Bleak Water

by Danuta Reah

  And they’d had a picnic. Ellie’s mum did good picnics. ‘I can’t come with you.’ Kerry could remember her saying that. ‘I’ve got to get this finished.’ And Dad had said, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll be fine.’ And they’d smiled at each other. Kerry and Ellie had a game where they pretended to be sisters together, pretended that they lived in the same house and that Ellie’s mum was Kerry’s mum.

  It had been so hot that day. And they’d sat down by the river. Then Ellie wanted the toilet, and Dad said, ‘Go in the bushes, Ellie,’ but Ellie didn’t like that. She always waited until there was a proper toilet. Only Dad didn’t know that. And Ellie went off into the bushes, and then Dad had gone off. ‘Wait here,’ he’d said to Kerry, and she hadn’t minded because there were strawberries with the picnic and she’d sat there eating them and the sun had been so warm on her back, and the sky was blue and the water was blue. And then, ages after, Dad had come back. But Ellie never did.

  The last day.

  ‘Move over.’ She blinked and she was back in the playground. Marie was standing there, watching her with some of the others. She moved up to make room and they talked about boys and clothes and music and things that didn’t really matter, and it was nice. She told Marie she would do her hair, and Marie asked if she would put some sequins on a T-shirt, and it was almost like having friends again. Until they knew. Until they found out.

  She went to the toilet before they went in for afternoon registration. She locked the cubicle door and took the letter out of her bag. She didn’t want to open it. She sat there staring at it. She could throw it away – but she had to know. She slipped her finger under the flap and pulled it open. Inside, there was a newspaper cutting: SEX SLAYER BLINDED IN JAIL ATTACK. She read the article. A man had been attacked in prison, a man who’d done things to kids, who’d done what they said Dad had done. And now he was blind. Her hand shook as she screwed the piece of paper up, screwed it up and threw it down the toilet. She flushed it, and flushed it again. Gone.

  ‘Are you there, Kerry? You are so going to be late.’ Marie, waiting for her, impatient. ‘News flash! The bell went five minutes ago.’

  She didn’t know what she was going to do.

  Tina had no problems tracking down the newspaper articles about Ellie Chapman’s death. She skimmed the headlines, but nothing leapt off the page at her, nothing to connect these with Cara or Stacy. She wondered if Farnham was going down a blind alley here. The drug stories were harder to find. They hadn’t made the national press. Using Ellie Chapman’s disappearance as a starting point, she began searching the archives of the local paper. That took most of the morning, but by the end, she had the picture. A batch of pure heroin had hit the streets around the time of Ellie’s disappearance, and several addicts had died.

  The stories appeared as unrelated incidents at first – a dead man, a known addict, found in a squat, two women treated for overdoses, just three-line paragraphs. Then the stories gained a little prominence as the deaths were linked: POLICE WARN OF HEROIN DANGER ON STREET…THIRD DRUG DEATH IN SOUTH YORKSHIRE…

  She almost missed the last story. Like the others, it wasn’t front page. It was a couple of short columns tucked away at the bottom of a page, in the newspaper dated a week after the ‘guilty’ verdict had been passed on Mark Fraser. FORGOTTEN VICTIM IN ELLIE MURDER. She read through the article and realized that she, too, had forgotten. It was another drug death.

  A girl had been found in a boat moored on the canal, a known haunt of the local junkie community. The dead girl had not at that stage been identified. A vicar who worked with the young homeless, with the young drug addicts, had castigated the authorities for their lack of interest in this death. ‘We can’t even give this dead child a name,’ he’d said. A police spokesman had said that the matter was in hand and they were investigating a series of overdose deaths in young addicts that had occurred recently, but that they weren’t looking for anyone else in connection with the teenager’s death.

  Tina frowned. Too many parallels. She thought about the recent deaths she had come across – those had been overdose deaths. She wondered if the dead girl had ever been identified. Her eyes were feeling heavy, and she shook her head to clear it. Concentrate!

