Haven

by Adam Roberts

  He covered her again and clambered up onto deck. The rain had stopped, at any rate, and he made his way up into town.

  There was no mayor, of course; no police, no courts, nothing like that. But on occasion an informal council of a dozen or so of the wealthier inhabitants might gather together, to organise tribute for a particularly pushy warlord, to keep things like the ferry chain in good order, or add fencing to the bits-and-pieces defensive boundary of the town itself. That sort of thing. Hat figured something like this dead body fell under their purview. If the girl were the daughter of a local notable, then they’d surely want to track down the killer. Of course, if the girl were a stranger or an unknown the whole town might, as it were, shrug its collective shoulders. Either way, Hat felt he had to do something. To stave off his future conscience.

  He stopped by the tavern, got a little drier by the fire, and told his landlady that he’d be sleeping on his boat from now on.

  “You bought a boat?”

  Hat pondered this for a moment, and scraped the skin of his chin through his beard-hair. “No,” he said. “I managed to raise my boat from the riverbed.”

  Agnieszka goggled at him. “You did? Clever Mr Hat.”

  “I am,” said Hat, slowly, “both pleased and disturbed.”

  “Pleased!”

  “To get my boat back.”

  “Of course. Disturbed?”

  “When I raised my boat from the river bank,” he said, and paused. Everybody in the saloon was paying the minutest attention to his words, now. You could have heard a flea cough. “There was a dead body inside it. The dead body is still inside it, actually, although I have wrapped the body in a makeship shroud.”

  “Makeship?” queried Agnieszka

  “Makeshift, I mean. Excuse I, but I’m quite tired.”

  “Male or female dead body?” asked somebody—it was Sylvia the Wool, over by the door.

  “A female dead body. A young, female, dead body.”

  “Whose?”

  “I,” said Hat, “did not recognise her.”

  “What was she doing on your boat? Did she drown when it went down?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did she die when it exploded?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What was she even doing on your boat?”

  A shrug.

  “Clothed?” asked a man in the far corner, in a deeply resonant voice.

  Hat shook his head.

  That tripped the whole saloon into a collective conversational buzz. This was something. People peeled away and ran over the still-damp streets to pass the news about. Hat, accompanied by half a dozen people, returned to his boat, and explained half a dozen times, to half a dozen different people, how he had raised it from the riverbed. People clonked onto the boat and bashed about belowdecks and Hat didn’t like it at all.

  The initial question was whether anybody recognised her. Nobody did. So that took some of the urgency out of the situation. People crowding the bank absorbed this news. The phrase “Does anyone know who she is?” became replaced with “Does anybody know who it is?”

  Hat was able to persuade two Goringers—merchants both, prominent in the town, one woman, one man—to take the body out of his boat and find a place for it on land. A group pushed the body up to the hatch and a second group grabbed it from on deck and pulled it through. As it came up the rain started again, and the plastic sheet covering the corpse slipped free. The crowd ooh’d like a theatre audience: a naked girl! Careless who saw her! The new rain made her slippy, and she twisted and fell to the deck with a clunk.

  Hat was finally able to shoo all the people off his boat. One of the last to leave was Sylvia Carr, Sylvia the Wool, who came close and cupped Hat’s elbow in one of her hands.

  “We’d like to have a talk with you about this bad business,” she said. There was a rather fierce expression on her face. It jolted Hat out of his usual placidity.

  “It is a bad business,” he said scratching his beard with his unencumbered hand. “I was very sorry to have found her in my boat. I could have just pitched her over the side, you know.”

  Sylvia looked closely at him. “You did the right thing,” she said, in what was perhaps an attempt at a softened tone of voice. “I’ll send one of my lads to escort you tomorrow, Mr Hat. We’d just like to chat.”

  As far as Hat knew, they put the body in a mushroom shed in the east of the city. He was just pleased, to begin with, that he was finally alone again. He made one more trip: up to Bert’s Plastic Emporium to return the fabric, and then looping via the tavern to pick up his things, and then he got onto his boat and began the business of cleaning up.

