Bleak Water

by Danuta Reah

  He looked down at the dead woman again. She seemed young, very young. The pathologist stood up beside him. ‘I’ll tell you something else,’ she said. ‘There’s a baby somewhere. This girl had a baby not so long ago.’

  Farnham closed his eyes. This was all he needed. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘We’ll get on to it.’ The rippling water reminded him of the sea. A dead woman in the water. A baby. What were they going to find when they searched the towpath and the canal? He pinched the bridge of his nose, and rubbed his eyes with his fingers. ‘OK,’ he said again. ‘Let’s get started.’

  Eliza put down the phone. She’d been talking to Maggie’s landlord. Maggie had named Eliza as her executor, and suddenly, all of this was her responsibility. She’d contacted him shortly after Maggie’s death to let him know what she was going to do about the flat. ‘The rent’s paid to the end of the month,’ Eliza had said, the first time she had talked to him, when Maggie was just two days dead. ‘The flat will be cleared by then.’ After Flynn’s exhibition, when she could give it her full attention.

  But he’d phoned this morning with worries about security. The upstairs flat was unoccupied and the house was standing empty. ‘Word gets around,’ he said. Someone had been seen hanging round. Eliza doodled flowers on the pad by the phone as she listened.

  ‘I’ll get to it as soon as I can,’ she said. The flat was a nagging irritation, but he had a point. An empty flat was vulnerable. There was little, if anything, of value there, but she didn’t want Maggie’s place vandalized, her books, her diaries, her photographs – all the memorabilia of Ellie – damaged or destroyed.

  After she hung up, Eliza contemplated the task she’d set herself. It probably wouldn’t take long. She found the prospect of sorting through the remains of Maggie’s life depressing. She’d get started on it as soon as she had a couple of hours. She tried to put it out of her mind. She made breakfast and stood at the window watching the canal as she ate toast and drank coffee. Daniel was arriving today. She felt a twist of emotion in her stomach which she found hard to analyse. Excitement? Fear? Anger? It was the way she always felt when she was about to do something new, something that presented her with a challenge, that was all. But she dressed carefully, twisted her hair on top of her head the way he used to like it.

  The gallery was busy when she came downstairs from her flat. Mel was unpacking boxes on the floor, surrounded by polystyrene and bubble wrap.

  ‘Hi, Eliza,’ Mel greeted her. Her hair, which had been black the day before, was pale blonde, carefully tousled. ‘This is that stuff from Daniel Flynn.’ She ran her eyes assessingly up and down Eliza. ‘You look nice. Jonathan, Eliza’s got dressed up for Daniel Flynn. Doesn’t she look nice?’

  Eliza felt her face flush. Jonathan looked up. ‘Mm,’ he said vaguely. Mel smiled.

  ‘What time did Flynn say to expect him?’ Eliza started checking through the post.

  ‘Sometime this morning.’ Mel shrugged. ‘He didn’t say.’

  Jonathan looked up from whatever was absorbing him at the desk. ‘Have you had a chance to talk to him properly, Eliza?’

  ‘Not really. I sent him a couple of e-mails, told him what I was planning. He didn’t reply, so I’m assuming it’s OK. I haven’t managed to get him on the phone. Everything’s in hand for Friday.’ Eliza kept her voice casual.

  Jonathan was checking the diary and opening his post. ‘Oh, not again. Get a letter off to this guy, Mel. It’s the third time he’s sent me some photos of his stuff. If I was looking for wannabe pre-Raphaelites I’d go to the greetings-cards section in Smith’s. At least I’d get someone who could handle paint.’

  ‘I’ll do that now,’ Mel said. ‘While I’m waiting for Eliza.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He flicked through the diary. ‘We’ve got more school kids in tomorrow. I’d better deal with that. You know, I thought I was an artist, not a child minder.’

  Eliza ignored this as she checked through her own post. It was just Jonathan’s usual complaint. He always moaned about the school visits – and almost always dealt with them himself. Jonathan liked children. He was a good teacher – she knew that from her own student days. But he was surprisingly good with kids; serious and sober, but able to hold their interest and arouse their enthusiasm. It was a side to Jonathan she never would have suspected.

