Bleak Water

by Danuta Reah

  ‘I don’t know…Something about…’ Mum was reaching into her bag. She got her cigarettes out and lit one. She put her bag down on the floor. The cigarette slipped in her fingers.

  ‘Mum!’ Kerry grabbed at the cigarette before it dropped. Mum’s eyes looked bleary and wandering. ‘What did she want?’

  ‘Oh, something about…was Stacy here. Something like.’ Her eyes focused on Kerry. ‘Why don’t you bring Stacy here? You never bring your friends…We could…I could…’ She pulled on her cigarette and slumped back in the chair.

  So Stacy hadn’t managed to get home on time. There was a sick feeling in Kerry’s stomach. She was worried about school, that was all. ‘What did you tell her?’ she said.

  ‘What?’ Mum’s voice had that blurry sound. Kerry knew what it meant. Mum had put her purse away again. She hadn’t even looked. She’d forgotten about tea. Kerry didn’t want to go out again. If Stacy’s mum was mad with Stacy, Stacy might tell her, then Stacy’s mum would be mad with Kerry. Suddenly, she had a picture of Maggie’s face in her mind, all twisted and blotchy, Maggie saying, Get away from me…But it wasn’t like that, not now. It was just that Stacy’s mum might tell the school. That was what was making Kerry feel sick and frightened. She wanted to tell someone. She wanted to tell her dad. But she didn’t want to talk to Stacy’s mum.

  She went into the kitchen. The dishes were still in the sink from this morning. She looked in the cupboard, and then in the fridge. There wasn’t anything much. She washed the dishes, then she made some beans on toast. She didn’t feel hungry any more, but when she’d eaten them, the sick feeling went away a bit. Then she went to her room. There was someone she could talk to.

  She tried calling Lyn, but she got the answering service. She sat on her bed and keyed the message into her phone: whr r u? She pressed ‘send’, and left the phone on the small table beside her bed. She left it switched on. She had pushed a chair under the door handle, though she didn’t think Mum would come in to see her. Then she got out her notepaper.

  Dear Dad

  How are you? I’m fine…

  It was the same as she’d written last time and the time before. She tore the paper up. What if Stacy still wasn’t home? The thought popped into her mind, chill and unwelcome. What if Stacy didn’t go home? That wasn’t anything to do with Kerry. It wasn’t her fault if Stacy went off somewhere. If they started asking questions, if they found out that she and Stacy had bunked off together, they might ask some more questions. They would stop her. Then there wouldn’t be anyone to help Dad. Stacy must be at home by now.

  The phone beeped. There was a message. She grabbed it and pressed ‘read’. She looked at it. It didn’t make sense. It was a mistake. It must be a mistake.

  WHO R U?

  Eliza closed the door of her flat behind her, kicked off her shoes and went across to the kitchen area. Her hand hovered over the wine bottle, then she switched on the kettle. She’d had enough wine at the party. It had been a success, she told herself. There was no doubt about that. The media people had turned out – several journalists from the nationals, someone from Channel 4 wanting to include the gallery in a documentary on the revival of arts in the regions, and the people from the Arts Trust had been delighted. Even Daniel’s sudden exit hadn’t caused problems. It had been a typically eccentric thing for him to have done, and the local dignitaries who had missed their introduction to the VIP were sufficiently small scale, and sufficiently in awe of his reputation, not to take offence.

  So why was she feeling so flat and so let down? She spooned coffee into the cafetiere as she waited for the kettle to come to the boil. Daniel had told her he would have to rush off. That was why he’d taken her to dinner the night before. She hadn’t been expecting…Was it because she seemed to be the only one to have noticed that he’d left with Tina Barraclough? Tina who had been looking witchily sexy in trousers and a revealing top that had made Eliza feel dowdy in her new dress.

  She poured coffee into a mug and wandered across the room to the windows overlooking the canal. She slumped into a chair. She was tired, that was the problem. It had been a long day. She thought about her visit to Maggie’s. Maybe that was why she was feeling so low. Looking through the scant remains of Maggie’s and Ellie’s lives had brought back to her those days after the news of Ellie’s death had reached her.

