Bleak Water. Danuta Reah
going back to the east coast today,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back for the do, don’t worry.’
Today. ‘OK, fine.’ She watched him as he left the gallery. He stopped once he was outside, as though he was getting his bearings, then he turned away from town, towards the road that crossed the canal over Bacon Lane Bridge. There was a route on to the towpath there, she remembered. She shook her head, confused. She’d better go and see Jonathan.
He wasn’t in his own room, he was in the general office talking to Mel, who looked up with alacrity as Eliza came in. ‘Where is he?’
‘He’s gone. He was in a hurry. Jonathan…’ She could hear her voice sounding flat.
Jonathan shrugged. ‘He’s known for it,’ he said. ‘Lots of enthusiasm, lots of How wonderful you all are, then he loses interest and fucks off.’ She was surprised at the hostility in his voice. ‘He’s OK with what you’re doing?’
‘Yeah.’ Eliza sagged. ‘He thinks it’s wonderful.’ She looked at both of them. ‘Well, haven’t I earned a coffee?’
Mel looked back at the gallery entrance, where Daniel had disappeared. Jonathan shrugged. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said again. ‘Look, I’ve got a meeting in town. Tell me about it later.’ He looked tired and edgy, Eliza noticed, as he left. He seemed more and more weighted down with admin – meetings, reports, more meetings.
‘What happened to you?’ she said to Mel after Jonathan had gone. The canal basin was only ten minutes from the gallery, but it had been almost an hour before Mel had come back with the coffee.
‘I had to go round by the road,’ Mel said. ‘The towpath’s closed off.’
‘Closed off?’ Eliza switched the kettle on. ‘Do you want some?’ She’d have to make do with instant.
‘Yeah. It’s all police and things.’ Mel started digging in her bag and pulled out her magazine. For her, coffee meant a cessation of work. ‘I started walking and before I got to Cadman Street Bridge, there was tape across the path and a couple of policemen.’
‘What’s happened?’ Eliza had forgotten the activity she’d noticed from the window earlier that morning.
‘Well, I stopped and talked to them,’ Mel said. She was an incorrigible talker, an incorrigible flirt, and the men watching the path would have been more than happy to oblige her, Eliza was sure.
‘So what did you get them to tell you?’ she said.
Mel smiled, pleased. ‘Well, not much,’ she admitted. ‘One of them said he might drop in later. But they said’ – her voice dropped and her eyes gleamed – ‘that they’d found a body in the canal.’ She shivered with manufactured excitement.
‘Drowned?’ Eliza said. She thought about the still, dark waters. They might be still, but they were cold and dangerous. People had drowned there before, and would again, but she, like Mel, was more intrigued than horrified by the idea of disaster and death on the towpath, close to where they lived and worked.
‘He didn’t know,’ Mel said. She dismissed the subject. ‘Can we have lunch now? I got a sandwich.’
Eliza looked at her watch. It was after one. ‘OK,’ she said. She had a Marks and Spencer salad in the fridge from yesterday. They could take half an hour.
Mel settled down with her magazine as Eliza made coffee. ‘Where’s he staying?’ she asked.
‘Who?’ Eliza poured water into the cups. The sour smell of the coffee made her slightly queasy.
‘Daniel Flynn,’ Mel said impatiently. ‘He looks really sexy in the photograph.’ She gave Eliza a speculative look.
Eliza concentrated on her coffee. ‘He’s OK,’ she said, keeping her voice neutral. She listened to Mel as she talked about Daniel, the things she’d read about him, the things she’d heard, his involvement with this famous beauty or that famous beauty, things that Eliza would really have preferred not to hear about, but of course Mel didn’t know, and Eliza had no intention of letting her find out. She tuned out the sound of Mel’s voice, responding with an occasional ‘Mm’, and let her mind drift.
And she kept coming back to Daniel. She’d managed to push him out of her thoughts for a while, but during the next few days, that was going to be hard. She’d need to keep herself focused on the work. She thought about the pictures and photo-montages that had surrounded her all morning. Daniel had liked her idea of using the Brueghel as a focus, drawing the viewer in through the greys and blacks and blues of some of the images to the centre of incandescence where strange winged creatures flew above a river of fire and screaming children fled a napalm hell. Suddenly, she was impatient to get back to work.
‘OK,’ she said, finishing her salad. ‘Let’s get on with it.’
Mel, silenced in mid sentence, looked put out. ‘Jonathan wanted me to…’ she began.
‘And I want you to help me get the room set up,’ Eliza said. She had just about had enough of Mel, and for once, Mel shut up.
They worked until late in the afternoon, then Mel said, ‘Eliza…?’
Eliza was angling a display board. ‘Yes?’
‘Jonathan said I could finish early today. I’m going to the concert. He said it was OK with him if it’s OK with you.’ Her voice was unaccustomedly diffident.
Eliza nodded. She’d worked her bad temper off, and she had no reason to keep Mel. They’d made good progress. ‘Fine. I think we’ve done as much as we can. I’ll go on for a bit. See you tomorrow. Make sure the door’s locked.’
She listened as Mel’s footsteps faded down the stairs. She was glad to be by herself now. She could walk round, absorb the design that they’d carefully set up, note places where it needed refinement or alteration, begin to get the feel of the exhibition as a whole. Flynn would be back on Friday for the private view, and Saturday, they were opening. She needed to check the arrangements for the private view again, check with the caterers, see if there were any last-minute invitations to be sent out.
She was holding up another of the enlargements from Brueghel’s original painting, the depiction of death on a red horse, this one taken from the centre of the painting where all the reenactments of death took place in the orange glow from the fires that suffused the dead landscape, when something made her jump – Too much time with the old masters – and she realized that there were two people, a man and a woman, standing in the doorway watching her. Mel must have left the door unlocked. She sighed. ‘The gallery’s closed now,’ she said. ‘We open at ten.’
The woman looked at the painting Eliza was holding. ‘Death on a red horse,’ she said. ‘I thought it was a pale horse.’ She moved round until she could see the picture more clearly. ‘“And behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death,”’ she said.
Eliza recognized the words. ‘Revelation,’ she said. The fading light fell on the woman. She was a Goya portrait, with full lips and dark eyes, her oval face framed by black hair. She looked pale and tired – a Goya with a hangover, Eliza diagnosed with the expertise of experience. ‘I don’t think Brueghel was painting Death specifically. I think they’re all deaths, if you see what I mean.’
The woman nodded, still eyeing the painting. ‘It’s…striking,’ she said. Her tone changed. ‘You’re Ms Eliot, Eliza Eliot?’ Eliza nodded. The woman took something out of her pocket and held it up for Eliza to see. ‘Detective Constable Barraclough, South Yorkshire Police,’ she said. She looked too exotic to be a policewoman. ‘And this is DC West.’ The second officer nodded at Eliza.
‘We’re investigating an incident on the canal bank last night,’ DC Barraclough said. ‘You live in the flat upstairs, don’t you?’ Eliza remembered Mel’s story of the closed-off towpath, the body in the water.