by Danuta Reah
She could still remember the tight feeling in her chest as she’d read the article. But it wasn’t about her dad, it was just about some kid who had hanged himself in prison. Still the tight feeling didn’t go away. She could remember Dad’s last letter. He’d sounded so sad. He’d said, ‘Prison changes you, Kizz.’
She huddled up on her bed, crouched over the paper in front of her. She didn’t know what to say to Dad. She wanted to tell him it would be all right, and she wanted to tell him that she wasn’t all right, that she was lonely and unhappy, that Mum didn’t care any more, but people in prison got depressed. THIRD DEATH AT SUICIDE JAIL.
Her dad wouldn’t do that. It had said in the article about a kid who’d killed himself because he’d been bullied. And no one cared. He’d torn up his sheets and hanged himself. And another one, about a kid who set his prison cell on fire…Kerry couldn’t stop herself. She’d shown it to Mum when she got home. Mum had pulled a face, screwed it up and dropped it in the bin. ‘What do you want to read that for? You don’t want to read this rubbish.’
I’m fine, Kerry wrote. Then: Mum’s fine. She sends her love. She bit the top of her pen. It’ll be all right, youll see. School is OK. I made my world wildlife T-shirt into a sequin one. It looks fab. She couldn’t think of anything else to say. I hope your OK too. Lots of love. Kizzy. xxxxx.
Her eyes felt heavy with sleep. She addressed the envelope carefully, with Dad’s number, and the wing, and then the address that said ‘prison’ as clear as anything. The prison address was Love Lane. She put her own name and address on the back of the envelope. If she didn’t do that, then Dad wouldn’t get it. She tucked the envelope deep into her school bag, and turned out the light.
The next day, the day of the opening, should have been hectic. Eliza was in the gallery early, going over the preparations, checking the exhibition to make sure that everything she and Daniel had discussed was now in place. And the gallery had to be ready for a massive influx of visitors the following week. The Triumph of Death was moving to London after five days.
But by half past nine, Eliza felt as though she had put her foot on a step that wasn’t there. There was nothing for her to do. She’d hired a caterer to deal with the opening, a temporary receptionist was demonstrating her efficiency in the office, even Mel seemed hyped up by the coming event.
‘For Christ’s sake, Eliza…!’ Jonathan said after she’d wandered into his office for the third time to see if there was anything she could help him with.
She went to see if the temp needed any help with the last of the admin. ‘I’m fine, thank you,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you leave this to me?’
‘I could…’ Eliza looked round. The gallery was quiet. Jonathan was talking to someone on the phone. ‘All the details for tonight are…’ He put his hand over the mouthpiece and looked at Eliza. ‘For Christ’s sake, Eliza,’ he said again, ‘take the rest of the morning off.’
‘Someone might call from the paper…’
‘I can deal with that.’
Eliza was surplus to requirements. ‘OK,’ she said. The idea of a morning off was starting to appeal. She could go shopping, buy a new dress for the party. ‘OK, I’ll go.’
An hour later, she was sitting in the winter sun in a coffee bar, her new dress in a bag beside her, and the shoes that she hadn’t intended buying but hadn’t been able to resist. She tried not to think about her credit-card bill. The new dress and the thought of Daniel Flynn were mixed together in her mind and she felt a frisson that was both exciting and dangerous. It was only ten-thirty, and she had the rest of the morning free. She remembered her conversation with Maggie’s landlord a few days ago. She’d told him she wouldn’t be able to do anything until after the opening, but now she had a bit of time. She could sort the stuff at Maggie’s in a couple of visits. She could spend the rest of the morning there, and then she would know what kind of task she was facing.
The roads were congested, and it took her half an hour to get from the town centre to the suburb where Maggie used to live. Maggie had spent the last year of her life in a small flat in Walkley, about half an hour’s walk from the graveyard where Ellie had been buried, and where she now lay. It occupied the ground floor of a house that was strangely isolated, set back on a steep side road. Access was through a small gennel and up a flight of stone steps, then through a gate into what must once have been a beautiful garden, private and enclosed, only it was long overgrown, the shrubs encroaching on the path and hanging over the neglected patch of lawn.