  She went back to the newspaper reports. She wanted to see if there had been any follow-up. The girl’s death had been overshadowed by the tragic discovery on the towpath. Ellie’s body had lain undiscovered in the bushes for months. But that wasn’t where she’d been killed. The body had been moved. Tina remembered Farnham talking about that at the briefing. It had been concealed somewhere, sealed away somewhere warm and damp, the pathologist had speculated, and moved after three or four weeks.

  Tina sat with the pile of papers. The still waters of the canal threaded their way through these killings – a boat that vanished from the water, a gallery that overlooked the canal, an exhibition that had some connection, a child abducted from the river side. She thought about Daniel Flynn talking to her at the private view. ‘The processes of death and decay…’ he’d said, leading her around the paintings and photo-montages. Art and death – the obsession wasn’t new, Tina reminded herself. Brueghel demonstrated exactly the same fascination. Art and death and water. She went back to the articles.

  Suspicion had fallen on Mark Fraser as a matter of course – he had been with the child when she vanished and witness evidence, supported initially by the evidence of his own daughter, said that he’d gone after Ellie, to look for her, according to his statement. To rape her and kill her, according to the prosecution. The evidence linking Fraser to the killing had been ambivalent. Fraser had been a teacher. He had had a relationship with Maggie Chapman – the perfect way of gaining access to Ellie, and gaining her trust. His wife was an alcoholic. She had had a young daughter when Fraser married her – another young child exposed to his perversion, another victim left unprotected. His stepdaughter had accused him of sexually abusing her, Fraser had denied it. Which he would. And the child-care team said that it was possible that Kerry, the younger child, had been abused as well. The interviews were inconclusive, but the child had talked about the secret and had then clammed up.

  Where was his stepdaughter now? Tina made a note to check.

  She went on through the newspapers. There was no mystery boat attached to Ellie’s disappearance – all the traffic on the river that day had been accounted for. A local man had reported screams in the woods near Conisbrough around the time of Ellie’s disappearance, but he hadn’t done anything about it. ‘There’s always kids screaming in those woods,’ he’d said to a journalist. He hadn’t known that a child was missing. The screams may have been nothing to do with Ellie anyway.

  It was all tenuous. She made notes on what she’d found. Maybe someone else had uncovered a closer link – maybe Farnham was barking up the wrong tree entirely and she had wasted her morning.

  And the dead girl, the addict whose end had been overshadowed by the finding of Ellie’s body. Had anyone ever identified her? Was there a name on her grave? More trawling through the records. It was time to go back to the incident room. If the information she wanted wasn’t in the Ellie Chapman file, then it would be in the records somewhere, if it was anywhere. Maybe the dead girl had never been identified – it wouldn’t be the first time.

  She collected up her photocopies and walked back through town. The fine morning had deteriorated, the sky was heavy with clouds, making the day dim, as though the sun had barely risen. It was starting to rain and the pavements were wet and slippery, the cobbles in the precinct making her ankles turn. They were designed for appearance, not for walking on, like a pair of fashion shoes.

  The rain was getting heavier. She hadn’t brought her umbrella, and by the time she got back, hurrying down the hill as she left the redeveloped part of the centre and began passing shop windows that were empty, or were piled high with the cheap and the tacky, her hair was wet and dripping down her neck, and the rain had started to penetrate her jacket.

&n
bsp; She felt the familiar weight of depression descend as she came through the entrance, nodding a hello to the man on the reception desk and letting herself through into the main part of the building. It seemed such a short time ago that she had come into work every day with a sense of excitement and challenge, a sense of being involved in something important. Now, she felt a sense of dark apprehension as though she, by her actions, could push the case down the route she could remember so well, the route that led to the tower block and the death in the night that still haunted her dreams. That wasn’t your fault. That wasn’t anything to do with you. But the mantra didn’t work, had never worked.

  She looked back through the door as it closed behind her, back into the reception area, dull and functional with its grey lino and painted walls. Someone had left the building as she went through the door, someone who had caught her eye for some reason. She squinted back to see who it was, and her stomach lurched. Daniel Flynn.