  It was almost eleven. She and Jonathan had gone out to celebrate the success of the exhibition. It had been an evening Eliza had been looking forward to for weeks, the launch of the first major exhibition she had organized, the vindication of the faith Jonathan had shown in her when he gave her the job. And then she had let Daniel – or her response to Daniel – take all the gloss off it.

  Her fault for letting it upset her. She tried to analyse her reactions. OK, part of it was the release of tension. And part of it was that she had thought, she had expected, even after the other evening, that she and Daniel had a future. The dinner last night – she thought they’d re-established something. She remembered Laura’s comment: Game player. Don’t waste your time. She was beginning to think that Laura was right. She had to make her mind up. Either she wanted a friendship with him – they shared an understanding of art, she liked him and he liked her – or she needed to cut him out of her life as a social contact altogether, keep any future contacts purely business.

  There was something moving on the canal. She looked out of the window. A small boat was drifting towards the canal basin. Its engine must be switched off, because it was moving silently. Her imagination peopled the deck with skeletons, soldiers of the army of death wrapped in winding sheets, a living man, his hands tied, being thrown into the water, a millstone round his neck. It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and he cast into the sea than that he should offend one of these little ones. She thought about Ellie. If anyone had lived with the millstone of her death, it had been Maggie, and in the end, it had dragged her under.

  She sat in the window, watching the moonlight on the canal as midnight came and went, then she switched the phone off, took a sleeping pill and went to bed. Something woke her in the small hours. She sat up, listening. But there was nothing. She’d been dreaming.

  Saturday morning, and Tina had a headache. Let’s be honest here, she had a hangover. And she had to go to work today. She groaned. Her first mistake had been to start drinking at six-thirty. Her second mistake had been to accept Daniel Flynn’s invitation to dinner, and her third mistake – admittedly, made after her judgement had been completely wrecked by too much excellent wine and the last of her supply of coke that they’d shared in the taxi on the way to the restaurant – had been accepting Daniel’s invitation back to his hotel.

  She tried to sit up and her head thumped, laying her back on the mattress. At least she’d made it back home. She didn’t normally go from ‘Nice to meet you’ to an all-out fuck in the stretch of a few hours, not these days, but the wine had seriously addled her judgement. Barraclough, you’re a slag.

  She rolled off the bed cautiously, keeping her head still. Her stomach felt awful and her recollections of the later parts of the evening were a bit vague. She felt stiff and sore, so they were probably recollections that would be worth having. Christ! She was old enough to know better. She hadn’t managed to get her clothes off before she’d gone to bed. She was still wearing her trousers and her glam top. Her jacket was on the floor. Her bra and her pants hadn’t made it home unless she’d stuffed them in her handbag.

  He’d been good company. She could remember that. She’d been surprised, and rather disarmed, by his air of keyed-up tension, as though even now that he was a well-known and celebrated artist – someone like Tina had heard of him – he was still excited by an event like this. He’d walked her round the exhibition, telling her what he’d had in mind when he was planning it and when he was working on it. It wasn’t the patronizing, thick plod thing she’d half expected. He’d been interested in what she had to say. She remembered the sho
ck of recognition she’d felt, standing in front of a photo-montage in which a small boy, his hand gripped trustingly in the hand of an older child, walked away into an incandescent sea while Death played a hurdy-gurdy. ‘I can’t see that as art,’ she’d said.

  ‘But you know what it is,’ he said. ‘What about that one?’

  It was a photograph of a young woman, fair-haired, heavily made up. Skeletal hands reached to embrace her. She looked at Flynn and shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘She was a prostitute,’ he said. ‘Found dead. No one cared much.’

  Tina looked at the photograph again. The woman looked very young, except for her eyes, which looked haunted and dead. ‘OK.’ Tina acknowledged the point. ‘But there is a difference, you’ve got to admit that.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said.

  People had kept coming over and engaging him in conversation, and Tina had twice moved away, aware that she had had more than her fair share of the star of the evening, but each time he’d sought her out again.

