Bleak Water

ONE

The grave seemed too narrow for what it was to contain. Eliza shivered in the wind that cut across the high cemetery. She stood with the awkward group that assembled round the burial place, noting with her artist’s eye the soil strata where the digger had cut through the frozen ground – the black of the topsoil, the yellow of the clay and down into the darkness of the grave itself.

The mound of soil around the trench was covered with artificial turf, and the grave diggers hung back against the wall, waiting for the interment to finish. The coffin was lowered and the ropes released. The minister stepped forward and said the words that the ritual required. Her voice was low, with none of the forced emotion that Eliza had heard at other funerals. This woman hadn’t known Maggie. There was no one here who had been really close to Maggie, not in the last few years. The one person who had been was already here in this burial ground.

Eliza’s gaze slid unwillingly to the dark headstone to the left of the new grave. Polished granite with gold lettering. The inlay of the lettering was fading, but the words were cut deep into the stone and would take centuries of weathering to vanish. They would last for as long as anyone who cared visited this place: Ellie Chapman, 1989–1998. Love is as strong as death is.

A man in a dark suit was watching her. He looked oddly formal among the ill-assorted band of strangers who had come to say their last goodbyes to Maggie. He’d come into the service late and was now standing to one side of the granite stone. She didn’t know him. She didn’t know any of the people who were here. Over the years, Maggie’s friends had drifted away.

The ceremony was over, and people were moving away from the graveside. Eliza looked at the flowers, all still wrapped in Cellophane that would, once the trench was filled in, be piled on the new burial. They would fade within their wrappings, the messages of sympathy would be obliterated by the weather, and, in a few days, they would be cleared away and destroyed. And then the whole episode would be over.

She found herself walking beside the man in the dark suit. She looked up at him. ‘I’m Eliza Eliot,’ she said. ‘I was at college with Maggie. We haven’t met, have we?’

‘Roy Farnham. No. I didn’t know her well.’ He seemed to realize this was a bit brief. ‘She consulted me about Fraser’s appeal,’ he said.

‘You were her solicitor?’ That would explain the suit.

He shook his head. ‘No, I’m a police officer.’

Of course. ‘Were you involved in the investigation?’ The investigation into the murder of Ellie Chapman, four years ago.

‘No, but I wrote an article about the appeals system. It ran when the news came out about Fraser. She thought I could get something done about it.’ They’d stopped now by the cemetery gate.

‘Excuse me?’ Eliza turned round. A young man was looking at her, holding a notebook. ‘I’m from the Star,’ he said, referring to the local paper. ‘I believe you were a friend of Margaret Chapman?’

‘Maggie,’ Eliza said. ‘Yes, we were at college together.’ She looked up at the sky. It was clear and cloudless, the branches of a tree that stood beside the new grave black against the brightness of the sun. A friend of Maggie’s…How did you answer something like that, Eliza wondered. She was aware of Roy Farnham standing back slightly, watching the exchange. With professional interest?

She had seen very little of Maggie for the last four years of her life. They had been students together at the art school, they’d shared a flat, shared the first excitements and fears of independent living, but by the end of those three, vital years, they had gone their separate ways, Eliza to London to do post-graduate work, then on to work in the galleries in Florence and Rome to study the techniques of the Renaissance masters, and then to Madrid with a coveted grant to study restoration techniques at the Museo del Prado. Maggie somehow remained marooned in Sheffield with a teaching qualification and a baby to care for. They had kept in touch. Eliza had come back to England regularly and had spent time with Maggie and the baby, Ellie, who gradually transformed into a person – a forceful toddler, a lively little girl, an intelligent and thoughtful child. Eliza had liked Ellie. But over the years, other friends, other interests had intervened, and she and Maggie saw less of each other.

