Bleak Water - Danuta Reah

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stood up, feeling his knees protest. He wasn’t forty yet, for Christ’s sake. He needed to get to the gym, cut down on the beer, start…After this case. He’d think about it then. He looked at the dark water of the canal. The wind ruffled the surface, sending ripples lapping against the stonework. ‘I’ll get a team down there,’ he said. They’d need to search the water under the bridge where the body had been found. They’d need a search team along the canal bank, along the canal itself – house to house – or boat to boat. God help his budget.

      He looked down at the dead woman again. She seemed young, very young. The pathologist stood up beside him. ‘I’ll tell you something else,’ she said. ‘There’s a baby somewhere. This girl had a baby not so long ago.’

      Farnham closed his eyes. This was all he needed. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘We’ll get on to it.’ The rippling water reminded him of the sea. A dead woman in the water. A baby. What were they going to find when they searched the towpath and the canal? He pinched the bridge of his nose, and rubbed his eyes with his fingers. ‘OK,’ he said again. ‘Let’s get started.’

      

      Eliza put down the phone. She’d been talking to Maggie’s landlord. Maggie had named Eliza as her executor, and suddenly, all of this was her responsibility. She’d contacted him shortly after Maggie’s death to let him know what she was going to do about the flat. ‘The rent’s paid to the end of the month,’ Eliza had said, the first time she had talked to him, when Maggie was just two days dead. ‘The flat will be cleared by then.’ After Flynn’s exhibition, when she could give it her full attention.

      But he’d phoned this morning with worries about security. The upstairs flat was unoccupied and the house was standing empty. ‘Word gets around,’ he said. Someone had been seen hanging round. Eliza doodled flowers on the pad by the phone as she listened.

      ‘I’ll get to it as soon as I can,’ she said. The flat was a nagging irritation, but he had a point. An empty flat was vulnerable. There was little, if anything, of value there, but she didn’t want Maggie’s place vandalized, her books, her diaries, her photographs – all the memorabilia of Ellie – damaged or destroyed.

      After she hung up, Eliza contemplated the task she’d set herself. It probably wouldn’t take long. She found the prospect of sorting through the remains of Maggie’s life depressing. She’d get started on it as soon as she had a couple of hours. She tried to put it out of her mind. She made breakfast and stood at the window watching the canal as she ate toast and drank coffee. Daniel was arriving today. She felt a twist of emotion in her stomach which she found hard to analyse. Excitement? Fear? Anger? It was the way she always felt when she was about to do something new, something that presented her with a challenge, that was all. But she dressed carefully, twisted her hair on top of her head the way he used to like it.

      The gallery was busy when she came downstairs from her flat. Mel was unpacking boxes on the floor, surrounded by polystyrene and bubble wrap.

      ‘Hi, Eliza,’ Mel greeted her. Her hair, which had been black the day before, was pale blonde, carefully tousled. ‘This is that stuff from Daniel Flynn.’ She ran her eyes assessingly up and down Eliza. ‘You look nice. Jonathan, Eliza’s got dressed up for Daniel Flynn. Doesn’t she look nice?’

      Eliza felt her face flush. Jonathan looked up. ‘Mm,’ he said vaguely. Mel smiled.

      ‘What time did Flynn say to expect him?’ Eliza started checking through the post.

      ‘Sometime this morning.’ Mel shrugged. ‘He didn’t say.’

      Jonathan looked up from whatever was absorbing him at the desk. ‘Have you had a chance to talk to him properly, Eliza?’

      ‘Not really. I sent him a couple of e-mails, told him what I was planning. He didn’t reply, so I’m assuming it’s OK. I haven’t managed to get him on the phone. Everything’s in hand for Friday.’ Eliza kept her voice casual.

      Jonathan was checking the diary and opening his post. ‘Oh, not again. Get a letter off to this guy, Mel. It’s the third time he’s sent me some photos of his stuff. If I was looking for wannabe pre-Raphaelites I’d go to the greetings-cards section in Smith’s. At least I’d get someone who could handle paint.’

      ‘I’ll do that now,’ Mel said. ‘While I’m waiting for Eliza.’

      ‘Thanks.’ He flicked through the diary. ‘We’ve got more school kids in tomorrow. I’d better deal with that. You know, I thought I was an artist, not a child minder.’

      Eliza ignored this as she checked through her own post. It was just Jonathan’s usual complaint. He always moaned about the school visits – and almost always dealt with them himself. Jonathan liked children. He was a good teacher – she knew that from her own student days. But he was surprisingly good with kids; serious and sober, but able to hold their interest and arouse their enthusiasm. It was a side to Jonathan she never would have suspected.

      The post was dull – some advertising and some charity leaflets that went in the bin, an invitation to a private view that might be worth going to, and some art catalogues she put on one side for later browsing.

      ‘…like some kind of charity for homeless kids.’

      ‘What?’ Eliza hadn’t been paying attention.

      ‘I said, this gallery is like some kind of charity for homeless kids.’

      He was bitching about Cara again. He’d taken against her, almost from the time she’d first moved in. Jonathan would have preferred the flats to be let at full market rents, rather than the ‘affordable rents’ – high enough in Eliza’s opinion – that the Trust required. He thought that the flats should be taken by ‘young professionals’, not the socially needy. ‘That’s what you get for using taxpayer’s money,’ Eliza said. She remembered the night before, the shut-down alarm. ‘By the way, Cara…’ She stopped. ‘It doesn’t matter. Come on,’ she added to Mel, ‘let’s get this lot upstairs before Daniel Flynn gets here.’

      Mel pulled a letter off the printer and put it in Jonathan’s in-tray. ‘OK.’ She sighed but stood up and she and Eliza began moving the boxes that contained Flynn’s drawings and sketches towards the lift.

      Once they had moved the boxes into the upper gallery, they began to sort the remaining pictures, matching the numbers with the plan that Eliza had set out the night before. So far it was all going smoothly, and they should have everything set up in plenty of time for the opening. She made a mental note to go over the invitation list for the private view and make sure that no one had been left off.

      Mel’s voice interrupted her thoughts. ‘Oh God, look at this!’ She was holding up a photo-assemblage, in which, against the barren incandescence of the Brueghel landscape, a man in the unmistakable uniform of an officer of the Third Reich was placing a noose round the neck of a young woman. The woman’s hands were bound. Eliza could see the fastidious care with which the man was positioning the rope, the concentration on his face, the woman’s white-faced fear. ‘Is it real?’ Her eyes were bright.

      Eliza nodded. She had seen the photograph before – in fact, she had drawn Daniel’s attention to it. It was one of a series taken towards the end of the war when Hitler’s army was in retreat. ‘The triumph of death,’ she said. ‘Flynn’s right. Brueghel’s images don’t do it for us any more.’

      ‘It’s gross,’ Mel said.

      Eliza wasn’t going to argue with that so she didn’t reply. She stood for a minute, looking down at the canal. There was some sort of activity further up on the towpath. She’d been aware of people hurrying past and now, as she looked, she saw a couple of police officers. There must have been some kind of trouble down there in the night. She shrugged, dismissing it.

      She closed doors, shutting off the hum of activity from the floor below, and let the silence of the gallery close around her. She had work to do.

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