Eliza had been there a couple of times when Maggie was still alive. The second time Maggie had invited her round for a drink. The evening had been uncomfortable, Eliza remembered. Maggie had tried hard not to talk about Ellie or about Mark Fraser, the man she had wanted to be part of her future – the man who had been, irretrievably and devastatingly part of her future and who was now serving a life sentence for killing her daughter. Eliza wouldn’t have minded. At least the talk would have been real. But Maggie pushed the conversation on to Eliza’s work at the gallery, their shared interest in art, anything other than the topic that must have been at the front of both of their minds.
‘So, he must think you’re hot stuff – Massey,’ Maggie had said with that odd combination of belligerence and approval that she used back then to talk about Eliza.
She refilled her own glass and waved the bottle at Eliza, who shook her head. They had each provided wine for the evening. Eliza had only had a couple of glasses, but both bottles were nearly empty. ‘I may as well finish this,’ Maggie said, upending the second bottle over her glass. She stood up and went into the kitchen. There was a slight uncertainty to her walk, but no other indication that she’d drunk so much. She brought more wine with her.
‘Not for me,’ Eliza said quickly.
Maggie looked at her. ‘You saint,’ she said. She picked up her glass. ‘He’d done it before, you know,’ she said suddenly. ‘Fraser. Mark Fraser.’ Her voice caught on the name as though it choked her to say it. ‘His daughter. His stepdaughter. He’d been up to stuff with her. He was a paedophile and they must have known, but nobody did anything.’
‘I know.’ Poor Ellie. Poor Maggie, left with the guilt.
‘And he was teaching, for God’s sake. And he saw Ellie…’ Maggie’s head drooped. ‘And there I was, all ready for a new relationship. You know, I discussed Ellie with him. I talked about how it was bad for her not to have a father. And he listened and he said all the right things. I thought he was wonderful.’ Eliza could remember Maggie’s letters, suddenly full of this amazing man she’d met. She didn’t know what to say. ‘And you know why I was asking him?’ Maggie’s voice was rising to a shout. ‘It was because I fancied him, because I…’ She broke off and drank some more wine. She looked at Eliza. ‘His wife, you know what she did? She threw the girl out. That’s what she did. So Ellie…’ She emptied her glass and began to take the cork out of the new bottle.
‘Let me.’ Eliza took it off her and busied herself with the bottle opener. If she took her time, maybe Maggie would forget about having another drink.
‘They never said sorry,’ Maggie said. Her voice was bewildered. ‘You know, that’s what I want. I want to know that he knows. That he knows what he did. If I thought he knew, really knew, I might…’ She looked at Eliza. ‘Give it here,’ she said impatiently, taking the bottle and corkscrew from her. She opened the bottle and poured herself another glass. ‘If he just knew,’ she said.
That had been the last time Eliza had seen Maggie. They’d talked on the phone a couple of times, but, somehow, Eliza had been busy, and then Maggie had been involved in her campaign, galvanized by the news that Mark Fraser’s lawyers were talking about flaws in police procedure and an appeal.
And now she was dead.
Eliza picked up the post from the doormat as she let herself in and checked through it. Junk. She looked round the flat, remembering. There was very little here. The furniture wasn’t her problem. A clearance firm w
as disposing of it. There were no photographs on the walls or the shelves, no ornaments, though Maggie, as a student, had been a collector of pots, things she picked up from junk shops and charity shops.
There was a card pinned to the cork board on the kitchen wall. She looked at it, and felt a slight chill running down her back. It was a postcard reproduction, so small that the detail was crowded to the point of incoherence, but she knew it so well. The Triumph of Death. Then she remembered. She’d given it to Maggie the last time she’d seen her, when she’d told her about Daniel’s exhibition. Maggie had seemed indifferent, but she’d kept the card.
Even though she remembered now why it was there, she felt cold, uneasy. Brueghel’s dark masterpiece seemed to be escaping from the gallery, creeping into the world outside – just the way she’d imagined in her plans for the exhibition.
