‘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’ into an ‘it’. The thought of it made me want to cry.
Carling stood.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘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 corridor 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 cosy.’
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 off 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 jumper, 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 do the bathroom up 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.’
‘It’s starting to sound a bit less idyllic,’ he said.
‘I’m not looking forward to the winter, to be honest. It gets really windy here.’
A mobile phone rang and it made me jump out of my skin. Carling fished in his pocket for his phone while my heart raced.
‘DC Carling. Okay… thanks. No worries. Bye.’ He drank his coffee. ‘They’re all done out there now,’ he said. ‘Will you be alright?’
I nodded. ‘Yes. Thank you. It was kind of you to stay with me.’
‘Thank you for the coffee. I’ll have to see the rest of your boat another time, maybe.’ He scribbled his mobile number on a scrap of paper. ‘Call me if you remember anything else.’
I wondered if policemen always said that.
When he’d gone, and I’d shut the door of the wheelhouse and locked it behind him, the boat felt very empty, and very big. I stared at the closed door, thinking about what circumstances could bring him back here again, and whether giving him a tour of the rest of the boat would be an option.
I stood for a moment in the silence. I should eat something, I thought, but I had no appetite. My coffee was going cold and I didn’t even have the stomach for that. I should try to sleep, but I knew I would just lie there thinking about it all.
In the end I started by wiping down the woodwork in the new room, getting the dust off everything so that I could paint it. Autopilot kicked in, which was a blessed relief. I put the radio on, which meant I could block out the sound of feet tramping up and down on the pontoon outside – what were they doing out there? Surely they’d looked at everything, sampled everything, photographed everything?
The boat had been my dad’s idea. It was one of our main topics of discussion, in his workshop. There was some unspoken understanding that it was only to be mentioned in that sacred space, between us: that if my mother knew of this, she would flip. He shared his dream with me. One day, he said, he would buy a boat and do it up, then he would take it around the canals and rivers of Britain. We spent hours discussing the merits of the narrowboat over the barge, whether to do just the fitting out ourselves or whether to buy a rusting shell and tackle the welding too. He sneaked in boat magazines which he secreted in a box under the workbench and we pored over the classified ads, choosing our dream boat and then changing our minds, over and over again. We set ourselves imaginary budgets and planned interiors. I had different names for my boat every week, but Dad’s was always the same. He was always going to call his boat Livin the Dream. I tried to tell him how naff this was, but he didn’t care. It was his dream, his decision.
My mother found his magazines when she ventured into the workshop for the first time, two months after the funeral. She’d burned them in the back garden, along with a whole pile of wood that he’d been planning to make into a chest of drawers.
When the woodwork was clean and everything in the room smelled of damp pine, the floor swept and washed too, I realised it had gone quiet outside. I stuck my head out of the wheelhouse. There were police cars in the car park, and the gates were shut – all the other cars and people outside the gate. Cameron must have evicted the press. The pontoon was as it always had been – empty, and starting to move on the rising tide. If there was anything left to find down in the mud, their chance had gone.
I seized the opportunity to head for the disposal tank, and emptied the toilet cassette and the bucket I’d used in the night, cleaned them both and scrubbed the bathroom from top to bottom. Then I took a bagful of washing up to the laundry and stuck it in the washing machine, leaving it to its own devices while I took a hot shower in the shower block. The hose was alright. It had been fine in the summer. But now the weather was turning chilly I should think about sorting the bathroom out next; I couldn’t keep coming out here when it was getting darker in the evenings.
I felt better once I’d showered, and back at the boat I made myself a fresh cup of coffee. After that I went back to the laundry and transferred the washing into the drier. Cameron was in the car park, up a ladder.
‘How’s it going?’ he called.
‘Okay, I guess,’ I said. ‘Are you fixing the lights?’
‘Yeah. Something’s snagged the cable.’
‘Really?’
He climbed down the ladder and showed me the section of cable he’d just replaced. It looked as if it had been caught around something, twisted.
‘I guess that means there wasn’t any CCTV either,’ I said.
Cam shook his head. ‘The camera one was alright; that feeds directly into the office. It’s only the lights that have gone. Of course, without the lights the camera’s not going to have picked up much, but they might be able to see something. I dunno.’
The police cars were still in the car park, two of them, but there was no sign of their occupants. The lights were on in the Souvenir, and in a couple of the other boats. The sun had gone in and the wind had picked up a little, and the clouds were making the afternoon feel darker and later than it was.
Back on the boat, the woodwork in the new room had dried off and I decided that now would be as good a time as any to paint it. I went to the end of the corridor and opened the hatch into the storage area. It was dark in there, and cold. The torch I usually kept just inside the doorway was missing. For a moment I hunted around for it, and then I realised it was probably still on the roof of the cabin where I’d left it last night.
