Deep Waters

by Patricia Hall

  As the fruitless morning wore on, she was encouraged to see that a faint hint of the sun was beginning to lighten the sky in the south where the renewed sea-defence wall protected the low-lying roads from the waters of the estuary. She gazed out at the sea, which merged seamlessly into the grey sky, and marvelled at the fact that France and England were, the governments had just announced, to be joined by a tunnel. It seemed an unlikely prospect to someone who had regarded the tunnel under the Mersey as an engineering miracle and who stood at a spot where engineering had so spectacularly failed to protect innocent people from the sea on a stormy night. She glanced again at the fitful sunshine and was persuaded that perhaps she should hang around a bit longer in the hope of better conditions later on. But her stomach told her she was hungry, and the only place she could see where she might get something to eat was the pub, a solid two-storey building which had been able to stand up to the worst of the floodwater that fatal January night.

  Kate went in and dumped her bag and camera on one of the tables, closely watched by the handful of men already in the bar. She was being assessed but she was used to that when she ventured into a pub by herself. She loosened the toggles on her duffel coat before approaching the counter, where a heavily built man leaned silently on his elbows with a copy of the Daily Express spread out in front of him. He did not speak but raised a questioning eyebrow as she glanced at the pumps in front of him and the shelves behind.

  ‘I’d like a half of shandy, please,’ she said. ‘And do you have anything to eat?’ The barman waved towards a plastic cover which she had not noticed at the far end of the counter, before pulling her half glass of beer and turning for a bottle of lemonade from the shelf behind him.

  ‘There’s pickled eggs, sweetheart,’ he said grudgingly. ‘Pork pie or a sandwich. Cheese and pickle.’ Kate took a closer look at the dry-looking offerings under the plastic dome.

  ‘I’ll have a cheese sandwich, please,’ she said, not sure how long the pork pies might have been festering there and repelled by the greyish eggs in their jar of indeterminate liquor. She paid and carried her lunch back to the table where she had left her equipment, conscious of the eyes still watching her from nearby tables, not hostile exactly but full of a sort of avid, neutral curiosity. As she began to eat and drink, the silence lengthened though she knew that sooner or later it would be broken. Women still did not often venture into pubs alone. Where she’d been brought up in Liverpool it was strictly frowned on and even in this tight little community in the south, cut off from the outside world, she guessed that she was still a rare sight.

  In the end the patience of one of the drinkers broke and a tall, thin middle-aged man with an almost military haircut, wearing nondescript green slacks and a tweed jacket, got up with empty glasses in hand and took a detour to Kate’s table on his way to the bar. He glanced at the camera visible on the top of her bag.

  ‘Not a very good day for taking pictures, is it dear?’ he said, his tone avuncular although possibly hiding a multitude of sins that would spark the interest of a confessor.

  ‘Not yet, anyway,’ Kate agreed. ‘I’m hoping the sun will come out a bit more.’ The man’s eyes widened slightly.

  ‘Blimey,’ he said. ‘You’re not a native round here, are you? Glasgow is it, that accent?’

  Kate gritted her teeth. She should have got used to this reaction by now but sometimes it still stung. She didn’t reckon most Londoners had ever been north of Watford and as for the inhabitants of Essex, from what she had seen this morning, she suspected they might as well live on another planet for all the contact they had with the big cities of the north.

  ‘Liverpool,’ she said. ‘You know? Big river, lots of boats, just like London really.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ the man said, unabashed. ‘Liverpool? So what’s a girl from Liverpool doing taking pictures on Canvey Island? What’s that all about?’ He glanced at her camera. ‘That looks like a nice bit of gear. You want to be careful it doesn’t get nicked.’

  ‘I’m working for a magazine,’ she said, taking a cautious bite out of her sandwich but wishing she hadn’t and putting one proprietorial hand on her camera just in case. ‘They’re opening some new flats here next month and the magazine’s doing an article about how Canvey has recovered since the flood.’ She could see that his two companions at his table were getting impatient waiting for their glasses to be refilled.

