by Adam Roberts
He got his hat, draped the blanket over his shoulders and popped up through the hatch and jumped fairly nimbly, given his age, onto the deck.
There was no rain, and the full moon was shining through a gap in the clouds making everything shine as if glazed: the wood of the deck; the river flowing past, mere yards away, in undulating crescents and tildes and snakes; the mud and grass on the bank; all of it. The air smelt fresh.
A tall figure in a long coat was standing on deck, a few yards from the hatch. Standing on his deck!
“Good evening, Madam,” said the stranger, gravely.
Hat said nothing. Adjusted his cloak of blanket more tightly about him.
“You’ll pardon me for stomping about on your boat, Madam,” the stranger went on, in a voice much closer to gloating than apology. “It’s just that I was surprised to find it afloat. I’d heard that it was sunk.”
“It was,” said Hat.
A quizzical expression perhaps passed over the stranger’s face. It was hard to tell in the dimness. He took a step forward, and then continued. “I was quite prepared to believe the stories about the boat being sunk, Madam,” he said, “seeing as how I sunk it.”
“You’re the one who killed the girl.”
Again, a pause, as if puzzled by the timbre of Hat’s voice. Then, “She held out longer than I thought she would do. You can be proud of her. On the topic of whereabouts on the barge you keep your records she gave nothing away at all. I don’t suppose you’d care to enlighten me on that one? I looked pretty thoroughly, but you can understand that I was in a hurry at the time.”
Hat said nothing. The stranger stepped forward again and lifted something out of the shadows of his coat. It looked like a handgun. Hat registered this, and then thought about it. In his experience, guns were more likely to misfire during Monsoon season than at other times of year. Damp getting into the ammo. Then again, the probability of a misfire was not the sort of chance it was worth literally risking your life on.
“No?” said the stranger. “Well, I’m not surprised. You realise, of course, that the alternative to me having it is me putting it out of the way of everybody else, yes? Can’t see that stuff falling into just anybody’s hands, can we? I suspect your bosses would even agree with me, on that score.”
Hat said nothing. The stranger leaned a little closer, as if trying to get a clearer view of Hat’s face under the shadow-hung rim of his hat.
“Madam,” he said, “do we know one another?”
“Don’t believe so.”
The stranger peered down through the hatch, although the gun was still trained on Hat. “You can feel the warmth,” he said. “You’ve been drying the old boat out, I see.”
Hat said nothing. He was sizing his opponent up. That sizing was not a reassuring process. The stranger was at least six inches taller than him, and bulkier, and younger. Presumably he was more experienced when it came to fighting. Evidently he had no qualms about hurting and killing people.
“Good idea,” the stranger was saying. “And handy for me. You can imagine the sort of accident that might befall you—falling asleep before the fire. A lady of a certain age, liable to nodding off, drowsy with the fumes of the stove. And then—pouf, up in flames. The weather probably won’t hold for very long, but a good chunk of the boat might burn before the next bout of rainfall. And that would serve my purposes perfectly adequately.”
Hat pondered this. “Most,” he offered, “of the timber is still damp.”
“You’re probably right. Still, you needn’t worry, Madam: it won’t be your problem. You’ll be past caring.” With his free hand the man was fumbling something out of his left coat pocket. A snake, or a belt, or a rope. Hat dropped his chin, half a nod of understanding—the stranger was going to throttle him, and burn his corpse, and try to burn his boat, for whatever incomprehensible reasons had led him to killing the girl and sinking the boat. Strangled, cremated, forgotten.
It was, all things considered, an undesirable turn of events.
“Your second-mate,” said the stranger, and then stopped again. He seemed again to be peering in a puzzled way at Hat. “Is that the correct nautical term? I’m no expert in these matters.”
Hat looked up. “Say?”
