Bleak Water

by Danuta Reah

  It was like climbing a tower block, a block of flats, the functionalism of the concrete, the grubbiness of the bricks, the cracked treads. And a face was looking down at her, white in the darkness. But this wasn’t the tower block, no one was standing high above her, looking down, assessing the drop. Tina reached the first landing. A discarded mask lay on the ground, a clown face, grinning and weeping as she ran past up the second flight, up the third and she was at the next landing and the smoke was pouring out, but she could see now that the fire was at the front of the building rather than at the back. That was why no one had seen it. It meant she might be in time.

  The door was shut. Someone had jammed a wooden bar across it. Anyone trying to open the door from the inside would fail. She put her shoulder against the bar and pushed, but it wouldn’t budge. The smoke was making her cough and she tied the scarf tighter round her mouth. She could hear the sound of the fire engines in the distance. No time! She braced herself against the brick, and kicked the bar. Her head jarred back against the wall. God, she would end up punch-drunk. But the bar had shifted, slightly. Two more kicks, and it was loose. She worked it free. Now the door. It opened outwards. If it was locked, then it was up to the fire fighters to get through, but in that case, Eliza Eliot was dead.

  The door opened, then caught on an obstruction. Smoke poured out, making her choke even through the scarf. She crouched down, pulled to free the door, feeling the obstruction move. The smoke was much less dense here, but she could feel the heat of the fire. The door was blocked by something jammed underneath it. The more she pulled, the tighter it became wedged. But she could see someone inside now, someone slumped on the floor. Tina pulled the door again and managed to grip one of the arms of the limp figure as she called again on the radio for help. The door was sticking, nothing was moving, the smoke was thick and impenetrable.

  Then she heard the sound of feet on the steps behind her, and someone was kicking the door free as Tina struggled to pull the unconscious woman clear. Then there were more footsteps, and someone pulled her away, someone else was past her and she was being hurried down the steps, struggling to get back to Eliza, who she couldn’t leave, not now, now that she had come so far.

  The water was getting deeper. As it rose, he lifted her head more so that she could breathe. But they needed to get out, they needed to escape before the water came too high. She struggled, making muffled sounds, and his eyes focused on her again. They looked dull. ‘You aren’t Ellie,’ he said. He gripped his arms round Kerry and tried to stand her up. Her legs wouldn’t hold her, and they both fell. He tried again, but the weight of the water seemed to wash her over, her legs too numb to feel where her feet were, and the water was getting deeper and deeper.

  It was lighter in the cabin. It must be getting to morning, but the light was all wrong, it was orange and it moved. He looked out of the window behind her, and made a strange sound. ‘It’s all finished,’ he said. A loud roaring filled the air and the boat rocked. His hands seemed to drop away from her and she fell again, sliding helplessly under the water. Her eyes were open and she saw the cabin flooded with light, a brilliance that cut through the night, through the water that was swirling above her and through the blood that was trailing away in streamers, floating, curling around her.

  The boat lurched again. It was going down, it was sinking, and she didn’t want to die, not here, not in this water, not where he was. And there were people on the deck. She struggled, breathing half water, half air, and she was coughing and retching, but the cabin door was open and strong arms were pulling her up and out and then she was out of the cabin and the sky was orange flames and a hard stabbing light, and the thump, thump, thump was loud in the air where something black hovered, and she had died and gone to hell. Kerry Fraser…love is as strong as death is.

  NINETEEN

  Jonathan Massey had fought with the men trying to pull him out of the sinking cabin cruiser. He seemed, one of the team said to Farnham later, to want to go down with the boat. ‘Not exactly the sinking of the Titanic,’ the man said cheerfully. ‘Swamped in a few feet of canal water.’ Though it would have been deep enough to drown anyone trapped in the cabin. Water had been gushing into the boat from the open seacocks, which looked as though they had been sabotaged, but they’d managed to shut them off before the boat sank.

  Massey had been caught with the missing Kerry Fraser; Kerry, trussed up with tape and helpless. No wonder he hadn’t wanted to be taken. Now, Kerry Fraser was under sedation in hospital. Her sister, Mel Young, was with her. Her mother, Judith Martin had informed Farnham without expression, had ‘self-sedated into oblivion’ at home. And Eliza was in hospital being treated for the effects of smoke inhalation. He put that out of his mind. There was nothing he could do about that for the moment.

