Bleak Water

by Danuta Reah

  She worked until the fading light sent shadows over the canvas, then shook herself out of her concentration and became aware of her surroundings again. She switched on the local news and listened with half an ear as she looked in the fridge, trying to decide what to eat…further closures at…She hadn’t been shopping with all the work for the opening and then sorting out Maggie’s stuff. Eggs, bread…retailers who had expressed concern about the disruption…She wanted something more interesting than that. She straightened up and stretched. She could go out…is growing about missing Sheffield school girl Stacy McDonald…She could go into town. She thought about calling Daniel. After all, he’d left a message asking her to contact him. Bad idea. For a moment, she wondered about contacting the enigmatic Roy Farnham – but she didn’t have his number. And anyway, things were different now. That was a contact that would have to keep.

  She cleaned her brushes and had a quick shower to get rid of the smell of turpentine. She pinned her hair up and put on her black dress with the close-fitting top and loose, calf-length skirt. She was tall enough for flat shoes – more comfortable for the walk up the hill into the town centre. She scooped up Maggie’s papers and put them into a drawer. She left the photos on the table. She needed to decide what to do with them.

  The corridor outside her flat looked bleak and functional in the glare of the light. She looked at Cara’s door. She felt cold. She pulled her collar up round her neck as she opened the door on to the outside steps.

  As she locked the door at the bottom, she noticed that there was a light on in the gallery, in Jonathan’s office. He must have come in after all, to catch up on the work he’d missed on Saturday. He used to do that a lot when Eliza first started at the gallery, often staying away during the day, then coming in and working late into the night.

  The towpath or the road? She looked along the canal side. The towpath was the quicker route, and several people were hurrying along it in both directions, bundled up against the cold. She pushed her hands deep into her pockets and walked briskly towards the canal basin. It was far colder than she’d realized; the puddles of water on the ground were sparkling with frost, and she could see the gleam of ice on the water of the canal. If she’d known how cold it was, maybe eggs on toast would have seemed more attractive.

  She was at the arch now, where the canal curved slightly. The water gleamed in the darkness, and then vanished as the light was cut off by the bridge. She quickened her pace as she went through the tunnel, slowing again as she reached the other end and the moonlight faded as the lights of the canal basin came into view.

  Dear Dad

  I am very worried and I need

  Something has happened and I don’t know what to

  Dear Dad

  I hope you are well. I am well. Mum is well. School is really boring right now. I am going to see Westlife when they come to the Arena. I got a new skirt and I altered it and it looks really good like the one I saw in J17.

  Kerry sucked her pen and read what she’d written. It was dark outside and her room felt cold. The draught came in round the windows in this house. In the other house, Dad used to get that sealer stuff and put it round the windows where the wood was loose. When Mum said, ‘Mark, this place is falling to pieces,’ Dad had laughed and said, ‘No it isn’t. You just want to move.’ Mum had never liked the old house. It was big and draughty with lots of rooms. Lyn said that she and Mum wanted to live somewhere new and modern.

  ‘Like where we used to live, before she met him,’ Lyn had said. Lyn always called Dad him, never ‘Mark’ and never, ever ‘Dad’. ‘He’s not my father,’ she used to say to Kerry when Kerry asked her why. ‘I’m going to go and live with my father when I’m old enough. He wants me to.’ But Kerry knew that Lyn’s dad didn’t keep in touch, never came round, never wrote to Lyn or sent her cards or presents. Lyn didn’t even know where he was, though she never admitted it. Dad always said, ‘Leave her, Kizz, she’ll come round.’ Only she never did.

  Maybe she should phone Stacy’s house and see if Stacy had come home. She looked at her watch. It was ten o’clock. It was too late to phone, but Stacy would surely be back by now. She had to be. Kerry ignored the cold feeling inside her. She’d been right not to tell the copper. She didn’t know where Stacy had gone. If she knew, she would have told, but she couldn’t tell them she’d been down the market, down the canal basin. She’d get excluded for sure, and then Mum would do what she’d done to Lyn. Beyond control, that was what Mum had said, and then Lyn had gone. Mum always said that Lyn had been born to trouble.

