by Jack Benton
Gasping, he broke the surface, his head thumping, vision a momentary blur. He coughed up water, gasping again until this time his lungs filled with air. He pushed his arms wide, steadying himself, his panic slowly easing as he regained control of his senses.
The boat was still close, but upriver, slowly turning away. From behind a tiller Alan McDonald stared at him, a look of shock mixed with anger on his face. He gave a little shake of his head, then bent to start an engine. As the boat straightened, it turned fully side on, holding its position while the engine idled. Slim, struggling in the current, could only stare as it pulled away. In its motion, though, something caught his eye.
Who is the woman in your paintings?
The single question he most wanted Alan to answer, he had never got a chance to finish. But now, from his position in the water, he realised the answer had been in plain sight all this time, there for anyone to see.
He read the name on the boat’s stern once more before it turned out of sight.
Eliza Turkin.
38
He had a name, but no strength left to pursue it, and by the time he had stumbled back to the abandoned house he was no longer sure whether the euphoria of gaining the name was better than the loss of a possible lead.
Food was the last thing on his mind, but his aching stomach thought otherwise, and he hungrily devoured a couple of stale bread rolls he had saved from an earlier scavenge. Although they only made his stomach hurt, it was enough to allow him to sleep, curled up by the upper floor windows, his jacket draped over his naked body, the clothes he had soaked while attempting to accost Alan McDonald hanging from the bare beams overhead.
Sleep was anything but comforting. He woke multiple times, often shivering from the cold, sometimes with the lingering recollection of a violent or horrifying dream which featured suffocating water or mud, or the silhouette of a woman, her face backlit with red. Once, the dream was so vivid he thought he was awake, the woman standing above him, shaking her head, muttering, ‘What can we do with you?’ under her breath as though unaware he could hear. He thought it was Lia or Kim or perhaps even his long dead mother, returned to admonish him one final time, but when he tried to rise, to tell her not to go, she stepped back into the shadows and disappeared.
The sun was shining down on his face when he awoke. He rolled over, remembering he was naked, shivering at the cool breeze through the window space. He reached for his clothes, finding them mostly dry. His body heat would dry out what dampness was left, provided he could summon some. Weaker than he could ever remember feeling, his lungs and chest ached, his throat raw. As he breathed he felt the urge to cough but swallowed it down, afraid that if he began he wouldn’t be able to stop.
He pushed himself up, holding on to the beam for support as he slowly turned around.
And stopped, frozen to the spot. Something sat on the floorboards at the very top of the stairs, right where he couldn’t miss it. At first he thought it was something living, its luminosity a sign of vitality. Then he realised it was simply a green plastic basket with the sun shining on it.
Slim approached it as he might once have approached a possible bomb, crouching low and moving forward one slow step at a time. Only when he got within a couple of feet did he accept that it was harmless.
It was filled with survival goods: a few individually wrapped bread rolls, some muesli bars, vitamin drinks. With them was a folded note and beside it a clear plastic pill bottle.
Slim nudged the note with his foot, flipping the sheet of paper open.
I can’t have you dying on me. Two per day, one in the morning and one at night.
It took a few moments for the sheer shock of what was happening to register.
Someone not only knew he was here, but they were looking out for him.
The woman he had dreamt about had to have been real. He squeezed his eyes shut, wishing he could remember. Tall, he had thought, but that could have been his perspective. Young, maybe, but the harder he tried to remember, the less sure he became.
It was useless. Even now he felt weak to the point of near delirium. He scooped up an energy drink and quickly downed one of the pills, aware it might still take a couple of days to make any difference.
Almost immediately he felt like an idiot. What if it was a drug designed to subdue him? Perhaps everything was a ploy to capture him the same way Carson had been caught, his ankles bound with twine. Slim started to put his fingers into his throat when another image came back to him.
The twine.
He remembered where he had seen it.
In the bottom of Alan McDonald’s boat.
39
‘Eliza Turkin? Sounds like a character from a book.’
Slim nodded, holding a hand over the phone while he coughed. ‘Yes,’ he muttered. ‘Anything you can find out about someone in the Dartmouth area with that name.’
‘Got it. Shouldn’t be too hard. Give me a couple of days.’
‘Thanks.’
Slim hung off. For a few seconds he leaned on the payphone’s metal body, waiting for the dizziness to subside. Despite the medicine, he felt little better. He stared through the glass at the Kingswear street, wondering whether he should have chanced the bus rather than endure the strenuous walk in his condition.
He tried Ben Holland next, but again got no answer. Frustrated, he headed back to Greenway, making it just before dark. The staff had gone and the building was closed up for the night. For the first time in several days the sky was clear and there was no rain around, so Slim made his way onto the grounds and around to the entrance he had made though the side window. Inside the visitor centre, he crouched down by the computer terminal Don had cracked and opened the drawers.
For once, he got lucky. Someone had left an ID card on top of the staff roster folder. Slim withdrew the card from its little plastic jacket and found a computer ID printed on the back.
