Bleak Water

by Danuta Reah

  ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘When you finish here. You could paint. And then you could come back to your old masters, if you still wanted to.’

  She felt a sudden lift of happiness. She was so convinced there could be no future in this relationship. It was too good. It couldn’t last. But it didn’t have to end now. It didn’t have to end with Madrid. They could go to Africa together. She closed her eyes, thinking of the skies and the light and the vast African plains.

  They could do that.

  Tina just made it to the briefing on time that morning. Farnham was in the incident room as she flew through the door, and raised an admonitory eyebrow at her as she found herself a space to sit on one of the desks. The information was in from the house-to-house inquiries – no one had any recollection of seeing anything suspicious around the canal or on the towpath, but there was one thing, a puzzling anomaly. ‘There were one or two people out on the canal that night,’ Farnham said. ‘We’ve found two boats that went down the canal towards Tinsley from Victoria Quays, and one of them came back later in the evening.’ A boat that did charters had taken a party up and down the canal. There had been a bar, a band and food, and it appeared that no one on board had noticed the existence of the canal at all, let alone a struggle on the canal bank.

  The owner, who had taken the party out, had been more observant, but had had little to report. It had been a bad night and by the time they were coming back – they were back at the canal basin by about ten-thirty – the canal had started to freeze. He’d seen one other boat on the canal that night – its lights had been some way behind him as he headed towards the canal basin. He said it looked like a small boat, a cabin cruiser or something.

  A second person had come forward who had taken his boat from the canal basin on to Rotherham and moored up there. Again, he hadn’t noticed anything unusual on the canal, though he, too, had mentioned another boat. ‘This man, Douglas Lovell, says he passed a cabin cruiser going towards the canal basin at around ten that evening. He said it was probably about half an hour from Cadman Street Bridge when he saw it. He didn’t recognize it, and he says he knows most of the boats that use the canal.’ He looked round the room. ‘We’re checking the boats moored on the canal between Tinsley and Victoria Quays. There aren’t many – and there’s only a couple of cabin cruisers. Those will need checking – who the owners are, where they were, who has access to the boat.’

  West put his hand up. ‘It could have come from further up the canal,’ he said. The South Yorkshire Navigation went east to Keadby, forty-three miles, where it joined the River Trent. You could, using the inland waterways, get to the Thames, to Liverpool, to Hull from Victoria Quays.

  Farnham shook his head. ‘Tinsley locks is the stopper,’ he said. This was a flight of eleven locks, rising 96 feet in one and a half miles, about three miles from the city centre. ‘There’s staff on duty all the time and it’s assisted-passage only. They’re locked. Anyone wanting to go through has to give twenty-four hours’ notice. There’s over a mile of locks there, and it takes between two and a half and three hours to get through. Only one boat went through the locks that night, up towards Rotherham, and we’ve talked to him.’

  There was a stir of interest. ‘So that boat is still on this stretch of the canal somewhere?’

  Farnham nodded. That same murmur ran round the room, that awareness of having sight maybe, however briefly, of their quarry. ‘We’re looking, but we need to check those cabin cruisers. OK, next thing. Are we any nearer getting some background on her?’ His eyes ran quickly over the team assembled in the room. ‘DC Barraclough,’ he said.

  Tina reported back on her search through Cara’s possessions, and her search through the records. On a hunch, she’d looked for the baby’s birth certificate. ‘She had the baby locally,’ Tina said. ‘I’ve still got to go and see them at the hospital, but she didn’t seem to have a GP or anything like that. But they might have a previous address.’ She hadn’t been able to track down any recent contacts, or any indication of how Cara had arrived at the flat in the first place.

  ‘Check it out,’ Farnham said. He allocated tasks and the briefing was over for that morning. He seemed to be giving Tina a second chance. She found herself with the job of tracking down the missing cabin cruiser – which was fine by her. Tracking boats sounded like more fun than chasing Cara through the records. There had been enough publicity around the canal to make boat owners aware of the inquiries that were going on. Whoever had been on the canal in that unknown boat had chosen not to come forward. There were several reasons why this could be, but there was one that was clear and pressing.

