The Death of the Elver Man

by Jennie Finch

  Lauren pulled a face. ‘You really does know how to have a good time don’t you. Well, ’tis a fishing term. When they’s out after some fish, big ones like pike, they need to get it to strike – come up fast and really grab at the hook. So they gets a little fish and fixes it by the tail and throws it in. The little fish, the live bait, it tries to get away and all that struggling brings the pike. So that’s how they see me when I’m trying to swim – prey.’

  Alex was aghast. ‘God I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize it was something as horrible as that. I didn’t mean …’

  ‘You know your problem,’ said Lauren, waving her hand dismissively, ‘You’re too serious about everything. That’s good for the job but you need to turn it off now and then. Like tonight, all that worry you’ve been doing for Kevin Mallory – it’s all over.’

  Alex felt a broad grin stretch across her face.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said, ‘it is. At last, it’s all over.’

  Chapter Eleven

  To say Derek Johns was upset when he heard of Kevin Mallory’s release would be a grave understatement. He was incandescent with rage, a red mist before his eyes and a ringing in his ears causing him to collapse into his chair in the front room of his house, the telephone clenched in his fist. Iris watched him from under her lowered eyelids, ready to react to whatever might come next. She tried not to flinch as he slammed the receiver down, tensing despite herself in anticipation of his fury.

  ‘How’s this then?’ he shouted, struggling to rise from the chair. ‘What’s wrong with them? He was caught there, red-handed with a body in the back – what do they think happened then?’ He began to pace the floor beating a path between the chair and the front window.

  Iris waited until his back was turned for an instant and slipped out into the kitchen to put the kettle on. After a moment she reached into a cupboard and pulled out a glass and his bottle of whisky. Derek was hovering over the phone again and muttering to himself as she returned to the living room. Rounding on her, he swept the bottle and glass aside with a furious gesture. ‘Bloody hell woman, I can’t be drinking now. I’ve got work to do. Got to get the lads together and sort out what we going to do about this.’ He turned back to the phone and began pulling out the drawers of the cabinet next to his chair.

  ‘What you looking for now?’ she asked, setting the whisky down a safe distance away.

  ‘My book, the book with all my numbers in. Where’s it gone to – can’t find nothing in here any more.’

  ‘I hope you’re not thinking of bringing them all over here,’ said Iris.

  Derek stopped his searching and eyed her warily. ‘What if I is then? What’s it to you what a man does in his own house?’

  Iris straightened up and stared right back at him.

  ‘But this ain’t your house, Derek Johns. This is my house. My name on the documents and my money paying the rent. You’re not having your criminal friends round here trailing misery and the law behind ’em. I won’t have it – no more now.’

  Derek stared at her open-mouthed. He could not have been more surprised if the dog had started singing folk songs. It was inconceivable, this show of rebellion from his wife. After a long moment he turned away and went to pick up the phone.

  ‘I mean it,’ said Iris.

  ‘You shut up if you know what’s good for you,’ he snarled.

  Iris folded her arms and glared back.

  ‘Or what? What do you think you can do to make things any worse, eh? One son dead and the other locked up and you back here about to lose me my home with the way you carrying on – what’s left then?’

  She was trembling and a voice in her head was telling – no demanding – she stop, shut up, sit down now but she couldn’t stop. All the years of frustration and misery came boiling out in a great wave of fury.

  ‘You sat here, all these years with those shiftless good-for-nothing cronies of your’n, talking about all the evil things you planning and doing and dripping poison into my boys’ ears. You brought death to this door and you’re never doing it again. I want you out, Derek. I want you out for good ‘til you can show me you changed your ways and you can be a fit husband and a decent father.’

  There – she’d finally said it. She realized she’d stopped trembling and a sense of calm filled her. For the first time in so many, many years she wasn’t afraid. She watched her husband and felt nothing but a vague curiosity to see what he was going to do.

