Bleak Water

by Danuta Reah

  It was a second before her mind took it in. The open door. The back door was open.

  She hadn’t locked it. Her mind seized on that. The door must have blown open in the night. But she’d checked it. She could remember doing that. It had been firmly bolted. She pressed the light switch again and again, but nothing happened. She felt around on the worktop and found the box of matches that she had seen earlier by the cooker. She let the pale light of the flame illuminate the door. The match dropped from her fingers and flickered on the lino before it went out.

  The bolts had been pulled back.

  Everything was still and quiet, but now the silence had a waiting, watching feel. The implications of what had happened were starting to sink in. The door had been unbolted from the inside. Someone had been here while she slept, someone had…Her hands were shaking. She had to get out. Her phone? Where had she left her phone?

  Back in the bedroom, it was back in the bedroom. She took a deep breath and went into the blackness of the corridor and the bedroom. The bedside table was at the far side. She could remember putting her phone down there. She crawled across the bed and ran her hands over the table. The phone was there.

  There was a crash from the back of the flat, from the kitchen where the door opened on to the silent yard and the gennel in the night. She gave up any pretence of calm and ran for the front door, ricocheting off the walls of the corridor, her hands scrabbling with the lock, and then she was outside, slamming the door shut behind her. Her breath was coming fast as she tried to get her bearings. The high walls cut off the light, and the moon was hidden. The garden was black night.

  She oriented herself. The door was behind her. She was facing down the path. The steps would be over there, to her right. She began to walk, quickly but carefully, away from the house.

  Everything was silent, and then, clear as anything in the still night, from the house behind her, the click of a latch, and she was running again, half-falling down the steps, her hands scrabbling against the rough bricks of the wall and then she was back on the road, her feet slipping on the ice, her breath coming in shallow gasps as the cold air attacked her throat. Her car, she needed to get to her car. But she’d left her bag, her keys – they were back in the flat.

  She made herself stop, listen again. The road was dark and silent. An owl called in the distance. The pavement shone with ice. There was no one in sight. But she had her phone. She pressed the button to make the display light up. The battery was low – she’d left it on as she slept. One call. If she phoned the police…an open door, nothing missing, things going bump in the night – they had their priorities. The flat had been standing empty, was known to be empty. They wouldn’t pull the stops out to catch an opportunist thief who would be long gone by now. She’d put the number of Roy Farnham’s mobile into her phone that morning. ‘If there’s anything else…’

  She was moving again, a ragged stumble down the icy pavement as her feet slipped. She pressed the ‘call’ button. For a horrible moment, she thought she was going to get the message service, then he answered. ‘Farnham.’ He sounded as if he might have been asleep, and she realized she had no idea what time it was.

  ‘It’s Eliza,’ she said. ‘There’s been…’ She didn’t know where to start.

  ‘Where are you? Are you OK?’ He sounded awake and alert now.

  ‘Yes, I’m at Walkley, I…’ She told him as coherently as she could what had happened. It sounded garbled and melodramatic as she spoke, but he responded to the urgency in her voice.

  ‘Are you out of there?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I’m outside, I’m trying to get down to the main road.’ She listened again. Feet on the steps behind her? Imagination! ‘Roy!’

  ‘Get away from there. Keep your phone switched on and keep your finger on the SOS button, right?’

  ‘Roy, listen, the battery’s low.’

  ‘OK. Get away, get to the road. There’ll be someone with you in –’ The phone beeped and was silent. The power had gone. She was very alone now. She had to get down the hill, get to lights, to people. She could see the streetlights below her, but there was no traffic, no life, just the empty pavements gleaming in the frozen night. She listened again. Nothing. She tried to quicken her pace, but her feet were slipping on the ice, sending her sideways into the road. Her shoes had no grip.

  And now she could hear the sound of a car coming down the hill behind her, the crackle of the wheels on the Tarmac as the car freewheeled closer. She began to run. She had to get to somewhere where there might be passing traffic, people, anything. Her feet slid out from underneath her, and she fell half into the road, aware of the headlights of the car illuminating her, aware of the sharp sting of the Tarmac where it had cut her knees. She was trying to get to her feet – he could see her now and she had to get away – as she heard the sound of a car door slamming shut and feet moving fast on the pavement towards her.