  Tina thought about the report that had come back from the laboratory after the post-mortem. It confirmed that the damage to Cara’s hands hadn’t happened in the course of a struggle to remove the cord that was pulling her under the water. Those injuries had happened a good hour before she died. Someone had broken her fingers, deliberately and brutally. Punishment? Had she got on the wrong side of one of the pimps? Maybe one of them was trying to move in. But if so, why kill her? The other option, a punter with a kink for pain, looked like a better bet. But again, why kill her? Sex killings, in Tina’s experience, involved a perverted intimacy or, sometimes, frenzy – hands, ropes, knives…Tying a weight round someone’s neck and dumping them in the water seemed strangely impersonal. It was the way you disposed of rubbish, the way some people disposed of unwanted animals.

  Tina found herself wondering what it would feel like, that moment of falling into the water, knowing that a weight was going to pull you under, that no amount of struggling was going to keep your head above water, allow you to breathe. She could remember a time when she was a child. Her father had taken her to the baths and, when his attention was on something else, she’d pulled on all the floats and rubber rings she could find, and swum about, high in the water. Then they’d slipped, and suddenly her head was plunged under, and the floats had held her so that she couldn’t lift her head. She could remember the seconds of choking panic, thrashing about, trying to find a way to breathe, before someone grabbed her and pulled her back up. Tina had had a horror of drowning ever since.

  She wondered what she was going to find, once she had managed to trace Cara’s background, the family and friends who had failed to come forward in response to the reports of her death. How had the girl ended up alone with a child, poor, working the streets, and then dead at – what? Nineteen? It was a terrible waste of a life, of a person, and Tina felt again that sense of baffled anger that murder always roused in her. How could someone – if they truly knew what they were doing – how could someone believe they had the right?

  Daniel was still at the gallery when Eliza got back. They spent a couple of hours on the exhibition, and he hadn’t been in a hurry to rush off. It had seemed quite natural to sit together on one of the deep window sills watching the canal. She told him about her plans to paint it, all the contradictions and contrasts that it represented. He had sketched intermittently as they talked, his attention on the water flowing by below them.

  He talked to her about her time in Italy. He’d always been fascinated by her interest in the Renaissance masters, the changing attitudes to art over the centuries, the role of the artist today. He told her about his plans to travel once the exhibition was well under way.

  ‘Africa?’ she said. She remembered the plans they had made. He shook his head, not picking up her reference. ‘I want to go back to New York,’ he said. ‘You know it?’ Eliza had never been. ‘Go,’ he said. ‘It’s the most exciting city in the world.’

  ‘I will,’ Eliza said. ‘But there’s still so much of Europe. I’ve only been to Amsterdam once, and I’ve only been to Germany as a student. We went on a trip down the Rhine.’ She smiled and then remembered. Maggie had been there. That was before Ellie was born. She watched a small boat heading up the canal towards the locks at Tinsley. She could hear the cracking sound of ice breaking under its bows.

  ‘What
are you thinking?’ he said.

  She didn’t want to talk about Maggie. ‘That I spent three years in Italy, but I never went to Naples.’

  He turned his attention to the sketchbook again, frowning slightly as he worked. She watched him, the quick, sharp looks at the canal, then down, concentrating on the paper where his pencil made swift lines, black on the heavy grain of the paper. ‘I can think of worse crimes,’ he said. He sat back, and she leaned forward to see what he had drawn. He was about to close the book, but after a slight hesitation, he passed it across to her.

  They were all unfinished, a series of sketches, isolated bits that had caught his eye, but the water and the weeds at the canal edges, the crumbling walls and the tangle of dead undergrowth, the suggestion of things floating in the water – all the ideas that Eliza had had about the canal, the contrasts between decay and life, turned into pencil marks on the paper. Her ideas.

  He was watching her. She handed the sketchbook back, aware that something of what she felt was showing on her face. ‘That’s what I meant,’ she said. ‘The canal.’

