Bleak Water
Danuta Reah

For Ken, who taught me everything I needed to know about the madness of artists

And in memory of Susan Sanderson Russell

And this is the occupation known as art, which calls for imagination, and skill, in order to discover things not seen, hiding themselves under the shadow of natural objects, and to fix them with the hand, presenting to plain sight that which does not exist.

Cennino d’Andrea Cennini, Il Libro dell’ Arte

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

Acknowledgements

Danuta Reah

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE

The grave seemed too narrow for what it was to contain. Eliza shivered in the wind that cut across the high cemetery. She stood with the awkward group that assembled round the burial place, noting with her artist’s eye the soil strata where the digger had cut through the frozen ground – the black of the topsoil, the yellow of the clay and down into the darkness of the grave itself.

The mound of soil around the trench was covered with artificial turf, and the grave diggers hung back against the wall, waiting for the interment to finish. The coffin was lowered and the ropes released. The minister stepped forward and said the words that the ritual required. Her voice was low, with none of the forced emotion that Eliza had heard at other funerals. This woman hadn’t known Maggie. There was no one here who had been really close to Maggie, not in the last few years. The one person who had been was already here in this burial ground.

Eliza’s gaze slid unwillingly to the dark headstone to the left of the new grave. Polished granite with gold lettering. The inlay of the lettering was fading, but the words were cut deep into the stone and would take centuries of weathering to vanish. They would last for as long as anyone who cared visited this place: Ellie Chapman, 1989–1998. Love is as strong as death is.

A man in a dark suit was watching her. He looked oddly formal among the ill-assorted band of strangers who had come to say their last goodbyes to Maggie. He’d come into the service late and was now standing to one side of the granite stone. She didn’t know him. She didn’t know any of the people who were here. Over the years, Maggie’s friends had drifted away.

The ceremony was over, and people were moving away from the graveside. Eliza looked at the flowers, all still wrapped in Cellophane that would, once the trench was filled in, be piled on the new burial. They would fade within their wrappings, the messages of sympathy would be obliterated by the weather, and, in a few days, they would be cleared away and destroyed. And then the whole episode would be over.

She found herself walking beside the man in the dark suit. She looked up at him. ‘I’m Eliza Eliot,’ she said. ‘I was at college with Maggie. We haven’t met, have we?’

‘Roy Farnham. No. I didn’t know her well.’ He seemed to realize this was a bit brief. ‘She consulted me about Fraser’s appeal,’ he said.

‘You were her solicitor?’ That would explain the suit.

He shook his head. ‘No, I’m a police officer.’

Of course. ‘Were you involved in the investigation?’ The investigation into the murder of Ellie Chapman, four years ago.

‘No, but I wrote an article about the appeals system. It ran when the news came out about Fraser. She thought I could get something done about it.’ They’d stopped now by the cemetery gate.

‘Excuse me?’ Eliza turned round. A young man was looking at her, holding a notebook. ‘I’m from the Star,’ he said, referring to the local paper. ‘I believe you were a friend of Margaret Chapman?’

‘Maggie,’ Eliza said. ‘Yes, we were at college together.’ She looked up at the sky. It was clear and cloudless, the branches of a tree that stood beside the new grave black against the brightness of the sun. A friend of Maggie’s…How did you answer something like that, Eliza wondered. She was aware of Roy Farnham standing back slightly, watching the exchange. With professional interest?

She had seen very little of Maggie for the last four years of her life. They had been students together at the art school, they’d shared a flat, shared the first excitements and fears of independent living, but by the end of those three, vital years, they had gone their separate ways, Eliza to London to do post-graduate work, then on to work in the galleries in Florence and Rome to study the techniques of the Renaissance masters, and then to Madrid with a coveted grant to study restoration techniques at the Museo del Prado. Maggie somehow remained marooned in Sheffield with a teaching qualification and a baby to care for. They had kept in touch. Eliza had come back to England regularly and had spent time with Maggie and the baby, Ellie, who gradually transformed into a person – a forceful toddler, a lively little girl, an intelligent and thoughtful child. Eliza had liked Ellie. But over the years, other friends, other interests had intervened, and she and Maggie saw less of each other.

Their friendship had dwindled to cards at Christmas and the birthday card and present that Eliza always sent to Ellie. And Ellie always wrote back. Eliza smiled, remembering some of the letters. The last one – Raed Azile, knaht uoy rof…Eliza had done things like that at Ellie’s age. She had once written to her grandmother in hieroglyphics, prompting a rather terse response. And then Ellie had died.

‘I don’t think that Maggie ever recovered,’ Eliza said to the reporter now.