  ‘Were you here back then?’ she asked quickly, not wanting to lose his attention just yet. The man glanced at his friends as if to ask permission before confiding in Kate, but they remained stony-faced and he evidently decided to go ahead anyway.

  ‘We were all here back then, duck,’ he said, his face clouding over. ‘More than fifty people drowned that night. It’s not something you’re ever going to forget, is it?’ His hands tightened round the glasses he was holding, the knuckles white. ‘Just let me fill these up and you can tell us what you’re doing and we’ll fill you in on how the place has changed, if you like. All right? Would that help?’ Kate nodded. This, she thought, might be the best lead she would get. In the middle of a miserable weekday, the island was not so full of residents on the streets that she felt she had much choice. ‘Can I get you another?’ the man asked, almost as an afterthought.

  ‘Half of shandy, ta,’ she said trying to look cheerful.

  Kate’s new acquaintance went to buy his round and took the glasses back to his two friends whose eyes swivelled sharply in her direction as he spoke. She could see he was having some difficulty in persuading the oldest of the trio, a grey-haired man who could have been already drawing his pension, his face deeply creviced by some experience she could only guess at. But in the end even he shrugged a reluctant assent and the man who had approached her waved her to their table and they shuffled up on their chairs to allow a fourth person space to sit down and even put a beer mat down for her shandy. From the bar, the landlord glanced in the direction of the group in feigned surprise before turning back to his paper.

  ‘I’m Tom,’ the first man said. ‘This is Reg and this …’ He waved at the older man. ‘This is Ken. We’ve all lived on Canvey since before the war – when most of it was just a holiday village for East Enders, a chance to get out of the slums for a while in the summer. But not many stayed in the chalets full time except a few retired folk. Then we all went into the forces, of course, and when we came back we found there was such a shortage of houses after the bombing and more people were staying all year round, making the best of it, families with kids even. At least it was a roof over their heads.’

  ‘That was the root of the trouble,’ Ken said, his pale eyes angry. ‘It shouldn’t have been allowed. Those houses were just standing on top of concrete bases. They had no proper foundations. Some had no power or sewage. When the flood came they just floated away or got smashed to buggery, taking people with them.’

  ‘Or they filled up so quickly with water that people didn’t even have time to get out. Anything with only one storey was a likely death trap if the water rushed in,’ Tom said.

  ‘If you were all here then, how did you all escape?’ Kate asked.

  ‘We’d all been here a long time and lived in brick houses with two floors,’ Reg put in. ‘We were away from the sea wall, just that little bit higher. I was asleep and when I woke up the water was halfway up the stairs. But it didn’t get any further.’

  ‘So you got away more lightly?’ Ken took a deep breath and the other two men flinched slightly, embarrassed, and Kate realized she had said the wrong thing. Ken took a deep draft of his beer and shook his head.

  ‘My lad had been to Southend that night and was on his way back when the surge came. He never got home. He couldn’t swim. They found his body two days later. So I wouldn’t say lightly, no.’ There was a silence for a moment as if no one dared speak.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Kate said quietly. The reality of the tragedy hit home, she thought, when you heard it from people who had actually been there. ‘That’s t
errible.’

  ‘It was all terrible,’ Tom said. ‘We were neighbours and Reg here had a dinghy, and when we could get out we took the boat to see who we could help. We were out all that night and half the next day bringing people to dry land – whole families, grannies, tiny children – all freezing cold and wet, with only the clothes they stood up in.’ He turned away from Kate and she suspected there were tears in his eyes. ‘Help was slow coming,’ he said. ‘Too late for some.’ Kate glanced at her camera and then at the three sombre-faced men.

  ‘I’ll have access to a lot of the pictures taken at the time. But the reason I’m down here today,’ she said hesitantly, ‘is that I’d like to take pictures of people who are still here. Of you, for instance, if that’s all right, as survivors of that night.’ The three men glanced at each other and then nodded slightly warily.