  He nodded and slipped the book into his pocket. ‘I need to go,’ he said.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘We’re all finished here.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He looked round the room. ‘You’ve done a great job,’ he said. He seemed undecided about something. ‘Look, Eliza, let me buy you dinner, OK? Tonight? It’ll be crazy tomorrow, and I’ll be off later anyway.’

  ‘OK,’ Eliza said. ‘Yes, I’d like that.’

  ‘Right.’ He smiled down at her. ‘I’ll pick you up. Say, eight o’clock?’

  Roy Farnham turned his car into the small parking area in front of the gallery. There were cars parked in both the spaces, but he managed to pull off the road on to the small strip of Tarmac behind them. He was blocking the exit, but if anyone needed to get out, they could ask him to move. He wanted to look the gallery over. The consensus among the team was that Cara Hobson’s death could be linked to her activities as a prostitute. It was the most obvious reason, and Farnham had no problems with that. Occam’s Razor – why make life difficult by looking for complications? It was impossible to tell, after her long immersion, whether she had had sex before she died, but if she had, there was no evidence of force. Yet someone had hurt Cara Hobson, deliberately and brutally. Sexual sadism was one obvious explanation, but Farnham wasn’t convinced. There was something impersonal about the brutality.

  He gave a mental shrug. It was all speculation. He wanted to look at the gallery again. Cara Hobson had spent a lot of time here, according to Jonathan Massey and Eliza Eliot. Eliot had put this down to a desire for company, but, if that were the case, what had she been doing sitting on her own in the dark when Eliot had found her the night she died? And then there was the timing. He felt angry as he thought about that. Such a crucial point so casually let slip. He was pretty confident that Eliot’s amended timing was correct, but the first statement she’d made clouded the issue.

  As he went towards the entrance, a man came out of the gallery, looked at him blankly for a minute as Farnham caught the door from him, then headed towards the road in the direction of the canal basin. Not one of the car owners then. He looked vaguely familiar, but Farnham couldn’t place him. Not Massey. This man was taller, clean shaven. Farnham watched him, then went into the gallery. The door closed behind him, the lock catching as it shut.

  There was a desk in the entrance, but no sign of anyone. Farnham looked round. He wasn’t trying to keep his arrival quiet, but no one came to see who was there. Poor security. He went past the desk and through some double doors. As he pushed the doors open, a girl came out of a room at one side of the gallery. ‘Yeah?’

  He was familiar with this studied, gum-chewing indifference. He wondered how old she was as he showed her his ID, and she made a carefully unimpressed face. Her hair was very fair, and her face had an almost clownish pallor apart from her mouth, which was painted a deep purple. The vampire effect was negated by an odd mix of ethnicity – mirror shards and gold embroidery on her waistcoat – and militarism – trousers tucked into her boots, heavily buckled belt. She looked odd but stylish. She folded her arms. So? Farnham supplied the mental dialogue. He kept his voice neutral. ‘And you are…?’

  ‘Mel.’ He waited. ‘Young.’

  The trainee. ‘You do the office work here, right, Mel?’

  Her face went a bit pink. She wasn’t quite as cool as she was trying to be. ‘I’m an artist,’ she said. ‘I only do this because…’ She shrugged.

  He thought quickly. Avuncular or monster? Did he even want to spend time sparring with a sulky teenager? He made a quick decision. He already knew that she had been out with her friends on Monday night, clubbing until the small hours. She’d known Cara at the gallery, but claimed no other association. He had no reason to talk to her at the moment. ‘OK, Mel.’ He kept his voice neutral. ‘I’m looking for Eliza Eliot.’ He wanted to get more of an impression of Eliot, see how she reacted in a work situation. He wanted to know how much he could rely on her judgement.

  Mel Young looked at him with a gleam of interest. ‘She’s upstairs,’ she said. ‘She’s been up there with Daniel Flynn all morning.’

  Daniel Flynn. That was the man who had come out of the gallery as Farnham came in. His picture had been all over the papers. Farnham looked round the gallery. ‘Upstairs?’ he queried, mildly. Mel jerked her head in the direction of the doors, and half turned to go back into what looked like the office. Farnham held her gaze, and she bit her lip and flushed. Then she said, ‘Up the stairs and through the double doors at the top. She’s in the upper gallery.’

