Along with all the other cars in the parking lot, a black van with “Private Ambulance” in gray letters on the side had arrived. At the main gate, two police officers were standing guard to prevent vehicles entering or leaving.
“I heard one of them say they were going to move it soon. Before the tide turns.”
We watched the activity as people came and went. The street filled up with spectators and a constable was stationed there to move people on. Then the press arrived and spent the rest of the morning hanging around trying to take pictures of anything interesting. Sally made sandwiches. Josie ate two. I stared at them because I didn’t want to look at anything else. In the end I lay on the sofa in the main cabin of the Souvenir and tried to sleep. I could hear them talking, on the deck, commenting on the action in the marina. I tried to block out the sound, but it still came through.
What seemed like hours later, I heard Basten on the deck of the Souvenir, telling Sally that I could go, if I wanted to.
I went up to the deck but he’d already left.
“He said you can go back,” Sally said. “They’re still working down there but you can go back if you want to.”
I looked doubtfully down to the adjacent dock where the Revenge was still surrounded by people in white coveralls. Josie pulled me into a hug. She was big and warm and soft. “You poor thing,” she said into my hair. “Do you want me to come with you?”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I think I’ll just go back to bed and try and get some sleep. I’m so tired.”
I was tired, it was true, but there was no way I was going to be able to sleep. I just needed to be alone. I needed them all to leave me on my own, so I could think. So I could work out what to do, without having to worry about accidentally giving something away.
“All right, then. I’ll come and look in on you later.”
I stepped off the Souvenir gingerly, my legs shaking. I felt as if I’d been ill, or asleep for a long time. The bright lights lit up the scene dramatically; I couldn’t think of a time when I’d seen so many people in the marina.
A young policewoman tried to stop me when I got close to my boat.
“He said it would be okay for me to go home,” I said, pointing at Basten.
“Oh, it’s your boat? Let me just check.”
The sergeant was at the end of the dock, talking on his cell phone. The police officer got his attention and pointed back to where I stood, behind the flapping strands of blue-and-white plastic tape.
I heard him say, “Yeah, let her through.”
She gave me a smile and beckoned me forward. “Must have been a shock for you,” she said, before I had time to reach the gangplank.
“Yes, it was,” I agreed. I had no desire whatever to go through all that again.
“Take it easy,” was all she said. Her smile was warm.
I stumbled down the steps to the cabin, my legs like jelly.
I picked up Dylan’s phone from where I’d thrown it the night before. My hands were shaking as I scrolled through the menus to the address book, selected the only name in there: GARLAND. I pressed Call.
It was ringing. My heart was pounding at the thought of talking to him.
“Yeah?”
Oh, the voice. It had been so long and yet I remembered it instantly, it came flooding back—everything.
“It’s me.” My voice was low, urgent. I didn’t want to risk anyone overhearing.
“Yeah. What do you want?”
I hadn’t been expecting an especially enthusiastic response, given his unequivocal instructions never to call him, but I hadn’t been prepared for quite such a hostile tone.
“It’s about Caddy.”
“Caddy?”
“She’s dead, Dylan. I found her last night. She was in the water, next to the boat. I heard this noise, and I went to look, and then I found her in the water.”
An indrawn breath, a pause. “What a fucking mess. What the hell was she doing there?”
“She was supposed to be coming to my party, and she didn’t show up, and—”
“Why the fuck did you invite her to your party?”
It registered somewhere in my foggy brain that he didn’t seem that shocked that someone we both knew well had met such a horrible death. And was this somehow my fault—was he blaming me?
“What should I do?” I asked.
“Did you tell them anything?”
“No. Nothing. I didn’t say I knew her. What should I do, Dylan? I’m so afraid.”
There was a pause. I couldn’t hear any sounds in the background, no traffic, no voices. I wondered if he was at home, or in the car. I longed to be there, wherever it was. If I could see him, if I could see his face, this nightmare wouldn’t be quite so awful. I felt another lurch of misery, like a jolt.
“Just keep your head down, right? I’ll be in touch.”
I went to say something else to him, something—what? That I missed him? That I wanted to see him?—but I didn’t get the chance. He’d disconnected the call.
I’d waited so long to talk to him again. And of all the conversations I’d imagined, none of them bore any resemblance to this one. Despite the exhaustion, the panic, one thing registered above anything else: he already knew. He knew Caddy was dead.
Chapter Six
The cabin was still a mess. I’d been staring at it for half an hour and not seeing it, my brain trying to process the image of Caddy in the water through a fog of exhaustion and alcohol.
I got started cleaning up, sweeping up the breadcrumbs, soaking the dishes in the sink and then working my way through them methodically, my back to the scene of chaos behind me. The clouds had cleared, and through the porthole above the sink I could see the river, peaceful and sparkling in the bright sunshine. It looked like it did on every other sunny day, and for a moment I could focus on the task at hand and forget about last night.
When everything was washed and dried, I was almost tempted to wash it all again, just so I could stay in the warmth and safety of that moment. I put it all away, leaving the lasagna dish on the table in the dinette. I would take it back to Joanna later on. The bathroom smelled awful, but I had no intention of emptying the toilet cassette while the dock outside was swarming with police officers. I used the bucket again, and closed the door behind me.