  The post was dull – some advertising and some charity leaflets that went in the bin, an invitation to a private view that might be worth going to, and some art catalogues she put on one side for later browsing.

  ‘…like some kind of charity for homeless kids.’

  ‘What?’ Eliza hadn’t been paying attention.

  ‘I said, this gallery is like some kind of charity for homeless kids.’

  He was bitching about Cara again. He’d taken against her, almost from the time she’d first moved in. Jonathan would have preferred the flats to be let at full market rents, rather than the ‘affordable rents’ – high enough in Eliza’s opinion – that the Trust required. He thought that the flats should be taken by ‘young professionals’, not the socially needy. ‘That’s what you get for using taxpayer’s money,’ Eliza said. She remembered the night before, the shut-down alarm. ‘By the way, Cara…’ She stopped. ‘It doesn’t matter. Come on,’ she added to Mel, ‘let’s get this lot upstairs before Daniel Flynn gets here.’

  Mel pulled a letter off the printer and put it in Jonathan’s in-tray. ‘OK.’ She sighed but stood up and she and Eliza began moving the boxes that contained Flynn’s drawings and sketches towards the lift.

  Once they had moved the boxes into the upper gallery, they began to sort the remaining pictures, matching the numbers with the plan that Eliza had set out the night before. So far it was all going smoothly, and they should have everything set up in plenty of time for the opening. She made a mental note to go over the invitation list for the private view and make sure that no one had been left off.

  Mel’s voice interrupted her thoughts. ‘Oh God, look at this!’ She was holding up a photo-assemblage, in which, against the barren incandescence of the Brueghel landscape, a man in the unmistakable uniform of an officer of the Third Reich was placing a noose round the neck of a young woman. The woman’s hands were bound. Eliza could see the fastidious care with which the man was positioning the rope, the concentration on his face, the woman’s white-faced fear. ‘Is it real?’ Her eyes were bright.

  Eliza nodded. She had seen the photograph before – in fact, she had drawn Daniel’s attention to it. It was one of a series taken towards the end of the war when Hitler’s army was in retreat. ‘The triumph of death,’ she said. ‘Flynn’s right. Brueghel’s images don’t do it for us any more.’

  ‘It’s gross,’ Mel said.

  Eliza wasn’t going to argue with that so she didn’t reply. She stood for a minute, looking down at the canal. There was some sort of activity further up on the towpath. She’d been aware of people hurrying past and now, as she looked, she saw a couple of police officers. There must have been some kind of trouble down there in the night. She shrugged, dismissing it.

  She closed doors, shutting off the hum of activity from the floor below, and let the silence of the gallery close around her. She had work to do.

  Madrid

  The silence of the museum closed around Eliza as she walked through the high, light corridors. These were the times she treasured at the Prado, the early mornings before the gallery got too busy when she could have the spaces and the paintings to herself.

  Her interest in the early painters had brought her to the rooms where the sixteenth-century Flemish paintings hung. They had developed techniques that produced paintings with a clarity and depth, and a saturation of colour that has never been surpassed. The big attraction for visitors was The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch’s enigmatic depiction of heaven and hell. The colours, after all the centuries, were still vivid and clear. Eliza had spent a long time studying it.

  But gradually she was drawn to a smaller panel tha
t hung on the far wall. From a distance, it looked dark, but closer, the detail began to appear, a bleak coastline, a sluggish river, fires that cast a sombre glow across a landscape where death marched as an army. Brueghel’s masterpiece: The Triumph of Death.

  The painting exercised a fascination over her. She was intrigued by the meticulous techniques that had kept the paint so fresh, the luminescence of the water and the incandescent glow that suffused the landscape. Brueghel had probably worked with tempera white heightening into the wet or on the dry imprimatura, beginning with the highlights of the flesh…It was a painting that drew the eye, as the army of death advanced across a desolate landscape, hunting down and slaughtering the living, men, women and children, with a pitiless dedication and terrifying cruelty.

  ‘Un cuadro interesante, no?’