‘Did the fact that Mark Fraser is trying to get his conviction overturned contribute to Maggie’s death?’ He didn’t need to ask Eliza to expand on her earlier comment. The murder of Ellie Chapman had become a brief cause célèbre four years ago. Eliza could remember Maggie’s distraught phone call, could remember going out early in the morning to get the English papers as soon as they arrived, tuning in to the BBC. No leads in Ellie disappearance.

‘I don’t know,’ Eliza said. Maggie had campaigned to keep Fraser in jail – not that his early release seemed a likely option. And anyway, nothing would have brought Ellie back.

She exchanged platitudes with the young man though neither of them addressed the question that had hung over the ceremony and hung unspoken in the air between them. Had Maggie’s death been an accident? A car crash in which no one else was involved was the kind of polite suicide that Maggie would have committed. On the other hand, she had become erratic, absentminded and given to drinking too much. She had been drinking when she died.

‘Thank you,’ the reporter said after a while. ‘And you are…?’

‘Eliza Eliot.’

‘Thank you,’ he said.

She looked back along the path to the new grave, the dark headstone beside it. There was a man standing there now looking down at the stone. He looked as if he was reading the inscription. He stood with his hands in his pockets, hunched up against the cold. His cloth jacket looked too thin for the winter day. She couldn’t make out his face, but there was something familiar about him. Someone from college? Someone Maggie had worked with?

Roy Farnham came up beside her and they walked together towards the cemetery gates. ‘I thought there would be more people here,’ he said.

‘Maggie lost touch with her friends.’ Or her friends lost touch with her in the aftermath of Ellie’s death.

‘I couldn’t help her,’ he said. Eliza looked at him. ‘She wanted guarantees that Fraser would stay in prison.’

‘Do you think he’ll get out?’

He stopped and studied the distance while he thought. The cemetery was on one of the highest points of the city, and the hills ran away to the west, a cascade of roofs and winter trees. ‘I looked it up after she came to see me. I don’t know, to tell you the truth.’

They stood in silence for a moment, then Eliza said, ‘It was good of you to do that.’

He shrugged. ‘It wasn’t much.’ He looked down at her again. ‘You’re local?’ He clearly wasn’t, but she couldn’t place his accent.

‘No, but I was at art school here. I came back last summer.’

‘What brought you back?’

‘I…’ Suddenly Eliza felt reluctant to go on. He was looking at her, waiting. ‘I came to work for the Second Site Gallery.’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Down by the canal? Where…?’ Where Ellie’s body had been found six months after her disappearance, concealed in deep undergrowth by the towpath, miles away from the place she had last been seen.

‘Yes,’ Eliza said. He didn’t say anything, just kept on looking at her. ‘I’d better be going,’ she said. ‘We’re really busy. There’s a big exhibition next week and there’s a preview on Friday.’

‘Oh yes,’ he said, with polite interest. Then he looked at her more closely. ‘I read something about that.’

The exhibition had attracted a lot of publicity for a new, provincial art gallery. ‘It’s Daniel Flynn’s latest work,’ she said. For a moment, she was back in the streets of Madrid. It was early summer, and the Puerta del Sol was suffused with light. Daniel was laughing at something she had said. Who else had been there? She couldn’t remember. There had been a group of them sitting outside the café watching the Madrileños’ leisurely drift towards the afternoon. Daniel.

She brought her mind back to the present. ‘You must come and see it.’

‘I’ll look out for it,’ he said. A careful nonpromise. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s a series of interpretations of one of Brueghel’s paintings.’ She looked at him. ‘It’s called The Triumph of Death,’ she said.

She looked back towards the graves, but the man who had been standing there was gone.

As the day drew on, the sky clouded over and an icy mist began to form, softening the edges of the new grave, black and mounded, a long, narrow rectangle in the grass. The flowers, still in their Cellophane, were piled up on the earth. The chapel of rest was locked up and silent, the business of the day over.

A young girl stood by the grave. Her clothes were summery, unsuitable for the winter weather, light blue jeans, cut off above the ankle, and a sweatshirt with a sequinned pattern across the front, flowers and birds. She was thin, with fragile wrists and ankles, narrow hips and back.

The knees of her jeans were muddy and she had the dirty hands and face of a child who had been playing. The dirt was smeared across her face, and she rubbed tears away with her hands. Then she turned back towards the cemetery gate, her ankles turning as her feet stumbled on the uneven path. She gave an angry shout, and began to run away from the graveside and the burial ground and on to the road where her shoes clattered on the Tarmac.

The chapel of rest was silent in the winter-dead landscape. Most of the graves were old, with mossy stones from which the writing had long ago faded into indecipherability. Next to the newly dug earth, overgrown by the grass and an encroaching laurel, the polished granite of the more recent grave stood out. There were flowers on this grave too, but it was as if the wind had caught them and scattered their petals in a splash of dark red against the black of the earth, a freak wind that had ripped the flowers apart, and strewn their petals across this one grave. Ellie. Love…as strong as death.