  He nodded. ‘Thank you, Mel,’ he said, and she turned back into the office, starting to shut the door behind her with angry force. He stopped it. ‘You’ll need to leave this open,’ he said. ‘Or you won’t hear if anyone comes in.’

  ‘They won’t,’ she said. ‘The door’s locked.’ Mr Clever.

  ‘I got in,’ he pointed out. She looked as if she was going to say something, met his eye and stopped. She went across to the desk with the same angry vigour and sat down hard. He suppressed a smile, and went back towards the entrance and the stairway to the upper gallery.

  The stairs and landing were dark, but when he pushed open the doors to the upper gallery, he found himself in a long, airy room suffused with a clear light. One wall was windows, high and arched with one central window that reached from floor to ceiling and looked down on to the canal. His first impression was one of chaos – things propped against walls, display screens set out at random across the floor – but it gradually resolved itself into a pattern as if someone was in the process of setting out the room according to a carefully devised plan.

  The images on the pictures began to impinge and he found himself in the middle of depictions of violence and death, familiar and unfamiliar. Then he heard feet on the wooden floor, and Eliza Eliot came into view, moving quickly, her face alight and welcoming. ‘I didn’t…Oh.’

  He wasn’t who she had been expecting. ‘Miss Eliot,’ he said, ‘have you got a few minutes?’

  ‘Eliza.’ The room was cold, but her face was flushed and her eyes looked bright. ‘I thought…Yes, of course. Is there any news?’ She ran her fingers through her hair distractedly.

  He kept his observation discreet, but this was interesting. He shook his head. ‘Nothing new,’ he said.

  ‘The baby?’ she said.

  ‘Oh. Yes, she’s out of hospital. They’ve put her with foster parents for now.’

  He looked round the room again, and she followed his eyes. ‘I’m setting it up for the opening,’ she said. ‘It’s Daniel Flynn’s exhibition, The…’ She broke off. ‘Daniel Flynn’s exhibition,’ she said.

  ‘The Triumph of Death.’ Daniel Flynn. He remembered what Mel Young had said: She’s been up there with Daniel Flynn all morning. That might also explain the bright eyes and rather flustered demeanour, very unlike the cool and serious persona he’d seen before. />
  ‘Yes…’ She looked at him with a slight frown. ‘Do you know Daniel’s work?’

  He looked round the gallery, at the few visible examples. ‘Not my kind of thing,’ he said. He caught her quick, assessing glance. ‘Tell me about Cara,’ he said. ‘When did she first move in?’

  ‘I can’t give you an exact date,’ she said. ‘About three months ago. The baby was tiny. The Trust can tell you.’

  He shook his head. ‘The Trust didn’t know she was there.’

  Her eyes widened in genuine surprise, then comprehension dawned. ‘Squatting,’ she said. ‘You know, that explains a lot. I couldn’t understand why they’d let that flat – mine wasn’t properly finished, and the staircase…’ She saw his look of query. ‘The staircase that runs past the gallery. They’re supposed to put in an outside door so you can get out from the flats without coming through here. The other steps are OK, but they’re a bit scruffy. And they’re cold and wet in winter.’

  ‘How might she have got a key?’ Farnham said.

  Eliza shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I got mine from the Trust. I think we keep spares in the gallery. To the outside doors, anyway.’

  Farnham ran this through his mind. The outside doors were the real problem. It probably wouldn’t be too difficult to get access to an uncompleted flat, put a lock on the door.

  ‘You found her in the gallery,’ he said. ‘How did she get in when it wasn’t open?’ He made a mental note to talk to her about security, remembering the ease with which he had wandered in.

  She bit her lip and frowned. ‘During the day she used the door from the stairs. It’s supposed to be locked, but it gets left sometimes –’ Her mouth twisted slightly. ‘Almost all the time, actually. Before Cara moved in, there was no reason to lock it, really. But that evening – I don’t know how she got the codes for the alarm.’