“Your sailor-ward did give me the name of the place. Eventually, she gave up that information. Benson, she said. Good news for you, since otherwise I’d have to go to work on you to extract the name. I don’t mind saying: in my experience women crack more easily than men, and old women crack more easily than young ones. It’s exactly what you’d expect. One might think that a counter-intuitive state of play where the old hold out longer than the young, and women have steel in them that men lack—think childbirth, think period pains. But what it is, I think, is that pain fires up male testosterone and makes them more stubborn.” He was saying all this, Hat figured, to give himself time to arrange the cord in his left hand—a process that was taking him longer than it otherwise would, because he was still aiming the pistol with his right.
“Benson,” repeated Hat.
“Indeed. Your people haven’t played it very well, I must say. It hasn’t been too difficult for me to put together the magic boy and the place, has it?” A cloud shunted in front of the moon, and the already dim light thickened and dimmed further.
“The magic boy?”
“You do understand, my dear,” said the stranger, coming another step closer, “that I have to cover my traces. It’s nothing personal. I can’t have your people coming after me, to punish me, as they surely would if they knew what I had done. But I am no sadist. I can make it as quick and painless as can be imagined, as a courtesy to you, ma’am. I assume you have some inkling of what he will unlock, at Benson? I can be honest, in the circumstances, and confess I don’t. Perhaps you could even tell me?”
“Honestly?” said Hat, “I haven’t the first fucking clue what you’re even on about, mate.”
The moon emerged from the clouds, and the deck gleamed with faint white light. Hat whipped his blanket off with his right hand and twirled it round into a ropey tangle of cloth. The action made his cods jiggle in the moonlight.
This disrobing seemed to freeze the stranger to the spot. Presumably, having believed he was in conversation with a rather gruff-voiced and elderly woman, it took him a moment to readjust his understanding of the situation. And, a fraction before his mind clicked into a proper sense of what was going on, Hat had whipped the blanket round and smacked him in the face.
The stranger flinched back from the blow. His foot slipped on the wet deck and his other leg kicked up like a dancer’s. He almost fell right over, but with a lurching hop on his one leg he managed—just—to stay upright.
Hat wasn’t about to stick around. Clouds veiled the moon again, and everything was suddenly dark. But Hat knew his boat. He ducked, turned, and ran past the length and round the bridge. This structure was not tall, too stumpy to give him any cover, but the stranger couldn’t see very clearly. A slit in the cloud let a single shaft of moonlight down, and Hat’s nakedness shone like a ghost in the night.
There was an intensely loud noise, like the whole boat snapping sharply in two. Hat was already bent over, but he ducked a little lower and heard a two-tone sound somewhere to this right, a whizz so high-pitched it was almost into dog territory shifting marginally down in register after passing him. Then his bare foot was where the gunwale should be—and it was—and he was leaping from the boat onto the shore.
He jinked to the right, and ran as fast as he could to get behind the trees he knew grew that way. But everything was dark and he didn’t know the bankside like he knew his own boat, so he misjudged this. As he thought he was approaching the tree he was actually at the tree, and a painful jarring collision of shoulder against bark informed him of that fact. He reeled, slipped on the wet grass and went down. But he was up again, and running.
The night was so quiet he could hear the footsteps of his pursuer. But he was on the main street
now, climbing away from the river, and already there was a light in at one of the windows. That gunshot would have awoken many. If the stranger fired again it would bring the whole town out of bed, which could only be good for Hat. Assuming a second shot didn’t kill him.
From behind the stranger bellowed something weird, “I thought you a pretty strange-looking woman,” he called. “But now I’m wondering—are you Henry himself?”
Henry, thought Hat. Henry? And he sprinted on, his cock slapping left and right on his thighs like a hard-swimming fish’s tail.
Given that his life was at stake, there seemed little point in reticence. “Haloo!” Hat yelled, as he ran naked up the high street, his blanket, still clutched in his right hand, flapping behind him like a great flag, his hat firmly on his head. “Haloo! Haloo!”
SOON ENOUGH THE whole town was up. People picked up crossbows and guns and went down to Hat’s boat. The stranger had returned to it and had attempted to set it alight, but although there was some scorching belowdecks the timbers were too wet to catch fire—exactly as Hat had said.