  But Massey was Farnham’s main target. The search of Massey’s office at the gallery hadn’t produced anything new, and the search of his home had been ambiguous. Farnham knew what he was looking for now. He was looking for evidence of a predatory paedophile.

  He didn’t find it, just hundreds of photographs. They were of children, girls, on the cusp of puberty, playing, laughing, riding bikes – everyday, outdoor pictures. And some portraits – private commissions, maybe – misty, soft focus: a girl cuddling a kitten, a girl holding a rose to her face. Photographs parents might cherish. And some pictures showing a darker side of childhood: monochrome, children on the streets, young prostitutes, a group huddled together in a drugged or drunken sprawl.

  Evidence of obsession, Farnham thought, unhealthy obsession, but not the evidence he was looking for. Farnham looked at the man sitting opposite him in the interview room. Massey had recovered from his brief immersion. He was huddled into the white coverall as though he was cold. He’d lost his glasses in the struggle and his eyes looked naked. He kept touching his fingers to the bridge of his nose.

  He still denied any involvement with Cara’s death. ‘She was a prostitute,’ he said. His voice was bitter, incredulous. ‘Anyone could have done it.’ His hands moved nervously to touch his missing glasses.

  His alibi for the night of Cara’s death still held. Patricia Carr was emphatic – Jonathan Massey had spent the night with her at her flat. ‘Kerry’s talked to us,’ Farnham said. Massey tugged a cigarette out of the carton in front of him with shaking hands. Farnham offered him a light. In fact, Kerry hadn’t said anything yet. She was behind an impenetrable shield of medics, but Massey needed a bit of encouragement.

  He looked at Farnham now, his eyes bloodshot from the canal water. ‘I thought it was…for a moment…it would all be OK,’ he said.

  ‘For the tape, Jonathan,’ Farnham said. Though the other man was only a couple of years younger than him, Farnham had found that Massey responded well to a slightly fatherly tone, as though something in Farnham’s role gave him an authority that Massey could relate to. ‘Tell me exactly what you thought.’

  ‘I thought she was Ellie,’ Massey said. He touched the bridge of his nose with his fingers, wiped the back of his hand across his eyes. ‘I thought Ellie had come back. I thought it was all a bad dream.’

  There it was! Farnham kept his voice level, his expression neutral. ‘Tell me about Ellie, Jonathan,’ he said.

  ‘I never meant to hurt her,’ Massey said. The lament of child killers everywhere, Farnham thought, as he listened. Massey had been on the river that day with a friend of his. ‘He was working on the river for a few weeks – running one of the boats between Sprotbrough and Conisbrough, taking people up the river. I joined him for the afternoon. The guy he was supposed to work with hadn’t turned up. I stayed in the galley – I wasn’t really supposed to be there.’

  ‘Tell me what happened to Ellie,’ Farnham said.

  Massey’s eyes were pleading. ‘You’ve got to believe me!’ he said. ‘I didn’t…I never meant…I was watching her. She was wearing a yellow jersey and little blue shorts. There were two of them. I could hear them running around and laughing. And
then she was leaning over the side of the boat and trying to splash her hands in the water. I took some photographs. So beautiful.’ He looked at Farnham, and there were tears in his eyes. ‘Everyone got off the boat at Conisbrough. We were supposed to go back to Sprotbrough, take back the people who’d done the trip earlier – but there wasn’t anyone. So we moored up a short way along the bank. It’s beautiful there. The trees come right down to the river. I stayed on board.’ He closed his eyes. ‘It was like a dream. I looked up, and she was there. The sun was shining on her hair and she came jumping down the steps – they never walk anywhere, have you noticed, little girls? They skip and they…’

  He looked at Farnham. His eyes pleaded for understanding. ‘I only wanted to touch her,’ he said. ‘But she started screaming and I panicked. I tried to stop her. And then…’

  ‘You killed her,’ Farnham said.

