Bleak Water

by Danuta Reah

  After Ellie Chapman had gone missing, Maggie Chapman had defended Fraser against police suspicions. They were wasting valuable time, she’d proclaimed, looking at Mark, when someone had kidnapped her daughter who might still be alive somewhere. ‘She so didn’t get it,’ Mel said. ‘Letting that perv take those kids out. So I went and told her that he was a pervert, that I’d left home because of him.’

  Tragedies arise from such mundane things. Mark Fraser had wanted too much from his stepdaughter. He’d wanted to compensate for the break-up of her home, had wanted to be her father, but he hadn’t been sensitive to the needs of an angry and resentful child. And he’d had a minor kink. A harmless one. But to Mel, for all her air of streetwise sophistication, crossdressing and paedophilia were two sides of the same coin.

  Mel looked through the ward door again. ‘She’s waking up,’ she said, and was back at her sister’s bedside before Tina could say anything. Tina stood there for a few minutes watching Mel sitting with her sister as she stirred on the pillow. Mel looked up and saw her watching, and rolled her eyes. Then she turned away so that Tina couldn’t see her face.

  They had got to Ivan Bakst’s boat with a search warrant within an hour of Farnham’s interview with Massey. The boat was moored above Rotherham. The other people using the mooring described Bakst as quiet and inconspicuous. They said he’d spent a lot of time on the boat, reading, carrying out routine maintenance. ‘Because we live on the water,’ one of them complained, ‘doesn’t mean we’re criminals.’ Farnham could sense the first signs of closing ranks.

  In the compact, meticulous living quarters of the boat, they found carefully stored sets of photographs and some books. There was very little that was personal, no letters, no diaries, no address books. They also found a small supply of heroin, very pure.

  The books were mostly art books. One was a copy of The Artist’s Handbook by Cennino Cennini, which fell open at a page with a heavily underscored passage:

  How to paint dead flesh.

  Do not apply any pink at all, because a dead person has no colour;…and mark out the outlines with dark sinoper and a little black…and manage the hair in the same way, but not so that it looks alive but dead…and so do every bone of a Christian, or of rational creatures’…

  In the margin, someone had written Crap!

  And the photographs seemed to support that succinct rejection of Cennini. Among the prints of derelict buildings, abandoned waterways, industrial concrete, were photographs of a child’s body. The face was hidden, but it was the body of a young girl, pre-pubescent. The prints explored the processes of post-mortem change: the white and shadows of purple spreading over the flesh; the greenish luminosity; the creeping blackness; the blurring of the fine lines as the body distended, as the soft tissue liquefied. The sequence ended with bones, animal bones, showing the green of moss marring the fine whiteness.

  Farnham remembered the flier they had found in Cara Hobson’s flat:

  Gonna roll the bones!

  ‘Entropy’ is an intriguing exhibition of film and computer images that is worth a visit. Ivan Bakst’s time-lapse animation, and the reworkings of stills into abstract designs turns the process of death and decay into something that has a strange if macabre beauty…

  The exhibition had been dated 1999. Had Bakst disguised what his photographs actually showed, presented them as abstracts, turned Ellie Chapman’s body, in fact, into a work of art? Farnham had heard of artists working with shit, with piss, with dead animals – so why not the corpses of murdered children? It seemed about par for the course to him.

  And The Triumph of Death? What was it that had brought Bakst back to South Yorkshire, back to the canals, back here to kill?

  ‘He never left me alone,’ Massey said, when Farnham resumed the interview. ‘I went away after…but he stayed, for a bit. Then he went, and Ellie came back.’ He picked nervously at his lips, at his fingernails, as he watched Farnham.

  Farnham was making the connections now. ‘Did you introduce him to Cara Hobson and Sheryl Hewitt?’ he said.

  ‘They met,’ Massey said. ‘I didn’t…Cara didn’t have much to do with him, but Sheryl was always around him. She’s dead now,’ he added.