  Two uniformed officers were helping her to her feet, and Eliza felt her breathing begin to slow down, and the road was just the steep hill where Maggie’s house was, and the night was a still winter’s night, with knives of frost in the air that stabbed at her chest as she tried to get her breath. ‘Are you all right, love?’ one of them said. He was a thickset man, solid and reassuring.

  She took a deep breath. ‘I’m OK,’ she said. ‘I think I panicked.’ She told them about the flat, and the sound of the door in the night.

  ‘You were lucky. We were just round the corner when the call came through. Let’s have a look then.’

  His partner had already disappeared up the steps towards Maggie’s. She followed his bulk, watching the play of light from his torch as it illuminated the walls, the steps with the dead leaves of autumn still lying. It must be close to dawn, she thought as she reached the top of the steps. There was a faint light illuminating the garden, instead of the impenetrable blackness she remembered. Then one of the officers was snapping instructions into his radio, and she came back to the reality of the crackle of flames and the smell of burning.

  The front room, the room where she’d sat the night before, sorting the papers, was ablaze.

  ‘Are you sure about that, Eliza? Do you need to go over it again?’ Farnham watched Eliza carefully as she shook her head. She’d had a shock on top of the shock of finding Stacy McDonald’s body; she’d had two broken nights and she had been cold and panicked when she’d called him. But she looked calm now, seemed very certain about what she was saying. He sent his mind back to his attempts to get her to clarify the time she had heard footsteps from the flat next door the night that Cara died, and decided that she was well able to differentiate between what she knew, and what she was uncertain about.

  He’d given instructions for the patrol car to bring her in when he heard about the fire. Strictly speaking, this was nothing to do with him, but there were some coincidences that he wasn’t happy with, and he wasn’t prepared to leave it. Twice now, someone had been up to no good close to Eliza Eliot – once near her flat at the gallery, once at Maggie Chapman’s. He’d stepped back and let the official systems take over, but he wanted Eliza’s story on his own record, in the kind of detail he doubted any investigation into the break-in would get.

  She clasped her hands round the cup of canteen coffee he’d been able to rustle up, as if she still couldn’t get warm. ‘I dropped one match on to the kitchen floor. It went out. I didn’t have a lit match anywhere else in the flat. I’m sure.’

  ‘OK.’ Farnham was satisfied. The fire had taken hold very quickly, far more quickly than a dropped match on to a tiled floor would account for, and it had been focused in the front room of the flat, away from the kitchen where Eliza had been using lit matches to find her way. By the time the fire had been put out, the front room had been a mess of smoke-blackened walls dripping with water. Someone had set that fire.

  And his investigation was tripping over the threads of an earlier death. Cara’s body had been found very close to the place where Ellie
Chapman had been found. Maggie Chapman had been buried the day before Cara was killed. And now there had been a break-in at Maggie Chapman’s flat.

  Child killings tended to stick in the mind. Most serving officers prayed that they would never have to investigate one. And now he had a dead thirteen-year-old on his hands. Was there a connection? He couldn’t see one. There were things he needed to look up and people he needed to talk to. But it was after four and he’d managed – what? – two hours’ sleep before he’d been woken by Eliza’s call. He had a briefing to conduct in a few hours. Eliza looked as bad as he felt. She was slumped wearily in her chair, fighting to keep her eyes open. ‘Where are you going to go?’ he said. She couldn’t go back to her flat.

  ‘A friend’s. But I need to get some stuff.’

  ‘We’ve finished up at the flats,’ he said. ‘Can you get in? You didn’t leave your key back there?’

  She shook her head. ‘It was in my bag.’ They’d managed to retrieve Eliza’s bag from the flat, but her car keys and her other things were buried somewhere among the ashes.

  ‘OK. I’ll take you back.’ He needed to get out before the working day proper began. ‘There’s an all-night café not too far out of our way. Do you know it?’