  Derek opened his mouth and closed it again, stepped forward as if to strike her and, faced with those steady sea-green eyes, dropped his fist to his side. Without a word he pushed past her, grabbed his jacket and slammed out of the front door. Behind him Iris sank down onto the couch as her anger trickled away and the full enormity of her actions hit her. After a moment she reached for the phone and dialled a number, leaving precise instructions in a calm voice that disguised the shaking of her hands. Then she poured herself a stiff drink from the whisky bottle and waited for the locksmith to come and make her home secure.

  Alex crossed the yard outside the offices and peered round the door to the refurbished workshop. The smell of sawdust and oil filled her nostrils and the radio blared in the background, assaulting her ears.

  ‘Morning Alex,’ came a cheery voice, booming over the music, and the general hubbub died down a little.

  She stepped into the busy space and a couple of the young men turned towards her with wide grins.

  ’Tis you going to do the race with us, Miss?’ someone shouted, and to her surprise there was a smattering of applause. Eddie hurried over wiping his hands on a piece of cloth.

  ‘Come and look at her,’ he said. ‘She’s not finished yet but you can see her basic lines and the main framework is in place.’

  Alex followed him into the body of the workshop where a large wooden structure was beginning to take shape. The raft was smaller than she had imagined and even taking into account its unfinished state it looked dangerously fragile.

  ‘Rules say it must be at least four feet wide in the water,’ said Eddie running his hands over the half-finished stern. ‘We’ve gone for the minimum, so we’ll sit in pairs here.’ He indicated the centre of the structure. Skipping round to the front he pointed to an angled area. ‘We’ve got a bow, to help with streamlining and our most experienced rower will be here, keeping stroke and helping to maintain the course.’

  Despite her apprehension, Alex was impressed by the amount of planning and sheer hard work that had gone in to getting this far. She’d had a mental picture of a raft, something out of childhood stories of shipwrecks and Robinson Crusoe. Rafts in her mental universe were heavy, flat and square not hybrid rowing boats like this.

  ‘How well does it move in the water?’ she asked, and there was a hush around her.

  ‘Well now,’ said Eddie, ‘we won’t know that until we get her sealed and try her out on the river, but all the figures look good so she should float.’ He caught sight of her expression and hurried on. ‘Look over here, the model’s been tested and it’s stable and moves well.’

  He indicated a plastic bowl on a bench where a tiny balsa wood raft bobbed and rocked in the centre. There were eight lumps of modelling clay spaced along the interior and she peered at them for a moment before asking, ‘So which one is me?’

  Eddie pointed to the back pair. ‘You’re left-handed so I’ve put you on the port side.’

  All this nautical language was beginning to seem a bit over the top for such an eccentric enterprise, but the lads in the workshop seemed to be working and enjoying it too so she decided to let it go for now.

  ‘We’ll need to get some practice in paddling so we can put on a good show,’ said Eddie. ‘How are you fixed for tonight? We do half an hour or so a couple of times a week and the paddlers are using the gym equipment to raise their fitness level too.’

  It was all too horrible, but Alex was stuck. She’d agreed to this and at least they were taking it seriously, which might mean she might no
t have to pull them out of the sea halfway to Minehead – providing the raft floated, of course, she added mentally.

  Ada bustled around her kitchen, humming to herself and enjoying the warmth of the sunshine and the unaccustomed feeling of security from having Kevin back in the house. She was not an overly imaginative woman and she was certainly not easily scared, but as the weeks of Kevin’s incarceration had dragged on she had felt more and more uneasy. The sense of being watched, followed by unknown eyes, had become stronger each day and she began to keep her doors locked and her windows closed despite the beautiful weather – and contrary to all the years of her life out on the Levels. With Kevin back she began to relax again, knowing help was close by should she need it, and now that she was no longer on her own she found the fear had lifted from her, drifting away into the sky to be replaced by a quiet contentment.