Hat spent some time warming his frozen feet at Agnieszka’s fire, the blanket around his shoulders again and tucked between his legs to preserve his modesty. She gave him a glass of mulled cider, and he thanked her. Sylvia Carr emerged, looking cross at having been woken, but she was efficient: organised a posse that went round Goring and found nothing. The ferry was safe, the fire on Hat’s boat had been put out, the stranger appeared to have vanished into the countryside.
“He’ll be back, I suppose,” said Agnieszka. “To finish the job.”
Hat couldn’t disagree with her. That is to say: he had no idea why the stranger had killed that girl and sunk his boat, or why he had assumed Hat was a woman, and threatened and cajoled him to give up some secret before killing him and sinking his boat again. All that was a perfect blank to him. He didn’t even know why the dead girl, whoever she was, had been on his boat in the first place. But the stranger’s murderous animosity didn’t need to be comprehended to be understood.
By the time he emerged from the tavern, walking barefoot down the chilly road to his boat, dawn was making the rim of the eastern hills glow ruddy and pink. He readied himself for disaster, but actually the inside of his boat was not as disarranged as he feared. The stranger had banged about, knocked stuff over, and started a fire with some of his kindling. The fire hadn’t taken, and the stranger had, clearly, run off as the town began to wake and shout and run around. Hat got dressed, cleared up down below, and went up on deck to sit and watch the sunrise take proper possession of the eastern sky.
He had nearly died, he thought. He had nearly been killed, which would have left him with four tobacco cigarettes unsmoked. That eventuality would have been almost a bigger tragedy than his actual death. Then again, he was still alive, and that was something. So he lit one of the remaining fags and smoked it slowly, and the daylight swelled and filled the east.
The clouds were few and scattered. It looked like the Monsoon was drawing to a close. And even if it wasn’t, it would make sense to move on, put distance between himself and whoever it was who wanted—for whatever crazy reason—to kill him.
He didn’t want to give the people of Goring the impression that he was absconding, so he stayed another day. He spoke again to Sylvia, and thanked her. But she was distracted—news of the commotion had reached the ears of the consignment of soldiers from Guz, and some were coming to check things out, a state of affairs that evidently preyed on Sylvia’s mind rather more than Hat’s being alive or being murdered. Hat gave Agnieszka a formal IOU, and said his goodbyes. Then he got back on his boat, and started the precarious business of navigating it down the Monsoon-swollen Thames.
The next day the temperature dropped sharply. Ice began to form on the edges of the river’s flow. One day more and ice was floating past him as he moved. He put all his clothes on, two pairs of gloves, and kept the stove on all day and all night. He made it over the flooded remains of Reading and had almost got to Shiplake when the whole river froze solid, clasping the boat tight as a corpse bride holds her lover, and taking the decision of where to stop out of his hands. Hat stomped up and down the deck. It was a lonely sort of place, which was worrying—what if the stranger were tracking him with intent to finish what he’d started? But then again, maybe the stranger had gone further north—he’d mentioned Benson, hadn’t he? Wasn’t that an old town, long swallowed by the Thames? The benefit of Hat’s present location was that there were many trees round and about: harder to cut off branches and boughs, now that they were all frozen, but still a source of fuel. He would wait out the deep chill until the river thawed, and then go on down to Henley. Stay there until spring and the warmer weather.
He was, Hat reflected as he fetched his axe, lucky to be alive. So maybe luck was with him after all.
SOME NIGHTS, WHEN he sat in his snug, the stove on, the freezing world outside, uneasy thoughts came to him. He couldn’t help imagining what it had been like for that poor girl, hurt and then killed, in this very space. These curving wooden walls the last things her mortal eyes saw, some horror of a man, tall and pitiless, pressing her into pain and death and not letting her ever return from that place. Hat wasn’t a man given much to dreaming, but he sometimes woke up in the night feeling sick and scared, and remembering what had happened.