  She looked round. Two men were standing behind her, studying the Brueghel. They were both tall, casually dressed, one with Mediterranean-dark hair, the other with the fairer colouring of the north. Something about them said ‘artists’. The dark-haired one seemed familiar. He was the one who had spoken, and she realized he had been talking to her. She tried to frame a reply in her still rudimentary Spanish, when she recognized his accent as English. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I always think that this is the wrong place for it.’ Where had she seen him? Had he been in the café the night before?

  ‘Where else would it belong but among the Boschs?’ the other man said. Her artist’s eye analysed his face – tanned as though he spent most of his time outdoors, Slavic bones. His dark glasses reflected her gaze.

  ‘I mean the place,’ she said. She gestured at the high, clearly lit gallery. ‘It ought to be in the shadows, I don’t know, in a dark corner of an old church, and you’d come across it out of the blue. Or…’ She’d been thinking about this painting for weeks. ‘I know it’s medieval, its ideas, but there’s something…I’d put it in a current setting. A cityscape, industrial ruins, show people a modern triumph of death.’

  The dark-haired man looked round the room. ‘That’s the problem with a place like this,’ he said. ‘It’s decontextualized. Stuck here, it’s history, superstition.’ He moved closer to the panel. ‘It’s a fifteenth-century video nasty,’ he said after a moment. ‘Someone’s cut that bloke’s eyes out. If it is a bloke.’

  There was an element of the video nasty in the relish with which Brueghel had depicted torture and death. ‘They were into death, the apocalypse,’ she said. ‘Like we are now, I suppose. The end of days, all that stuff.’ In the foreground, a body lay in a coffin, its head resting on a bundle of straw. It reminded her of something she’d read recently. ‘“Do not apply any pink at all, because a dead person has no colour;…and mark out the outlines with dark sinoper and a little black…and manage the hair in the same way, but not so that it looks alive but dead…and so do every bone of a Christian, or of rational creatures…”’

  ‘Cennino Cennini,’ the other man said. The fifteenth-century artist whose manual of painting techniques illuminated the world of Renaissance art for later centuries. ‘How to paint dead flesh.’ Eliza was surprised he’d recognized it. He had taken off his sunglasses to look more closely at the picture and at her. He narrowed his eyes as though the light in the gallery was too bright. ‘Cennini. “A dead person has no colour…” He’s wrong, you know. The dead decay. We don’t see it in modern times, not in the so-called civilized places. They have colour. We never see that, it’s all hidden away, burned, buried…’

  Eliza thought of Ellie in her bleak grave.

  He slipped his glasses back on. ‘Someone should do an exhibition, isn’t that right, Daniel?’ He seemed amused.

  Of course! She knew why the dark-haired man seemed familiar. ‘You’re Daniel Flynn, aren’t you?’ she said. He had had a show in London two years ago that had caused a sensation among the critics and an interesting scandal when a fellow artist accused him of plagiarism. He was attractive, bohemian and controversial. Since then, his name was everywhere, his photograph in the magazines and Sunday papers. She should have recognized him at once. ‘I didn’t know you were in Madrid.’

  ‘I got here a few days ago. I’m travelling, looking for what to do next. This is Ivan. Ivan Bakst.’ The name wasn’t familiar to Eliza. They shook hands.

  ‘Eliza,’ she said. ‘Eliza Eliot. I’m here on a temporary contract.’

  The two men had met up in France, Flynn told her. ‘We knew each other in London,’ he said. ‘Years ago, when I was at art school.’ Bakst had been travelling the European waterways. He’d left his boat near Lyons, and the two of them had come down to Spain together.

  ‘Are you staying?’ Eliza said. They looked as though they would be interesting additions to the small expatriate community of artists that had assembled in Madrid that summer.

  ‘We’re going across to Morocco,’ Flynn said. ‘Tangier. And then further south, Tanzania, maybe, Ivory Coast.’

  ‘I’ve never been to Africa.’ Eliza and Flynn were drifting away from the painting now. Bakst remained studying it.

  ‘Spain’s almost there,’ Flynn said. ‘It’s easy to forget. The Moors occupied most of it. I don’t know, I might stay for a while.’

