Bleak Water

by Danuta Reah

  ‘Sir?’

  He leant back in his chair. She shifted her feet nervously. The bastard was going to keep her standing. ‘You don’t know what I’m talking about,’ he said. ‘OK, I’ll tell you.’ He looked at her. ‘First briefing, late. Second briefing, late. A less charitable man might say hungover, as well. First interview – you not only don’t get the crucial detail, you suggest a time to the witness. The wrong time, as well. Second interview, I come in and find you halfway through doing the same thing. We’ve got the correct times now, but Eliot changed her story – any defence lawyer could make hay with her in court.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she said.

  ‘You could have chosen a worse way to muddy the waters,’ he said, ‘but I can’t offhand think of one. Cara Hobson – remember Cara Hobson, Tina? – Cara Hobson had been dead for at least six hours when she was found. Now, if the Eliot woman is right, and she heard someone in the flat at one – rather than midnight – then it wasn’t Cara Hobson.’

  Tina felt her face flush. She hadn’t thought of that – it was so blindingly obvious, and she hadn’t even thought about it. She saw Farnham register her response. He knew.

  ‘If you screw up again, you’re off the case, right? You’re still on it now because I’m short-staffed. Understood?’

  She nodded.

  He kept his eyes on her, tapping his pen on the desk. Then he relaxed slightly. ‘Anything in the stuff from Hobson’s flat?’

  The sudden switch of direction confused her for a moment, and she stammered as she tried to reorganize her thoughts. ‘There’s this,’ she said, holding out her notebook.

  He looked at her. ‘Yes?’

  She flushed. Get a grip, woman! ‘The flat,’ she said. ‘Cara’s flat.’ She told him what the woman from the Trust had said.

  He frowned. ‘So she was living there unofficially?’ he said.

  Tina nodded. ‘Like a squat,’ she said.

  He thought about it and shook his head slowly. ‘Doesn’t make sense. She’d need keys to the outer doors. Someone must have given her those.’ He balanced his pen between his hands. ‘I wonder why no one spotted it…OK,’ he said after a minute, ‘find out who had keys, who had access to them. She must have got them from somewhere. Anything else?’

  She showed him the reviews that West had found, with the scribbled note to ‘J’. Farnham read through them quickly and raised his eyebrows. ‘You know about this stuff, Barraclough,’ he said. ‘What’s all this death stuff got to do with anything?’ He looked irritated.

  Tina hadn’t thought of herself as an art expert. ‘It’s…they’ve always done work about death,’ she said. ‘This kind of thing is fashionable, I suppose. You know, Damien Hirst and dead cows and things like that.’ Full marks for erudition, Tina.

  ‘OK.’ Farnham rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. He looked like a man with a bad headache. ‘If these are Massey’s, we need to know what they were doing in her flat.’

  Tina felt herself slump as she went back to the incident room. Her eyes felt heavy and her head felt full of cotton wool. She checked her watch. If she tried an artificial boost now, she probably wouldn’t be hit by the come-down too badly until she came off shift – only a couple of hours to go. She picked up her bag and headed for the ladies.

  The classroom was noisy and it smelled of chalk. Kerry laid her arm across the desk and rested her head on it. She was bored. She yawned and sucked her pen.

  ‘Are we keeping you awake, Kerry?’ Mr Nixon. There was a flurry of giggles around her.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ Kerry said, sitting up again. He was looking at someone else now, so she slumped forward over her book. The electronic beep of a mobile phone penetrated the voices and the scraping chairs. Kerry jumped, and felt her face going red. She’d forgotten to turn her phone off. Mr Nixon looked round. ‘Whose was that?’ he said. ‘Come on, you know the rules. Switch it off.’ He looked round the room. If he saw whose it was, he might confiscate it. Kerry had kept her head down, praying that another message wouldn’t come through. Then some of the lads started up, and Mr Nixon went across to deal with them. Kerry breathed again, and slipped her hand into her bag to switch off the phone. She saw Stacy looking at her accusingly, and glared at her to keep her quiet. The maths lesson dragged on.

