, this is pretty out-there stuff.’
‘Don, I know it. I’m at a point where I can’t believe anything I hear or read, but if I sift through enough dirt, I might find gold.’
‘You know how many prospectors probably said that, and how many actually found it?’
Slim gave the phone a tired smile. ‘I don’t, but I expect you could tell me.’
‘Almost all of them. You could quit on this one, you know. Sometimes a case can’t be closed.’
‘I know that too. I’m giving it another week, then I’m done.’
‘Well, call me back tomorrow. I’ll pull an all-nighter if I have to, but you’ll owe me for this.’
‘I’ll add it to the account.’
‘Speak soon, Slim.’
Don hung up. Slim sighed as he stared at the payphone handset, wondering if Don was right. Perhaps he should save himself a fruitless week and walk into the nearest police station, face whatever music was due, and perhaps get a decent wash.
He took a ferry back across the river to Kingswear, holing himself up in his favourite café to look over the notes Marion had given him.
It was as she had said, mostly trivial stuff, crime scene photographs, autopsy reports for both Max Carson and Irene Long, the results of blood samples, transcripts of interviews with a number of people who might have seen either in their last few days. Slim was amused to find his own interview in there, but of the others there was little revelation: most were interviews with other tour customers, as well as some hotel staff and the two tour reps. Slim browsed them one by one, finding nothing noteworthy; Carson had raised a few hackles but had done nothing worse than act with the obnoxiousness his reputation suggested.
And concerning Irene, there was only Slim’s interview to work with. Marion had included a few scribbled notes mentioning possible sightings, but it was clear that of the two, Irene’s death had been far more quickly written off as suicide. Slim stared at the autopsy report, wondering what he might be missing. Blood tests revealed Irene had been on several types of medication, as she had told him herself. He could no longer recall the names of any, nor even if she had told him. In any case, they were listed only as chemical components, rather than brands or common store-used names.
He scratched a mark beside them with a pencil. It might be worth checking, just in case.
So Carson had gone out there to the old bridge because he wanted to screw a mermaid. It was unique, for certain, albeit—having briefly met the man—something Slim could believe. For a philandering, drug-addicted radio host with a history of affairs and misdemeanours, it was almost trivial.
But somehow he had ended up dead.
Eloise, the daughter Carson didn’t know existed, had a personal vendetta on his head. She had planned to kill him, but maybe she thought someone else had got there first.
I’ll kill you for what you did.
Slim frowned.
He had been interviewed before anyone else, called away while in the middle of a conversation with the girl.
Was it possible Eloise hadn’t killed Max Carson after all, but believed that Slim had? Had she had tried to kill him for supposedly denying her the chance of revenge?
He rubbed his temples, wishing there was some way to make sense of it all. Marion’s revelation gave some credence to the myths of Eliza Turkin and Beatrice Winter. Two women with an unnaturally strong ability to swim, giving rise to the tales of them as both mermaids and sea witches. But was it something else, something perhaps genetic, which had caused the deformation? Something that, upon its appearance in a newborn, could fuel stories of a curse, one which had seen Beatrice Winter outcast and her property burned, and had tarred Eliza Turkin by association before she was old enough to even understand why?
Slim wanted to bang his head on the tabletop. Too much history when all he was trying to do was figure out a simple murder case.
Or was it simple?
Perhaps for clarification, at the top of the police file was a typed list of names of people considered persons of interest. They had been separated into subgroups—the tour party, associates, locals who might have come into contact with either Carson or Long. Slim reached into his pocket and pulled out his own list, torn and water-stained, written in pen that had smudged in places, one containing all the persons he had himself considered of interest. He had of course added historical characters such as Eliza Turkin and Beatrice Winter. There were some crossovers, such as Alex Wade and Jane Hounslow from the tour party, others that existed on his list but not on Marion’s, such as the painter, Alan McDonald, and the same could be said of hers. As Slim scanned them, he tried to spot connections he had missed, people he hadn’t considered that the police might have, connections between the names.
And there it was, staring him in the f
ace.
Winter.
Beatrice Winter, the prostitute and—depending on your point of view—a suspected mermaid or even sea witch.