The new room was just as I had left it, the woodwork soft with the last of the sanding, a shaft of sunlight dancing with specks of sawdust. It smelled of fresh timber. It would almost be a shame to paint over it all.
The smell of the wood reminded me of my dad, as it always did. Certain smells took me back to his workshop, a large shed behind our house built of corrugated asbestos and breeze blocks: linseed oil, turps, pickled onions, barley sugars, and engine oil. My dad was a practical man. He could fix anything, build anything, and repair anything. He scoured rummage sales for lonely and discarded items that could be recycled, reworked, or otherwise brought back to life with a bit of care and attention. His workshop had rows of old pickle jars half-full of screws, nuts, bolts, nails, capacitors, resistors, and fuses, nailed by their lids to the cobwebby beams overhead. As well as random bits of machinery, he collected cars that now would be called classic: a Ford Escort Mark II, a Citroën 2CV, and a Lotus, which, even with his best effort and constant tinkering, never traveled another mile under its own power. My mother tolerated it all, since it kept him out of the house and out of her way.
I was never excited by the cars. I watched him as he tinkered and fixed, but I never felt that same drive to see those old things working again. But when he got out his workbench and the woodworking tools I was always there, ready to help. I built a chair when I was nine years old. There was something about the transformation from the rough wood to the beautiful, practical lines and curves of the finished article that I found inspiring.
He died the day I took my final exam at university. I’d phoned home when I’d finished, but there’d been nobody there. He had suffered a massive heart attack in the m
all at lunchtime. My mother had told me she knew he was dead the moment he fell.
I helped organize the funeral while all my friends were celebrating their summer of freedom. My mother was supported by a lanky, gray-haired man called Richard, whom I’d never met until the day we buried my dad. She married him three months after the funeral, sold the house I’d grown up in, and moved with him to the South of France to renovate a farmhouse. Our contact shrank from sporadic to virtually nonexistent over the course of the next few years, and while I missed my dad every single day, I barely thought about her at all anymore.
I went back into my bedroom, looking for something to do. This was turning into the longest day of my life, and it felt as though I’d been awake for a week. It was too early to go to bed, but it looked so tempting, the duvet thrown back. Just as I had left it last night when I went to investigate that noise.
I took off my jeans and lay down on the bed, pulling the duvet over myself. I was exhausted, my head aching with the remains of what was probably a hangover from all that beer I’d drunk.
I lay there for a while, dry-eyed, wondering why I wasn’t crying. Caddy’s body was outside, probably less than two yards away from where I was lying, in the mud of the river Medway. Dylan had answered me as though I were the last person on earth he wanted to speak to. There were so many things wrong with this that I couldn’t begin to understand what could have happened. Poor Caddy. My poor, dear friend.
Thinking about it made my head hurt. And my heart.
It was impossible to sleep, to rest, even to think. I could hear them talking out on the dock—just the impression of voices at first, but when I sat up in the bed I could make out phrases.
“. . . could be worse, at least it hasn’t been raining . . .”
“. . . get out of here before it starts . . .”
I wanted to know how she’d died. I wondered if they would tell me, if I asked.
She couldn’t have been there when the party started. It must have been afterward, after everyone had gone. I’d sat in the main cabin, looking at the mess, and Caddy was—where? Outside, on the dock? In the parking lot?
Had she come for the party after all, slipped, and fallen into the river? No, she hadn’t. I remembered that first glance, what I’d seen in the beam of the flashlight, the shock that it was Caddy—and her face had been misshapen, her head—some kind of wound, too deep for an accidental blow—she’d been hit.
Why hadn’t I heard anything? Why hadn’t she screamed?
She hadn’t just fallen in the water. She hadn’t floated downriver from Cuxton or anywhere else upstream. Someone had killed her, and dumped her body in the water, next to my boat.
Outside, on the dock, a cell phone rang.
It was no use. There was no way I was going to sleep. I got out of bed and went back to the main cabin, got a clean glass out of the cabinet and ran the tap. The water still didn’t take the taste away. Last night’s beer, last night’s panic.
I heard the sounds of footsteps on the deck above and then a sharp knock on the door to the wheelhouse.
“Yes?”
The door opened and a man in a suit appeared at the top of the steps. But it wasn’t Basten; this one was younger, with dark hair and dark eyes and—unexpectedly—a nice smile.
Just as I was thinking how easy it was to spot police officers, I realized he was looking me up and down. Underpants. Cropped T-shirt displaying an expanse of midriff.
“Sorry. Didn’t realize you were—er . . .”
“I was just trying to get some sleep,” I said, even though I was patently standing in my main cabin and not in the bedroom.
“Miss Shipley?”
“Yes.”
“I’m DC Jim Carling.” He showed me his badge. Like Basten’s, it was scuffed and worn so badly that the image was unrecognizable.
“I already spoke to somebody.”
“I know. I just wanted to let you know that they’re bringing the body up now. Didn’t want you to get another nasty shock.”
“Oh,” I said, my voice rising. I looked across to the porthole without thinking, at the several pairs of legs that had now gathered on the dock.