  At break, she went straight to the toilets. Stacy trailed after her. ‘That was your phone, Kerry, I heard it.’ Kerry looked in the mirror, pretending to be fiddling with her hair. ‘I saw Martin Smith at the bus stop this morning,’ Stacy said, and giggled. She wasn’t really interested in the phone. She wanted to talk about Martin Smith. She had been going on about the Year 12 boy for weeks. Year 12s didn’t look at the girls from Stacy and Kerry’s year, Kerry could have told her that. She stood in the queue in a jitter of impatience as Stacy checked her make-up in the little mirror she carried round with her, fiddled with her hair, talking on all the time. Kerry wanted to scream.

  When a cubicle finally came free, she locked herself in and checked the phone. The message icon was flashing. She pressed ‘read’, her fingers clumsy with impatience. The words ran across the screen before she could take them in properly. She pressed ‘read’ again. ITS ABOUT YOUR DAD FDAY SAME PLACE 5.00. About Dad. Friday, same place. Friday. That gave her time to plan. Five o’clock was after school, it would be all right…Then she remembered the letter. Will be required to stay in school on Friday…to complete the work missed during her unauthorized absence…without good reason…excluded…Her mind flew into overdrive. She had to be there on Friday. What if Lyn changed her mind? A good reason…Maybe she could get one, maybe…An idea was beginning to form in her head.

  Stacy was in front of the mirror as she came out, tugging impatiently at her hair with a comb. ‘I’ll do your hair,’ Kerry said. Kerry was good with hair. Stacy stood still while Kerry wound it round the brush and pulled it back. ‘Just pin it for now,’ she said. ‘If you wash it, I can do it properly. I can do it so it flicks up, you know?’

  Stacy looked pleased. ‘Let’s go to my house after school.’

  Kerry pretended to think about it. She didn’t want to go home anyway. ‘OK,’ she said.

  Jonathan Massey projected ‘media’ and ‘arts’. The dark jacket and shirt, the studied carelessness of the open collar proclaimed his status. Farnham wasn’t sure about the brutally short hair, the small beard and the dark frames of his glasses. He had a feeling that these were no longer the mark of someone at the cutting edge – they were the mark of someone who was letting fashion get ahead, who was losing the battle with staying young.

  Farnham had done his research into Jonathan Massey. A provincial gallery, an administrative job, was a come-down for someone who had, briefly, shown potential for renown. His career as an artist seemed stalled, his personal life seemed oddly bleak – no partner, no marriage, no children. Jonathan Massey was a disappointed man and disappointed men sometimes vented their frustrations in less than social ways.

  But he seemed co-operative enough. Farnham took him through the evening of Cara’s disappearance again. Now he had something closer to the correct timing – he tried to push the distracting anger away – he had a clearer idea of the times he needed to cover with Massey.

  And Massey seemed to be in the clear. He’d been in Leeds. He’d gone to the theatre. ‘The Leeds theatre is still better than Sheffield,’ he said, irrelevantly. He’d gone with a friend, and they’d had something to eat afterwards. They’d gone back to her house, and he’d stayed the night, driving back early the following morning. He gave them the name of the friend with a slightly impatient twist of the mouth. ‘Patricia,’ he said. ‘Patricia Carr. I don’t want her embarrassed,’ he’d said. Farnham wondered what the nature of such embarrassment might be, whether it might prove potentially useful.

  He took Massey through the workings of the gallery. He was curious about who might have had contact with Cara in the course of the working day. ‘We don’t get many casual visitors,’ Massey said. ‘We’
re mostly for schools and colleges at the moment. The upper gallery is the one that will bring the public in, and that isn’t open right now. We’re hanging an exhibition. Private view this Friday.’ He looked worried, as well he might, Farnham thought. This must be his big night coming up, and there was murder on the doorstep and a police investigation getting entangled with the last-minute preparations.

  ‘But who comes to the gallery apart from you and…’ Farnham checked his notes.

  ‘Eliza Eliot and Mel Young,’ Massey finished his sentence off for him. Farnham ran the names through his mental inventory. Young? The trainee. He waited for Massey to go on. ‘Oh, I see what you mean. Well, we’ve had deliveries, of course. I can give you a list. We had people from the Trust round a couple of times.’ He thought. ‘There were the decorators finishing off. But that was about a month ago.’