  As she worked, she puzzled over what to do about Kevin. He was not a boy anymore, he was a young man and she couldn’t keep him at home for ever. The thought of him leaving for good, setting out to make his own place in the world, nearly crippled her with anxiety, but she knew he would go sometime and better she helped find him somewhere with good people and an occupation than he just upped and went, heading who knows where. There was a sound behind her and she swung round to see the object of her musings standing in the doorway, clad in boxer shorts and a T-shirt, his hair sticking up every which way.

  ‘What’s for breakfast then Mum?’ he said with a yawn.

  ‘Breakfast? ’Tis almost lunch time you lazy great lump. Go back upstairs and put some clothes on. Is disrespectful, wandering around like that. Get off with you!’

  She chased him upstairs and returned to the kitchen to set the little table by the window. Things were running low, she thought, as she rummaged through the larder. Time to head into town and restock. There was a travelling grocer who drove his van around the hamlets and outlying houses of the Levels bringing staples and occasional luxuries to busy smallholders and those without their own transport. When Frank Mallory had been around, Ada had patronized this mobile shop, but with him gone, money was very tight and she refused to pay the prices the van man charged.

  ‘Daylight robbery,’ she’d told him the last time he called. The argument was over a packet of shortbread biscuits, Kevin’s favourite she recalled. The van man had protested; he needed to cover the costs of the van and petrol had shot up in price over the past year.

  ‘You’re getting a personal service,’ he said, ‘like your own delivery out here. I got to pay for the petrol and that’s just going up and up. ‘Twas £1.75 a gallon in that garage in Glastonbury. £1.75 – I asks you. Who can afford that then?’

  Ada was brutally unsympathetic. ‘That don’t mean you can rob decent folk just ’cos you got to drive a little way. Them biscuits, they’s ten pence cheaper in the supermarket. I ain’t paying that for ’em.’

  After suggesting Ada might like to walk to the supermarket to get her cheap biscuits, the man departed, never to return. Ada’s pride had been saved by the introduction of a ‘market bus’ twice a week. Although it was supposed to be for customers of the main supermarket in Highpoint it was used by all the people on the Levels without their own transport. The first time that she used it, she’d been mortified when challenged by the driver over where she’d got her shopping, but the next time she slipped into the supermarket, helped herself to a couple of carrier bags and put her shopping in them, marching on to the bus with a flourish. They were good bags, lasting almost four months before Ada needed to replace them and the tattered remains still fluttered over her vegetable patch deterring the flocks of starlings that could descend and strip a garden in minutes. The bus driver had grown older and wiser and he and Ada had become quite friendly over the years. He often stopped the bus at the end of her small track, hooting the horn and ignoring his impatient passengers as he waited for her to appear. Bus was due tomorrow, Ada thought. She’d roust Kevin out of bed and they’d go into town. Was a market day too and she’d make sure Kevin got to see that young probation officer of his.

  She glanced out of the window and spotted those cheeky grey ears, twitching at her from the field. Calling softly, so as not to disturb the grazing rabbits, she beckoned Kevin to look out of his bedroom window.

  ‘I see him,’ he said, and after a moment’s rummaging above her head he appeared at the door holding the shotgun. Ada snatched it away from him, holding it pointed to the floor.

  ‘What the hell do you think you doing boy?’ she said, placing the gun behind her.

  ‘Aw come on Mum, I’m old enough. ’Tis only a shotgun after all.’ He tried to reach around her and she slapped his hand away.

  ‘Yes, ’tis a shotgun that you got no licence for. I’ve got the licence and the last thing you needs now is to be caught poaching again – and with a gun. Will take more than Smythe to get you out of that. Here …’ She reached into a drawer and pulled out a heavy catapult. ‘Go on now – one for the pot and maybe a couple for the market if you can. Take Mickey with you an all so you don’t get seen in the field.’

  Kevin took the catapult with bad grace and slouched out of the door whilst Ada cracked the shotgun and removed the shells. She heard Kevin whistle softly to the dog and the creak of the back gate told her he was out of the way for a few minutes. She stood for a moment staring at the heavy red cartridges, rolling them back and forth in her hand before hurrying upstairs to her room. Separating the box of shells and the gun she hid them in different places, under the floorboards and behind a little panel in her bedroom wall. After a moment’s thought she slipped the two cartridges she’d taken from the gun into her underwear drawer, just in case she needed them in a hurry. Then she went to the window and watched how Kevin was getting on.