He switched on the computer and loaded up the log-on screen. He needed the ID to match the password Don had retrieved. He started to sweat as an hourglass appeared, slowly revolving. Slim counted the seconds, but finally it let him inside.
Don had told him to cover his tracks, but Slim had no interest in the National Trust database. He went straight for the internet, loading up his old, underused social media pages.
It had been several days since he had gone pseudo undercover, and this was his first chance to view the email he had drunkenly sent before fleeing the hotel.
He had sent it to Eloise’s Facebook account. He first requested that she talk to him, then continued with a rambling paragraph forgiving her for any involvement in his fall from the pier. He closed with another plea for her to get into contact which was so close to begging it made him cringe. The whole message was littered with spelling, grammatical, and word choice errors, leaving it barely legible. Her simple, brief reply, however, was sharp and clear.
I’ll kill you for what you did.
Slim frowned. What was he supposed to have done?
He checked her social media page but there were no comments or updates. Then he checked his own long-neglected page and found that the girl had clumsily posted the same message to his newsfeed. It was a sign of how little time he spent culturing his online presence that none of his few acquaintances had commented.
He checked a few other things, including a brief online search for Eliza Turkin, which, as expected, yielded no results, then came back to the private message.
Did Eloise still feel the same? Was it worth sending a reply? One way or another, he had to talk to her.
He glanced at the message again, noticing the READ time stamp in the corner. If she was still following him, she now knew he had seen the message.
40
Still feeling foul but with an artificial buoyancy caused by the energy drinks and food his benefactor had left, Slim vainly set up his traps again before attempting to sleep, but when he woke everything was as he had left it. No one had come in the night this time.
He felt a little better, so he planned to head to Paignton, but by the time he had walked to Greenway Halt Station, his legs were shaking with exhaustion. He had just missed a Paignton-bound train, but one headed for Kingswear was due to arrive in the next couple of minutes.
Craving the warmth and comfort of coffee and heating, he headed instead for the nearer town, then made his way to his favourite quiet café where he pulled out the folder of information Don had sent.
Bringing over a second coffee, the proprietor, a man in his early sixties, asked after his health. Slim glanced down at his clothes, at the stains left by the mud and the river, and the dozen tears and frays from catching on branches and brambles. Perhaps only the folder of notes kept him from appearing homeless.
‘I’m feeling a little under the weather,’ he told the man, who until now had never openly spoken to him. ‘I’m sure it’s just a bug.’
‘You seem like a nice enough fellow,’ the man said. ‘If you want to use the back room to clean up a little, I wouldn’t mind.’
‘Clean up?’
The man looked uncomfortable. ‘There’s no easy way to say this, but you smell bad and you look worse. I’m concerned about what other customers might think. Like I say, I’m not throwing you out. I can see you’re busy, but—’
‘I’m looking for a woman called Eliza Turkin,’ Slim blurted, cutting the man off. ‘I don’t suppose that name rings any kind of a bell?’
The man frowned, then gave a little shake of his head. Slim expected a shrug and a blow-off, but then the man said: ‘Well, you’re a bit late to that party. A hundred years, more like.’
‘So you know of her?’
The man shrugged. ‘Only the legend.’
‘What legend?’
‘The one about what they did to her.’
At Slim’s incredulous stare, the café owner added, ‘Look, get yourself cleaned up and then I’ll show you something. I’ve been wondering what you were doing all this time. I thought you were on the run or something. If I’d known you were a historical researcher I’d have spoken up sooner.’
At no point had Slim claimed to be a historical researcher, but he saw no reason to correct the man’s opinion.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I’d like to hear what you have to say.’
The proprietor of the café told Slim his name was James Wilson. After a welcome hot shower, Slim found himself sitting in a small living room with a window that overlooked the river and Dartmouth on the other side, wearing a borrowed dressing gown while James ran his clothes through a washer-dryer.
‘Why are you being so kind to me?’ Slim asked, as James sat down opposite, holding a notebook in his hands.
‘Because you were carrying a lot of notes for one small story,’ he said. ‘It didn’t look like you’d found many answers.’
‘And you have them?’
James shook his head. ‘No, not at all. That woman is more questions than answers. I’ve heard the other stories. They’re not common now, but when I was a boy, we used to make up new ones just to freak each other out.’
‘Is there a common one? One which might be true?’
James shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.
Slim nodded at the book. ‘And that’s yours?’
James laughed. ‘Oh, no. This is just something I used to work on in my free time. A book of local history I never finished. I thought I’d show you what I found out about Eliza Turkin.’
He passed the notebook across to Slim, who began to read.
Eliza Turkin—origins unknown—lived in a cottage on the grounds of Greenway. Employed as a housekeeper by two generations of owners, it was long rumoured that she had a darker side. Thought by many to also be a notorious prostitute in the Dartmouth area known only as Old Bea, accusations against her grew so loud that on the night of December 1st, 1901, a mob dragged her from her home and allegedly murdered her. While no record remains of the method of death employed, the most common rumour is that she had rocks tied to her feet and was thrown into the mud of Wellwater Inlet, which can be thirty feet deep on a spring tide. Rumours persist that Eliza was considered something of a sea witch, and that sending her back to the sea was the only way to break her curse over the area.