  ‘And it would be good, if you could help me,’ Kate went on quickly. ‘If one of you could show me round. I’d like to take pictures of what was there in ’53 and what’s been built since. To give people an idea of what’s changed and whether people who live here feel safe now, more than ten years on. Building flats seems like a good idea—’

  ‘If you’re not on the ground floor,’ Ken said bitterly.

  ‘To be honest,’ Tom said. ‘I don’t think anyone who was here that night will ever feel safe again. But I’ll give you a walk round if you like, show you the sights such as they are, maybe find someone else you can talk to. Will that help?’

  ‘It will,’ Kate said. ‘It really will. Thank you.’

  DS Harry Barnard was not often taken by surprise, but the message DCI Keith Jackson had just delivered had shaken him. He worked on the premise that things were generally bad and could always get worse, but what Jackson had just said floored him.

  ‘Off the case, guv? Why the hell would they think that was a good idea?’

  Barnard had come back to the nick from the East End feeling understandably frustrated. When he’d been relieved at the gym, he had driven east to the narrow street of small Victorian houses where Ray Robertson’s mother had lived for as long as he had known the family. But when he parked outside he was surprised to find it in darkness, and when he knocked there was no reply. He had stood on the pavement for a moment looking up at the bedroom windows before he realized he was being watched by someone standing in a doorway on the opposite side of the street.

  ‘You won’t find her this afternoon, dear,’ the elderly woman said with what sounded like satisfaction. ‘She’s gone to the town hall, hasn’t she?’

  ‘The town hall?’

  ‘Don’t you know nuffink?’ the old woman went on. ‘It’s the protest, ain’t it? Ma Robertson’s like me, lived here all her life. Came through the Blitz together, didn’t we? The ruddy bombs missed this street, we was the lucky ones. And now they’re going to pull it down.’

  Nonplussed Barnard stared at her, taking in the grey hair scraped back from the wrinkled face, the hearing aid and the flowered pinafore. They dated her as a survivor of the worst Hitler had thrown at the East End, but she now looked defeated by the new threat that had arrived from much closer to home.

  ‘The council’s going to do that?’ he asked.

  ‘Redevelopment, they call it,’ the old woman said. ‘They’re going to pull down twenty streets between here and the City and put us all into flats, like they’ve done already down Poplar way. Ma Robertson says we’re not going to put up with it. She’s gone to talk to the mayor and the councillors. Lots of us have gone to protest. I’d be down there meself if my hip wasn’t so bad. It’s a bleeding liberty. These houses came through the war. We don’t want to be redeveloped to finish off what Hitler started.’

  Barnard had had to admit defeat. When he reported back to the nick, he’d been surprised to learn that DCI Jackson wanted to see him straight away. Ma Robertson had evidently become less important as the day had gone on and he was to see Jackson immediately. The DCI had not asked him to sit down when he arrived in his office, which was always ominous, and sat looking at him for some time with an unreadable expression on his face before he spoke. It was certainly long enough for Barnard’s sense of foreboding to grow exponentially and he could feel himself beginning to sweat.

  ‘Sergeant,’ Jackson had said at last. ‘I’ve just had a call from the Assistant Commissioner for Crime at the Yard. He’d seen the first report of the death we attended this morning at Robertson’s gym and decided that as you have been so closely connected with the man, who has to be regarded as a major suspect, you are not to work on this case. You’ll be diverted to other duties and I’ll take charge of this investigation myself.’

  Barnard’s sense of anxiety turned in a moment to anger, which he swallowed down with difficulty.

  ‘So the ACC thinks I can’t be trusted?’

  ‘You’re too close to that family,’ Jackson said flatly. ‘I never know where I am with you and your East End friends.’

  ‘I was close to Rod Miller, guv,’ Barnard came back quickly. ‘He trained me as a kid. He was a diamond bloke and I know that’s what Ray Robertson thought too. There’s no way Ray could have shot him.’

  ‘That’s your opinion,’ Jackson said. ‘But it is nothing more than an opinion. Which is precisely why the ACC doesn’t want you on this case. You obviously think I have jumped to a conclusion, but you have obviously jumped to the opposite conclusion. When did you last see Robertson to talk to?’ Barnard shrugged wearily.