  The usual traffic in a small operation. But all these people needed interviewing. ‘What about upstairs?’ he said. ‘The flats?’

  Massey shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t know about that.’

  ‘Who would?’ Post, deliveries, repairs – there could be a long list there. ‘Would the Trust keep records of any repairs, anything like that?’

  Massey shook his head. ‘I don’t know. You’d have to ask Eliza. Sometimes the post came to the gallery,’ he added. ‘I know that. It was one of the reasons Cara was always down here. It gave her an excuse, coming to check her post.’

  ‘She was a problem?’

  Massey looked weary. ‘I had nothing against her,’ he said, ‘but she was always there. When you’re setting something up, you don’t want people under foot.’ He was indignant at the suggestion that Cara had learned the alarm codes from him. ‘Certainly not,’ he said emphatically. ‘I never set the alarm when she was around.’

  He was less clear about why he hadn’t simply solved the problem by banning her from the gallery. ‘It’s the flats,’ he said. ‘The linking door – it helped Eliza to have access, and we’d just got used to using it.’

  ‘And you never contacted the Trust about her?’ No one, apparently, had ever alerted them to the fact that they had a squatter on their property.

  ‘What would they have done?’ Massey said. ‘The gallery is nothing to do with them. It was our problem.’

  Farnham showed him the reviews that had been found in Cara’s flat. He glanced at them irritably, then looked more closely. ‘Where did you get those?’ he said after a moment.

  ‘They were found in Cara Hobson’s flat,’ Farnham said, watching him carefully.

  Massey went red. ‘Well, I didn’t put them there,’ he said, returning to his original defensiveness.

  ‘No one is saying you did,’ Farnham said. ‘But they were found in her flat. Perhaps you’d like to tell me about them.’

  ‘They’re cuttings.’ Massey looked at him. ‘I sent for them. Someone suggested he might be good for us at the Second Site. So…’ He shrugged. ‘Last time I saw them, they were on my desk,’ he said. He couldn’t account for their presence in Cara’s flat.

  ‘Where is he now?’ Farnham said. ‘This Bakst?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  An inconsistency. ‘So how were you going to contact him, if you wanted him to do an exhibition?’

  ‘I hadn’t got that far,’ Massey said. ‘It was only a suggestion.’

  ‘And you’re not aware of any contact between him and Cara Hobson?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ he said firmly. He didn’t know anything about Cara. Men had not come to the gallery looking for her. He began to look uneasy at the direction Farnham’s questioning was taking. ‘I don’t know anything about her social life,’ he said. ‘I don’t think anyone did.’ He refused to speculate any further.

  Triumph at Canal of Death

  The ‘Triumph’ of Sheffield’s latest entrant to the arts scene, the Second Site Gallery in premiering Daniel Flynn’s new exhibition, The Triumph of Death, became grimly ironic with the discovery of the body of a young woman in the canal…

  Sheffield canal is no stranger to mysterious and violent death…

  …and in 1998, the body of nine-year-old Ellie Chapman was found by the towpath near Cadman Street Bridge, and close by, on a boat moored on the canal side…

  Now, days before the exhibition is due to open, this latest tragedy has local people asking…

  The phone rang as Eliza read the article, a feature in the arts pages of the local paper. She ran her fingers through her hair. She should have expected it after what had happened. She picked up the phone. It was Laura, a friend from college days who had, like Eliza, gone into arts administration. Eliza, Laura and Maggie had shared a flat in their second year, and all of them had had their dreams. And they’d all done well enough, Eliza had supposed in the years that followed. Maggie’s ambitions had been curtailed a bit by Ellie, but she’d gone into teaching and had been doing well at a local primary school. The school where Mark Fraser taught. Eliza could remember the letters when Maggie had talked about Fraser – his kindness, his problems with his alcoholic wife and dysfunctional stepdaughter, his lovely, lively child who was Ellie’s best friend…She didn’t want to think about that.