Their friendship had dwindled to cards at Christmas and the birthday card and present that Eliza always sent to Ellie. And Ellie always wrote back. Eliza smiled, remembering some of the letters. The last one – Raed Azile, knaht uoy rof…Eliza had done things like that at Ellie’s age. She had once written to her grandmother in hieroglyphics, prompting a rather terse response. And then Ellie had died.

‘I don’t think that Maggie ever recovered,’ Eliza said to the reporter now.

‘Did the fact that Mark Fraser is trying to get his conviction overturned contribute to Maggie’s death?’ He didn’t need to ask Eliza to expand on her earlier comment. The murder of Ellie Chapman had become a brief cause célèbre four years ago. Eliza could remember Maggie’s distraught phone call, could remember going out early in the morning to get the English papers as soon as they arrived, tuning in to the BBC. No leads in Ellie disappearance.

‘I don’t know,’ Eliza said. Maggie had campaigned to keep Fraser in jail – not that his early release seemed a likely option. And anyway, nothing would have brought Ellie back.

She exchanged platitudes with the young man though neither of them addressed the question that had hung over the ceremony and hung unspoken in the air between them. Had Maggie’s death been an accident? A car crash in which no one else was involved was the kind of polite suicide that Maggie would have committed. On the other hand, she had become erratic, absentminded and given to drinking too much. She had been drinking when she died.

‘Thank you,’ the reporter said after a while. ‘And you are…?’

‘Eliza Eliot.’

‘Thank you,’ he said.

She looked back along the path to the new grave, the dark headstone beside it. There was a man standing there now looking down at the stone. He looked as if he was reading the inscription. He stood with his hands in his pockets, hunched up against the cold. His cloth jacket looked too thin for the winter day. She couldn’t make out his face, but there was something familiar about him. Someone from college? Someone Maggie had worked with?

Roy Farnham came up beside her and they walked together towards the cemetery gates. ‘I thought there would be more people here,’ he said.

‘Maggie lost touch with her friends.’ Or her friends lost touch with her in the aftermath of Ellie’s death.

‘I couldn’t help her,’ he said. Eliza looked at him. ‘She wanted guarantees that Fraser would stay in prison.’

‘Do you think he’ll get out?’

He stopped and studied the distance while he thought. The cemetery was on one of the highest points of the city, and the hills ran away to the west, a cascade of roofs and winter trees. ‘I looked it up after she came to see me. I don’t know, to tell you the truth.’

They stood in silence for a moment, then Eliza said, ‘It was good of you to do that.’

He shrugged. ‘It wasn’t much.’ He looked down at her again. ‘You’re local?’ He clearly wasn’t, but she couldn’t place his accent.

‘No, but I was at art school here. I came back last summer.’

‘What brought you back?’

‘I…’ Suddenly Eliza felt reluctant to go on. He was looking at her, waiting. ‘I came to work for the Second Site Gallery.’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Down by the canal? Where…?’ Where Ellie’s body had been found six months after her disappearance, concealed in deep undergrowth by the towpath, miles away from the place she had last been seen.

‘Yes,’ Eliza said. He didn’t say anything, just kept on looking at her. ‘I’d better be going,’ she said. ‘We’re really busy. There’s a big exhibition next week and there’s a preview on Friday.’

‘Oh yes,’ he said, with polite interest. Then he looked at her more closely. ‘I read something about that.’

The exhibition had attracted a lot of publicity for a new, provincial art gallery. ‘It’s Daniel Flynn’s latest work,’ she said. For a moment, she was back in the streets of Madrid. It was early summer, and the Puerta del Sol was suffused with light. Daniel was laughing at something she had said. Who else had been there? She couldn’t remember. There had been a group of them sitting outside the café watching the Madrileños’ leisurely drift towards the afternoon. Daniel.

She brought her mind back to the present. ‘You must come and see it.’

‘I’ll look out for it,’ he said. A careful nonpromise. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s a series of interpretations of one of Brueghel’s paintings.’ She looked at him. ‘It’s called The Triumph of Death,’ she said.

