Bleak Water - Danuta Reah

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clear, and the orientation of the building meant that it was fairly consistent right through the day. As she looked round the long room, she forgot the events of the morning, the sense of oppression and incompleteness that Maggie’s funeral had left in her, and felt the work draw her in.

      It was almost five when Mel came into the room to tell Eliza she was leaving. ‘Jonathan said I could go a bit early today,’ she said.

      Mel had a habit of doing this – making requests of Jonathan without consulting her. Eliza had had to stamp quite hard on the ‘Jonathan said’ line that Mel was prone to peddle when she wanted her own way. But this evening, she wanted to be alone with the work, so she nodded. ‘That’s OK,’ she said. ‘I won’t need you till tomorrow.’

      Mel seemed about to say something, then she stopped. ‘Shall I lock up?’ she said.

      ‘Lock the front entrance,’ Eliza told her. ‘But leave the galleries. I need to set the alarms.’

      ‘OK.’ Eliza heard Mel’s feet on the stairs, and a few minutes later, the sound of the outer door closing. Eliza hesitated, then went downstairs. She checked the doors – Mel had locked them. Now she was down here, she might as well set the alarm for the downstairs exhibition space. She punched in the code, hearing the beep beep beep and then the continuous tone that gave her about thirty seconds to get out of the room. She pulled the doors closed behind her, and the alarm fell silent. OK, that was dealt with and out of the way. She went back upstairs and lost herself in her notes.

      It was dark outside when she surfaced, and the wind was getting up, rattling the windows and making a strange moaning noise as it blew through the derelict building on the other side of the canal. The sound was almost soothing to Eliza in the warmth and shelter. She stretched and stood up. The gallery was silent around her, the work for the exhibition propped around the walls.

      She lifted one of the panels and tried it against the wall to get a feel for the height and positioning. It was one of the reproductions from the Brueghel. In the original painting it was background detail, part of the desolate landscape in which the forces of the dead triumphed over the living. Enlarged and brought into prominence, it was a bleak depiction of solitary death.

      A bare tree stood against the sky, and a figure hung from it, the head forced back into a fork between two branches so that the empty eye sockets gazed blankly up and the body arched away from the tree. A bolt or nail had been hammered through the two branches, forming a garrotte that held the figure to the tree. The arms were tied and pulled up behind the back so that they bent at an unnatural angle. The legs hung down, the whole figure stretched under its own weight. It was half decayed – almost skeletal, but not quite, not enough. Brueghel had imbued the figure with human suffering and a drear loneliness that had the capacity to haunt the mind of anyone who saw it.

      Eliza thought about Ellie, the bright and beautiful child whose life had been cut brutally short. She thought about Maggie whose youth had come to such an abrupt end. She thought about the dark pit and the coffin being lowered into the grave, the earth falling on the lid with heavy thuds that grew fainter and fainter as the darkness closed in.

       Madrid

      As the darkness closed in on February in England, Eliza flew to Madrid. Spring came early to central Spain that year. As the plane crossed the Pyrenees the morning sun caught them, the night shadow falling behind as they passed above the browns and oranges of the central plateau, dropping gently down, down to the city that was reaching up to meet her.

      Madrid was light and space. The sky was cloudless blue as the bus carried her towards the city, past the lines of trees and the apartment blocks, clean and bright, standing far back from the road.

      The hostal was in the centre of the city, close to the Paseo del Prado, and even here, at the heart of this European capital, the sense of space stayed with her. The roads were so wide that Eliza, a first-time visitor, hung back at the crossings as the Madrileños surged through the traffic. The exact rules of the driver and pedestrian engagement, which were so clear to her in London, here seemed oddly ambiguous. A light would tell her she could cross the expanse of carriageway, but as she stepped out (her head automatically turning right) a car would bear down and skim past her, seeming to brush her skirt as she leapt for the safety of the kerb, its horn echoing in her ears.

      The cafés spilled out on to the pavements, the parks filled the city with air and green spaces. And all around her, the city life, the street life of central Madrid buzzed and swirled. Within a week, it felt as though she had been there for a year. Within a fortnight, she wondered if she ever wanted to leave.

      And in her memory, Madrid was always a city of space, even though she soon discovered the narrow streets of Old Madrid, the stifling Catholicism of the churches and the congestion of the relentless traffic. It was months before the city faded into familiarity and then into disillusionment. And even after a long weekend with Daniel in Seville, a trip they made to the coast to Barcelona, Madrid remained her first love in Spain.

      ‘Because of the light,’ she told Daniel when he shook his head at her stubborn insistence. ‘It’s because of the light.’

      

      Eliza put the panel back against the wall. Something had distracted her. She listened. There was nothing but the silence of the gallery and the distant sound of the traffic. It was dark outside. She checked her watch. It was after seven. She needed a break. She turned the lights off and walked the length of the empty gallery. The room was long and high, the floors bare wood, the walls whitewashed, the ceiling supported by pillars that broke up the space. The only light came from the moon, shining through the windows behind her. Her shadow lay across the floor and danced on the wall as she moved. Silence. The double tap of her feet echoed as she walked, heel and toe, tap-tap, tap-tap, as she moved through the long room.

      For a moment, she thought there was an echo. The sound of her feet seemed to go on for a second after she had stopped moving. She stood there, listening. She moved again, and her shoes made their light tap-tap on the floor. This time there was silence, then she heard it again, like an echo of her own movement, hush-hush, like soft shoes moving across the floor. Weird. That’s weird. It seemed to be coming from the downstairs gallery. She ran lightly down the stairs.

      ‘Hello?’ she said. The empty space gave her voice an echoing quality. The downstairs gallery was in darkness. She looked round. The main entrance was still locked, but the light for the alarm was out. Someone had switched it off. She felt herself relax. Jonathan. He must have come back for something. She didn’t bother turning the lights on, but went through the doors watching the interplay of shade and shadow, the window frame a lattice shape lying across the floor. He must be in his office.

      As she moved past the pillars, something caught her attention. A sound? She looked round, but the gallery was empty behind her. Then she saw someone sitting in front of one of the windows, half concealed behind a pillar, hunched forward as though whoever it was, was watching intently something on the canal below. Her heart thumped, then slowed as she realized who it was. It was the young woman who lived in the flat next door to Eliza’s. ‘Cara?’

      The woman jumped, turning quickly, almost overbalancing. ‘I didn’t…I…’ Her eyes focused on Eliza standing behind her in the dark. ‘Eliza.’ She struggled to her feet, hampered by the sling in which she habitually carried her baby, Briony Rose. In the dim light, her eyes looked wide and startled.

      She must have used the inside stairs that led to the gallery. There were plans to put in a separate entrance at the bottom of these stairs, but for the moment the occupants of the flats were only supposed to use them in an emergency. In practice, Eliza used them most of the time, and Cara had started following her example.

      Eliza looked at Cara. ‘Did you turn the alarm off?’ she said.

      Cara nodded. ‘I’ve seen Jonathan doing it, so I know how it works,’ she said. ‘I was going to switch it all back on again, honest. I’ve done it before. I love the gallery. It’s a lovely place to sit. I was going to go in a minute.’ She was

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