  Sylvia Carr’s ‘lads’ didn’t come the following day, and Hat was content not to be compelled to leave the boat so soon. There was a lot to do. He began by pumping out all the remaining water, scooping most of the mud out with a small shovel and cleaning up the rest as best he could. He tidied up all the bits and pieces that the sinking had tossed about and discovered, in amongst his things, a set of clothes that, he had to assume, had belonged to the dead girl. He put these, sodden as they were, in a bag.

  This all took a day, and the inside of the boat reeked of decay and riverbed and damp. There wasn’t anything Hat could do about that as yet, and he slept an uncomfortable, fitful night in his damp clothes. The rain kept raining, off and on, all night, and all the next day.

  In the morning he found a pool of water by the repaired section of the hull, and he went over the inside with putty and treated the outsides again too, even though the rain was constant. Since this necessitated his going back in the river to reach the lower parts of the repair, it was not comfortable. The putty was a temporary solution. What he needed was tar, and for that he needed a heat-source.

  So Hat spent much of the rest of the day trying to get a fire going in his stove, a frustratingly awkward process.

  The stove was an antique black iron structure, built well before the Sisters came—possibly hundreds of years before. It was of course damp inside and out, and all his firewood, carefully collected and chopped up with Hat’s little axe, was soaked through with water. Hat dried out individual shards of wood over the flame of his oil lamp, and when they were dry enough to light he stacked them in the stove and set them going. He had to do this three times: the first two lots fizzled and died in moments. The third burned, though, and Hat kept feeding in large splinters and twiggy-chunks of wood until the interior of the stove dried out. Then he cleared it out, and set a fourth fire, bigger than the rest, and carefully, one by one, handed through extra chips and portions. When the fire was properly raging and nicely hot, he fed it one of the damp chunks from his reassembled woodpile. This block hissed and smoked and generally made a racket, and although Hat wondered if it might catch in the end it simply smothered the original fire. So he took this log out and carefully reset the fire with shards warmed over the oil lamp. A second time, and with the same log, the fire bedded in properly.

  For long minutes Hat huddled in front of the stove in almost a fugue state, letting the heat reach his flesh. But he couldn’t afford to waste time. He split a large log, did his best to dry it out in front of the fire, turning it as though cooking it, and as the original fire turned the corner from peak brightness and began dying down he fed one of these in. Again there was a great deal of spitting and hissing, but although the flame dimmed very low, in didn’t go out, and soon the fire was as bright and hot as before. He did the same thing with the second half of the split log, and within five minutes the stove was stonking hot.

  Hat shut the stove’s front door and piled as much wet wood around it as he could. Then he spent an hour or so going through the whole of the belowdecks, tidying away everything else that was amiss, wiping as much dirt and mud off as possible and throwing out the strands of weed. Some of the food in his larder was already going off. He threw away the clearly dangerous stuff, ate the stuff that was just on the turn—hoping for the best—and arrayed
the remains out near the stove to try and dry them a little.

  The heat of the little stove was already drawing the worst smells from the damp wood and a kind of misty fug filled the interior. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was bearable. Some of the wood around was dry enough now to feed to the fire, and to do so with only minimal hissing. He restocked the pile with wet wood, curled up on the floor in front of it—like an old dog—and fell asleep.

  He didn’t sleep long, conscious that he didn’t want to let the fire burn out. Nonetheless he woke feeling more refreshed than he had for a long time. It was easy, now, to feed stove-dried wood into the fire, and to stack more damp logs around to dry; and he piled the rest of his wood supply behind the stove. Then he tidied up some more, and spent a tiresome but worthwhile hour wiping away the last of the interior mud with two rags, which he rinsed in rainwater on the deck. He spent another hour scraping mud out of the seams between the planks and regrouting where he needed to. Then he laid out all the various bits and pieces of carpets he had acquired over the years on the deck to wash clean in the rainfall.