She looked back towards the graves, but the man who had been standing there was gone.

As the day drew on, the sky clouded over and an icy mist began to form, softening the edges of the new grave, black and mounded, a long, narrow rectangle in the grass. The flowers, still in their Cellophane, were piled up on the earth. The chapel of rest was locked up and silent, the business of the day over.

A young girl stood by the grave. Her clothes were summery, unsuitable for the winter weather, light blue jeans, cut off above the ankle, and a sweatshirt with a sequinned pattern across the front, flowers and birds. She was thin, with fragile wrists and ankles, narrow hips and back.

The knees of her jeans were muddy and she had the dirty hands and face of a child who had been playing. The dirt was smeared across her face, and she rubbed tears away with her hands. Then she turned back towards the cemetery gate, her ankles turning as her feet stumbled on the uneven path. She gave an angry shout, and began to run away from the graveside and the burial ground and on to the road where her shoes clattered on the Tarmac.

The chapel of rest was silent in the winter-dead landscape. Most of the graves were old, with mossy stones from which the writing had long ago faded into indecipherability. Next to the newly dug earth, overgrown by the grass and an encroaching laurel, the polished granite of the more recent grave stood out. There were flowers on this grave too, but it was as if the wind had caught them and scattered their petals in a splash of dark red against the black of the earth, a freak wind that had ripped the flowers apart, and strewn their petals across this one grave. Ellie. Love…as strong as death.

The frozen stillness of the morning thawed to rain, chill, persistent and driving. Eliza turned up the heater in her car as her wipers struggled to keep her view clear. The windscreen fogged, and she had to wind her window down a little to clear it. Her hat was pulled down over her ears, and her scarf muffled round her face, but she still felt cold. It was as if the hour spent in the chapel of rest and standing by the frozen grave had chilled her to the marrow, and it was going to take time for the warmth to creep back in.

The dullness of the afternoon depressed her as she drove back into the centre of the city in a slow-moving line of traffic. The rain splashed up from the road, and she speeded up her windscreen wipers to give herself some chance of seeing ahead. The traffic shuffled forward a couple of yards and stopped again.

The grey of the weather carried echoes of the chill graveyard, and she thought of Maggie alone in the dark, under the ground, dead and gone. And Ellie, with all her bright promise. She wanted to be back in the summer of Spain, or failing that, home in the warmth and colour of her flat, or in the spaciousness of the gallery. The traffic inched past the bus station and then she was on to the confusion of the massive Park Square roundabout. She switched lanes with the expertise of practice, ignoring the impatient horn that sounded behind her, and drove down past the new developments of the canal basin and along the road where the old industrial buildings still stood, unchanged and deserted.

The gallery and Eliza’s flat were housed in one of the old warehouses beyond the expensive and redeveloped canal basin that seemed to be the demarcation line between new Sheffield and the promise of prosperity, and old Sheffield, upon whose flesh the beneficiaries of industrial wealth had fed, and where now there were only the decaying bones. At night, when the gallery was empty, Eliza sometimes felt as isolated as if she were living on a remote island in the Shetlands rather than in the centre of a massive urban sprawl.

She drove past the hotel that seemed to mark the end of the gentrified area and under the bridge to the road that led along the canal side. The change was abrupt. The brickwork on this side of the bridge was crumbling, the surface stained with the water that ran from the broken fall-pipes. Beyond the bridge, there was a narrow alleyway, a cul-de-sac, where old household rubbish was dumped and then left to rot.

She took the turning that led to the canal road and drove past the chained and padlocked gateways of the old loading bays and the canal company offices. She was at the gallery now, the old warehouse looking dark and forbidding in the fading light. It had a mellow brick frontage and arched windows that gave balance and symmetry, and made the building beautiful in the daylight, even before its restoration.