The frozen stillness of the morning thawed to rain, chill, persistent and driving. Eliza turned up the heater in her car as her wipers struggled to keep her view clear. The windscreen fogged, and she had to wind her window down a little to clear it. Her hat was pulled down over her ears, and her scarf muffled round her face, but she still felt cold. It was as if the hour spent in the chapel of rest and standing by the frozen grave had chilled her to the marrow, and it was going to take time for the warmth to creep back in.

The dullness of the afternoon depressed her as she drove back into the centre of the city in a slow-moving line of traffic. The rain splashed up from the road, and she speeded up her windscreen wipers to give herself some chance of seeing ahead. The traffic shuffled forward a couple of yards and stopped again.

The grey of the weather carried echoes of the chill graveyard, and she thought of Maggie alone in the dark, under the ground, dead and gone. And Ellie, with all her bright promise. She wanted to be back in the summer of Spain, or failing that, home in the warmth and colour of her flat, or in the spaciousness of the gallery. The traffic inched past the bus station and then she was on to the confusion of the massive Park Square roundabout. She switched lanes with the expertise of practice, ignoring the impatient horn that sounded behind her, and drove down past the new developments of the canal basin and along the road where the old industrial buildings still stood, unchanged and deserted.

The gallery and Eliza’s flat were housed in one of the old warehouses beyond the expensive and redeveloped canal basin that seemed to be the demarcation line between new Sheffield and the promise of prosperity, and old Sheffield, upon whose flesh the beneficiaries of industrial wealth had fed, and where now there were only the decaying bones. At night, when the gallery was empty, Eliza sometimes felt as isolated as if she were living on a remote island in the Shetlands rather than in the centre of a massive urban sprawl.

She drove past the hotel that seemed to mark the end of the gentrified area and under the bridge to the road that led along the canal side. The change was abrupt. The brickwork on this side of the bridge was crumbling, the surface stained with the water that ran from the broken fall-pipes. Beyond the bridge, there was a narrow alleyway, a cul-de-sac, where old household rubbish was dumped and then left to rot.

She took the turning that led to the canal road and drove past the chained and padlocked gateways of the old loading bays and the canal company offices. She was at the gallery now, the old warehouse looking dark and forbidding in the fading light. It had a mellow brick frontage and arched windows that gave balance and symmetry, and made the building beautiful in the daylight, even before its restoration.

Eliza locked the car and set the alarm. This was an area where you had to be careful. Her mind was already moving away from the events of the morning, and towards the work she still had to do. She noticed that Jonathan Massey’s car was parked at the side of the old warehouse.

Jonathan Massey was the gallery director. Eliza had known him for years – he had been her tutor at college, and Maggie’s tutor as well. She hadn’t been expecting him in today. He’d had some kind of meeting at the education department.

She went into the gallery, nodding a hello to Mel, a young trainee Jonathan had taken on before Eliza’s appointment. Mel had dropped out of an art and design course at the local college. They couldn’t teach her anything, she’d claimed to Eliza. She was sitting on one of the window sills reading a magazine, More, or Hello!, Eliza assumed from past experience. She tried to suppress her irritation. Mel was supposed to be working on the opening today, checking the invitations, making sure the replies were in, checking the catering arrangements, while Eliza worked on the exhibition.

‘Have you finished checking the invitation list?’ she said as she pulled off her hat and unwound the scarf from round her neck.

Mel looked round and shrugged. ‘I was waiting for you,’ she said. She was affecting boho glamour today, Eliza noticed, a tiered skirt of leather and chiffon, an embroidered jacket, DMs. Mel made most of her own clothes. Her hair, which was currently black, was gelled severely back.

So that’s a ‘no’, then. ‘You don’t need me to do that,’ Eliza said shortly. ‘Next time you’re waiting,’ she began, then decided that she couldn’t be bothered. Mel’s contract only lasted for another five months, and then she would have to move on.

Jonathan must be in his office. She knocked on his door and went in. He was rummaging through his desk drawer, his back to her. ‘Jonathan?’ she said.

He looked round quickly. ‘Eliza! I didn’t…’ He pushed the drawer shut. ‘How did it go?’

Eliza shrugged. A funeral was a funeral. What did you say? ‘I thought I’d get on with setting up the exhibition. What have you lost?’

‘Oh, just a letter,’ he said. ‘I’ll ask Mel…There was a message for you earlier, about Friday.’

‘From Daniel?’ She’d last seen Daniel six months ago, a brief glimpse in a bar on her last night in Madrid. ‘What did he say?’