  ‘He helped me,’ Massey whispered. ‘After I’d done it. When he came back to the boat, I thought that was it, I thought…But he looked at her, and then he put his fingers on her neck, on her pulse, you know. He said he’d met her on the path and told her she could use the boat, told her where it was. And he knelt there for a bit. Then he said he’d help me. He said “You’d better leave it to me.” And he made it all go away.’

  ‘Who, Jonathan?’ Farnham leant forward, close, confiding. This is just between you and me. ‘Who took you on the boat? Who helped you?’

  ‘Ivan,’ Massey said. ‘Ivan Bakst.’

  Ivan Bakst. The artist whose name had been on the flier they’d found in Cara’s flat. The man Eliza had seen with Massey in the gallery, the evening after Stacy’s disappearance. Shit!

  Massey picked nervously at his lips, at his fingernails, as he watched Farnham. ‘I first met him when I was at art school,’ he said. ‘It was exciting, the art scene. There were ideas and people and we were all going places. And there was Ivan. He was an artist – he had these amazing ideas. When I graduated – I was hot in those days, I did my post-grad stuff at the Slade, and everyone thought I was going places – after that, Ivan took me on the canals with him. We went along the Grand Union Canal and then to the River Trent. We were in the veins of a corpse, he said.’

  Farnham had had enough of this arty-farty stuff from Eliza, but he nodded as though he understood.

  ‘They were starting to renovate the canals. Ivan said – I’ve never forgotten this – he said it was like embalming a corpse, but it was all decaying anyway. “You can’t stop it,” he said. He said that the empty buildings, and the old machinery were the bones. “Just the bones left now,” he said.’ Suddenly Massey was lost in his story. ‘I took photographs all the way. Did you see them? That summer, I really thought I was going to make it. That exhibition. It was the best stuff I’d ever done.’

  Farnham needed to let Massey talk now. ‘And then…’ he prompted.

  ‘Oh, I needed to work, you’ve got to live. But I kept in touch with Ivan. We’d come up as far as South Yorkshire, and he said he wanted to come back. He liked all the old industry, the way everything was falling apart. That’s what he’s into. When I got the place in Sheffield at the art school, he heard about it and he turned up one day, got his boat moored up near Rotherham. And he kept on coming back. Until that summer…’

  Among the things found on the Mary May, apart from a stained plastic sheet neatly folded away in one of the storage units, and a tiny earring, its sparkle dulled, caught in a gap between the seats, were two cell phones. One was in the bag Kerry Fraser had been carrying. The other had been discarded on the deck. This phone was registered to Mel Young. Farnham had looked at the exchange of messages stored on the SIM card when the information landed on his desk the following morning and despatched Tina to the hospital.

  Tina remembered Mel from the gallery, a young woman who projected spiky, gum-chewing hostility. When she arrived at the hospital, Mel was sitting by her sister’s bed. Kerry Fraser was sleeping. Mel’s fingers were gently untangling the knots in the fair hair that spread across the pillow, matted and dirty. As Tina watched, she smoothed the hair away from Kerry’s face. Then she looked up and saw Tina, and her expression changed. ‘What?’ she said. Her eyes narrowed. ‘You leave Kizz alone.’ Her voice was low but furious.

  ‘It’s OK, it’s you I need to talk to.’

  Mel Young looked at her, looked at Kerry, shrugged and came to the door. They sat on chairs outside the ward, Mel glancing through the doors as they talked.

  Her eyes were more interested now as she looked at Tina in the bright light. ‘I remember you. You got off with Daniel Flynn at the private view,’ she said.

  ‘I’d like you to have a look…’

  ‘You should have seen her face! Eliza. She looked like…’ Mel screwed her face into an expression of fastidious dismay. ‘Cow,’ she said.

  Tina assumed that was aimed at the absent Eliza, rather than at her. ‘This phone,’ she said.

  Mel glanced through the ward doors again. She saw Tina watching her and shrugged. ‘She’s such a div, Kizz,’ she said. ‘It’s always me has to pick up the pieces.’ She looked at the phone Tina was holding out and frowned. ‘That’s mine,’ she said. She’d lent it to Cara, she told Tina, the night Cara died.

  ‘You knew Cara, then?’ Mel had claimed little knowledge of the dead woman outside of the gallery.