  ‘You could spend a year going round the galleries here,’ Eliza said. Not that she’d done as much gallery visiting as she’d planned. The social life in Madrid was too enticing.

  ‘Why bother? You might as well visit Lenin’s corpse,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s what these galleries do to art. It isn’t allowed to die. It doesn’t go through the natural processes. A place like this is a mausoleum. Or a trophy hall. Dead art.’

  Ivan Bakst had come up behind him as he was speaking. He gave Eliza a cool smile as though the two of them were sharing a joke. ‘You do well enough out of galleries, Daniel,’ he said.

  Flynn laughed. ‘So I should turn them down? Look, the money lets me keep working.’ He looked at Eliza again. ‘We’ve just got here. Show us around. Have a drink with me. Tonight.’

  She looked at him. His face was thin, long-jawed. Against his dark hair, his skin had the almost translucent fairness she associated with the west-coast Irish, the Spanish. His eyes were blue.

  ‘OK,’ she said.

  The flats were a concrete cliff towering up into the sky above her. It was dark, but her eyes were straining upwards because she knew it was coming, soon, and she wasn’t going to be able to stop it. She tried to duck away from it, get out of sight, but it was coming now, hurtling down towards her and… The sudden ringing alarm jerked her out of the dream and she threw her arm up instinctively to protect herself and then she was awake, breathing fast, her heart hammering. She lay there staring at the ceiling. That dream again. Shit! Detective Constable Tina Barraclough rolled over and picked up the phone. ‘Yeah?’ Her voice sounded hoarse.

  ‘Tina? Where the fuck are you? You’re supposed to be here. Now.’

  Dave West, her partner. She looked at the radio, and groaned. It was after seven. She’d forgotten to set the alarm – no, she could remember now, she’d come in after three and switched the alarm off. She didn’t want to be jolted out of sleep. And she was going to be late again. ‘Shit. Where…?’

  ‘Look, there’s been an incident down by the canal. We’re supposed to be there sorting out the house to house. I’ve covered for you – I said you were heading straight down – so you’d better be there.’

  ‘OK, OK. I’ll…’ As she was speaking she rolled out of bed on to the floor, where she lay for a minute, holding her head and trying to gather the pieces of the day around her. The remains of her dream fell apart inside her head. Something about falling…The phone was still talking at her. Dave, trying to tell her the details of the incident. ‘Yeah, yeah.’ She couldn’t get her head round it. She’d gone clubbing the night before.

  She unravelled herself from the sheets and stood up, promising Dave she’d meet him at the canal basin in half an hour. She felt strung out and sick. It had
seemed like a good idea at midnight, a bit of speed to get the party mood going. Now she wasn’t so sure. Ten minutes on the exercise bike might bring her round, but she couldn’t face that. She went through to the bathroom and turned on the shower, then she sat on the edge of the bath, holding her head. She was horribly aware of her stomach, her throat. A cold sweat was breaking out over her body, and she felt lightheaded and dizzy. She didn’t know how she was going to get through the day.

  She toyed with the idea of calling in sick. But that wouldn’t be fair to Dave. He was covering her back, and she’d let him do that a bit too much lately. They’d both been involved in a not very successful investigation into some recent drug deaths. A batch of pure heroin had turned up on the streets and effectively culled three unwary users. The outcome had been the arrest of a few minor players, a slight shift in the hierarchy on the streets and a return to business as usual. The source of the heroin had not been established. It had been an uncomplicated case, but she hadn’t managed to get on top of it. Tina should have had her promotion by now, but her reputation as a good and reliable officer had taken a bit of a hammering recently. She had to get her act together, for what it was worth.

  She struggled to recapture the details of this new case that Dave had tried to tell her. A body in the canal. A murder. He’d said who was in charge, and she couldn’t remember. Shit, she needed to know that. She could phone…no, she’d remembered. DCI Farnham. Roy Farnham. That was the name Dave had said. Farnham had come across to Sheffield from Humberside, and he had a reputation as a high flier who didn’t suffer fools gladly.