  As the crowds began to thin, Tina had been aware of Eliza Eliot watching them. ‘I think you’re meant to be circulating,’ she said.

  He shrugged. ‘It’s more or less finished. I’ve done all my thanks to the gallery people here.’ He looked across at Eliza, who was busy talking to a group of late arrivals, people who looked as though they were expecting the VIP treatment. ‘Oh, shit. I can’t face it,’ he’d said. ‘Not the local arty types. I’ve already seen anyone I want to see. Eliza can deal with them. I need to get out of here.’ He looked down at her. ‘Come with me. I’ll buy you dinner. Or take you for a drink. Anything. You know everything you need to about the madness of artists.’

  That was when they’d shared the coke, and they’d stopped off at Tina’s favourite club so she could score some more. They’d ended up at a restaurant in Crosspool, one she hadn’t been to before and one that was distinctly out of her income bracket. She’d enjoyed his company. He’d been interested in her work, in the demands it made on her. They’d talked in a very general way about the current case – he hadn’t tried to pump her about it, but he was interested in the attitude it demonstrated to the deaths of prostitutes. ‘We don’t send the mobs out to avenge them,’ he’d said.

  ‘Or drug addicts,’ Tina said, remembering her recent case.

  He’d told her about flowers he’d seen by the canal, flowers that had been left, not for Cara, but in memory of Ellie Chapman, dead these four years past.

  She could feel the wine relaxing her as they talked. He was interested in what she was saying, asking questions occasionally, but his signals – a smile, a look, a touch – promised more. ‘What do they think about prostitute killings? Your colleagues?’ he’d said.

  Tina thought about it. ‘Some of them’ – some of her colleagues – ‘think getting murdered is an occupational hazard for a prostitute. You know, that it doesn’t matter, not so much.’ He nodded as if that was easy enough to believe.

  She found herself talking about the Ellie Chapman killing. ‘Is that what you call it?’ he said. ‘The Ellie Chapman killing. He’s appealing against the conviction, isn’t he?’ He poured more wine into her glass. ‘Fraser? Has he got any chance?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. The guys who worked on the case, it really pisses them off. If someone like Fraser gets off on a technicality – you know, if the conviction is “unsafe” – that doesn’t mean it was wrong, you know…’ Her sentences were beginning to ramble as she spoke. She needed to be careful. It doesn’t mean it was right, either. The thought popped into her head from nowhere.

  ‘Was it unsafe? Fraser’s conviction?’

  She waved her hand to indicate she didn’t know, catching her glass and nearly knocking it over. He grabbed it before it fell. ‘Steady,’ he said.

  ‘There was a lot of strong feeling. Someone told me the SIO –’ she met his inquiring gaze – ‘the Senior Investigating Officer, wasn’t sure they’d got enough to make a case, a cast-iron case.’ She drank some more wine. ‘But they knew it was him.’

  He nodded. ‘How did they get on to him?’

  Tina tried to remember. Her brain wasn’t functioning too well. ‘I wasn’t on that case,’ she said. ‘But we all kept an eye on it – you do when it’s a kid. It was because he was there, you know? That was the first thing.’ Her thoughts wandered. ‘That’s what it’s like with murder cases. It’s usually the person on the scene. They haven’t planned it, it just happens.’

  ‘And Mark Fraser?’ he said, topping her glass up.

  ‘He’d been abusing one of his kids. Ellie was friends with his daughter.’

  He nodded. He didn’t seem surprised.

  ‘You aren’t drinking,’ she said.

  He smiled, but his face looked tired and worn. ‘I had too much at the gallery. I hate those things. I get drunk. It’s the only way.’ There was silence for a moment. ‘Wasn’t there another death?’ he said.

  ‘The canal thing? Yes, a few days ago.’

  ‘No. When Ellie Chapman was found. Wasn’t there another death, someone else killed?’

  The waiter came and cleared their plates away. ‘Would you like to see the menu again?’ he asked.

  Daniel looked at Tina, who shook her head. ‘Just coffee,’ she said. She tried to smile at him. Her head was spinning. ‘I need it. I’m pissed.’

