Submersion (12 page)

From the stories they brought back with them, I knew Elinor and Billy spent a lot of time hiding out and exploring the twisting train remains. Yet, I had such a determined sense that I’d find something of Elinor here, I didn’t skip any part of the graveyard, combing through it as thoroughly as possible. There wasn’t much to discover in the blocks of old cars – remains of food packets, sodden, out-of-date magazines, odd items likes socks or empty aerosol cans, items we no longer had regular access to – but nothing that indicated the girl I was looking for had been there in the last few days. Searching through the crammed-in buses - climbing from one to another through the glassless window frames, careful not to catch my protective suit on the jagged edges - my find was more hopeful. In one of the vehicles, right in the very centre, I found a pink blanket and an old nylon sleeping bag, navy on the outside, with a beige, furry lining. Agnes had something similar at home, an extra cover she had pulled over herself on winter nights, when the cold got too much to bear. I would check when I got back, see if hers was missing. I found little else there, but, buoyed by the hope this discovery brought, I carried on.

It was within the labyrinth of curling train carriages that I found something of potential significance - food recently touched, an apple core, its flesh dark brown and the crusts of a sandwich, dried, brittle stale. But how recent had these items been consumed; it was impossible to say. With these remains, I found a small, denim bag and inside it something unexpected. Searching further through the maze of upside-down seating and twisted luggage racks, I found no other traces of what might have been Elinor, so I returned to where I had left Jessie.

‘Find anything at all?’ he asked, without hope, as I climbed aboard.

I didn’t have to think through my reply. My open accusations from earlier had been unfair, but they had confirmed one thing to me above anything else - I had no idea what or whom I was dealing with. And, whilst that state of play ensued, I decided to limit my field of trust. The small item I had discovered in the denim bag was hidden in the pocket of my jeans, concealed again by my outer protective garments, not something Jessie would notice with ease.

‘No,’ I told him, as somber as possible. ‘Nothing that points to her having been here.’

When Jessie dropped me off at Agnes’, my first instinct had been to visit the one person I knew I could trust implicitly – Papa Harold. The possibility of my old hermit friend having any involvement being very limited, I knew he would be the one I could safely share my find with. Further, he was the keeper of all my secrets and not a single one had ended up in anyone else’s hands, despite their potential value. No, he was definitely my safest option that day, or on any day.

Yet, first I had to deal with the distraction Billy caused with the decapitated rat. The emotional pandemonium this incident unleashed was a welcome diversion. With Agnes caught up in the whirlwind of grief and disbelief at the young boy’s insensitivity, the real questions were avoided. Further, I took the small, severed corpse into my possession with ease. Once Billy and the others had left and Agnes was finally calm, I took the opportunity to visit our hermit neighbour, armed with not one but two pieces of significant evidence I was certain related to our search for Elinor.

Papa H took the lid off the plastic box and studied the dead rat. Examined the bite that had taken its head off.

‘I guess we have to ask ourselves what else could have done this.’

‘What else could be in that water?’ I questioned, but Harold didn’t answer; he continued to examine the still specimen before him, prodding it with a pen knife he had pulled from his pocket.

I wondered what was going through his head. His face betrayed the studious look of a scientist – fascination, eyes that were looking for information, discoveries. But I knew his history, knew about his mother, dragged from her home, torn apart by a trio of rabid dogs that no one could stop or control. He had to have that thought in there, that memory clouding his vision, interfering with his scientific focus.

‘Do you
know
of any other creatures living in this water that could bite a rat in two like that?’ he asked me, his tone almost suggesting I was stupid to ask.

He threw me a small, sad curve of a smile.

‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’

I nodded.

‘Dogs,’ I uttered, as if it needed confirming.

‘Seen any around here lately?’

I almost laughed; were we both aware of the enormity of what we were entertaining, it would have been a laughable moment.

‘I know it doesn’t make sense, but if-.’ I stopped myself, caught up in what I knew, in a past wretched with desperate evil.

‘But if they are back, however this has occurred,’ Papa H concluded for me, ‘and if the authorities are aware, they may be taking desperate steps to stop it before it gets out of hand?’ I nodded, still unable to voice my conclusions, for fear that expressing them aloud would further determine their likelihood. ‘Which takes us right back to your fear that first night that Elinor was taken.’

‘But I can’t really believe that-.’

‘I can’t really believe any of this, Tristan, but it’s happening. Elinor has gone and the details we’ve been given do not add up. And now this,’ he said, pointing a flat, upturned palm at the rat in the plastic container. ‘You said Agnes spoke of the testing at the school?’

‘Yes,’ I confirmed, realising that this was one puzzle that did slot together. Whilst the version of events presented by the police was full of doubts, the one Papa H and I constructed that night across his kitchen table was more certain at every point.

‘So, with all this in mind, what do you suggest we do?’

I shrugged.

‘I don’t know. The people we need to ask – the police, the authorities – are the very ones lying to us. And, if we are right, those lies are simply going to continue, running deeper and deeper. I still can’t believe they would simply start this all over again. Not after last time. Not after everything that happened. All that damage can never be put right. And it didn’t provide the solution, Harold.’

‘We don’t know that, Tristan.’

‘The floods killed off the dogs, Harold - not something else. Not something that justifies what the authorities did in the past.’

‘You don’t know that, either.’

I was puzzled and my creased brow confirmed that to my old hermit friend.