I turned on the light in the hallway, one I rarely used, and it shone brightly enough into the cavernous space to show me where the tub of undercoat was, and the brushes in a carrier bag.
The light shone directly into the bow and illuminated the box at the end. KITCHEN STUFF. I tried not to look at it. If I ignored it long enough, I would forget it was even there. But, once I’d got the paint loaded into the tray and started work on the plain pine claddin
g, the thought would not leave me alone.
I had to get rid of it. I had to get rid of the parcel.
Dylan should have come to collect it. A few weeks, he’d said, maybe a couple of months. Five months was really pushing his luck. And it couldn’t stay where it was. If the police took it upon themselves to search the boat properly, they would find it and then I would be in big trouble.
I worked fast, splashing paint on to the wood. Missing bits. Going over other bits twice.
On my first night on the boat, I’d lain awake on the sofa in the saloon – the only really habitable space on the boat back then – and thought about all the hiding places, all the options. It had to be somewhere safe. It had to be close by, where I could be certain that it was still there, that it hadn’t been tampered with. It had to be dry, and well-hidden enough that someone wouldn’t accidentally come across it.
The very front of the bow was the place I chose. If I’d realised I was going to have to hide it for all this time, I would have incorporated a better hiding place into one of my build projects – a false wall maybe, a hidden compartment behind the cladding. Too late for that now.
The porthole was a dark circle, nothing beyond it but black. The boat rocked gently, almost imperceptibly, beneath my feet on the river. The wind was blowing waves up from the estuary, and after a while I heard rain on the skylight in the hallway outside.
I finished painting. It wasn’t a very good job. I would put another coat on in the morning, and try harder to concentrate.
I turned the radio off and the quiet was like a blanket that descended on the boat. Just the tickling of the rain on the roof of the cabin, on the skylights. It was a lonely night to be on board a boat this big. I washed the brush out in the sink and thought about making something to eat, a proper meal. I still had no appetite.
I couldn’t bring myself to think of it, and yet it was there, all the time. Waking up, still half-drunk. The sound. Caddy’s body, against the side of my boat. The cable to the automatic light in the car park, mangled and snapped. The car, driving away with its lights off.
Seven
I hadn’t expected to be able to sleep, but somehow I did. I kept both phones by the bed, mine and Dylan’s, and neither of them rang. Apart from the rain, which grew heavy, and the gentle rise and fall of the river, nothing stirred all night.
When I looked out of the wheelhouse the next morning, one of the two police cars was still parked in the car park. No sign of anyone in it.
It was still raining, so I pulled on my thick waterproof jacket and took a plastic bag over to the laundry room with me. My clothes were in a laundry basket by the side of the drier, neatly folded. The washing machine and the drier were both whirring. The room was warm and humid and smelled of fabric conditioner. As I was transferring my clothes to the plastic bag, Josie came in to check on her clothes.
‘Did you fold these?’ I said. ‘That was kind. I’m sorry I didn’t take them out of the drier last night.’
‘It’s no bother. How did you sleep?’ She was eyeing me, concerned.
‘Not bad, considering. You?’
She laughed. ‘Oh, I always sleep like a log. Nothing ever wakes me. Good job too, with Malcolm’s snoring.’
‘Josie,’ I began, talking quickly so I didn’t have a chance to change my mind, ‘I was wondering if Malcolm would help me with something on the boat.’
‘Oh, love, you don’t have to ask. You know he’d love to. What is it?’
I hesitated, the momentum gone. ‘I think – um… I think I’d like to see if I can get the engine started.’
She stared at me. ‘What’s brought this on?’
I shrugged. ‘Nothing really. I just thought – you know. It might be nice to take the Revenge on a trip one day.’
‘There’s a lot more to it than just getting the engine started – you know that, don’t you?’
‘Mm. I just thought, shame to have a boat that never goes anywhere. I need to have a new project, that’s all.’
‘Well,’ she said uncertainly, ‘I’ll ask him. Maybe if you wanted to go on a trip he could go with you. Where did you want to go?’
This was all starting to get a bit too detailed. I should have asked Malcolm, rather than Josie – he wouldn’t have batted an eyelid at the idea.
‘Nowhere special. Look – just forget I asked. It’s not a problem.’
‘Genevieve,’ she said sternly, ‘are you worried about what happened yesterday? Because I’m sure it was just a one-off. We don’t often get bodies washed up here, you know. I know your boat is the one nearest to the river but you don’t need to worry about it happening again, really you don’t.’