Slim looked up. ‘What curse?’ he asked.
James smiled and shrugged. ‘I never have found out,’ he said. ‘People don’t like to talk about her. She’s like the Dart Estuary’s dirty little secret.’
‘You must have some suspicions?’
‘Of course. But nothing concrete. Nothing I can prove.’
‘Tell me, please.’
‘Why such an interest?’
Slim let out a slow breath. ‘I’m not a historical researcher, as you assumed,’ he said. ‘I’m actually a private investigator.’ Then, with a shrug, he added, ‘I’m also a functioning alcoholic. During a stay on a rehabilitation course in Dartmouth a month ago, two people allegedly committed suicide. I’ve been investigating their deaths, but more than that, I believe I’ve come under suspicion from the police. I’m trying to find out what happened to them in order to clear my own name.’
James nodded. ‘Well, that makes sense, I suppose. Max Carson and Irene Long, wasn’t it?’
‘You know of them?’
‘Oh, word gets around. People talk and all that. I don’t know about Long, but Carson died up there, didn’t he? Up by Wellwater Inlet?’
‘Yes, he did.’
‘He was probably looking for her.’
‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘Well, kids would go up there sometimes, hunting Old Bea as they called her, even though she and Eliza Turkin were supposedly two different people.’
‘I’ve heard mention of Old Bea. She was a prostitute?’
‘Supposedly. Back when the Dart Estuary took more commercial trade, mid-nineteenth century sometime. Old Bea ran a brothel in Dartmouth. The rumour went that she took every sailor herself before passing them off to her girls.’
‘A rumour?’
‘Of course. One of many. It was believed she got pregnant so often that she was known as the mother of street children. And her rages were apparently so great they’d whip up a storm out to sea. Sailors in the area still talk of Old Bea when a sudden storm hits. Heaven help a sailor who couldn’t pay her rates.’
‘What happened to her?’
James smiled. ‘I imagine she died a prostitute’s uneventful death and ended up in an unmarked grave.’
Slim lifted an eyebrow. ‘And what does the legend say?’
James laughed. ‘Her brothel eventually burned down. Old Bea was likely cast out on the street, but the legend is that she stole a rowing boat and drifted out to sea, where she was claimed by the most vicious of storms.’
‘Interesting,’ Slim said, rubbing his chin as he remembered the rowing boat containing the body of Irene Long.
‘Quite.’
‘Yet she and Eliza are often considered one and the same?’
‘The legends of two old sea witches tend to blend together, yes.’ He smiled. ‘Back in those days, people didn’t have the internet to fact-check.’
‘And do you believe that?’
James shook his head. ‘Oh no, not at all.’ He had assumed a small smile which gave Slim the impression he had something else he was desperate to share.
‘What do you really think? Totally speculatively, of course.’
James leaned forward as though he had been waiting for this moment. ‘Well, there are certain facts that fit. Eliza died in 1901; there’s a historical record of it—an obituary in a local newspaper. While I’ve found no historical mention of Old Bea, she’s often associated with the mid-nineteenth century. Move her just a couple of decades forward, however, and you find a link.’
‘Tell me.’
‘In 1885 there is a record of a great fire in Dartmouth, engulfing the Mariner’s Arms, a hotel and tavern on the waterfront. The building was gutted, torn down. Eliza Turkin was a w
oman of no known parentage. She was allegedly an orphan left on the steps of Greenway as a baby and raised by the servants to work in the household. She was around thirty at the time of her death. Old Bea, at the time of hers, was described as a “broad, bawdy matron with arms like trees, and thighs strong enough to crush the most durable of men.” That’s from a poem dated 1880. Doesn’t sound like a young woman, does it?’
Slim shook his head. ‘No, it doesn’t.’
James had a twinkle in his eye as he said, ‘If you assume that Eliza was left at the building that later became Greenway in 1870 or so, and estimate that the woman from the poem was in her forties or fifties, the relationship would fit.’
‘What relationship?’
‘I think Old Bea was Eliza Turkin’s mother.’
41
Slim barely noticed the journey as he walked back to Greenway, lost in thought. James Wilson, despite giving him little practical information, had fired up Slim’s imagination.
A notorious local prostitute dead at sea and a woman murdered for being a sea witch, possibly mother and daughter. It was fanciful, fantastical, the sort of novel fodder Slim would have dismissed if it wasn’t clear that both Carson and Long had possessed some sort of knowledge of either or both. Carson had died at the spot where Eliza Turkin had both lived and died, while Irene’s attempt at a dramatic death couldn’t surely have paralleled Old Bea’s legendry one by pure coincidence.
At a payphone near Greenway Halt, Slim rang Don to give him an update.
‘Eliza Turkin was considered a sea witch,’ he said. ‘I need to know why and what that means.’
Don laughed. ‘Give me another day,’ he said.
Next, Slim called Kay. ‘Any news on that DNA sample?’ he asked.
‘I passed it to a friend who ran it and extracted human DNA,’ he said. ‘You were right, there was someone there.’