Bleak Water. Danuta Reah

       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.