  Mel’s gaze drifted away. ‘When I left home, I went to this hostel,’ she said. ‘It was OK. Cara was there, so I kind of got to know her. My family were in the news, on the TV, you know, all the Ellie Chapman stuff, all that stuff about him. She thought it was cool. We hung out a bit, you know, but she was a bit of a div. Don’t get me wrong, she was OK, really. She got me the job at the gallery.’ She was quiet for a moment. ‘Anyway, she said she’d lost her phone so I lent her mine.’

  She rolled her eyes when Tina asked her why she hadn’t told the police. ‘Like that was anything to do with it,’ she said. ‘I’m not stupid.’ She’d seen what police involvement had done to her sister.

  She and Kerry had kept in touch after Mel had left home. ‘I thought your mother…’ Tina searched for the words. She’d heard that Mel Young’s mother had thrown her out.

  Mel’s face hardened. ‘She wanted me out. But I would have gone anyway.’ She’d gone into a foster home briefly, then to the hostel where she had met Cara. Her mother wouldn’t have her near the house, and didn’t want her and Kerry meeting. ‘I didn’t want to get Kizz into bother, so I’d phone when she was out. And I’d meet Kizz in town, things like that. Or down the canal basin, when I got the job. Then she couldn’t even pay the phone bill. She’s a waste of space. They got cut off. So I got Kizz a phone, but I made her promise not to let her have it.’

  She hadn’t seen Kerry for over a week, she said. They’d met the Thursday before Maggie Chapman’s funeral and they’d had a row. ‘About her pervy dad,’ Mel said. Then she’d lost her phone. ‘So I didn’t call. And it was all, you know, about Cara. I didn’t want Kizz around that. I called her from the gallery,’ she said. ‘Yesterday. I left her a message telling her to call, but of course she didn’t.’ She looked at Tina. ‘Have you got a kid sister?’ she said.

  ‘No.’ Tina had brothers.

  ‘You’re lucky.’ She looked through the list of messages they’d found on Kerry’s phone: 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.

  ‘Yeah. We text each other. Eliza used to get a face on if I got calls at work. And Kizz gets into bother if her phone goes at school. And I wasn’t going to let her find out Kizz’d got a phone. No way.’

  She shook her head over the other messages: its abut yor dad meet u at the cafy 7 dont b l8; RUOK?; FDAY SAME PLACE 5.00.; OK. DONT B L8; WHO R U?; WHR R U?; WHR R U?; MT U ON TOPATH RLY BR 7.30 RGNT DNT B L8.; WR R U? ‘I didn’t send those.’

  ‘What about that one?’ its abut yor dad meet u at the cafy 7 dont b l8 Tina could see the difference in the other mess
ages – whoever had sent most of them didn’t know how to make the phone use lower case – but that one looked no different.

  ‘Oh, please,’ Mel said. ‘I do know how to spell.’

  That left Cara. ‘Did Cara have the number of Kerry’s phone?’

  Mel shook her head. ‘Why’d she want to get in touch with Kizz? No.’

  So if Cara had wanted to get in touch with Kerry, and didn’t want Mel to know, then she could get the number from Mel’s phone. But why was Cara arranging to meet Kerry? ‘Did she know something about Mark Fraser? Cara?’ But Mel looked as baffled as Tina felt. ‘You know that he probably didn’t kill Ellie, don’t you?’ Tina wasn’t sure if she should say that, but she wanted to find out what exactly had been going on in the Fraser house before Ellie’s death. Fraser had never been convicted of abuse, and if his appeal was successful, he might be coming back to his daughter.

  Mel looked at the floor. ‘That’s not my fault,’ she said. She looked at Tina. ‘He’s a pervert. He was always touching. Always putting his arm round me. Just because my dad forgot my birthday or something, as if I cared. Never mind, Mel, I’ll be your dad. He was always going on about that. He is so not my dad. He’s such a loser. And he came into the bathroom once when I was in there. Lock the door, Mel. As if he didn’t know. And when Mum went out, you know what he did? I used to watch. He’d get dressed in her clothes. Her undies, even – yuk! – and her skirts and he’d put make-up on. And he’d walk round in front of the mirror. He was such a pervert. And Mum wanted to leave Kizz alone with him.’