  She could hear shouting outside, and someone was screaming, the kids messing around on the estate again. Kerry peered round the curtain. Sometimes she wanted to go out, meet up with the kids out there who were hanging out and having a good time while Kerry was sitting upstairs in her room on her own. But they might…She could remember them shouting at the old house, before she and Mum moved, Paedo! Paedo!, and they’d chucked stones at the windows. It would be different when Dad came home.

  Kerry bit her nail. She was remembering the day in Conisbrough, the last day, the day Ellie went away. They’d gone on the water-bus. Kerry rocked herself gently on the bed. And it was like the way the water-bus had rocked as it puttered slowly up the river. She closed her eyes. Dad had shown Ellie the wave foaming up the side of the boat, and Ellie had leant over, trying to trail her fingers in it, while Kerry looked over her shoulder. And Dad was standing up watching the river bank and the trees. There was hardly anyone else on board that day, and she and Ellie had run along the inside of the boat that was long and narrow with seats like a pub, and it was like a pub because there was a bar, only it was closed, and a door that said Toilet and a door that said Kitchen. And then they were at the landing and they could see the castle on the hill, all broken and falling down.

  Her eyes snapped open. She reached for her bag and searched around inside it. She pulled out the phone and switched it on. She waited in suspense as it registered, then she heard the faint beep, and allowed herself to look at the display. But there was nothing there. She checked her messages anyway, in case something had gone wrong, in case a new message had come. She let the messages run across the display, weeks of messages: c u @ caff usual time don’t b l8; dont b a div kizz bunk off; c u fday same time caff; dont let the cow get u down; 2sday 7 caff. Kerry’s eyes skimmed them. And then the special one. its abut yor dad meet u at the cafy 7 dont b l8…But she had been late, and she had missed Lyn, and she hadn’t seen her since. And she didn’t know what to do.

  She could hear Mum’s feet on the stairs, slow, uneven. Step, creak. Step. Step. She slipped the phone under her pillow, watching the door. Mum’s feet moved along the corridor, hesitated outside Kerry’s room, moved on and past. Kerry heard the bedroom door open and shut. That was it. Mum wouldn’t get up again now. She turned off the light, and lay back against her pillow, watching the shadows on the wall.

  She used to be scared of the dark when she was a little kid. Mum wouldn’t let her sleep with the light on, and she’d wake up sometimes and it was all black except where the curtain was she could see a faint light and the curtain would move and bulge, and she’d lie there trying not to call out. Dad used to say, That’s my brave Kizzy, but there was nothing to be brave about, not then.

  The night was cold and clear. Frost glittered on the pavements, and the moon shone with an icy brightness. Eliza walked home via the road, past the hotel – she wondered if Daniel was there – under the old bridge towards the gallery. The steps looked dark and uninviting. Once or twice, Cara had forgotten to lock the door at the bottom and Eliza had found evidence of people using the stairs for shelter at night – the remains of a cardboard box, an old blanket and once, more worryingly, a discarded syringe.

  She let herself in through the gallery entrance, resetting the alarm once she was inside. She hesitated, then switched off the alarms. She wasn’t tired, and she felt like wandering around the exhibition in the empty silence of the night. S
he remembered the light in Jonathan’s office earlier, and opened his door to check if he was still there, but his room was dark and empty. She switched the light on. His desk was clear, apart from a small picture propped against his desk lamp. She looked at it. A reproduction from Daniel’s exhibition. She picked it up. It was the Vietnamese children running down the road in the napalm blaze, naked and screaming in terror. She turned the light off again – she didn’t want anyone coming to investigate what was going on in the building so late – and wandered into the moonlit gallery.

