Bleak Water

by Danuta Reah

A murder was a good, high-profile case to be involved in. So why did she feel the drag of depression as she thought about the things that the investigation might uncover. And the feeling, at the end, that you had done little, if any good. She thought about a tower block on a summer night, the cars, the lights, the voices shouting, and the flicker above her that became the figure plummeting down from that dizzy height…She shook her head. That had been three years ago. There was a murder case, she was on the team, and she needed to do a good job to try and get her stalled career moving again.

  A few minutes under the shower revived her a bit, but when she looked in the mirror, she still resembled Dracula’s daughter. Fuck it! Why had she let herself get talked into the speed? It would have been OK, otherwise. Today, she needed some artificial aids. She took a small twist of paper out of her bag and opened it carefully. Better than she’d thought. There were still a good couple of lines there. She tipped a tiny bit out, cut it and breathed it in, her eyes watering as the numbness hit then a sharp pain deep inside her nose. Then she felt the magic start to work. Her head cleared and the cold, sick feeling retreated. Her energy was returning – she’d have to be careful not to go hyper when she got to the canal. They’d spot it.

  She crammed her stuff into her bag and went down to the kitchen. Pauline, one of the women she shared the house with, was there, eating cereal and reading the paper. ‘There’s coffee,’ she said, without looking up.

  Tina poured herself a cup. ‘Oh God, last night, I don’t know what I thought I was doing it was stupid crazy but hey there’s something going on down by the canal could be a good case for me so I really, really need to get…’

  Pauline looked at her. ‘I’d come down a bit before you get there,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, OK.’ Pauline was right. She’d need to watch herself. She gave the coffee a miss, forced down a slice of bread and marmalade and headed for her car, the energy suddenly singing in her veins. The rain stung her cheeks and she felt a great surge of optimism as though, after all this time, she’d found her real self, that relaxed, confident self that lived inside her and was so often – these days – inaccessible.

  It was half an hour before she’d managed to force her way through the city traffic to get to the place where Cadman Street Bridge crossed the canal. She was aware of Dave’s reproachful glance as she arrived to be given her instructions for the day.

  Eliza and Mel spent the first part of the morning moving the display boards around to get the angles right. ‘I want to make a link with the canal,’ Eliza explained to Mel. ‘Look at the water on the Brueghel. And the bridge. It’s just…I don’t want people to look at it and think, “Oh, old master,” I want them to look at it and look out of the window and think, “This is here. This is now.”’ She straightened the enlargement of the hanging man on the display board in front of her and stood back.

  ‘Is that what Daniel Flynn says?’ Mel asked. She brushed dust off her trousers.

  ‘No, those are my ideas,’ Eliza said.

  Mel pulled a face and sat back on her heels. ‘Can we have a break? I’m tired. Shall I go and make some coffee?’

  Eliza translated this as Mel wanting a chance to get away from the drudgery of setting up the exhibition space. Whatever Mel’s motives were, coffee was a good idea. ‘You’ll have to go to the café,’ she said. ‘We’re out of coffee here.’ She reached for her purse. ‘I’ll have a cappuccino.’ Mel was looking out of the window with interest, and Eliza remembered the activity she’d noticed earlier. ‘Maybe you can find out what’s happening,’ she added.

  Mel gave her a bright smile. ‘Yes,’ she said. She went to get her coat.

  While Eliza was waiting for Mel, she went downstairs to see if there were any messages for her and to see if Jonathan wanted her for anything. His door was ajar, and she could see him in front of his computer. She knocked, and pushed the door open. ‘Hi.’

  He jumped and twisted round in his chair. ‘Don’t do that, Eliza. Get some shoes that make a noise.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t train to spend all my days writing reports,’ he said. ‘Eliza, what was that about Cara?’

  So he hadn’t missed her evasion. ‘It’ll keep. Anything new?’

  He shook his shoulders irritably. ‘No. You could write this report for me…No. Let me know when Flynn gets here.’

  There wasn’t too much of the morning left. She was beginning to think that Mel had got the message wrong. She checked her watch. It was almost half past.