  Farnham had sent for the records relating to the Ellie Chapman case. He couldn’t ignore the way this current investigation kept tripping over the threads from four years ago. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for. He wanted to go through everything, try to pin down that nagging feeling of ‘something’, the ‘something’ that Eliza had felt as she looked at those photographs.

  But he didn’t have the resources to spare for a full review of the evidence. He’d already sent Barraclough on what was almost certainly a wild-goose chase to track down some press cuttings, and he’d told one of the uniformed officers to go through the files and find any photographs of the river trip. There was just the one set, apparently, developed from the film in Mark Fraser’s camera, and these he now had on the desk in front of him.

  He’d glanced at them, but he didn’t have time to do any more. He was waiting for Daniel Flynn. He tapped his pen on his desk as he thought. Massey or Flynn? They were both disturbingly close to the killings. Flynn claimed to have been in Whitby the night that Cara died, but there was very little to substantiate that. Massey had been in Leeds. What about Stacy? They’d both been in the gallery the evening she vanished. Massey had gone on to a restaurant with Eliza Eliot, but after that, after about ten-thirty, he’d been alone. Daniel Flynn’s story was even thinner. One of the waiters at the restaurant where he said he’d been had recognized his photograph, but said this man had been there with a woman. Flynn said he’d gone there alone.

  Massey claimed his relationship with Cara Hobson had been ‘innocent’, whatever that may mean. In Farnham’s book, there were more ways than one of having a sexual relationship. He said he’d moved her into the flat because she needed accommodation urgently, and she had repaid him by posing.

  He read through Massey’s statement again – the story depended on the woman who was alibiing Massey telling the truth. If she knew how serious the case was, if she knew the consequences of providing a false alibi, she might back down. They needed to put some pressure on her. He’d arranged for a search of Massey’s flat. He needed to see what, if anything, turned up there.

  He was thinking it through, when his phone rang. Daniel Flynn was downstairs, waiting to see him. ‘OK, take him to the interview room,’ he said. There was no reason, or none that he could find, for Flynn to harm Cara Hobson – there was no evidence he even knew her – but his exhibition, his Triumph of Death, was linked to the killings in some way. Farnham needed that link.

  He’d gone through Flynn’s previous statement earlier. He checked his notes, and tried to clear his mind as he went down the stairs. He was distracted, trying to work through the connections, two children by the river, an exhibition, a dead prostitute, a dead teenager…Eliza.

  He brought his mind back to the moment as he sat down opposite Flynn. He thanked him for coming in, and flicked through the file on the desk in front of him. ‘Mr Flynn,’ he said. ‘One thing that has been puzzling me – why did you bring your exhibition to a small gallery in the north of England? Why not go straight to London?’

  Flynn shrugged. ‘I come from Sheffield,’ he said. ‘It was a homage to my roots.’ He said it with a light irony, but Farnham could detect a bitter note underlying the words.

  ‘I see,’ he said. ‘OK, why this gallery?’

  Flynn stared at the ceiling, thinking. ‘Why not?’ he said. Farnham waited. Flynn looked at him and acknowledged the inadequacy of his reply with a slight smile. Farnham almost responded – against his better judgement, he quite liked the man – but he raised an interrogative eyebrow.

  ‘Well,’ Flynn said slowly, ‘I know the people, I know Jonathan Massey – and I know Eliza Eliot.’ He was quiet for a moment, then he went on: ‘I needed someone who could work with all the pieces, pull them together for the final exhibition. I knew Eliza could do that.’

  Farnham nodded. He wasn’t convinced by that one, but let’s see where Flynn was going with it. ‘So there were people you could trust with your work?’ he said. Flynn remained silent, waiting. ‘Was that it?’ Farnham said.

  ‘And I liked the setting,’ Flynn said.

  Farnham thought about it. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Tell me about your Sheffield roots. How long were you in Sheffield? Where did you live?’

  Flynn wasn’t smiling now. He was still leaning back in his chair, but he no longer looked relaxed. ‘I was born here,’ he said.

  ‘And your parents were…?’

  ‘Local people? My mother was.’

  ‘Your father?’