  ‘It must be a month ago, at the Delilah Club. I was making inquiries about some betting scam which I thought he might have information on. It was nothing out of the ordinary and he said he couldn’t help me pin down the organizers.’

  ‘Couldn’t or wouldn’t?’ Jackson asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. ‘And Miller? When did you last see him?’

  ‘Not for months,’ Barnard said. ‘I don’t think I’ve been to the gym since the end of last year.’

  ‘You’re too close,’ Jackson said again. ‘Go and draft a statement about your recent contacts with Robertson and Miller and let me see it before you go off duty. Did you talk to his mother, by the way?’ Barnard allowed himself the faintest smile.

  ‘She was off on a crusade to stop the council pulling down her street, guv,’ he said. ‘I don’t think she likes that sort of progress. She’d rather be back in the 1930s when it wasn’t Ray who ruled the roost down there but her husband, Jim. But maybe after this it won’t even be Ray. It sounds to me as if the Yard believes the reign of the Robertsons in the East End is nearly over.’

  ‘And isn’t that something we should be devoutly hoping for?’ Jackson asked, his Scots accent thickening with emotion and his colour rising. ‘Isn’t that what we’re here to achieve?’

  Kate O’Donnell got back to the Ken Fellows Agency by four, feeling slightly deflated. Tom, her acquaintance from the Red Cow, had done as he had promised and guided her round the island in his battered-looking Ford, stopping at places of particular interest or, more often, tragedy. They had looked at the sea wall that failed so catastrophically in 1953, inspected the restored houses and chalets, some of which still looked desperately insubstantial, and ended up outside the new block of flats which was to be opened in a couple of weeks’ time. The builders were still working there, the scaffolding only just coming down. A group of women stood outside watching a dumper truck busy removing debris from what was obviously intended to be a forecourt.

  ‘What are they looking for?’ she asked. Tom shrugged.

  ‘They built this block where some damaged properties had stood. Some people complained that people had died there and no one had thought to search the place for personal stuff that might have got left behind. They wanted a proper search done. A lot of them never came back here to live, but while the building work’s been going on, especially while the foundations were being dug, they’ve been coming in from Southend or one of the Wakerings, or wherever they ended up. But I don’t think much has been found. Whatever was there got was
hed away or buried back then and isn’t likely to turn up now. Do you want to talk to them?’

  But by this time Kate had lost her enthusiasm for the project. The light had been poor all afternoon, the weak sun never really breaking through the mist and low cloud, and it was now fading fast. She took a few more shots but was afraid that her prints would be barely usable and she would have to make this trip again in better weather. She knew that Ken would not be pleased if she had wasted the best part of a day.

  ‘I need to get back,’ she said. ‘It’s getting too dark already.’

  ‘I’ll run you up to Benfleet station,’ he offered. ‘It’s a long walk.’

  Back at the agency she shut herself in a dark room and processed the film, looking critically at each print as it emerged to dry off. She made two sets of prints of shots that were not too affected by the weather, thinking that as well as showing them to Ken Fellows she would show them to Barnard as he had had such a close encounter with Canvey Island and its traumatized residents after the wind and sea had done their worst. It was different now, she thought, tidied up and sanitized, but still bleak and to an outsider, especially one brought up in another port and only too aware of the worst the sea could do, very sad.

  She was surprised when she got back to Highgate to find that the lights were on and Harry Barnard was already at home. She found him slumped in his favourite revolving chair in the living room, tie loosened, cigarette in one hand and a generous glass of Scotch in the other, swinging aimlessly from side to side. She did not need him to speak to guess from his expression that there was something seriously wrong.

  ‘Whatever’s happened?’ she asked.

  ‘The roof fell in,’ he said with a weary shrug, and he told her briefly how he had discovered Rod Miller’s body and the DCI’s implacable conviction that Ray Robertson must be the prime suspect.