‘After the flooding, there were no more dogs, that’s true,’ Papa H continued. ‘And the vast majority of us were content to swap one way of living for another – with dogs we had dry land and dry goods and lived in fear; without the dogs, we lost everything, but got back our freedom. With some restrictions, obviously. But the right questions weren’t asked or answered. Yes, the authorities returned the children they had taken. At least, they did their very best. But we don’t know if their strategy actually worked or not.’

‘Are you saying they were right to take the children?’

‘No, you’re running away with-.’

‘That they’d be right again?’

‘Listen to me, Tristan.’ He raised his voice slightly, demanding my focus. ‘I’m not saying that any of this is right, or ever was. And even if I did, I wouldn’t be saying that to you, of all people. I’m just getting you to consider why they might do it. If taking the children really did lead to the extinction of those rabid, uncontrollable creatures, then it stands to reason that the authorities would revise that strategy if the problem reoccurred. Last time, it was years before an effective solution chanced and hundreds of lives were lost. People in authority take a very different view of people who are not, Tristan. Like it or not, they do. So, this could be happening all over again.’

I had my eyes closed, holding in tears, blocking out what I didn’t want to see and Papa H’s hand reached out to me. When it touched mine, it had the effect of opening my eyes.

‘Did you find anything on your trip out today?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I told him, pulling out the other item I had brought to show him. ‘I found this at the train graveyard, in a bag that looked similar to one Elinor owned. I can’t be certain.’

‘Did you bring the bag, too?’

I shook my head. I didn’t tell him that, if I had brought the bag, I would have had to have shown Jessie. That, during that moment, I had doubted everyone, including the man most likely to be Elinor’s father. That, discarding the bag meant the smaller item I had found inside could be concealed in my pocket until now. I didn’t tell him any of that.

‘No,’ I told him, instead, ‘when I checked it over, it held no further clues. It was just this that I thought was significant.’

I put the item on the table, next to our friend the rat. Papa H’s eyes lit up with a hint of joy. Had the circumstances been different, I think he might have leapt about, grabbed the item with boyish enthusiasm. But he didn’t. He touched it gingerly, carefully checking it over.

‘Does it work?’ he asked after several minutes.

‘I haven’t had a moment on my own to try it out,’ I confessed, instantly revealing that,
no, I hadn’t trusted this find with anyone else,
confirming aloud that I hadn’t trusted Jessie, either.

Papa H continued to examine it, pressing a couple of buttons, opening and closing the item, pressing buttons again.

‘The battery is dead.’

‘Right.’

‘But I know someone that could help.’

‘Someone we can trust?’

‘Someone that can
help
,’ Harold repeated, neither denying nor confirming the issue of trust, though his view was implicit: no.

‘Who?’

The following day, Jessie and I went east, back along the journey we had taken the day Elinor went missing. The day he blindfolded me and took me to a secret location.

‘You’ve got to be kidding me, right?’ I asked him, incredulous, as he packed the blindfold into his rucksack, along with some food and a flask of his dark, rich coffee, before we left his house. ‘After everything, you still won’t trust me?’

‘Isn’t that a little rich?’ Jessie responded, recalling my words from the previous day. I said nothing. ‘Exactly. Unlike you, Tristan, I do trust you. Implicitly and explicitly. But it’s not a question of whether I do or not, just whether I should. And what you don’t know, can’t hurt you. Can’t be extracted from you, should you get yourself in a sticky situation with the authorities. You understand?’

I understood only too well and Jessie knew that. Knew the extent to which they might go; the tricks and technology they had on their side that could access what you knew, no matter how determined you were to conceal it. The unbelievable science they had developed that was equal in both cleverness and cruelty.

‘So, are you going to trust me?’

I nodded, zipping up my protective suit in unison with Jessie, picking up my gas mask in preparation for our leaving.

‘Good. So, are you finally going to tell me what you discovered at the dump yesterday?’

‘What?’

‘It was written on your face, Tris,’ he told me, heading towards the front door. ‘And bulging in your pocket, too,’ – a parting comment that made me chuckle, and put me in the right frame of mind to confess all.

As with our last trip east, I saw the way for the first part of our journey: out of Jessie’s road, over at the crossroads, curling along a mile of fir tree lined avenue, until Jessie stalled the engine and insisted my sight was covered. Even if I had protested at this point, I had next-to-no leverage in this situation: Jessie had a speedboat and I needed it. I needed him; Elinor and Agnes did too. And I understood his point: what we were working on had to be kept under wraps. Its location, in the wrong hands, was too dangerous. And the trouble with the wrong hands was we didn’t really know whose arms they were attached to.

‘You ready?’ he asked, holding out the same, ragged scarf he had blinded me with last time. Seconds later, I felt the cuffs in place too.

‘I’d forgotten about them…’

‘Sorry.’

Even if I had managed to find another means to sail out, the land to the east was not familiar territory to me. I had no reason to venture that far – neither friends nor business had lured me in the past – and I had little knowledge of its geography, its landmarks or perils, and no true understanding of where it led. Whereas, south, north and west held something for me, even if it was just the past on a distant horizon.

From our starting point to the place where he deemed it safe to remove the blindfold, Jessie gave commentary, as he alone searched the banks of the road river for signs of Elinor.
Nothing here to see. No signs of anything here for weeks. The nettles are thick and fast – no child would venture along here, no matter how desperate.
He appeared to leave the boat a couple of times, searching on nearby land. I felt a little uneasy, a little exposed, with my vision impaired and my hands restrained. What if something happened to him; where would that leave me? But, each time, he was soon back, revving up the boat, calling out the results of his scrutiny:
nothing here to see, no signs of anything here for weeks…

When we reached our location and Jessie released my restraints, we pondered whether to carry further on.