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 mall 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.”
“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 cell phone rang and I nearly jumped 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 all right?”
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 cell 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 was really an option.
I stood for a moment in the silence. I should eat something, I thought, but I had no appetite. My coffee was getting 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 relief. I put the radio on, which meant I could block out the sound of feet tramping up and down on the dock 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 fix 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 snuck 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 cheesy 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 realized it had gotten quiet outside. I stuck my head out of the wheelhouse. There were police cars in the parking lot, and the gates were shut—all the other cars and people outside them. Cameron must have evicted the press. The dock 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 was 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 wash to the laundry room and stuck it in the washing machine, leaving it to its own devices while I took a hot shower in the shower room. The hose was all right. It had been fine in the summer. But now that the weather was turning chilly I should think about doing the bathroom 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 room and transferred the wash into the dryer. Cameron was in the parking lot, up on 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 all right; that feeds directly into the office. It’s only the lights that weren’t working. Of course, without the lights the camera’s not going to have picked up much, but they might be able to see something. I don’t know.”
The police cars were still in the parking lot, 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 hall and opened the hatch into the storage area. It was dark in there, and cold. The flashlight I usually kept just inside the doorway was missing. For a moment I hunted around for it, and then I realized 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 can of primer was, and the brushes in a shopping bag.
The light shone directly into the bow and illuminated the box at the end. 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 siding, the thought would not let me be.
I had to get rid of it. I had to get rid of the package.
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, they would find it and then I would be in big trouble.
I worked fast, splashing paint onto the wood. Missing spots. Going over other places twice.
On my first night on the boat, I’d lain awake on the sofa in the main cabin—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 hidden well enough that someone wouldn’t accidentally come across it.
The very front of the bow was the place I chose. If I’d realized I was going to have to hide it for all this time, I would have incorporated a better hiding place into one of my projects—a false wall maybe, a hidden compartment behind the siding. 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 inlet, 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 parking lot, mangled and snapped. The car, driving away with its lights off.