  She walked slowly through the empty space, her feet echoing on the floor, tap-tap, tap-tap. The moon was high in the sky now, and the light made patterns on the floor between pools of shadow. Tap-tap, tap-tap as Eliza walked past the pictures, and she remembered that strange echo she’d heard that night, almost like a disturbance in the air of something soft and heavy moving through the rooms behind her. She looked out of the window at the water that lay still and silent below her in the moonlight.

  Dark and still. The silence of the gallery lay around her and she closed her eyes, listening. The call of a night bird. A siren fading away into the distance. She could hear the sound of the water washing against the canal side, and there was a cracking noise. She looked out of the window, and saw the shape of a boat coming down the canal. It was in darkness, almost invisible in the night. Wasn’t that illegal? Weren’t they supposed to show lights? Its engine must be off, that was why she hadn’t heard it before. It was only the disturbance in the water and the sound of ice cracking under its bows that had warned her of its coming. She listened as it went past.

  She stretched and went towards the stairs, switching on the gallery alarm as she left. The light in the corridor outside the flats was harsh, illuminating the scratches on the paintwork, the patches of damp on the walls. Common areas. Neglected. Outside Cara’s flat, her feet crunched in some debris. The corridor needed cleaning. It was cold. The heating didn’t extend to the common areas, and a flow of icy air seemed to wrap itself round her bones. She let herself into the flat, feeling the residual warmth from the heating. She turned on the floor light, relaxing in its softer glow.

  She kicked off her shoes and wandered through the flat. She was aware of the empty gallery below her and the empty flat next door. She was walking on the boards now, rather than the rug, tap-tap like the sound of her feet across the floor of the gallery. She pulled off her dress, her stockings, her pants, then wrapped herself in the towelling bathrobe that had been her treat to herself at Christmas and headed towards the bathroom. A shower would relax her.

  Once she was in bed, the warmth began to creep over her. She picked up her book, but after less than a page, the print began to swim in front of her eyes. She put the bookmark in, and dropped the book on to the floor. She turned over and pulled the quilt up round her neck, resting her face on her hand, feeling her thoughts start to disintegrate into dreams as she drifted off to sleep.

  And she was swimming in the canal in the sunshine, except she was caught in an icy current, and Daniel Flynn was standing on the bank and they were supposed to be having a picnic together, but he was walking off down the towpath with someone, and the current was so cold her legs were too stiff to swim fast to keep up with them. The dark water under Cadman Street Bridge lay ahead of her, and the bridge was creaking, creaking, and it was going to fall on them. She tried to call out, to warn them, but her voice would only make a whisper.

  She tried again, and then, suddenly, she was awake in the still of the night, and the icy current was there, and the creaking, faint but clear in the silence.

  She sat up, shivering. Her head felt muddled and she was still half in her dream. Cara had left the fire door open again and the freezing night air was blowing into Eliza’s flat. She shuffled her slippers on and went across the room. She was standing in her front door in the stream of cold from the open fire escape when her mind began to work. Cara wasn’t responsible. Cara was dead. Cara had been killed. But the door was wide open, and the creaking, it wasn’t in her dream, it came from…Her head turned slowly. From the dark lobby in front of Cara’s door. Creak and silence. Creak and silence. Like the ropes of her swing when she was a child as she sat on the old wooden seat before she began to push it up to swing among the low branches of the trees. As she sat there absently, letting the swing rock her, the ropes had made that sound: creak and silence, creak and silence. Her hand reached for the light switch, but the corridor remained dark. The bulb must have blown.

  And there was a smell like…like drains or garbage, like something left too long to rot.

  And it drew her like a magnet. The awake Eliza, the day-time Eliza was starting to come alert in her head, starting to say things like Wait! and Stop! But the night-time Eliza, the Eliza who was still half in a dream, walked towards the darkness of the lobby, her hands reaching out, feeling for whatever it was that made that strange noise like rope moving slightly, pulled tight by a heavy weight.