  Derek didn’t stay away, of course. That would be too much to ask, Iris thought, as she heard the key scraping around the new lock in the front door. There was a pause, more scraping and then some muffled curses. She stood in the hallway, hesitating before she went to the door, then, checking the chain was fixed, she slid back the security bolts.

  ‘What you want then?’ she said, peering through the gap. He was drunk, by the look of him, drunk and not in the best of tempers. Hardly surprising under the circumstances, mind.

  ‘What the bloody hell do you think I want, woman? Girt bloody key’s not working – come on, hurry up and let us in!’

  ‘I told you, you’re not welcome here. Now be off or I’ll call the police.’

  Derek blinked at her, trying to read her expression, but she had her back to the light in the hall and her face was in deep shadow.

  ‘You’d never – you’d not dare!’

  Iris leaned forwards and lowered her voice. ‘You listen to me Derek, I know you’s up to something, out all hours and coming back with that funny smell on you. You is up to no good and the last thing you need is the police sniffing around you, asking awkward questions. I don’t want to know nothin’, for it’s no business of mine. You leave me alone; you get out of my life and that’s the end of it. Far as they’s concerned I’ve not seen you nor heard of you since you was released and that’s how I want it to stay. But if you come near me again I’ll call it harassment and you’ll be a marked man. And one thing more – you stay away from my son. I don’t want you having nothing to do with Billy, you hear?’

  ‘You can’t do that! He’s my son too and I got rights,’ said Derek.

  ‘Reckon you should keep your voice down unless you want to wake a few more decent folk, have them peering round they curtains and wondering what’s going on,’ she said calmly.

  ‘You wouldn’t dare try to keep me away from Newt!’ Derek hissed.

  ‘Oh, I would. You killed Biff and I’m not having you killing Billy too. What you going to do anyway – try an’ visit him? Reckon they’d be right eager to let you in, ‘specially as you got no visiting order nor nothing. You leave him be, Derek. He’s no son of your’n now. I want my boy back and free of you and your k
ind.’

  She went to close the door but Derek had his foot in the way.

  ‘Where’m I supposed to go then?’ he asked. ‘Is the middle of the night.’

  ‘You go where you been all those nights I needed some company,’ said Iris. ‘You go back there and stay away from me. Move your foot now, or I’ll make you.’

  She pulled the door back to the limit of the chain and Derek hastily jerked his foot clear, staring at his wife until she closed the door in his face. He listened as she double locked the latch and pushed the bolts into place. He was still staring as the hall light went off and the house descended into darkness. Derek Johns’ life had turned to shit all around him and he couldn’t understand why. He just knew someone was to blame and they were going to pay for all this.

  There was great excitement in the workshop the evening Eddie turned up pulling a trailer behind his car. Alex watched from the rest-room window as the whole workshop contingent, paddlers, assemblers and instructors alike, heaved and wrestled the raft out of the doors and on to the flat bed, securing it with canvas straps. There was a moment’s anxiety when it looked as if it were too large to get out of the door, but with some tilting and sliding and a great deal of swearing the raft emerged into the evening sunlight in all its patchwork and multi-colour glory. There was a scuffling at her elbow and Lauren nudged her, a wicked grin on her face.

  ‘What was that poem we all used to learn at school,’ she said. ‘Something about going to sea in a sieve?’

  ‘The Jumblies,’ muttered Alex.

  ‘Yep, that’s it. Well, reckon you might be better off in a sieve. That thing looks a bit – well, amateurish.’

  ‘Looks bloody dangerous to me,’ said Alex. Eddie had spotted her at the window and was waving enthusiastically for her to go down and join them. As she walked across the room, trying not to appear too reluctant, she heard Lauren humming the ‘Funeral March’.