She shook her head. Morbid fancies. She needed to start sorting things out here so that she could tell the clearance people to come and take the rest away. The flat was tiny. It could have been charming, if Maggie had ever bothered with it. There was a living room at the front, a bedroom and a bathroom at the back. The kitchen was in an off-shot.
She checked the bedroom, rummaging through the clothes that had been carelessly crammed into drawers or on to hangers. There was a faintly stale smell that suggested the sheets piled on a shelf hadn’t been properly aired, that the clothes themselves were perhaps a day too far from a wash. In those last few years, Maggie really hadn’t cared.
There was nothing there. She went to the living room. There was a small bureau, empty apart from some folders. Eliza flicked through the first. It contained bank statements, business letters, certificates, a passport – unused for years – all the expected paraphernalia of daily life.
The next folder contained letters: copies of letters that Maggie had written, and replies. Eliza checked through them quickly. These were part of Maggie’s campaign to keep Mark Fraser behind bars. She had written to newspapers, to MPs, to her solicitor, to various pressure groups. She’d had sheaves of replies. There were address lists – people who, presumably, were happy to assist in her campaign. There were also letters that had no salutation, handwritten rather than typed. Had these been sent? If so, had Maggie written out copies? She looked at one and then pushed the pile back into the folder. Maggie had written these letters to Mark Fraser, and the grief and rage that burned off the page was more than Eliza could stand. She didn’t want to share this…Every breath you take was stolen from my child and I will make sure each one is a burden to you that…
There were also yellowing newspaper cuttings that looked as if they had lain in the folder undisturbed, apart from a couple of more recent ones that lay at the top. Eliza unfolded one of the older ones. It was a story about Ellie’s disappearance: FEARS GROW FOR MISSING SOUTH YORKSHIRE CHILD. The recent ones related to Mark Fraser’s appeal: CHILD-KILLER FRASER IN NEW APPEAL.
She looked in the bureau drawers next. Here was the more personal stuff. Boxes of photographs: Maggie through childhood and her teenage years, as a student. Eliza found one of herself with Maggie. She couldn’t remember the occasion, but it looked as if they were at a party, dramatically dressed and made up, making a big thing of being art students, no doubt.
And then photographs of Ellie – as a baby, as a little girl, growing up, smiling, beautiful. These photographs looked as though they hadn’t been touched for a long time. Eliza could feel the dry contamination of dust on her fingers. All of these photographs, to go – where? Maggie had had no family, or no close family.
And in the next drawer – memorabilia. A child’s drawings, a first shoe, a tiny box containing what Eliza first thought was a shell, then realized was a tooth, a milk tooth. A lock of hair, fair, curling round the blue ribbon that held it. And another lock, this one tied with black ribbon. The hair looked dull and stiff. Eliza pushed the drawer shut abruptly.
She stood up and stretched, pressing her hands into the small of her back to relieve the crick that had developed. You’re getting old, Eliot. She needed to sort through the photographs, decide who might want them. Or maybe they should all be destroyed. Eliza would like to keep a few – one or two of Maggie, some of Ellie.
And the personal stuff, the milk tooth, the locks of hair. Maybe Eliza could buy a plant, a small shrub, a rose, maybe, and plant it on Ellie’s grave with those last things buried in the roots. And the pictures and the shoe – those could be burned and the ashes scattered at the same time.
But now wasn’t the time to look through this stuff, now wasn’t the time for reflection. She packed the papers into folders, discarding obvious junk – magazines, coupons, old receipts. She put the folders of letters and the boxes of photographs on to the back seat of her car. She could sort through them at her leisure back at the flat. She left the cuttings and the other papers for later. She didn’t want the story of Ellie’s death, of Fraser’s trial, any closer to her life than it already was. She checked her watch. It was gone one. It hadn’t taken her much time at all. She’d missed lunch, so she drove down into Broomhill and stopped for a sandwich at the small coffee bar. She would be back at the gallery in plenty of time for any last-minute crises.