  Found dead of an overdose on the derelict boat where addicts used to meet. Farnham was thinking about the heroin found among Bakst’s possessions. If he was in the habit of bringing heroin back into the country, he may have gone with Sheryl to make contact with other users, with other potential buyers. He would have seen the deserted place, seen the dense undergrowth on the canal bank, seen its potential as a place of concealment. Bakst had left the country before Ellie’s body had been found, left around the time that Mel Young had made her accusation against her stepfather and moved into the hostel where Cara was living. Cara had been impressed by the second-hand notoriety that the Ellie Chapman case gave. She would probably have mentioned to Bakst that her new friend, Lyn, was the stepdaughter of the accused man. Bakst would have wanted no contact with Mark Fraser’s stepdaughter.

  Massey was speaking again, the words tumbling out in a jerky torrent. ‘And then Flynn wants to have his exhibition here, wants Eliza to put it together. She was a friend of Maggie Chapman. It was the nightmare starting all over again. I kept thinking Maggie would come to the gallery. I would have gone mad. I couldn’t have coped with that.’ His voice was shaking. He took a deep drag on his cigarette.

  ‘Then – about a month ago, he came back. He said he was going to have an exhibition and I was going to help him. It was called The Triumph of Death. I didn’t understand what he was talking about. That was Flynn’s exhibition. He just laughed and said it was OK, the show was all in hand. I didn’t need to do anything.’ He wiped his face. His hand was trembling. ‘He came back later. Eliza saw him. I was terrified he was going to say something, start her asking questions.’

  He nodded. ‘Go on,’ he said to Massey. ‘What happened to Cara?’

  ‘When Eliza started doing a lot of evening work in the gallery, I began taking Cara to my flat.’ He looked at Farnham. ‘To pose,’ he said. ‘And she started looking at things – she was always into things. And there were some pictures, nothing bad, lovely pictures. They were of Ellie, on the boat. She found them. She must have realized what they were. And she took them. I don’t know why.’ His hand touched against the bridge of his nose, reaching for his missing glasses. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I told Ivan. He said he’d talk to her, sort it out. I gave him the gallery keys, the codes. He said he needed them.’

  ‘And you didn’t do anything, even when Cara turned up dead?’

  Massey shook his head. ‘I couldn’t!’ he said. ‘You’ve got to understand that. I couldn’t. But he said it was all right. He said he hadn’t hurt her. He said he’d talked to her and she hadn’t said anything. She was just puzzled. I wanted to believe him. I did believe him.’

  Cara must have been on a cushy number with Massey. She had rent-free accommodation, regular money without having to do much for it. And she hadn’t been particularly bright. When she found the photographs of Ellie in Jonathan’s flat, she probably didn’t realize their significance. It had worried her enough to want to ask questions, but not of Mel – bright, stroppy Mel who might cause trouble, disrupt the life that Cara had made for herself and her baby.

  Who better to ask than Kerry? Kerry had been there. Kerry would be able to explain how Jonathan came to have photographs of that fatal day on the river. Cara’s fingers had been twisted and broken. Her killer would know what she had done. He’d gone to her flat that night to retrieve the photos. And they weren’t there. But he had what he assumed was Cara’s phone, with the exchange of messages. It must have looked as though Cara had managed to fool him, that she had a far closer relationship with the girl than she had admitted to. Kerry knew too much.

  How dangerous were the photographs to Bakst? If anyone had done what Farnham had done, and compared Jonathan’s photographs with the ones Fraser took, then it would become
clear at once that there was someone else on that boat with an interest in the children. So if the photos were missing, then the next step would be to destroy the other set to prevent that comparison being made. Eliza had mentioned the concerns of Maggie’s landlord that someone was hanging around her flat – but of course the photos weren’t there. Eliza had taken them. And then she took them back.

  He looked at Massey. ‘The day after Stacy McDonald was found…’ Massey nodded, kept his gaze on the desk in front of him. ‘Did Bakst know that Eliza had gone to Maggie Chapman’s flat?’

  He nodded. ‘He phoned me after your lot had left the gallery. Said he needed to talk to me. He wanted to know if the coast was clear. I told him that Eliza was up at Maggie’s but it wasn’t safe for us to meet.’