  By now, the working stove was creating a virtuous circle of heating and drying. The wet was being driven out of the walls and floor—more slowly than it would have been in summer, of course, because it couldn’t simply be ventilated. But for the first time in several days Hat felt his body relax into the warmth. If anything, in fact, it began to feel too warm belowdecks. That couldn’t be helped either.

  He went through a few of his belongings to determine whether the water had damaged them beyond use. He had three treasured books, the pages transformed from tight-bound neat rectangles into crazily contoured and blotched rhubarb leaves. There seemed little point in keeping them to read, although he stood them up on the opened V of their spine and fanned the damp paper out in front of the stove to dry them. They’d be good as kindling. An old clockwork clock seemed, still, to work, and his spare clothes would dry OK.

  He had one last task to do before he could call it a day. He retrieved an old screw-top tin, and put it on the top of the stove. Tar.

  He went up on deck. The rain had eased off for a while. The only sound the xylophonic dripping from the trees into the puddles below. He wiped a bench dry-ish and sat down, looking around him. The air smelt clean. He retrieved a second precious cigarette. For a while he simply looked at it and put it to his nostrils to sniff it. Finally he lit it up, and sat smoking it for as long as it took to smoke. Three dark birds, possibly rooks, took advantage of the absence of rainfall to scutter into the air and flap away south. Eastward, over the hump of the rising Chiltern hills, Hat saw a brief flicker of light, as if the sky god was trying, and failing, to kindle a fire. He counted one, good-and-ready, two, good-and-ready… and had got to ten before the crunching rumble of the thunder swelled into audibility. What was that? Two miles away?

  What had the girl been doing on his boat? He didn’t know.

  Why had she taken off her clothes? Maybe she had she set the explosion, and maybe had accidentally died in it? Her skull broken by the blast, or herself drowning before she could escape the sinking boat?

  More likely: somebody else had killed her and sunk the boat to hide the corpse.

  He didn’t know.

  The sky overhead was cauliflowered with grey-white clouds, but there were enough breaks over the brown of the westward hills to let in tints of egg-yolk yellow and low red light. The sun setting, as it always did.

  Hat went back belowdecks. It reeked down there, and was far too hot. The tar was liquid now, bubbling with slow-popping black blisters. The smell of it was very strong. Hat wrapped his left hand in an old rag, lifted the tar from the stove and took it to the repaired breach. He didn’t have a proper brush, so he used a rusty old spatula, and spread the steaming black goo into the seams and cracks of his repair. He put the tin away, scraped the spatula clean, had a little more to eat and went to sleep.

  Three days later Sylvia’s lads finally came to escort him up the hill to the Carr house. “Just a little chat,” said the eldest. “Nothing to be afeared of.” Hat hadn’t been particularly scared until the fellow said that.

  They let him into the big house and left him waiting in the downstairs hall—a tall, whitewashed space with many pictures hanging on the wall and clusters of mildew spotting the edges and corners. There were two wall-mounted radiators facing one another on opposite walls, and an electric light dangling ostentatiously from the ceiling. Privileges of wealth: heat and light at the press of a button. She must have a generator out back. Or in the basement.

  Eventually Hat was ushered through to a chill room containing a heavily scratched and revarnished dining table. Across this sat Sylvia. Her eldest son sat on her left—a man called Don, Hat thought, or maybe Ron—and a man Hat didn’t recognise on her right. She didn’t introduce anybody.

  “Mr Hat,” she said, “We want you to tell us everything about this dead girl.”

  Hat scratched his chin, and then smoothed his beard-hair back into place. “I don’t know everything about her.”

  “Tell us what you know.”

  “I don’t know anything about her.”

  “Don’t play games with us, Hat,” said the grizzled stranger on Sylvia’s right.

  Hat thought about this. “I’m not playing games,” he said.

  “Tell us,” Sylvia tried, “how you found her.”