Tina Barraclough was on the trail of the missing cabin cruiser. Her luck was in. The canal patrol officer, Michael Riley, was on the Sheffield stretch of the canal and free to talk to her. She drove through town and parked by the side of the canal below the flight of eleven locks that had, with luck, trapped the mystery boat. It was a clear, cold day. The water gleamed in the sunlight, and a couple of men sat on the opposite bank, fishing rods extended into the water. An arched bridge with white railings stretched across the canal and bare trees lifted their branches to the sky. The canal looked gentle and benign here, not a place of torture and violent death.
Michael Riley was a tall, weather-beaten man who knew the canal in all its aspects. ‘It’s shocking, this,’ he said to Tina. ‘Poor lass.’ He was the first person who’d expressed much regret about Cara’s death.
She explained what she wanted, and he nodded. ‘Yes, I’ve talked to someone from your place,’ he said. ‘They wanted to know about traffic through the locks.’ He went over the records again with Tina. One boat had gone through the locks the night of Cara’s death, and there had been very little traffic since then.
‘Could someone get through here without anyone knowing about it?’ she said.
He shook his head. ‘It’s assisted-passage only. You’d need a key – and anyway, it takes almost three hours to get through all the locks.’ He grinned at her, his teeth surprisingly white in his tanned face. ‘It’s not quick get-away country.’
Tina thought about a canal chase, two narrow boats in hot pursuit, drifting up the canal at three miles an hour.
‘How many boats are moored below Tinsley locks?’ she said.
‘Twenty-eight,’ he said immediately. ‘It’s pretty static at this time of year. There’s a few come into the moorings at the canal basin, but most of the boats are regulars. I’ll talk you through them.’
‘Have any left since Monday?’ The night of Cara’s death.
‘Not that I’m aware of,’ he said. ‘We get visitors in the summer, but not at the moment.’
Tina began to get a picture of the working of the canal as he talked. There was very little commercial traffic. A lot of money had been spent in the 1970s to widen the canal so that steel could be moved along the Don Valley. The completion of the works had coincided with the ravages that the Thatcher Government had inflicted on the steel industry, and the scheme had never come to anything. ‘There’s the one barge that runs scrap up to the Humber,’ he said. ‘But that’s about it.’ The rest of the commercial traffic was leisure. And then there was the holiday and recreational trade, and the residents. ‘There’s almost no holiday traffic on the canal at this time of year,’ he said again.
Some owners took their boats out in the winter, but most had them moored up or even out of the water for ma
intenance. The residents lived on the canal all year, occasionally moving on if they could afford to change moorings. ‘A boat’s got to have a permanent mooring, see?’ he said. ‘Then there’s visitors’ moorings that they can use when they’re moving around.’
‘So any boat on the canal will have a permanent mooring somewhere?’ Tina said.
‘That’s right, unless it’s a trailer boat that’s out of the water when it’s not being used. Or unless it’s someone who moves around all the time.’
Tina made some notes. This didn’t bring her any nearer the missing boat. ‘I’m looking for a cabin cruiser, or something that could be mistaken for a cabin cruiser after dark.’
‘I can get you the name of every cabin cruiser with a mooring between here and Keadby,’ he said. ‘Who told you it was a cabin cruiser on the canal that night?’
Tina told him, and he nodded. ‘You can rely on that,’ he said. ‘If Doug said it was a cabin cruiser he saw, then that’s what it was.’ He thought for a while. ‘If I’d seen it, I’d likely be able to tell you which one it was. But I didn’t. I wasn’t on the canal that night.’ He patrolled the canal regularly, covering its full length once a fortnight. Anyone who knew the system would have known when he was likely to be around.
‘Could it still be on the canal?’ she said.
‘You can get a list of everything that’s been through Tinsley locks,’ he said. ‘And that’ll not be a lot at this time of year. Of course, someone could have brought a trailer in, taken a boat off up a slipway.’ If they had, then the cabin cruiser could be anywhere. Tina felt depressed. ‘But you couldn’t do that without someone noticing. There’s not so many places you can take them off.’