‘No idea.’ Jonathan began putting papers back into folders. ‘Mel took it.’

‘OK.’ The Triumph of Death. It was Eliza’s triumph as well, vindicating her appointment, relatively inexperienced, as curator of the new gallery. But Jonathan had been surprisingly unenthusiastic when she’d suggested that they try for a preview of Daniel Flynn’s latest exhibition. ‘Flynn?’ he’d said. ‘He’s overrated. And he thinks far too much of himself to come somewhere like this. What’s the point? He’s only ever been interested in London.’ Jonathan and Daniel had trained together at St Martin’s. Jonathan’s low-key response to the exhibition, the most prestigious the gallery had had since its opening six months ago, had been a constant irritation to Eliza.

The rationale of the Trust that funded the gallery was to bring important and innovative work to the provinces, breaking the stranglehold that London had on the arts scene. ‘Daniel Flynn would be perfect,’ Eliza said. ‘There’s a real buzz about his work – a lot of people will come. Look, The Triumph of Death is already scheduled for London, but I think he’ll agree to a preview. The dates are right and I know this is the kind of setting he’s thought about.’

Jonathan’s agreement had been grudging. She’d enjoyed showing him the letter agreeing to her suggestion: a one-week preview before the exhibition transferred to London. Even then, he’d had been oddly subdued. ‘Must be some kind of gesture towards his roots,’ he’d said. Daniel Flynn had grown up in Sheffield.

He was having problems with his own work – a series of photographs around the idea of social exclusion, photographs of children whose lives and origins more or less put them out of the race from the very beginning. The idea was good, but he had been working on it for the past five years, and it still seemed no nearer completion. Which would explain his rather sour response to the success of one of his fellow students.

He’d said, almost as an afterthought, ‘That was good work on your part, I suppose.’ She hadn’t told him about her personal connection with Daniel Flynn. It was good work. She was happy to accept the plaudit, tepid though it was. She looked quickly at the diary to see if anything had changed since yesterday. ‘I’ll get on with setting up the exhibition,’ she said.

Jonathan murmured something. He wasn’t really paying attention. Then he looked up. ‘Do you need me for anything? Only I want to get off early. I’ve got tickets for the theatre in Leeds.’

‘No, that’s fine.’ Irritated, Eliza went back to where Mel was looking through a list and ticking names off in a desultory way.

‘Daniel Flynn’s been in touch,’ she said. ‘He said he’s sorry he hasn’t been up before but he’s been stuck with something in London. Anyway, he’s coming in tomorrow.’

‘OK,’ Eliza said. She hadn’t known Daniel was back in England. There was no reason why she should. But she’d thought – somehow – that he was still travelling, that he’d gone to Tanzania where they had planned…

Mel was looking at her, and there was a knowing gleam in her eye that Eliza didn’t like. She shook herself. ‘Right, I’d better get up there. He hasn’t sent all the work yet.’

‘There’s some more coming in tomorrow,’ Mel said. ‘Didn’t you know he was in London?’ There was the sound of a door opening and she sat up and became more focused on her work.

Jonathan came out of his office, pulling on his jacket. ‘I’ll be off then,’ he said to Eliza.

‘Bye, Jonathan,’ Mel said brightly. They watched him go.

Eliza pulled on a smock to protect her clothes. She went quickly up the stairs, trying to put the irritations of Mel out of her mind and concentrate on the exhibition which combined interpretations of detail from Brueghel’s Triumph of Death, a vision of a medieval apocalypse, with modern imagery and icons that spoke compellingly to a twenty-first century audience.

The windows of the gallery looked out on to the canal: low, arched bridges, the water shadowy in the clouded afternoon. The reflection of the water gave the light a particular quality, pale and 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 talking rapidly, nervously, her eyes looking beyond Eliza into the gallery behind her. The baby gave a brief cry of complaint.

Eliza bit back the comment she had been about to make. She could deal with this later when the baby was settled. ‘I need to lock up,’ she said briskly. ‘Come on.’ She waited as Cara scrabbled round for her bag. ‘Here, let me carry that.’ She picked up the cloth carry-all that the other woman always toted around with her, and slung it over her shoulder. ‘Come on,’ she said again.

Cara followed her slowly, looking back over her shoulder at the window. A rendezvous? Was Cara in the habit of meeting a boyfriend on the canal towpath, or in the gallery? There didn’t seem much point when she had a perfectly good flat upstairs.

She headed up the stairs, stopping when she realized Cara wasn’t following. ‘Cara?’ she said.

‘I’m coming.’ Cara had stopped to look at the poster for Daniel’s exhibition, the reproduction Eliza had been looking at earlier, the hanging man. She gathered the baby closer to her. ‘It’s horrible,’ she said.