Eliza locked the car and set the alarm. This was an area where you had to be careful. Her mind was already moving away from the events of the morning, and towards the work she still had to do. She noticed that Jonathan Massey’s car was parked at the side of the old warehouse.

Jonathan Massey was the gallery director. Eliza had known him for years – he had been her tutor at college, and Maggie’s tutor as well. She hadn’t been expecting him in today. He’d had some kind of meeting at the education department.

She went into the gallery, nodding a hello to Mel, a young trainee Jonathan had taken on before Eliza’s appointment. Mel had dropped out of an art and design course at the local college. They couldn’t teach her anything, she’d claimed to Eliza. She was sitting on one of the window sills reading a magazine, More, or Hello!, Eliza assumed from past experience. She tried to suppress her irritation. Mel was supposed to be working on the opening today, checking the invitations, making sure the replies were in, checking the catering arrangements, while Eliza worked on the exhibition.

‘Have you finished checking the invitation list?’ she said as she pulled off her hat and unwound the scarf from round her neck.

Mel looked round and shrugged. ‘I was waiting for you,’ she said. She was affecting boho glamour today, Eliza noticed, a tiered skirt of leather and chiffon, an embroidered jacket, DMs. Mel made most of her own clothes. Her hair, which was currently black, was gelled severely back.

So that’s a ‘no’, then. ‘You don’t need me to do that,’ Eliza said shortly. ‘Next time you’re waiting,’ she began, then decided that she couldn’t be bothered. Mel’s contract only lasted for another five months, and then she would have to move on.

Jonathan must be in his office. She knocked on his door and went in. He was rummaging through his desk drawer, his back to her. ‘Jonathan?’ she said.

He looked round quickly. ‘Eliza! I didn’t…’ He pushed the drawer shut. ‘How did it go?’

Eliza shrugged. A funeral was a funeral. What did you say? ‘I thought I’d get on with setting up the exhibition. What have you lost?’

‘Oh, just a letter,’ he said. ‘I’ll ask Mel…There was a message for you earlier, about Friday.’

‘From Daniel?’ She’d last seen Daniel six months ago, a brief glimpse in a bar on her last night in Madrid. ‘What did he say?’

‘No idea.’ Jonathan began putting papers back into folders. ‘Mel took it.’

‘OK.’ The Triumph of Death. It was Eliza’s triumph as well, vindicating her appointment, relatively inexperienced, as curator of the new gallery. But Jonathan had been surprisingly unenthusiastic when she’d suggested that they try for a preview of Daniel Flynn’s latest exhibition. ‘Flynn?’ he’d said. ‘He’s overrated. And he thinks far too much of himself to come somewhere like this. What’s the point? He’s only ever been interested in London.’ Jonathan and Daniel had trained together at St Martin’s. Jonathan’s low-key response to the exhibition, the most prestigious the gallery had had since its opening six months ago, had been a constant irritation to Eliza.

The rationale of the Trust that funded the gallery was to bring important and innovative work to the provinces, breaking the stranglehold that London had on the arts scene. ‘Daniel Flynn would be perfect,’ Eliza said. ‘There’s a real buzz about his work – a lot of people will come. Look, The Triumph of Death is already scheduled for London, but I think he’ll agree to a preview. The dates are right and I know this is the kind of setting he’s thought about.’

Jonathan’s agreement had been grudging. She’d enjoyed showing him the letter agreeing to her suggestion: a one-week preview before the exhibition transferred to London. Even then, he’d had been oddly subdued. ‘Must be some kind of gesture towards his roots,’ he’d said. Daniel Flynn had grown up in Sheffield.

He was having problems with his own work – a series of photographs around the idea of social exclusion, photographs of children whose lives and origins more or less put them out of the race from the very beginning. The idea was good, but he had been working on it for the past five years, and it still seemed no nearer completion. Which would explain his rather sour response to the success of one of his fellow students.