  So Hat told that story. It wasn’t much of a story. “I didn’t recognise her. I gave a lift to a girl a month or more ago. Perhaps two months. I took her up from Henley to Pangbourne, and that’s where she got off. For a while I thought the dead girl was her, but she looked—” Hat crunched up his brow, and ran his thumbnail over the left and then the right flank of his moustache. “Different,” he concluded.

  “Who was this girl, the one you gave a lift to?” demanded the gruff stranger. “Were you sleeping with her?”

  “No,” said Hat, mildly. He rather wished, now, that he hadn’t mentioned the other girl.

  “I’m trying to see the relevance of that little story,” said Sylvia, in her stern voice. “Were you also giving the dead girl a lift on your boat? Is that why she was on board?”

  “No,” said Hat. “I never saw the dead girl before. The first thing I saw of her was her shoulder, when the rest of her was submerged. Then I saw all of her when I pulled her out of the water. That was the first time I ever saw her.”

  “How do we know you didn’t kill her?” squeaked Sylvia’s son.

  “Hush Ron,” said Sylvia, scowling at him. “Hush now.” She turned to face Hat. “How do we know you didn’t kill her?”

  “I didn’t,” said Hat.

  Oddly, they seemed to take this as tantamount to proof of his innocence. They all nodded.

  “We’ve spoken to people who were in Agnieszka Lis’s tavern,” said Sylvia. “They confirm you were there all morning.”

  “They confirm it,” agreed the cross-faced man on Sylvia’s right.

  “So you can’t have killed her.”

  “Can’t!” repeated the cross-faced man, as if the word were an accusation.

  “The girl—we don’t know her name—”

  “We haven’t,” the cross-faced man broke in, glaring at Hat as if this were somehow his fault, “been able to discover what her name was.”

  “—the girl was tortured.”

  “Oh dear,” said Hat in a voice so low it was almost a whisper.

  “There were marks on her wrists to suggest she’d been tied. There were signs that sharp objects, needles maybe, had been driven under her fingernails and also her toenails. You didn’t see the marks of this when you recovered her body?”

  “I didn’t look too closely. It didn’t seem,” said Hat, his mouth dry and his voice low and hoarse, “decent to ogle her.”

  “Somebody wanted to hurt her,” said Sylvia. “Either to get something from her, information maybe. Or else just for the pleasure of hurting her.”

  Hat stared at the table top. Most
of the scratches on it were shallow, and most ran parallel to the rim of the table. But there were one or two deeper scrapes and gouges that ran from the outside in towards the centre. He couldn’t imagine how they’d come about. They looked as though somebody had set out to damage the table on purpose.

  “Horrible,” he said, eventually.

  “It would help us if we knew who this girl was,” Sylvia said. “But you don’t know.”

  “I don’t.”

  “See yourself out, Hat, won’t you?” Sylvia said, and it was so abrupt that it took Hat a moment to realise that he was being dismissed. Belatedly he stood up, and turned, and went out.

  It was raining again.

  He walked back down the hill in a low mood—his old mum, decades dead, used to divide sadness into three categories: the blues, the purples and the blacks. His heart was edging blue into the mauve end of purple. That poor lass!

  Back at the boat: he’d left the stove on, and belowdecks was stifling and hot, with a strange pong of wood-resin and river-algae and staleness and tar. One object that had survived the sinking and raising of the vessel without harm was a small jar of apple whisky, stoppered with a plastic cork. He took three sips of this sharply burning liquid, recorked the jar and stowed it again. Time to sleep. It was so hot belowdecks that he stripped entirely naked, lay under a blanket in his bunk and tried to turn off his brain. The thought that he was sleeping within yards of the place where the nameless girl had been tortured and killed kept him awake for a long time.

  Eventually he drifted off, only to wake—moments later he thought, but it was actually hours—because somebody was knocking on his deck. Banging a fist or kicking a heel on his deck. The cheek!