‘I suppose it is,’ Eliza said briskly. Cara still seemed reluctant to move. ‘Do you want some coffee?’ Eliza regretted the impulse almost as soon as she had spoken. She was cautious about socializing with Cara. Eliza felt sorry for her, but she didn’t want – she didn’t have time for – the demands a lonely teenager might make on her.

‘OK.’ Cara seemed to make a decision. She looked back at the gallery and then followed Eliza up the stairs. Eliza set the alarm and locked the doors behind her. She thought she heard the echo again as she and Cara walked towards the exit that led to the flats, but when she stopped and listened, everything was quiet. The alarm was sounding its single note, then dropped a tone and stopped. Eliza found herself listening, waiting for the alarm to go off in response to an intruder in the gallery, but nothing happened. She relaxed. ‘You really think it’s bad, that painting?’ Cara said as she followed Eliza up the stairs. She was talking about Daniel’s poster.

‘Not bad,’ Eliza said shortly. ‘Disturbing.’ Something was nagging at her and she wanted to pin it down, but Cara’s chatter was distracting her.

‘Why does Jonathan want to exhibit him?’ Cara went on. Her eyes were nervous, darting round the walls of the stairway and landings.

‘Who? Daniel Flynn? That reproduction is just a part…You need to see the exhibition as a whole.’ Eliza was trying to fit her key into her lock. She could never get it the right way up. If Cara had been upset by that small detail, then she would find the rest of it devastating.

‘I know. I thought…It’s creepy, that’s all.’ Cara followed Eliza through the door into the flat.

‘Good art is meant to disturb you. But it’s only here for a week.’ Eliza dumped her work bag and Cara’s carry-all, and switched on the lights.

‘Hey, nice!’ Cara looked round the loft space.

Eliza was pleased. The Trust had run out of money before the loft conversion was complete. Her loft had been renovated to the point of habitability, the roof and the walls repaired, plumbing installed, the floors fixed. She had moved in to bare bricks and raw timbers. She had needed accommodation urgently. There was no time – and no money – for carefully thought out schemes. She had painted everything white and black, had moved in with her bed, her chairs, her lights and her painting equipment. She’d arranged the room carefully to create living and sleeping and working spaces. Now, it looked spacious and inviting, the chairs made splashes of colour close to one of the arched windows overlooking the canal. At the far end of the room, Eliza had set up her easel, and her painting, her Madrid painting, glowed its Mediterranean warmth against the winter night. Behind her, the kitchen welcomed with red tiles and bright pots.

Cara moved over to the window and hovered uncertainly, the baby sling distorting her outline like a misshapen pregnancy. Eliza shifted the papers that were set out on the chairs, photographs, slides, notes, some of her planning for the exhibition. ‘Why don’t you put it – I mean her, down?’ she said.

‘She might wake up,’ Cara said. ‘She cries a lot.’ She looked at the child, an expression of bafflement on her face, then went over to the chairs as Eliza went to make coffee, and began to unhook the sling. The baby stirred as Cara put it down, tucking a shawl round it. ‘I get so tired,’ she said. She slumped into the chair next to the one she had put the baby on. ‘It’s a lot, when there’s only you,’ she said.

‘It must be hard work,’ Eliza said. She wondered what Cara had expected. She poured out the coffee and put it on the table. She looked at the infant’s sleeping face. She didn’t know much about babies.

‘You know,’ Cara went on, ‘I thought that having a baby would be…you know, it would make me special. Now I’m just…I dunno.’ She shrugged.

Eliza looked at Cara, wondering how to respond to that. Cara was tucking the shawl around the baby as she spoke, and her eyes were shadowed with tiredness. Her face, under the dramatic make-up she favoured, looked thin and pinched.

‘Do you need a baby to make you special?’ Eliza said.

‘I don’t know.’ Cara frowned. She picked up her cup. ‘This is nice.’ She leant back in the chair. ‘I’d like to have my flat as nice as this. I used to think about it when I was carrying her.’ She nodded at the baby. ‘I was going to have my own place and make it really nice. I wanted those drape things over the windows, you know, like they have, and I thought all plants and that. And they had such lovely baby stuff, I wanted…’ Cara’s voice faded away as she contemplated the plans she had had. ‘I used to think that no one could say you were useless if you had a baby. You’ve got something to do then. They used to go on at me all the time: “You’ll never get anywhere, you’ve got to work if you’re going to pass any exams…”’

‘Didn’t you want to?’ Eliza had always been successful at school, had enjoyed shining in a system that had never struck her as too challenging. Her degree had taken her to London, and then to Italy and Spain. Education had opened up the world for her.

Cara shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I didn’t like school. I wasn’t clever and they were always on at me, you know…’

‘So you had a baby?’ Eliza said.

