Cassie woke to the rhythmic shhh-upp of water against the timber hull, a comforting sound which, along with the gentle rocking, had been both her lullaby and morning alarm call for the last few months. But today the lazy slap of each wave against the side of the narrowboat was accompanied by an intermittent knocking sound – almost as if someone was tentatively rapping their knuckles on the hull, right beside her ear.
As she drifted up towards consciousness, her brain strained to identify the sound. It wasn’t like that caused by the usual flotsam and jetsam which found its way into the canal overnight – bags of rubbish, discarded trainers, once even a plastic cold box which had ended up beating a tattoo against her bows. Judging by the light level it was still before 6 a.m. – three hours till Cassie’s shift at the mortuary – so she turned over, trying to stay in the sleep zone and blot out the extraneous noise. But after ten minutes of lying there, just waiting for the next knock . . . knock-knock . . . she sat up in her bunk cursing, and pulled a hoodie on over her pyjamas. In her flat she’d always slept naked but after five months living on the boat, with summer fading and the night-time damp starting to penetrate even her fifteen-tog duvet, she’d given in and ordered M&S’s hottest flannelette jim-jams and bedsocks.
As she emerged in the tiny cockpit in the aft (she’d learned not to call it ‘the back’) the chill of a September morning struck her like the flat of a cold hand. She’d always loved the canal in autumn but now as she shivered, peering through the blanket of mist lurking above the black-green water, she felt a stab of nostalgia for summer, even with Camden Town’s tourists and trippers who treated her boat like some kind of visitor attraction.
Taking the boathook from the deck, she headed up to the bows of the narrowboat: ten metres long and moored pointing upstream.
Reaching the foredeck on the canal side, she lowered herself down and, keeping one hand firmly around the deck rail, peered down through the shifting skeins of fog that veiled the surface. At that moment a patch cleared in the mist and a wavelet washed something rounded, dark and slick against the hull. A split second later it had retreated out of view, but she didn’t need a second look to realise the source of the knocking.
It hadn’t been made by a discarded trainer but by the sodden head of a man, face down in the water.
*
Cassie Raven might only be twenty-six but having spent the last six years working as an advanced pathology technologist – an APT – in Camden Mortuary she’d seen thousands of dead bodies up close. She had sliced through their skin, cracked open their ribs, and extracted their organs ready for post-mortem examination. She’d taken samples of their bodily fluids and could identify the distinctive reek of a decomposed body at twenty paces. But seeing a dead guy floating there, his head inches from where hers had been just moments ago – cheek to cheek – gave her the heebie-jeebies. A dead body here, in the real world, was just so . . . out of context.
As she bent to pick up the boathook, which she’d dropped in her shock, she felt her heart beating double-time, pumping oxygen-rich blood to her major muscles, priming them for fight or flight. After taking a couple of steadying breaths, she guided the business end of the boathook into the neck of the guy’s puffer jacket, taking her time, knowing how a careless post-mortem injury could make the pathologist’s job harder when it came to determining cause of death.
With one hand on the deck rail, she started pulling the body towards the stern. The canal was flat calm today with barely any current and he came through the water easily, as though eager to help. She manoeuvred him around the stern and into the gap between the boat and the canal-side. Even if he sank it was less than a metre deep here and the starboard fender would stop him getting crushed against the black bricks of the side.
As she extracted the hook from his jacket, the guy’s body started to turn. He rolled over lazily in the water as if making himself more comfortable in bed, his face breaking the surface. He was in his late twenties, at a guess, broad-shouldered and good-looking in spite of a flurry of acne across his cheekbones. His eyes – a distinctive shade of golden-green – appeared to be gazing up at the sky with a questioning look.
Squatting down, Cassie leaned towards him. ‘How did you end up in the canal, then?’ she asked gently. Held her breath in the hope of picking up what she had sometimes got from the dead bodies she looked after at work – some clue to their last thoughts, to what had happened to them. But deep down she knew she was just going through the motions.
Green-Eyes remained stony silent: further confirmation that the special bond she had felt all her years working with the dead – the sacred vocation that had given her life meaning – had deserted her.