He came down the steps into the cabin, so he was on my level. “I’ll stay with you for a bit, if you like,” he said gently. “Here.”
He’d taken the crocheted blanket from the sofa and put it around me, guiding me to the sofa to sit down so my back was to the porthole. For the first time I felt on the brink of tears.
“It’s all right, Genevieve,” Carling said. “It’ll be fine.”
He was nice, really, I thought. He had a kind face.
Like Dylan. Dylan had a kind face. A face that only a mother could love, he’d said once. He did look like a bruiser, broken nose from boxing when he was a kid, misshapen ears, shaved head—but then, an unusually sensual mouth, and beautiful eyes, kind eyes. He wasn’t what any girl would describe as handsome. Maybe that had been a blessing, otherwise I would have fallen for him sooner than I did, and then everything would have been different.
Carling was in the armchair, looking around the main cabin. I wondered if he’d ever been on board a houseboat before today.
“Do you want to have a look around?” I asked.
“Hm? Oh.” He looked curiously embarrassed, as though I’d caught him looking at something he shouldn’t. “That’s okay. I just—I think it’s nice in here. You’ve done a good job.”
“Thank you.”
“What made you want to live on a boat, then?”
I smiled at him. “I don’t know. Just something I always wanted to do: buy a boat, spend a year fixing it up.”
“Did it cost a lot?”
“I had a good job in London for a few years, saved up.”
“What are you going to do when the year’s up?”
“I don’t know. I might stay on the boat, try and find work around here. Or go back to London.”
From the dock came noises, shouts. They were hauling up the body. Josie told me afterward that there were four of them down in the mud, wearing waders. Another four on the dock. She watched the whole thing from the safety of Aunty Jean. They’d put a tent up, perched on the end of the dock and rocking in the wind because they had nothing to anchor it to, because the parking lot was starting to fill up with press. Cameron was talking to the journalists, while next to my boat they lifted her out of the mud and onto the dock. She was tiny, Caddy, probably weighed no more than a hundred pounds, but it took eight of them to lift her up.
“It will be strange, going back to a nine-to-five after this, won’t it?” he asked. His voice was jovial, a little forced. I think he was trying to distract me.
“It will. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it. But the money will run out soon enough.”
“Does this thing work? I mean—does it go anywhere?”
“It could, I guess. I’ve never tried the engine but it does have one. That part of it is beyond my technical capability at the moment.”
“You should take it on a trip, before the money runs out.”
“Maybe I should.”
There was an awkward pause. I wanted to ask him about his job, what it was like. I wanted to ask if he was married, what he did when he wasn’t working. But none of it would come out. It sounded wrong, to be asking such things, given what was happening outside.
“Would you like a drink, Mr. Carling?” I asked at last. “Coffee?”
He smiled, a warm smile. “That would be great. Thank you. And call me Jim.”
“Jim. All right, then.” I pushed the blanket to one side and went to the galley, filling the kettle from the sink and putting it on the gas burner. At least I’d managed to clean the kitchen this morning. If he was going to spend time on my boat, he might as well see it at its best.
“It’s an odd name for a boat,” he said. “Under the circumstances.”
“I guess so. It was already called that when I bought it. Apparently it’s bad luck to change the name.
”
I turned from the galley, and the way he was looking made me realize that I still hadn’t managed to get dressed again.
“I couldn’t be having much worse luck, really, could I?” I said.
“I guess it’s not really luck. Your boat is the closest to the river; if it was going to wash up anywhere it would be here.”
I wondered at what point Caddy had changed from a “she” to an “it.” The thought of it made me want to cry.
Carling stood.
“I think I would really like to look at the rest of the boat. You don’t mind?”
“Go ahead,” I said.
From here I could see down the hall to the end, to the hatch leading to the storage area at the bow. He wouldn’t go in there. If he did, I told myself, he would just see boxes, carpentry tools, tubs of emulsion and paintbrushes. But he wouldn’t go in there. Not with his suit on, at any rate.
He stopped at my bedroom and looked inside. “I like the skylight,” he called.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s nice to wake up to. I like it when it’s raining.”
He said something else, but the kettle was starting to whistle on the stove and I missed it. I poured water in the coffee mugs and left them, and went to find him.
He was in my bedroom, looking up at the skylight.
“I didn’t hear what you said, I’m sorry.”
He started a little and turned. “Oh, I just said . . . it’s cozy.”
We stood for a minute, facing each other. My jeans were on the floor by his feet, the duvet a tangle on the bed.
“I should . . . um . . . put my clothes on.”
“Oh, yes. Sure. Sorry.”
“You could finish making the coffee, if you like.”
His cheeks were pink. He squeezed past me and went back to the galley, while I pulled my jeans back on and found a thin sweater, one that didn’t make me look like an ancient mariner.
“I wouldn’t go in the bathroom,” I said as I went back to the galley. “Toilet needs emptying.”
“You have to empty the toilet?” he said, handing me a mug.
“Yes. You get used to it. When I redo the bathroom, I’m going to put one in with a bigger cassette, then I won’t need to empty it so often. Or maybe a composter.”