The rain drummed against the window. Cara looked out at the canal and sighed. ‘It wasn’t like that really.’ Eliza wondered if Cara had anyone to talk to. She was a solitary figure, drifting through the gallery, cuddling the baby against her in its sling. ‘But when I got pregnant I thought, well, it would be nice. To have a baby.’ She finished her coffee and smiled at Eliza. She looked round the room again. ‘This is nice.’ She was curled up in the large chair, and the tense, pinched look was leaving her face. She was as thin as a child.

Eliza finished her coffee. She could see that it was doing Cara good to have some company, but Eliza had things to do. She finished her coffee and stood up. ‘Well, I need to get on,’ she said. She saw a look of – what? Apprehension? – in Cara’s eyes. ‘We must do this again,’ she said. There was no harm in the odd half-hour spent talking to Cara.

Cara’s smile was rather strained as she nodded and gathered up the baby. ‘It’s been nice,’ she said.

Eliza saw her out of the flat, then pulled out the sheaf of notes she had made downstairs. If Daniel was coming tomorrow, she wanted to be ready for him. The rain spattered across the window. It was just the night, just the weather for a couple of hours with Brueghel’s macabre vision of the apocalypse.

TWO

The road from the cemetery had been dark and wet. Kerry had got lost, taken a wrong turn, and then she had been wandering along dark lanes, like the countryside, where the wet grass slapped at her ankles and green tendrils hung over walls and caught and tugged at her hair. She’d found her way back to the main road eventually, but it was dark now. She looked at her watch.

Lyn would be waiting for her at the café where they always met. She’d be mad if Kerry was late. Lyn was mad at Kerry anyway. They’d had a row about Kerry’s dad the last time they met. They always fought about Dad. But maybe Lyn was a bit sorry for what she’d said. Kerry’s phone was clutched in her hand and she looked at it again as she pressed the buttons. The saved message ran across the screen:…its abut yor dad meet u at the cafy 7 dont b 18… Lyn never said sorry, but Kerry could tell when she was.

There was a bus stop ahead, and she limped up to it, sinking down gratefully on to the wall. She eased her feet out of her shoes – her best ones – and rubbed her toes. Her feet were wet and splashed with mud. She looked up the road, squinting through the rain that distorted the lights and dripped into her eyes. And there was the bus, pulling away from the lights.

She scrambled on board, grateful for the warmth. The driver was friendly and smiled at her. ‘You’re a bit wet, love,’ he said cheerfully. It was almost empty. Kerry pressed her face against the steamed-up window. The bus jolted and rattled, bumping her head against the glass.

She looked at her watch. She should be there by now. She keyed in Lyn’s number, but she got the answering service. She keyed in another message: pls w8. Please wait. Please, please wait!

Lyn never did anything she didn’t want to. She used to try and teach Kerry that as well. ‘You don’t have to do what he says,’ she’d say, when Dad had told Kerry to go to bed, or tidy her room, or do her homework. But Dad wasn’t Lyn’s dad. Lyn’s dad had left. ‘She’s jealous, Kizz,’ Dad used to say. ‘She’ll get over it.’ And he’d tried to be friends with Lyn, but Lyn didn’t want to know. It drove Kerry mad sometimes. Dad would read her a bedtime story, and Lyn would come in and pretend to be looking for something. ‘You’re too old for stories,’ she’d say. Dad would promise to take Kerry swimming. ‘I’ll take her,’ Lyn would say. ‘She’s my sister.’ But then she usually forgot so Kerry never got to go swimming.

And then Lyn had gone.

She pressed her face against the window. They were nearly there. She stood at the door fidgeting with impatience. ‘Can’t let you out here, love,’ the driver said. ‘Got to wait till we’re in the stand.’

And then the doors were open and Kerry was out of the bus and running as the driver’s ‘Take care, love,’ echoed after her. It had stopped raining, but her clothes were wet and her feet were hurting. She ran up the ramp that led to the tram tracks and across the bridge high over the road. That way to the tram and Meadowhall. That way was the old market.

The steps took you to an empty road and a car park, and they smelled of pee. She used to run down those steps with Ellie, both of them holding their noses and laughing, pushing past slower people, excited about the shops and the lights and the people. And Dad used to follow behind laughing at them too, and saying things like, ‘Careful, Kizzy, slow down, remember you’ve got an old man here.’ And he’d get them a burger – Ellie’s mum didn’t like Ellie eating burgers, so it was a secret. Kerry and her dad liked secrets – and…Kerry didn’t want to think about that.