  Jonathan’s window caught the sun. The room was light and airy. Eliza thought it would make a good seminar room when they managed to expand the educational side of the gallery. There were posters on the walls from exhibitions Jonathan had particularly admired, including his own big success from over ten years ago now, a photographic exploration of England’s industrial landscapes, abstract shapes against the wildernesses that were encroaching on the urban decay. Jonathan’s skill as a photographer, and the depth of ideas behind it, had attracted a lot of critical acclaim. But he’d never produced anything of a comparable quality.

  ‘About Cara…’ she said. Jonathan needed to know that Cara had got through the gallery alarm system.

  He looked up from his work, his face expressing irritation. ‘What about Cara?’ he said.

  ‘She’d let herself into the gallery last night.’

  He looked at her in silence. He didn’t seem surprised, more irritated and a bit anxious.

  Eliza went through what had happened, her encounter with Cara, and Cara’s claim that she’d learnt how to work the alarm system by watching Jonathan. His face grew tense as he listened to her.

  ‘Rubbish,’ he exploded. ‘Bullshit.’

  Eliza shrugged. ‘That’s what she said.’ He seemed more upset by that than anything else. Jonathan didn’t like to be seen as fallible. But now she thought about it, it did seem odd. When would Cara have watched Jonathan setting the alarms? ‘Anyway, I thought you needed to know,’ she said.

  ‘You should have told me sooner.’ His face was angry. It didn’t bode well for Cara. ‘I’m getting on to the Trust. We never agreed to this sort of thing.’

  ‘Do you want me to do it?’ Eliza thought she could soften the message a bit, get the Trust to impress on Cara the importance of the security systems without getting her into major bother.

  ‘No.’ Jonathan was adamant.

  Oh well. He had a point. Eliza looked at her watch again. Mel was taking her time with the coffee. She ran back up the stairs and went in to the upper gallery, pleased that the placing of the display boards hadn’t diminished the sense of space and light. She crossed to the other side of the room, to look at it from a different angle. Good. And from here, she just had to turn her head and she was looking down into the dark waters of the canal.

  Then she was aware that someone was standing behind her, and hands lightly touched her shoulders. ‘Un cuadro interesante, no?’

  She spun round, her heart hammering, and Daniel was there, smiling at her a bit warily, a bit cautiously, as though he wasn’t sure of his reception. ‘Daniel!’ she said. Then, ‘You frightened me out of my wits!’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘There was no one downstairs.’

  It was so long since she had seen him that she had been imagining him more and more like his publicity photograph, which portrayed him in chiaroscuro, brooding and shadowed. But without the photographer’s art, he was ordinary, the Daniel she had known in Madrid, with dark hair, blue eyes and a friendly smile which became less guarded as she smiled back at him.

  ‘It’s been a long time,’ she said. ‘How are you? What have you been doing?’

  ‘I’m OK,’ he said, still slightly careful. ‘I’ve been working. I left Madrid a few weeks after you – kind of lost its charm then.’

  ‘Where did you go?’ she said. She thought she knew the answer. Africa. Tanzania.

  ‘Whitby,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a flat on the coast there.’ />
  Whitby. She wanted to laugh. ‘You should have come across,’ she said. ‘We could have – I don’t know, something.’ He’d been so close, and he hadn’t bothered to get in touch.

  ‘I was working,’ he said. He moved across to look out of the windows. ‘This canal,’ he said. ‘It’s like the Brueghel landscape – you’ve even got the arched bridges and the dead trees.’

  ‘They’re alive in summer,’ Eliza said.

  ‘Artistic licence.’ He looked at her. ‘I’ve never forgotten what you said that time we were looking at the Brueghel together.’ His gaze moved to the canal, and he was quiet for a moment as he looked out of the window, frowning slightly. ‘I like what you’ve done. I knew you’d understand this exhibition.’

  The slight tension that had been inside her all morning relaxed. That was the one factor she had been unable to control. Daniel might have hated her ideas. ‘Good. I’d better tell Jonathan you’re here.’

  He shook his head. ‘It’ll keep.’ He was leaning against the window frame, looking out at the canal side. ‘So how do you enjoy being a curator?’