  ‘Coffee doesn’t sober you up. I’ll have an alert drunk on my hands.’

  She squinted at him, trying to focus, and then laughed. ‘There was,’ she said, suddenly remembering his question. ‘But it was an overdose. A smack-head overdosed down by the canal. There was a really pure batch on the streets. About four people died of it after that. There was a case a few months ago…’ She made a face and picked up her wine glass. ‘May as well go for it,’ she said, and drained the glass.

  He looked at her. ‘Come back for a while,’ he said. ‘I’ve got wine, coffee. And you’ve got…’ He smiled and she smiled back. She didn’t need to say anything. He asked the waiter to call a taxi.

  His room at the hotel seemed anonymous, as if he was careful to leave as little record as possible of his passing, to mark any stay, in any place, as transitory, temporary. There was none of his stuff scattered about the room, nothing in the wardrobe, she noticed as she hung up her jacket. The only sign of occupancy was the toothbrush and the soap in the bathroom. The drive in the taxi had sobered her up a bit, and now she had some misgivings, but when she came out of the bathroom and he started kissing her, the optimism of the coke they had taken, and the effects of the alcohol, made her reckless, and she surfaced from blackness in the small hours stretched out on the bed with her clothes scattered around her and the beginnings of a hangover.

  The other side of the bed was empty. She sat up holding her head, and saw him. He was sitting by the window that looked out over the canal basin. She didn’t want to talk to him. She needed to be alone. She wanted to limit the intimacy of what was after all just an encounter with a stranger. He called a taxi for her. ‘I’ll phone you,’ he said, politely.

  She laughed at him. ‘Maybe,’ she said.

  Now, in the cold morning light, she was starting to feel bad about the way she’d behaved. She’d gone to a party – well, a kind of party – that she had been invited to at the last minute. She’d more or less ignored the woman who’d invited her. She’d drunk too much and made off with the guest of honour. She sent up a silent prayer that nothing new would turn up that would necessitate her going back to the gallery in her official role. If any of her colleagues got to hear about this one…Private view! She’d never live it down.

  Eliza woke up feeling strangely alert. She had expected the combination of wine and a sleeping pill to leave her sluggish and woolly headed the next morning, but she felt rested and a lot more positive than she had the night before. Yes, the long-anticipated opening had been a letdown, but that was to be expected – it was bound to leave her feeling a bit lost and empty at the end
of it. The important thing was, it had been successful.

  She sat up, stretching. The sun wasn’t up, but the night was fading and the sky was clear and bright. She looked out of the window. The canal was gleaming in the early light, and she could see the shimmer of ice on the water. She checked the time. It was almost seven. The gallery didn’t open until ten. She had plenty of time.

  When she came out of the shower half an hour later, she noticed that the message light on her answer-phone was blinking. Two messages. She pressed the button, towelling her hair as she listened. The first one was from Laura: she was going away for the weekend – work – so their planned meeting would have to be rearranged. The other one was from Daniel Flynn. His voice sounded cautious, as though he wasn’t sure what her reaction would be.

  ‘Eliza? Daniel. Sorry about last night. I got a bit freaked. Look, I’m in Sheffield for a few more days. I’ll be coming in to the gallery – can we have lunch? A drink? Sometime? Give me a ring. I’m at the same hotel.’

  So, some kind of an apology from Daniel for running out on her last night. Sincere, or just another game? She needed to think about this. The night before, she had been plagued by an irrational need to see him again. Morning reminded her of the need for caution.

  It was gone eight by the time she was dressed. With a sense of anticipation, she hurried down the stairs to see if Jonathan had brought the papers in. The closed door of Cara’s flat dampened her optimism, but she pushed it determinedly to the back of her mind. Mel was in the office, uncharacteristically early. She was wearing trousers cut very low on the hips revealing the mandatory tattoo in the small of her back, and a short waistcoat. Her hair, still blonde, was pulled back from her face. The effect was stylish and striking. For the past couple of days, since Cara’s death, in fact, Mel had been pale and subdued. Today, she looked better.