She tried not to think about the afternoon either, about the way the mist made it hard to see as she walked along the path, about the black rectangle of earth, and all the flowers piled up, dead, like the people in the graves. And the names. They were only names, they didn’t mean people, until she saw the stone with the gold letters. Ellie… Ellie and Kerry.

No Ellie now. She remembered the kids walking past her house that last morning, the day after the police had come and taken Kerry’s dad away. They had to walk past that way, there was no other way for them to go, and she waited for them to call out, ‘Hey, Kizz, you coming?’, waited, didn’t run out like she usually did to join the arm-linking huddle on the walk to school, but no one called, and no one looked, not really, just glances that Kerry could see from behind the nets where she was watching, and their faces were tight and frightened, and they said things to each other as they passed and they cast their eyes over the house again, and then they ran off up the road.

And she’d gone to see Maggie. Maggie used to talk to Kerry when Mum was ill. ‘You’re fine, Kerry,’ she’d say. ‘You’re a great kid.’ And she meant it. Or Kerry had thought that she meant it. But Kerry had gone to Maggie and Maggie’s face had been all twisted and blotchy, like Mum’s was, and she’d looked at Kerry as though she hated her. ‘Get away from me,’ she’d said, and she hadn’t shouted it, she’d said it in a cold, dead sort of way. ‘Get away from me, you…’ And someone had come to the door and pulled Maggie inside, and had looked at Kerry in the same way as she pushed the door shut. And all Kerry could hear was the crying.

And Dad had gone to prison. He wrote to Kerry. Once a week, the letters came, and Kerry wrote back. But they couldn’t say anything real to each other. Kerry couldn’t write about what it was like at home with Mum, or what had happened at her last school and the place they’d last lived. She could still remember the voices in the night, Paedo! Paedo! And the sound of breaking glass as a brick shattered the front window. She couldn’t tell Dad about that. And he wasn’t telling Kerry anything. He said things like It’s not so bad once you get used to it and Don’t worry, I’ll be home soon. Only he didn’t say that so much now. In his last letter, he’d said, Prison changes people, Kizz…

She didn’t watch the TV news, she didn’t read the papers. The teachers said they all should. But Kerry didn’t want to read what they said about her dad: Pervert. Monster. Evil.

She was there – Victoria Quays, the entrance to the canal basin. The water was black, reflecting the white of the moon. She hurried across the cobbles, her feet turning on the uneven footing, towards the café.

She pressed her nose against the window. Lyn? The café door opened, and some people came out. Kerry bit her fingernail. She could see through the steamed-up windows. There were only a few people, and she was sure…She kept looking. Lyn wasn’t there.

She tried Lyn’s number but got the answering service again. ‘I’m here,’ she said. ‘I got it.’ I got the message. That was a daft thing to say. Of course she’d got the message. Lyn knew that. It was so late, she’d got fed up and gone.

She didn’t want to give up yet. She could walk along the towpath, walk to the gallery. Maybe Lyn was there. She could see the faint gleam of the water ahead of her. The city lights made an orange glow against the sky but the path itself was in darkness. She hesitated a moment, then stepped out of the light into the shadow of the first bridge. The air was cold and damp and the ground felt soft and slippery under her feet.

She could see a faint gleam beyond the tunnel mouth and the dank smell of the water closed round her. Now she was feeling her way, her hands pressed against the curving stone wall that came down low, almost to her head. The water lapped against the brick in a sudden flurry of ripples as though something had disturbed it.

As she came out of the tunnel, a shape formed itself in the water, a moored boat, dark and featureless, half concealed in the shadow of the bridge. The boards of the deck were grey and uneven. The path seemed to be petering out now, the buildings coming right to the water’s edge. She was faced with a blank brick wall. She was on the wrong side of the canal. She needed to go back to the canal basin.

The moon came out and the reflection of the canal side appeared in the water. The water was still now, and she could see the walls that lined the path, the bushes and the path framed in the mirror of the canal. She turned back, and the darkness faced her, the black mouth of the tunnel, the smell of the canal that had rippled as though something was moving through the dark water. She didn’t want to go back that way.

Her throat felt tight. She turned round again, and the boat was low in the water beside her, and a brick wall in front of her. She looked back, but the tunnel waited, trapping Kerry between the canal and the wall.

Eliza couldn’t sleep. The sheet kept twisting up as she tried to find a comfortable place to lie, and she felt too hot, then she felt too cold. It was raining again, and the steady beat on the window became an irregular rattle as the wind blew the rain across in a flurry. The roof creaked. She turned over and punched the pillow into shape again. She settled down and curled her arm round her head. Deep, slow breathing, relax into the bed, just let go and melt away…There was a clatter from the other side of the wall, like the sound of something dropped on to a bare floor, rolling to stillness. She was awake again.