He hoarded his last remaining tobacco. It had cost him dearly, after all. Indeed, together with the debts he had incurred in Goring it would take him most of the spring and summer to get his head back above water, financially. So he went back on his herbal smokes, and he made the best of the situation. Sitting on his deck, swaddled up with as many items of clothing as he could fit in, smoking and looking around the frozen world.
It all had something to do with Wycombe, of course. He wasn’t stupid. He could figure that much out. Content as he was to keep his head down and just get on with his life, he was aware that Henry up in Wycombe had big strategic plans for the place. The poor lass killed must have been part of it. The killer thinking he—Hat the Boat, a most unfeminine individual—must have been a woman. That was because he assumed the boat was Wycombe’s vessel, and that Wycombe’s plans were hidden inside it somewhere, and that if he (the killer) couldn’t find them it was better if it (the boat) was completely destroyed.
It was a mess, no question.
One day, some weeks later, Hat went out on the frozen river, a dozen yards from his boat, and cut an oval in the ice (he was aiming for a circle, but the shape got away from him as he laboured). He dangled a line in the water. He sat on a little stool and looked at the birds flying over the gleaming white sky above. And then he looked at the perfectly silent, trees, all wrapped in the suede of their frost. And here, coming through the trees, was a stranger.
Naturally Hat was apprehensive. But as the figure came closer he saw that he knew her. It was Eva, from Wycombe, the person who had given him the docket that had originally taken him up to Pangbourne, the voyage on which the other girl, Amber, had tried to stow away. Eva, whose previous arrival had more or less kickstarted this whole turn of events.
“Hello Eva,” he called.
She stepped from the bank onto the ice, and carried on walking towards him, stepping less steadily on that more treacherous surface.
“Hello Hat,” she said. “Any luck, with the fish?”
“Not yet,” he said.
She reached him, and stood next to him, her breath coming out in ferny clouds. “Hat,” she said, when she had got her breath back. “I’ve been looking for you.”
He nodded slowly, as if he expected nothing less.
“We heard about all the business in Goring,” she said. “Somebody tried to sink your boat.”
“Somebody succeeded in sinking my boat,” said Hat.
“We’re sorry.”
“I got it back up.”
“And you found a dead body on board, I hear?”
He nodded.
“Hat,” said
Eva. “I’d like it very much if you could tell me all about the whole thing.”
And so he did.
Chapter Nine
DAVY TRUDGED BEHIND Daniel as they walked north-west, following their own hazy shadows over crunchy ground. Every now and again Daniel would get spooked, and usher Davy into some cover or other—behind a clutch of trees, or into the ruins of an old house. They would sit there for a while as Daniel surveilled the landscape with an unhurried eye. Davy couldn’t see anything, or anyone, but Daniel insisted his sixth sense had saved his life on more than one previous occasion.
Eventually they resumed their trek.
To their left the river widened and slowed, until it was a cold lake stretching almost to the horizon. The surface had a mauve-black quality, speckled with patches of paler ice, and the far bank was softly occluded by a low-lying mist. Every now and again they would see the steeple of an old church lifting Excalibur-like from the water’s surface, or the vegetation-clogged roofs of taller buildings. Far away, just visible in amongst the cold haze, were the bin-shaped tops of the old Didcot power-generating chimneys. Nobody had ever explained to Davy how chimneys could make electricity, but everybody knew that once upon a time they had done precisely that. Aunt Eley had an elephant-leg basket in which she kept umbrellas: a real elephant leg, she insisted, cut off hundreds of years before and hollowed out and embalmed. That’s what the distant power chimneys looked like to Davy.
They clambered up onto slightly higher ground, which made Daniel nervous because they were more exposed. Then they descended the other side into a maze of young trees, none of them taller than Davy was himself. They passed an overgrown children’s play-area, climbing bars a solid wall of ivy, a tree bursting through the roof of the play house, and Davy saw movement out of the corner of his eye. He looked again: far away, through the trees, he saw a skinny, hunched-over figure darting from trunk to trunk, the saplings not quite fat enough yet to hide him.