  Flynn shook his head. ‘I’ve never met my father,’ he said.

  ‘And is your mother still in Sheffield?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking.’ Flynn shrugged. ‘She’s scattered around the crematorium somewhere.’

  ‘I see.’ But Farnham didn’t, yet. This didn’t sound like deep-rooted devotion to a place. It sounded like a mix of hostility and indifference.

  ‘When did you leave?’

  ‘Fifteen years ago.’ The answer was prompt. Flynn hadn’t had to think about it.

  ‘And you come back much?’

  ‘I came back in 1998,’ Flynn said. His eyes were unfocused now, looking into the distance.

  Four years ago, the year Ellie Chapman had died. ‘Why then?’ Farnham said, keeping his voice neutral.

  ‘I’d just got my first big exhibition,’ he said. ‘I realized I was going to go places. I wanted to come back, look at where I’d come from, I suppose.’ He sounded distracted, as though he was thinking about something else.

  ‘When did you start planning this exhibition, this Triumph thing?’ The killings had all the marks of being carefully planned. The links with the painting, that bit of glorification of violent death that would have had the tabloids jumping up and down if it had been produced today, were too carefully organized to be the result of impulse. An image he didn’t want, a passive figure exposing its throat to the knife, flashed into his mind. He had to stop this before the next one – and there would be a next one, he was sure.

  Flynn stared at the ceiling. ‘About a year ago,’ he said. ‘I started work on it about that time.’

  ‘And how many people knew about it?’

  ‘Not many,’ Flynn said. ‘My agent knew.’

  ‘Eliza Eliot?’ Farnham tried to ignore the slight tension he felt inside him as he waited for Flynn’s answer. He didn’t want to find that Eliza had lied to him.

  Flynn nodded. ‘It was talking to Eliza that gave me the idea in the first place, but she didn’t know the details, not until it was finished.’

  Twelve months. ‘That was when you were first planning it? So you wouldn’t have said anything to her earlier than that?’

  ‘That was the first time I met her,’ Flynn said.

  ‘You said she was one of the reasons you wanted the exhibition to come to Sheffield,’ Farnham pointed out.

  Flynn frowned. ‘Well, she was an added incentive, let’s say.’

  Farnham rubbed his hand over his face. He was feeling the lack of sleep now. He could do with another shot of caffeine. E
liza’s coffee had rather spoiled him for the stuff that came out of the machine. ‘Mr Flynn, I’m investigating the murder of a woman and a child. This exhibition of yours seems to have brought some lunatic out of the undergrowth. I need to know who knew what was in the exhibition, and how early on they knew. I need to know everything you can tell me.’

  ‘That’s a tall order,’ Flynn said. ‘OK, who knew? I talked about the ideas in Madrid, but no one knew the details. I didn’t know them, not until I started working on it. When I started it, no one, only me. Then, when I could see it was going somewhere, I discussed it with my agent, with Eliza. But once it was finished, about three months ago, lots of people knew. There was a buzz in the press, it was everywhere. Specially as it was coming to this gallery first. Good publicity gimmick.’ His tone was light, but there was something underlying it that Farnham couldn’t quite interpret.

  ‘Was that the reason you let it come here?’

  Flynn grinned. ‘That, and Eliza.’ He looked at Farnham. ‘Eliza and I have a history,’ he said.

  Farnham hoped that nothing showed on his face. That wasn’t something he’d wanted to hear, and it was something Eliza had kept quiet about. He wasn’t surprised, now he thought about it. ‘The night of the party, the night the exhibition opened, no one seems to remember seeing you at the restaurant.’

  Flynn shrugged. ‘I was there,’ he said.

  ‘On your own?’

  Flynn looked at the ceiling. ‘I was with someone,’ he said after a slight pause.

  ‘At the restaurant?’ Farnham said.

  The same slight hesitation. ‘She came back to the hotel with me.’

  ‘Until when?’

  ‘Not sure…’ Flynn caught Farnham’s look and grinned. ‘It wasn’t a watch-the-clock sort of night,’ he said. ‘But she left around three, something like that.’