  There was something moving in front of her face. She ran into a soft and heavy weight that moved and then swung back against her, engulfing her in the darkness where things rotted and a dream voice sang in the night. There was fabric against her face and something cold and her brain couldn’t interpret what she was touching. A person, a person who was so cold, who was standing in mid-air, the legs dangling free…

  Her knees hit the floor with a thump, her hands sliding numbly down the legs and feet of the figure that dangled loosely in front of her face, barely visible in the darkness, spinning slightly as the rope creaked.

  And then the moon came out and shone with a cold clarity on the thing that swung gently above her.

  ELEVEN

  The corridor was harshly lit by the arc lamps that the scenes-of-crime team had rigged up. The call had come in the small hours, and Farnham felt spaced out by fatigue. He looked up at the bedraggled figure. The dangling legs looked sturdy. The toenails were painted pink, but the polish was chipped. It was hard to tell what she was wearing, because the body had been draped in a blanket, but he could just make out a grey skirt and a dark top. He could see something glitter as the light caught it. He moved closer.

  Shadows fell on the lobby walls from the differently angled lights. As people came and went on the stairs, the air currents moved and the body swung slightly, making the shadows dance. The effect was oddly stroboscopic and he found himself thinking of film, of photographs, of paintings and designs. He shook his head to clear it and pulled his eyes away from the shadows. The noose had been tied so that the knot was at the front of the neck, forcing the head back towards the ceiling. The legs dangled, but the arms…at first he couldn’t see them, then he realized that they were tied, pulled behind the body and bent up. There was something wrong about the head, but the way the lights were angled left it partly in shadow and he couldn’t make out the details from where he stood.

  A door opened somewhere and the dangling figure swayed. The rope creaked. Dancing bones. Where did that come from? Maybe this was too much like Halloween. He dragged his mind back to the job. Tired. He was tired. The pathologist spoke quietly to him. ‘I’ll need to have a closer look before I can tell you any more, but she didn’t die here. She’s been dead…I don’t know.’

  ‘She was dead when someone strung her up?’ Farnham said. ‘Are you sure?’

  The pathologist looked at him. ‘A hanging can be a messy death,’ she said. ‘Forget all that stuff about the drop and instant death – in the days of public hangings, they used to talk about victims dancing at the end of the rope. Their friends used to try to get to them and pull on their feet to speed things up. It can be quick. Sometimes the pressure on the neck stops the heart, but if the victim asphyxiates as the rope tightens, you get the build up of pressure, oxygen deprivation, incontinence, the lot. I don’t know how she died, but if it was hanging, she wasn’t hanged here.’

  Farnham looked up at the oddly positioned noose. He wanted a close look at that knot. ‘I thought it snapped
the neck, hanging,’ he said. ‘Bang. Gone.’

  She looked at him over her glasses. ‘I used to know someone who worked for the prison service when we executed people in this country,’ she said. ‘They’d leave the body hanging for a certain length of time before they cut it down. It made the job much worse for the prison staff who attended. They would talk about the body trembling, and facial contortions, but they were always told it was post-mortem reaction. Well, I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies, and I never saw one that pulled faces at me. Spinal-cord severance at the neck isn’t always fatal. People survive it. You don’t get to dance, that’s all.’ Her voice was sharp. She turned back to the body, ending the discussion.

  Farnham watched her in mild surprise. What rattled her cage? He turned his attention back to the scene in front of him. They were lowering the body now, laying it out carefully on the body bag so that it could be transported to the morgue. The light shone on the head and face, and he closed his eyes. He remembered the post-mortem report on Cara Hobson, the evidence of torture. They were dealing with madness here.

  ‘She’s young,’ he said to the pathologist, who was kneeling beside the body.

  The woman nodded. ‘Early teens, I’d say.’ She looked up. ‘That’s a guess,’ she added. She had a reputation for never committing herself until she was certain. ‘Have we got a description of the missing school girl?’

  Farnham looked at the body, then at the pathologist. ‘It fits,’ he said. He’d been following the case. Now it looked as though it was going to be his. ‘Can you do something with her before we get the family in to identify her? Or are we going to have to…?’

  She shrugged. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said.