She was thinking about Maggie, and about Ellie. Seeing Cara’s baby tonight had reminded her of the first time she’d seen Ellie, a tiny bundle in Maggie’s arm. Eliza had been more engaged by the older Ellie, the bright girl with her mother’s talent for art and a delight in words that seemed to be her own. Raed Azile…

Images from the exhibition began to form in her mind. She didn’t want them there, not now. Suddenly, she wanted no part of that medieval dance of death. She turned over again, disturbing the quilt. A cold draught blew round her. She looked at the clock. One a.m. Tomorrow was going to be difficult. She needed to get some sleep. She could feel the draught again. She knew what it was – it had happened before. Cara must have come in up the outside staircase earlier and not shut the door properly, so it had blown open.

She braced herself and got out of bed. It was freezing. She pulled her dressing gown round her, shivering with cold, and looked out of her door. The passage was in darkness, but the door was open and banging in the wind. There was water on the floor where the rain had blown in. She pulled it shut, banging it hard to make sure it locked, half hoping that Cara would hear it and realize what had happened.

She huddled back into bed, her hard-won warmth gone. Someone was moving around on the other side of the wall. She could hear soft footsteps moving backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. The baby had cried almost every night since Cara had moved in.

The rain was heavier now, and she could hear the drips from the gutter hitting the fire escape. She drifted into the suspension of time that was neither sleep nor wakefulness. Her thoughts were starting to fragment into dreams. Then she was awake again. She had a residual awareness of a sudden noise. She listened. Only the rain and the blowing wind. Sometimes it blew through the broken roofs and windows of the canal-side buildings, making a shrill, wailing cry. She could hear the sound of the baby on the other side of the wall. She glanced at the clock again. Two. She was wide awake now. Maybe she should get some cocoa or something.

She needed to sleep. She’d try the hot-milk treatment. She got up and went over to the fridge. There wasn’t much milk left, but there was enough. Just. She tipped the milk into a pan and lit the gas, yawning and shivering slightly with the cold. Maybe she should curl up in a chair in front of the fire, drink her milk and try and drift off to sleep there.

The milk was starting to froth. She poured it into a glass, and sprinkled some chocolate on the top. She wrapped a blanket round her shoulders and curled up in the chair. The rain drummed on the skylight above her head. The wind was rising and the window rattled. She heard the staircase creak, and for a moment she thought there was someone out there, but it was only the wind making the building groan and rattle.

The crying had changed to hiccuping sobs. Eliza shifted restlessly. There was nothing she could do. She sipped the milk and tried to shut the sound out. The milk was warm and soothing, and the chair felt soft and comfortable as she sank back into its cushions. Her eyes were heavy now and she let the empty glass drop to the floor. Soft and warm. A sob, and silence. A sob and silence. She was looking for the baby. The corridor was long and there were doors and the baby was behind one of them, then she was in the gallery and the painting on the wall was the graveyard, and she protested because she didn’t want that painting. ‘You must.’ It was Maggie’s voice, and she laughed. She reached out to the painting but as she touched it, it fell apart under her fingers, the paint flaking away, falling off the canvas and vanishing as her hands dug deeper and deeper into the darkness, through the black of the topsoil and the yellow of the clay and then it was the canal and she could see the figure reaching up and up from the depths of the water, from the painted grave.

And then it was morning, bleak and dreary. She woke in the chair feeling stiff and cold. The rain had stopped, and on the other side of the wall there was silence.

The empty buildings were a faint presence in the dawn now, their dilapidation becoming apparent as the sun rose higher. The converted warehouse looked incongruous, new. The water lay still, gleaming in the faint morning light. The canal was little used here.

A bridge crossed the canal further down the towpath. The canal ran under the road through a short arched tunnel. The bridge was a silhouette as the sky lightened, the water in the tunnel opaque and black. The sky was heavy with clouds, promising more rain. The sound of the early traffic disturbed the silence, and the smell of car fumes drifted through the air. The light crept across the water, across the mouth of the tunnel, reflecting up on to the brickwork. The colours began to appear, the dull green of the undergrowth on the towpath, the black of the sodden ground, the reds and yellows and blues of discarded crisp bags, softdrink cans, cigarette cartons. It illuminated the crumbling brickwork, the weeds growing in the pointing. The shadow of the tunnel lay sharp across the water which moved slightly as the wind disturbed it, slapping against the side of the canal.

The rain was starting again, making the light dull, making the surface of the water dance. And there was something in the water under the bridge. It was like a tangle of weed and cloth, half in and half out of the shadow, sinking into the oily water. As the water rippled, the bundle moved slightly, rocking gently in the eddies. Rise and fall back. Rise and fall back. And sometimes as it moved, a faint gleam of something almost blue white gleamed through the water in the thin morning light.

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