  ‘I love it.’ That was true. Eliza enjoyed interpreting other people’s work, presenting it in ways that would make people look carefully, think about what they were seeing, think about art in its context, not as a series of isolated pieces stuck like relics in an exhibition.

  ‘What about the painting?’ he said. ‘Your own stuff?’

  The Madrid painting that was on her easel upstairs. She had discussed it with Daniel months ago when it first began to form in her mind. She had wanted to do – a modern triumph, not of death but of life, something that would encapsulate what Madrid had come to mean to her. She had been brought up in the far north of England where shadows and light merged, where night and day segued one to the other in an indeterminate creep of time. Madrid was of the south – a place of hard shadow and saturated colour. That was what the painting would celebrate.

  But as Sheffield had closed around her, the dark winter, the solitary life she seemed to have chosen here, as though she didn’t want to commit herself to this place for longer than was necessary, didn’t want to make the ties that might hold her here, the painting had changed. The shadows of the north began to creep around the edges, the colours began to fade, and she realized that the painting was growing under her hands, turning into something different from what she had originally planned.

  But she didn’t want to talk to Daniel about it, she realized. They had discussed everything in Madrid. But this wasn’t Madrid, and Daniel was different now.

  She shrugged. ‘It’s easy to get distracted,’ she said ambiguously.

  He pushed himself upright. ‘But you are still painting?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Show me what you’ve done,’ he said. ‘Show me what you’re working on at the moment.’

  For a second, she thought he meant now, but he was looking round the gallery again. ‘I need to spend some time with this,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it for a while, shall I?’ she said.

  ‘No. Walk me round it. Tell me your ideas for the rest. Then we’ll do the official welcome bit, OK?’

  Eliza felt her slight depression lift. She got out her notes, and they went through the exhibition together, talking through problems, sharing ideas, disagreeing once or twice. Eliza saw Mel in the doorway at one point, looking a query. Eliza shook her head, wondering what had taken Mel so long, and she disappeared.

  It was getting on for midday before they had covered everything. They had spent the time walking round the gallery, sorting through the pictures, experimenting with different arrangements on the walls and display boards. They had fallen back into the swift exchange of ideas that had marked their relationship. They talked about the things they missed, the people they’d been friendly with. ‘Do you remember…?’ they each kept saying, and then laughed as they thought about the places they’d gone to, the things they’d seen, the things they’d done. ‘It’s Madrid comes to Sheffield time,’ he said. She looked at him. ‘Ivan,’ he said. ‘He’s been in touch. He’s coming through South Yorkshire in a couple of days. He’ll be here for the show.’ He smiled at her.

  Ivan Bakst. She couldn’t share Daniel’s enthusiasm.

  Then he stopped abruptly and looked away from her, out of the window towards the canal. The sun had gone in and the light had faded. ‘I think that’s it,’ he said. She had the feeling that his attention was elsewhere. The words seemed to die in the air between them.

  The upstairs gallery was very quiet. She had expected Jonathan to come up to see Daniel – Mel would have told him that Flynn was here – and she had half expected Cara to appear, drifting into the gallery from her flat, eager for company and conversation, but there was no sign of her. Eliza remembered the crying in the night. Suddenly, she felt tired and had to suppress a yawn. He noticed and said, ‘You’ve been working all morning without a break. You should have said something.’

  Eliza shook her head. ‘Bad night,’ she said.

  They were at the entrance to the gallery now, at the reception desk. Jonathan’s office was to their right. ‘Look.’ He checked the time. ‘I’m running late. I’ll get off now – I’ll give Massey a ring later. Tell him everything’s fine, just go ahead as we agreed, right?’

  Eliza was surprised. She didn’t know what to say. ‘Oh. Yes, all right.’ She’d expected him to suggest some kind of further meeting, a drink, something. She wanted to talk about Madrid, put some kind of closure on their relationship, the closure it had never properly had. ‘When…?’

  ‘I’m going back to the east coast today,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back for the do, don’t worry.’