  So Bakst must have gone back to see if the photographs had been returned, and Eliza may have disturbed him as he searched. He would have had no time to sort out the photos he was looking for. So he’d burnt the lot. Farnham looked at Massey. ‘Tell me about Stacy McDonald,’ he said.

  Massey covered his face with his hands. ‘I knew then,’ he said. He took a deep breath. ‘I knew he’d killed Cara to keep her quiet. And somehow he knew she’d been in contact with…Mark Fraser’s daughter. The second little girl. He asked me if Cara talked about her, if she’d ever been to the gallery. How would I know? Of course she hadn’t. Why would she?

  ‘I couldn’t take it any more. That night, I was going to end it. I’d got the pills, and I’d got the vodka. I was going to do it at the gallery. Only, when I got there, Eliza was still around. And then I saw him. He was getting off this boat. I knew he was coming to the gallery – Eliza was there – I had to stop him seeing her. I managed to get her to go upstairs and I got out, before he came in. I didn’t know what he was going to do, I swear.’

  ‘Why did you get on the boat, Jonathan?’ The one possibly mitigating factor. He could have run away, but he’d got on the boat and found Kerry, trussed up, injured and drowning.

  ‘It was…he hadn’t tied it up and there was something about the way it was lying in the water. There was something wrong. And in the Brueghel, in the background…’ He caught Farnham’s expression. ‘I knew. I know that painting. I’m a trained artist for…’ He stopped, then said, ‘In the background, there are boats foundering in the water. Dead people, drowned people. There was someone on that boat – I knew. Someone else he’d killed. And it had to be that little girl, the second little girl, Ellie’s friend. And it was my fault. I thought I could die too, with the pills and the vodka, die on the boat, like I deserved.’

  He’d taken no action when he realized that Kerry Fraser’s life was in danger, had run away and left Eliza alone with a killer.

  But without him, Kerry Fraser would have died.

  A week after the fire at the gallery, Tina Barraclough was surprised to see Daniel Flynn waiting in the car park, leaning against her car. He threw away his cigarette as she came over. ‘Hello.’ He looked unsure of his welcome.

  ‘How did you know I was due to leave now?’ she said.

  ‘I asked. I wanted to talk to you.’ She wasn’t particularly pleased to see him, but she had no grudge against him. He’d done his best not to shop her to Farnham, and he’d kept his mouth shut about the drugs.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘But I haven’t got much time.’ She was meeting Steven Calloway later. They were going drinking, and maybe clubbing after.

  They went to a wine bar close by, which was quiet at this time in the evening. He bought a bottle of wine, and they sat in silence. She waited to see what he wanted. ‘I’m sorry I had to tell your boss about that night,’ he said. ‘You didn’t get into trouble, did you?’

  ‘A bit,’ she said. ‘but it’s sorted. It’s OK.’ Farnham had reprimanded her for keeping information back, and seemed to have dropped the matter. He didn’t ask her again about the pills. Maybe he’d decided not to ask the question when the answer was going to be something he didn’t want to hear.

  ‘I thought I was going to get banged up for murder, otherwise…’

  ‘I told you, it’s OK. I should have told him myself.’ There was an awkward silence.

  ‘Ivan Bakst,’ he said after a moment. ‘I know him.’ He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘I can’t believe he…Do you think he always…Did he do it?’

  Bakst had been in custody since he’d been arrested on returning to his boat the morning after the fire. Tina shrugged. ‘It’ll be months before it comes to trial,’ she said. ‘He’s been charged. It’s up to the courts now.’ And up to Farnham to put together a cast-iron case.

  He poured himself another glass of wine. ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said again. ‘This place has never been any good for me.’

  She remembered that he came from Sheffield. ‘So why did you bring the exhibition here?’ She had heard about Flynn’s manipulations to get Eliza Eliot to put his exhibition together for him. She wanted to hear what he would say about it.

  ‘It was…’ He poured more wine into his glass and offered the bottle to Tina. She shook her head. She’d be drinking later. ‘I had a sister,’ he said.

  He’d been thirteen when she was born. ‘God knows who her father was,’ he said. ‘I don’t think my mother ever knew.’ The girl had died of a heroin overdose in 1998. The year Ellie Chapman died. ‘There were a few people died of overdoses then,’ he said.