I picked up my bag full of washing. ‘It’s fine, Josie, honest. It was just a thought.’
I was putting the washing away when I heard a knock at the door to the wheelhouse. It was Malcolm.
‘Morning,’ he said cheerily.
‘How did the clothes shopping go yesterday? I forgot to ask Josie.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Didn’t happen, in the end. Far too much going on here.’
He filled the kettle and put it on the stove, as if this were his boat and not mine. I didn’t mind, although I probably wasn’t at the stage yet where I could stroll on to Aunty Jean and help myself to whatever I wanted.
‘The police, you mean?’
‘Yeah. The gavvers.’
‘Did they talk to you?’
‘Oh, yes. They wanted to come aboard the Jean, but I told them it was too cramped and we sat in the office instead. Good job too.’ He gave me a lopsided smile. ‘I’m not too keen on the gavvers. Although this lot weren’t too bad, to tell the truth.’
‘I thought they were alright.’
‘Yeah, but see, there’s all sorts of things wrong with that body being there. I don’t think it was washed downriver, for one thing.’
‘I’ve been trying not to think about it, to be honest with you.’
‘And it didn’t just fall in.’
‘No, I guess not,’ I said with a sigh.
He helped himself to two mugs from the cupboard, spooned coffee into each. ‘The police are starting a murder enquiry.’
‘Really? Are you sure?’
‘You don’t get that number of cops for a suicide, or even an accidental death. And they don’t know who it is. Generally by the time they find a body in the river they know exactly who it is that’s missing. That means, either they’ve not been reported missing, or they’re not from round here. Maybe from London or somewhere, I dunno.’
‘Why London?’
He pulled a face. ‘It’s handy here, innit? Straight down the A2. First river you come to. First bit that feels like countryside.’
‘I guess so.’
‘What gets me,’ he said, pointing a teaspoon at me, ‘is why your boat? Now that’s intriguing me.’
I stared at him. ‘Maybe they just thought it would get washed out to the river if they put it at the end of the pontoon.’
‘Maybe,’ he said. The kettle was starting a low whistle. ‘Feels to me like it was put there deliberate.’
‘What?’ My voice sounded dull, a long way off.
‘You come here from London, yeah?’
‘So?’ I felt sick all of a sudden. How could I get out of this? How could I wind the clock back, to before the laundry, before I asked Josie for Malcolm’s help? I felt as if I’d managed to give myself away.
‘You never mentioned moving the boat before,’ he said.
‘It was just something that policeman said,’ I replied lamely. ‘He asked if I’d taken the boat out on any trips. It hadn’t really crossed my mind before that. That’s all. It’s got nothing to do with the body, not really.’
He smiled, as though he didn’t believe me. Nor should he.
‘You shouldn’t be scared, Gen.’
‘I’m not.’
‘You shouldn’t lie to me, either.’ The kettle screamed its final, loudest note and he turned off the gas
.
Malcolm handed me a mug of coffee and we went to sit in the saloon. I felt as if I was at a job interview that was going badly wrong.
‘Well, of course I’m bloody scared,’ I said lightly. ‘I came face to face with a corpse last night. That sort of thing doesn’t happen in Clapham. Not often, anyway.’
‘When I was in the army I saw all sorts. I saw a lot of bodies, in Bosnia, and other places. It fucks with your head. You think you’ve dealt with it, but you haven’t. It takes years.’
‘I didn’t know you were in the army,’ I said.
He sniffed. ‘Don’t like to talk about it really.’
I sipped my coffee. It was chilly in the saloon. I wondered whether to ask Malcolm to light the woodburner again, to give him something to take his mind off the topic of starting the engine.
‘I never felt scared here before, never worried about being here alone. This place always felt so safe.’
‘You’re not alone. You’ve got all of us now.’
‘Yes, I guess so. I’d still like to try and start the boat, though. Just to see if it works. Will you help?’
Malcolm’s whole face brightened. ‘Of course I’m going to help, you big jessie.’
An hour later, Malcolm was up to his armpits in the engine.
I’d looked at the engine when I bought the boat; Cameron had pointed out all the various parts and I’d nodded and smiled as though I knew what he was talking about. As though I was listening. Thanks to my years of training with my dad in his workshop, I was fully prepared to do all that needed doing on the boat in terms of renovation, and I’d done a lot already: I’d learned as I’d gone along and I’d made the Revenge into a habitable, comfortable boat. But the engine was just a step too far.
Of course, Malcolm scarcely stopped talking. It started with a low whistle when we lifted the hatch down to the engine space.
‘Nice.’
‘Is it?’
‘Looks good from here,’ he said. ‘Maybe it just wants a good clean. Have you tried starting her up?’