  Today. ‘OK, fine.’ She watched him as he left the gallery. He stopped once he was outside, as though he was getting his bearings, then he turned away from town, towards the road that crossed the canal over Bacon Lane Bridge. There was a route on to the towpath there, she remembered. She shook her head, confused. She’d better go and see Jonathan.

  He wasn’t in his own room, he was in the general office talking to Mel, who looked up with alacrity as Eliza came in. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He’s gone. He was in a hurry. Jonathan…’ She could hear her voice sounding flat.

  Jonathan shrugged. ‘He’s known for it,’ he said. ‘Lots of enthusiasm, lots of How wonderful you all are, then he loses interest and fucks off.’ She was surprised at the hostility in his voice. ‘He’s OK with what you’re doing?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Eliza sagged. ‘He thinks it’s wonderful.’ She looked at both of them. ‘Well, haven’t I earned a coffee?’

  Mel looked back at the gallery entrance, where Daniel had disappeared. Jonathan shrugged. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said again. ‘Look, I’ve got a meeting in town. Tell me about it later.’ He looked tired and edgy, Eliza noticed, as he left. He seemed more and more weighted down with admin – meetings, reports, more meetings.

  ‘What happened to you?’ she said to Mel after Jonathan had gone. The canal basin was only ten minutes from the gallery, but it had been almost an hour before Mel had come back with the coffee.

  ‘I had to go round by the road,’ Mel said. ‘The towpath’s closed off.’

  ‘Closed off?’ Eliza switched the kettle on. ‘Do you want some?’ She’d have to make do with instant.

  ‘Yeah. It’s all police and things.’ Mel started digging in her bag and pulled out her magazine. For her, coffee meant a cessation of work. ‘I started walking and before I got to Cadman Street Bridge, there was tape across the path and a couple of policemen.’

  ‘What’s happened?’ Eliza had forgotten the activity she’d noticed from the window earlier that morning.

  ‘Well, I stopped and talked to them,’ Mel said. She was an incorrigible talker, an incorrigible flirt, and the men watching the path would have been more than happy to oblige her, Eliza was sure.

  ‘So what did you get them to tell you?’ she said.

 
Mel smiled, pleased. ‘Well, not much,’ she admitted. ‘One of them said he might drop in later. But they said’ – her voice dropped and her eyes gleamed – ‘that they’d found a body in the canal.’ She shivered with manufactured excitement.

  ‘Drowned?’ Eliza said. She thought about the still, dark waters. They might be still, but they were cold and dangerous. People had drowned there before, and would again, but she, like Mel, was more intrigued than horrified by the idea of disaster and death on the towpath, close to where they lived and worked.

  ‘He didn’t know,’ Mel said. She dismissed the subject. ‘Can we have lunch now? I got a sandwich.’

  Eliza looked at her watch. It was after one. ‘OK,’ she said. She had a Marks and Spencer salad in the fridge from yesterday. They could take half an hour.

  Mel settled down with her magazine as Eliza made coffee. ‘Where’s he staying?’ she asked.

  ‘Who?’ Eliza poured water into the cups. The sour smell of the coffee made her slightly queasy.

  ‘Daniel Flynn,’ Mel said impatiently. ‘He looks really sexy in the photograph.’ She gave Eliza a speculative look.

  Eliza concentrated on her coffee. ‘He’s OK,’ she said, keeping her voice neutral. She listened to Mel as she talked about Daniel, the things she’d read about him, the things she’d heard, his involvement with this famous beauty or that famous beauty, things that Eliza would really have preferred not to hear about, but of course Mel didn’t know, and Eliza had no intention of letting her find out. She tuned out the sound of Mel’s voice, responding with an occasional ‘Mm’, and let her mind drift.

  And she kept coming back to Daniel. She’d managed to push him out of her thoughts for a while, but during the next few days, that was going to be hard. She’d need to keep herself focused on the work. She thought about the pictures and photo-montages that had surrounded her all morning. Daniel had liked her idea of using the Brueghel as a focus, drawing the viewer in through the greys and blacks and blues of some of the images to the centre of incandescence where strange winged creatures flew above a river of fire and screaming children fled a napalm hell. Suddenly, she was impatient to get back to work.