  She nodded. ‘Near the station?’ she said.

  He remembered their last meeting in a café. ‘How do you feel about breakfast with a strange man again?’

  He surprised her into a smile. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘But we can get something at the flat. I’ve got coffee and stuff.’

  Her flat was five minutes’ drive away at this quiet time of the morning. The sky was clear and the moon was full as he pulled up in front of the gallery. She took him up the outside staircase.

  He looked at the concrete stairwell as they went up. It was poorly lit with dark landings. It seemed secure enough, the bottom door had a good lock on it, but he still didn’t like the idea of Eliza coming up and down here by herself at night. ‘Why don’t you use the gallery entrance?’

  ‘I do usually,’ she said. ‘But this is quicker when the gallery is closed.’

  ‘Use the other entrance,’ he said. ‘Until this is sorted.’

  She unlocked the door at the top of the staircase. ‘I wasn’t too bothered before,’ she said. ‘I mean, it’s secure enough.’ She was opening the door. He moved quickly beside her and went through ahead of her, blocking her view of the empty corridor, the shadows in the dark of the winter morning. She looked at him assessingly for a second. ‘I’ve got to get used to it,’ she said, ‘if I’m going to stay here.’

  ‘Now may not be the best time,’ he said.

  She didn’t say anything, just unlocked the door to her flat.

  He hadn’t been here before. His first impression was one of space and shadows. A window at the far end of the long room gleamed faintly with the reflection of the moon on the canal. Eliza pressed a wall switch, and the window went black, as pools of light illuminated the room, the kitchen area with its red tiles, the groups of chairs with throws in vivid greens and deep reds, scatter cushions lying randomly across them. An easel stood at the far end of the room in front of the window.

  Eliza checked the answering machine and went over to the kitchen. After a while, the smell of coffee began to drift through the flat. He wandered across the room, his policeman’s eye checking the light on the machine: 0. No messages. He looked at the canvas on the easel, one that she was, presumably, working on. At first, it looked a mess, then his eye began to pick out bits of the canal, the arched bridge, a broken fall-pipe with a dead shrub, a mat of weed and rubbish on the water. He frowned. He couldn’t understand why she didn’t paint what she could see out of the window, if she wanted to paint the canal.

  ‘Sugar?’ she said.

  ‘One, please.’

  She brought two cups of coffee across to where he was standing. She gave him one, and stood beside him, looking at the painting. ‘I started that the day…the day before yesterday,’ she said.

  The day they’d found Stacy McDonald. He didn’t want to get on to that topic. ‘Why don’t you paint that?’ He gestured towards the black square of the window.

  She glanced up at him. ‘I have.’

  He shook his head, baffled.

  ‘It’s…’ She was searching for the words. ‘Look, you’ve got this idea in your head that’s the canal. To you it’s a place where you’re investigating something, where a murder happened. To me, it’s – well, it is that, but it’s a lot of different things as well. I’m trying to paint that canal. It isn’t just a line of water under a line of sky. Think about it. You never see it like that and you never think about it like that, unless you’re thinking about a picture of it, right?’

  This was all a bit arty-farty for him. ‘A canal is a canal,’ he said. ‘That suits me.’

  She looked at him for a minute as she thought about this, then she smiled. ‘The Hay Wain,’ she said. ‘Fair enough.’ There were shadows under her eyes. She pushed her hair back off her face as she kept her gaze on him. He raised his eyebrows in query, and she said, ‘I probably wouldn’t do this if I wasn’t too tired to think straight,’ and she reached up and put her hands on his shoulders, and kissed him lightly.

  His first reaction was surprise, then he put his arms round her and pulled her closer. She kissed him again, a warmer, longer kiss. In his fatigue-drugged state, he wasn’t prepared to listen to the voice of reason and common sense that told him it was mad to let this happen with someone who was so closely tied in with an investigation. He was happy to go with it, to let her take this as far as she wanted to, and she seemed to want to take it all the way. She pulled his jacket open and pressed herself closer to him and he kissed her again.