If Marion was a descendent of Winter, it made sense that she had married out of her family name, or perhaps dropped it altogether. But what if the claim that Beatrice had multiple children was true, and her later-generation descendants chose instead to retain a portion of their family history, out of respect or reverence?
The fisherman, who had run the tour excursion, a man Slim had briefly suspected of following him.
Winters.
Terrance Winters.
57
The tackle shop was closed, which wasn’t unusual for a Sunday, Slim thought, as he made his way down a side alleyway, looking for lights or other signs of occupation in the adjoining cottage. The only side window was one of frosted glass, and the back was a white-washed stone wall surrounding a small, enclosed garden which bordered the rear of the house, too high to see over, and entered only through an old latched door fastened on the outside by a clunky padlock. Slim had his lock pick with him, but the rusty padlock would only respond to a pair of bolt cutters.
It looked like Terrance was out, perhaps enjoying some free time on the river. Slim glanced left and right, checking he was alone in the alley and that no one might be spying on him from any nearby buildings. Satisfied, he reached up, felt the top of the wall for anything unsavoury like embedded glass, then hauled himself up, every muscle in his body complaining as he slung himself in an ungainly manner over the top.
He landed heavily in a paved yard, then took a couple of minutes to rub his sore lower back while he looked around him.
The yard showed all the signs of a single man’s life focused around a simple hobby. Along the back wall of the property were several open sheds filled with old maritime goods and trophies: sea buoys with faded colours, old lobster pots, interestingly shaped lumps of driftwood, pieces of fishing net, rusted lumps of metal which could have come from shipwrecks, and all manner of other bits and pieces a dedicated fisherman might have found in or near the sea.
To get to the back door, Slim had to step around a couple of small rowing boats in various stages of repair. There, his lock pick worked with its usual precision on a Yale lock, and he let himself into a gloomy dining room which smelled of cigarettes and coffee.
Certain the rear of Terrance’s house was hidden from any neighbouring properties, Slim allowed himself the luxury of switching on a light, covering his fingertips with the cloth of his shirt in case his entry was later discovered. With the glow of an uncovered sixty-watt bulb pushing the shadows into the room’s corners, he confirmed his suspicions: Terrance’s life had the complete absence of a woman’s touch. On a round table against a rear window covered by a dirty net curtain, a Sun newspaper lay open on page three, beside a coffee cup with a dried residue at the bottom, and an ashtray that either hadn’t been emptied in several days, or marked Terrance as a heavy smoker. Slim frowned, remembering the inhaler he had seen that had marked Terrance as an asthmatic. Glancing around, he found it lying discarded in a bowl on the lower shelf of a dresser, beside an unopened pack of mints and half a pack of batteries. Slim used his sleeve to pick it up, gave it a press and smelled stale air but nothing else. A prop then, perhaps used to fake a condition.
Certain now it had been Terrance who had followed him in the forest back in the early days of his tour but unable to say why, Slim continued with even more caution. Hanging from a string on the wall was a tide-table book open on the current month, several tide times circled in black biro, indicating where Terrance had gone today. Taking each step carefully, Slim took in Terrance’s life, eyes scanning the walls, getting a picture of the man. Clearly Terrance had an invested, almost religious interest in the River Dart, with framed historical photographs hanging from the walls, a tatty terrain map of the river valley tacked to a closed door, and several memorabilia pieces on a mantel which were labelled with loving care not evident elsewhere. One amorphous chunk of driftwood about the size of Slim’s fist was labelled as part of the first steamship to dock at Dartmouth Harbour; while a rusty steel tube had apparently come from the wreck of a Second World War vessel that had run aground on the cliffs near Dartmouth Castle. Family photographs or personal mementoes were few and far between, but there was one dusty fly fishing prize from 1986, and a couple of black and white pictures of a young boy standing beside an older couple. Slim leaned closer to look, surmising that the woman was much older than the man, perhaps suggesting three generations. The man looked vaguely familiar, while the boy Slim guessed was Terrance.
The door with the map attached led off to the side, away from the shop entrance. Slim covered his hand with his sleeve again and opened it, stepping inside and closing it again before switching on a light.