  They’d all done well, that was the thing. Laura had worked her way up arts administration in local councils, and had come back to Sheffield a couple of years before. But now, to Eliza, it didn’t look like success at all. Maggie had stayed put and substituted teaching and Ellie for her dreams of creativity. And Laura and Eliza had ended up back where they had started, but servicing the art of others, not producing their own.

  ‘Eliza?’ Laura’s voice was puzzled.

  ‘Sorry. I was miles away.’

  ‘We haven’t met for ages,’ Laura said. ‘You’re working too hard. Let’s have a drink. I’ve been reading about lurid events at your gallery.’

  ‘Yes.’ Eliza could hear her voice sounding flat.

  ‘Sorry,’ Laura said. ‘It’s a bit close to home really, isn’t it?’

  ‘I knew her – the girl who was killed,’ Eliza said. ‘Oh, not well,’ she added quickly as she heard Laura’s shocked drawing-in of breath. ‘She lived next door to me.’

  ‘That’s close to home,’ Laura said. Her voice became brisk. ‘Well, you’re definitely going to need a drink, then.’ They arranged to meet later, at the pub on the hill near the Wicker Arches. Eliza put the phone down and looked at her watch. It was after six. She needed something to eat, but first she needed to do a final check on the gallery, make sure everything was secure.

  The story in the paper about the events that had taken place a few hundred yards from her window, albeit four years ago, was weighing on her mind. Jonathan had left the gallery shortly after lunch and she had been on her own for most of the afternoon, apart from Mel, who had been uncharacteristically subdued.

  She looked out of the window. The sky was clear, and the chill in the gallery, which she hadn’t noticed engrossed in her reading, told her that the night would be cold. She cleared her desk, and locked the door of her office. The upper gallery was dark and silent now. She needed to check the downstairs and set the alarms before she left.

  The gallery was in darkness as she went down the stairs, but there was a splash of yellow light from the open office door, making an odd, abstract shape. ‘Jonathan?’ Eliza said. She went to the door and tapped.

  He was sitting at his desk, engrossed in something on his computer. He jumped and looked up. ‘Eliza. I thought you’d gone.’ He looked back at the screen. ‘I’m shutting down,’ he said. He looked tired, as well he might, Eliza thought. The tinted glasses he habitually wore concealed his eyes, but there were sharp lines beside his mouth, and his beard, normally meticulously groomed, looked a bit shaggy, as though he hadn’t taken the trouble to trim it recently.

  ‘I’m just finishing,’ she said. ‘Listen, I’m meeting Laura for a drink at the East House later. Do you want to join us?’

  He shook his head. ‘No. I’ll be getting home.’


  Jonathan lived on his own. It would be lonely going back to an empty flat after what had happened. ‘I’m not meeting her for a couple of hours,’ she said. ‘Why not come and have something to eat before you go back? We could walk along to Victoria Quays.’

  There was a click and silence as the computer switched off. ‘OK,’ he said without enthusiasm. ‘I’ll get my coat.’

  They left the gallery and crossed the bridge to the towpath. The air was frosty, and Eliza huddled into her coat, pulling her scarf more closely round her neck, and digging her hands deep into her pockets. They walked in silence for a while, then Jonathan said, ‘What did they ask you about Cara?’

  ‘Where I was, what I’d heard. They asked me what I knew about her. What did they ask you?’

  He shrugged irritably. ‘They wanted to know where I was. They wanted to know who I was with.’

  ‘Well, you were in Leeds,’ Eliza said. The police were bound to want alibis – something she hadn’t been able to provide for herself, come to think of it.

  ‘I had to prove it,’ he said. ‘I had to give them someone’s name. It’s very difficult.’

  Aha! Jonathan had someone in Leeds. Something a bit clandestine by the sound of things. ‘I’m sure they’ll be discreet,’ she said. ‘All they want is to eliminate you.’

  ‘Well, maybe.’ He hunched his shoulders and pushed his hands into the pockets of his coat. ‘They always make it sound as though you’ve done…something.’

  Eliza nodded, though it hadn’t been her experience particularly. She’d never had much to do with the police. She’d quite liked Roy Farnham on the couple of occasions – disconcerting ones, admittedly – that she’d talked to him. He’d seemed simpatico, interesting.