  He tightened his arms round her and lifted her off her feet. He walked her over to the bed, let her drop, and she fell back on to the covers, pulling him down with her. He slipped his hands under her jersey and eased it over her head. She was wearing a thin blouse, but no bra, and he could see the shadow of her breasts. He ran his fingers across them, feeling the nipples harden under his touch. He kissed them through the fabric, catching them gently with his teeth, and he heard her breath quicken. He unbuttoned the blouse and peeled it off her shoulders and down her arms. Her breasts were small. He could cup them in his hand.

  ‘They aren’t very big,’ she said, ruefully.

  ‘They’re beautiful,’ he said.

  She kicked off her shoes, and he undid the fastenings on her trousers, slipping them down her legs. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I’d better…’ She gestured towards a door that was, presumably, the bathroom. She stood up, the whiteness of her skin glimmering in the half-light. ‘I won’t be long,’ she said.

  He felt dizzy with the mixture of excitement, confusion and fatigue. He lay back against the pillows, aware of a faint perfume that said ‘Eliza’ to him. She had come on to him so strongly and he couldn’t understand where that had come from, didn’t want to think about it. He was too tired to think. His thought processes seemed to be breaking up. He had to be back in the incident room in a couple of hours and he had to…

  Her painting. The pieces and parts of the canal that shifted and coalesced, the beauty and the decay, and the discarded remains, the dark hair floating like weeds on the surface of the water. Like the painting, the swollen body floating in a sea of putrescence, the tortured figure, mutilated and eyeless, decaying at the end of a rope. And so many more, the flames and the knives and the pikes and spears, and it wouldn’t make a pattern, not a pattern he could read, just a pattern that said madness, and torture, and death, and then there was darkness and after darkness…It all drifted away into chaos.

  Farnham was coming back from a long way away. There was something wrong. This wasn’t his bed, he was lying on top of a quilt with something light covering him. He could smell coffee. He lay there in the blankness of first waking, then his memory began to work. He reached out, and he breathed again when he found the space on the bed beside him was empty.
The images from the night before were coming back to him. Eliza kissing him, Eliza lying on the bed, Eliza, naked, fading into the shadows. Shit!

  He pushed himself up on to his elbow, rubbing his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. ‘Eliza?’ he said. Someone had taken his shoes off, and pulled a red throw over him. Christ, what time was it? He looked at his watch and relaxed a bit. Seven-thirty.

  ‘I was just going to wake you.’ Eliza came into view wearing a dressing gown. Her feet were bare and her hair was wrapped in a towel. She looked a bit wary, a bit defensive.

  ‘I’m sorry, Eliza.’ He’d fallen asleep. She’d been naked on the bed with him and he’d fallen asleep. It would be funny if it wasn’t so…Though it was probably for the best. Now he could think straight, it would have been crazy to let a complication like that get in the way of the investigation.

  She relaxed a bit. ‘I don’t usually have that effect.’

  ‘You didn’t,’ he said. ‘It was me.’ He couldn’t leave it there. ‘Listen, Eliza. Last night…’

  ‘I know. It’s OK. It’s a bad idea at the moment. We were both a bit looped.’ She unwrapped the towel and shook her head. Damp hair fell round her shoulders. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘But you need to get to work. Look, I’ve got stuff here. You can have a shower and I’ll do us breakfast.’

  ‘You still get breakfast with a strange man,’ he said.

  ‘Not so strange,’ she said. ‘Not so strange.’

  She was setting the table when he came out of the shower, feeling more rested and awake than he had for days.

  ‘I’ve done some eggs and some toast,’ she said. ‘Want to eat?’ Her hair, as it dried, was curling in tendrils round her face.

  She put plates and the coffee pot on the table, pushing aside a pile of folders that lay there. ‘All that stuff,’ she said.

  He looked a query at her.

  ‘Maggie’s stuff – her papers. I was going to decide what to do with it all, and now it’s destroyed, most of it. I should have burned it in the first place.’ Her laugh was without humour. ‘And I should have listened to her landlord.’