Bleak Water. Danuta Reah

back. ‘Right, so you worked for – what – all of the evening? Did you do anything else?’

      ‘No, I worked, then I felt tired, so I got ready for bed.’

      ‘And then…’

      ‘I went to bed. I read for a while…’

      ‘Let’s go through that again,’ he said. ‘It was about half past seven when you went upstairs with Cara Hobson. You had coffee and then she went – how long did she stay?’

      ‘Oh, only as long as it took to drink the coffee. Twenty minutes or so.’

      ‘OK. So about half past eight, you started working. How much work did you get through?’

      ‘There was a folder of stuff – I got that finished. It must have taken me more than a couple of hours…Yes. The news was finishing – I meant to watch it and I missed it.’ He didn’t say anything, just waited. ‘I had a shower,’ she said. It was coming clearer.

      ‘So it would have been about eleven by the time you got to bed.’

      She nodded again. ‘And then I read until I began to fall asleep, you know.’

      ‘And something woke you up?’ he prompted.

      ‘It was the draught from the door,’ she said. ‘There’s a fire door leading on to the steps, and sometimes Cara didn’t shut it properly when she came in. I had to get up and shut it.’

      ‘So you were wide awake,’ he said. His smile was sympathetic. ‘And an early start the next day?’

      She looked at him. ‘I remember now, I looked at the clock. It was after one. I was really pissed off. And that was when I heard the footsteps. I was trying to get to sleep, but I could hear Cara walking around with the baby.’

      ‘And then…’

      She frowned. ‘Something else woke me up later, I remember that. I spent the rest of the night in the chair. The baby was crying. But it was something else woke me up.’ She shook her head. She didn’t know what it was.

      ‘Someone going out? Opening the fire door?’

      Eliza shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t hear that. I don’t know what it was.’ In her mind, she could hear the wailing cry of the wind as it blew through the empty windows of the derelict buildings. She shook her head. She’d be guessing now. ‘I made myself a drink. It was about two, I think. I’d forgotten.’ She felt pleased with herself for remembering.

      Farnham nodded. ‘Did you hear anything else from Cara’s flat? Apart from the baby.’

      Eliza thought. ‘No, it was only the baby. I don’t remember hearing anything else.’

      ‘OK,’ he said again. ‘And you didn’t see Cara at all after she left your flat?’

      ‘No.’ Eliza remembered Cara as she walked towards the door. Hindsight – was it hindsight? – made her a sad and lonely figure. ‘No, I didn’t see her again.’

      He stood up. ‘Thank you, Miss Eliot, you’ve been very helpful. DC Barraclough will sort out your statement with you.’ Eliza was aware suddenly of the other woman as a silent presence in the room, aware of a tension in the air.

      ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘There was something I wanted to know…I don’t know if you can tell me…’

      Farnham waited, his hand on the door.

      She knew he must be busy, but she had to ask. ‘The paper,’ she said. She could see his expression changing, becoming cautious. ‘They said something about the canal, they called it “the canal of death” and they mentioned Ellie Chapman. Why are they making a connection? Is it just the canal?’

      He looked at her. ‘You knew Ellie,’ he said. He seemed to hesitate, then he said, ‘We found Cara Hobson’s body near Cadman Street Bridge.’

      Of course. The place where Ellie’s body had been found dumped in the undergrowth by the towpath, an accidental find. The police were searching the towpath after a junkie had OD’d in a boat moored by the canal side.

      ‘It’s a deserted place,’ he went on, ‘but it’s bang in the centre of the city – and there’s a lot of dodgy places close by, you must be aware of that – a good place to shoot up, a good place to take a punter. A good place to dump a body.’ He looked at her to make sure she understood. ‘There’s no other link,’ he said.

      It was gone twelve by the time Eliza left the police station. Somehow, she had expected the news of Cara’s death to have more impact, for the people going about their business in the city to be concerned, aware, talking about the death that had occurred in their midst. Eliza only felt that sense of involvement, that sense of something cataclysmic having happened, because she had known Cara. Otherwise, would the death of a prostitute have weighed heavily on her mind?

      The thought depressed her and she returned to the gallery in a bad mood. The police had been and gone. The search of the gallery had revealed nothing, and Jonathan was preparing to leave for the meeting he’d been agitating about earlier. She showed him the paper and he scanned it in trepidation. ‘They mention the gallery,’ he said.

      ‘Well, they would.’ Eliza hung up her coat and pulled on the smock she used to protect her clothes when she was moving stuff around. ‘Cara lived here.’

      ‘She lived in the flats, Eliza. They’re nothing to do with the gallery.’ He rattled the paper irritably.

      ‘Yes, well…’ Eliza’s mind was moving between the events of yesterday and the work she still needed to do.

      ‘I knew it was a bad idea letting the flat to that child,’ he said. ‘And now we’re going to have all the pimps and kerb crawlers knocking on our door. It was bad enough when it was a kindergarten, but now we’re a fucking brothel.’

      ‘What other kind of brothel would there be?’ Eliza said wearily. ‘Shut up, Jonathan.’

      He looked a bit abashed. Eliza wasn’t really angry with him. He’d had a stressful day, the preparation for the opening disrupted by the visit from the police team. She supposed he was just dealing with it in his own way. He pulled his coat on. ‘I won’t be back today,’ he said. ‘Phone if anything urgent comes up.’

      ‘It won’t,’ Eliza reassured him. She made herself some coffee – instant, yuk – and took it upstairs so that she could get on with her work for Flynn’s exhibition. She was behind now. But the words ‘suspicious death’ kept resonating in her mind, and she kept thinking of feet moving silently through the gallery in the dark, in the night, a couple of floors below where she slept, coming to the stairs, beginning their stealthy climb…Stop it! ‘Drama queen!’ she said out loud. No one had come into the gallery. The police had checked. The paper said that Cara had gone out, gone working, leaving the baby alone in the flat.

      Cara had been in the flat during the night – Eliza had heard her. She must have gone out after that. She could remember the sound of crying. The crying had sounded almost hysterical, and then it had gradually faded into hiccuping sobs, and then into silence. Eliza stood still in the empty gallery, the light from the low winter sun casting long shadows across the floor. What had been going on, on the other side of the wall, in the dark, in the night, when she, Eliza, had been curled up in her chair, drinking cocoa, slipping away into dreams?

       Madrid

      Eliza’s eighteen months in Madrid slipped past her like a dream. Once Daniel Flynn had arrived, time seemed to kick into overdrive in a whirl of excitement, of art and books and travel and sex and wine.

      It was a month since they’d first met. Their relationship had taken off with a giddy speed that still made her uncertain about its status and durability. In her experience, a swift tumble into intimacy was usually followed