  Had Bakst brought that lethal supply of pure heroin? Had he been responsible for the recent deaths? That was something they would probably never know. Tina remembered the photograph in the exhibition. ‘Are you saying that Sheryl Hewitt was your sister?’

  ‘Sheryl Hewitt? Oh, you mean…No. I used her picture. I didn’t have one of Julie. She’d been in care since she was thirteen.’

  ‘How old was she when she died?’

  ‘Seventeen. She’d been in trouble for years.’

  Tina frowned. Flynn would have been twentysix when his sister went into care. ‘Why didn’t you have her with you?’ she said.

  His eyes slid away. ‘I couldn’t,’ he said. ‘She didn’t really know me.’ He drank some more wine and refilled his glass.

  ‘But later,’ she said. ‘When you had got to know her.’

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I was in London. She was in Sheffield.’

  She didn’t react, waiting for him to go on with his story. ‘I wanted there to be something,’ he said after a pause. ‘No one knew anything about Julie. She was just another dead addict. The Ellie Chapman killing. Nobody talked about the Julie Iqbal killing.’

  ‘Iqbal?’ Tina said.

  ‘One of my mother’s marriages. He wasn’t Julie’s father. He was OK, but he bailed out before she was born. I was in London when she died. I was the only person went to the crematorium.’ He looked at her. ‘I know I let her down,’ he said. ‘But there was something I could do for her. The Triumph could be her memorial.’

  And about as much use as a three-pound note, Tina thought. It was easy to be sorry after the event, easy to make gestures, but it didn’t mitigate the effects of what had gone before. Daniel Flynn hadn’t made a memorial for his sister, he was trying to assuage his own guilt. He hadn’t even gone public with Julie, hadn’t even included her in the exhibition. He’d used a picture of one of the other victims instead. He wouldn’t have come out of the story too well. Maybe he was hoping for some kind of sympathy from Tina, but if so, he’d come to the wrong person.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ she said, deliberately changing the subject.

  He looked at her, then shrugged. ‘I’m taking the exhibition to New York in the autumn,’ he said. ‘And then there’s a European tour in the offing.’ His voice was cold.

  ‘But it’s gone.’ The Triumph of Death had been destroyed in the fire.

  ‘It was photo-montages, reproductions, things like that mostly. A bit of painting. I kept everything. I can recreate most of it – maybe even better this time.’ He frowned. ‘I’ve got the parts. I need to make it in
to a coherent whole.’

  ‘Take Eliza Eliot with you,’ Tina said. There was some malice behind that.

  His face went carefully blank. ‘Why Eliza?’

  ‘Why not?’ she said. She was pleased to have got under his skin. ‘She’ll be at a loose end now.’ She finished her glass of wine. It was time she was off. She left Flynn sitting at his table in the wine bar, staring moodily at the wall in front of him.

  She put him out of her mind. It promised to be a good evening, but she was feeling tired. Maybe she ought to look out some kind of artificial stimulus; nothing much, just a bit of something to carry her through.

  Life was getting back to normal. Life was OK.

  TWENTY

  The sky was heavy with storm clouds that turned the late afternoon into evening. Eliza parked her car outside the cemetery gates. She pulled her bag off the back seat, hesitated, then picked up her umbrella as well. She didn’t want to be encumbered, but it was going to start raining soon. She had a long journey ahead, and she didn’t want to get soaked at the start.

  The colour of the grass was dulled by the grey light, and the flowers on the graves looked dead. The chapel of rest was closed and deserted. She walked along the path, towards the corner of the graveyard where Maggie and Ellie lay. She could see the green of the laurel gleaming in the half-light, the shadows that obscured the polished granite of Ellie’s stone. Roses are red…

  From this high point, she could see across the city, the houses running down into the valley and up the hills on the other side, the sky disappearing in banks of dark cloud. The first spatter of rain blew across her face. She stood for a few minutes looking at the graves. The mound that marked Maggie’s had sunk, though the earth was still bare. She read the epitaph on Ellie’s stone, the fading gold lettering: Ellie Chapman, 1989–1998. Love is as strong as death is.