He’d said, almost as an afterthought, ‘That was good work on your part, I suppose.’ She hadn’t told him about her personal connection with Daniel Flynn. It was good work. She was happy to accept the plaudit, tepid though it was. She looked quickly at the diary to see if anything had changed since yesterday. ‘I’ll get on with setting up the exhibition,’ she said.

Jonathan murmured something. He wasn’t really paying attention. Then he looked up. ‘Do you need me for anything? Only I want to get off early. I’ve got tickets for the theatre in Leeds.’

‘No, that’s fine.’ Irritated, Eliza went back to where Mel was looking through a list and ticking names off in a desultory way.

‘Daniel Flynn’s been in touch,’ she said. ‘He said he’s sorry he hasn’t been up before but he’s been stuck with something in London. Anyway, he’s coming in tomorrow.’

‘OK,’ Eliza said. She hadn’t known Daniel was back in England. There was no reason why she should. But she’d thought – somehow – that he was still travelling, that he’d gone to Tanzania where they had planned…

Mel was looking at her, and there was a knowing gleam in her eye that Eliza didn’t like. She shook herself. ‘Right, I’d better get up there. He hasn’t sent all the work yet.’

‘There’s some more coming in tomorrow,’ Mel said. ‘Didn’t you know he was in London?’ There was the sound of a door opening and she sat up and became more focused on her work.

Jonathan came out of his office, pulling on his jacket. ‘I’ll be off then,’ he said to Eliza.

‘Bye, Jonathan,’ Mel said brightly. They watched him go.

Eliza pulled on a smock to protect her clothes. She went quickly up the stairs, trying to put the irritations of Mel out of her mind and concentrate on the exhibition which combined interpretations of detail from Brueghel’s Triumph of Death, a vision of a medieval apocalypse, with modern imagery and icons that spoke compellingly to a twenty-first century audience.

The windows of the gallery looked out on to the canal: low, arched bridges, the water shadowy in the clouded afternoon. The reflection of the water gave the light a particular quality, pale and clear, and the orientation of the building meant that it was fairly consistent right through the day. As she looked round the long room, she forgot the events of the morning, the sense of oppression and incompleteness that Maggie’s funeral had left in her, and felt the work draw her in.

It was almost five when Mel came into the room to tell Eliza she was leaving. ‘Jonathan said I could go a bit early today,’ she said.

Mel had a habit of doing this – making requests of Jonathan without consulting her. Eliza had had to stamp quite hard on the ‘Jonathan said’ line that Mel was prone to peddle when she wanted her own way. But this evening, she wanted to be alone with the work, so she nodded. ‘That’s OK,’ she said. ‘I won’t need you till tomorrow.’

Mel seemed about to say something, then she stopped. ‘Shall I lock up?’ she said.

‘Lock the front entrance,’ Eliza told her. ‘But leave the galleries. I need to set the alarms.’

‘OK.’ Eliza heard Mel’s feet on the stairs, and a few minutes later, the sound of the outer door closing. Eliza hesitated, then went downstairs. She checked the doors – Mel had locked them. Now she was down here, she might as well set the alarm for the downstairs exhibition space. She punched in the code, hearing the beep beep beep and then the continuous tone that gave her about thirty seconds to get out of the room. She pulled the doors closed behind her, and the alarm fell silent. OK, that was dealt with and out of the way. She went back upstairs and lost herself in her notes.

It was dark outside when she surfaced, and the wind was getting up, rattling the windows and making a strange moaning noise as it blew through the derelict building on the other side of the canal. The sound was almost soothing to Eliza in the warmth and shelter. She stretched and stood up. The gallery was silent around her, the work for the exhibition propped around the walls.

She lifted one of the panels and tried it against the wall to get a feel for the height and positioning. It was one of the reproductions from the Brueghel. In the original painting it was background detail, part of the desolate landscape in which the forces of the dead triumphed over the living. Enlarged and brought into prominence, it was a bleak depiction of solitary death.