He blinked. In sharp contrast to the clutter of Terrance’s dining room, this room looked plucked right out of an art gallery, with a simple desk at one end and a couple of cupboards, surrounded on every available space by colourful paintings of the river valley.
The newest arrival lay on a small rectangular table in the room’s centre, inside an open cardboard box. It showed a view of the Dart Valley looking downriver towards Dartmouth and Kingswear. Slim recognised it immediately as the same painting he had seen in the back room at the museum.
An Alan McDonald, a painting of an almost identical view to that which Slim saw each morning from the upper floor of Eliza Turkin’s old house, but from lower down.
The waterline.
And the light, the shadows falling over the hills to the west, suggested it was an early morning view.
A handwritten note lay beside it.
Lad, just finished this one. Really proud of it. What do you think?
Slim felt his cheeks flush. How long did it take to finish a painting of this quality? A week? A month?
Could it put Alan McDonald at the scene of Max Carson’s death?
Slim looked up. Now that he looked closer, he realised every single hung painting was an Alan McDonald original. A stack of several others stood against the wall, as though they reached Terrance faster than he could find places to hang them.
The man in the picture on the dining room mantel, he now recognised. Alan McDonald, far younger, with an ease to his features no longer present. The older woman had to be Corrine, his mother. And if the boy was Terrance—
His son?
Slim shook his head, thoughts and ideas swirling. He was still staring at the painting when the door clicked open behind him.
Time seemed to slow. Slim felt numb and immobile as Terrance Winters stepped into the room, pulling off a deerstalker hat as he did so. Terrance looked up, clocked Slim standing by the table, and his eyes widened.
‘What the hell are you doing in here?’ he said.
58
Terrance turned, but Slim’s old military reflexes made him quicker. He got a grip on Terrance’s jacket lapels and hauled him to the floor, wrapping his arms around the fisherman and pinning his arms beneath him. Slim felt Terrance’s strength as the fisherman tried to kick him off, and knew in a straight fist fight he had no chance. What he did have was training—however long ago—and he used the old techniques to his advantage. Keeping Terrance pinned, he locked his hands together and held on, waiting for the stronger man to tire.
‘Get the hell off me,’ Terrance growled, his struggles growing weaker. ‘What do you want from me? I’ll call the police—’
‘I’ll be doing that myself,’ Slim said, mouth close to Terrance’s ear, trying to summon as much menace as he could. ‘Accessory to murder? You could go down for five years, minimum. Ten if you’re connected to others.’
‘What are you talking about? What murder?’
‘We talk like men, or I tie you like a pig and call you in,’ Slim said. ‘I’m a private investigator, not connected to the police. I can make evidence against you disappear if I get the information I want.’
‘What evi
dence? What are you talking about?’
‘Or I could get you put away tomorrow.’
‘How do I know you’re not lying?’
‘You don’t,’ Slim said. ‘That’s the chance you take. I won’t be taking any, though. I have a friend in the police on speed dial, a pre-recorded voicemail ready to go at the push of a button. I can have them outside in five minutes. You wouldn’t get to the end of the street.’
Threats made up on the spot, but he guessed correctly that Terrance’s knowledge of technology extended no further than fishing tackle. Below him, the other man went limp.
‘I need a cigarette,’ Terrance said. ‘That all right by you?’
‘I can manage. All I want is answers to my questions. If you don’t have all of them, it doesn’t matter. As long as you have enough.’
‘Why did you follow me that day?’ Slim said. ‘And why the ruse with the inhaler when I showed up in your shop? I know it’s fake.’
Terrance shrugged. ‘It’s not fake. It’s just empty. It’s not even mine. A customer left it behind, but never came back for it. I kept it around just in case, but as you can probably tell, I’m not one for throwing stuff away.’
‘But why pretend to need it?’
‘I didn’t want you to know it was me following you, did I? That’s why I acted like I didn’t know you when you showed up at the shop waving some fake ID around. Those tour groups, they’re all nutjobs and addicts. I get paid to run those classes, but I don’t trust any of them. When I heard you heading up the path I wondered what you were up to, that’s all. I do a bit of conservation work around the area. I’ve had them off setting fires, that kind of thing.’
