Submersion (3 page)

When I reached Agnes’, it was immediately evident that something was up. There were three – not one – small boats moored out the front. We had visitors and, if I recognised the boats correctly, family visitors. Inside, there was no buzz to accompany the increase in numbers; just a dull murmur of somber voices that confirmed the visit was one of seriousness.

Agnes’ local family consisted of a band of five: Jimmy and Penny, her uncle and aunt, Esther and Billy, her sister and nephew, and Ronan. Ronan wasn’t a blood relative, but the last partner her mother had before she died. Like many of the men in Agnes’ loosely connected family, he was a father figure but a father to no one in particular, all the same.

All five were present that evening.

Once moored, I unlocked the front door with my key and waded through the waters of our ground floor. Ascending the stairs, I was met by Ronan at the top. His solemn expression gave the silence inside an extra chill.

‘It’s Elinor,’ he told me, but somehow I knew already.

‘And Agnes?’ I asked, accelerating my steps to a gallop up the stairs, my velocity hampered by bulky protective outdoor gear.

‘In here,’ she called out to me and I turned left at the top, into the front room that served as our kitchen and living room. There was a square table in the centre of the room, at which Agnes was seated. Her sister, Esther, was next to her, holding her hands. Esther had a purposeful look about her face,
I’m performing a duty,
it said, whilst Agnes’ expression was cold and calm. Whatever had happened had left her in shock.

I entered the room, but kept my distance. Agnes and I were not open about our relationship. At 31 Cedar Street, I had my own room and paid rent. The family may have thought otherwise but for all intents and purposes, I was a bona fide lodger. It kept things simpler.

My eyes searched the room: her Uncle Jimmy was at the stove, cooking something up and her Aunt Penny was by the sink, washing up, looking out through the front window onto the street. The nephew, Billy, was not in the room, but I heard footsteps from the room directly above us: Elinor’s room. He’d be playing up there.

That evening, I didn’t give Billy much thought, but he was a good boy. Naïve, and a little too easily bossed around by his older cousin, but – being only-children - they had developed the bond of siblings. He must have been missing her, rattling around in the echo of her empty room, wondering, like the rest of us, what the hell had happened to her. Unlike the adults, however, he wouldn’t have suffered the knowledge of the past and the crimes enacted against children of his age. He wouldn’t have been able to indulge his imagination that vividly. But we all were.

‘Will someone tell me?’ I asked, feeling sudden sickness in my gut. Something bad had happened to Elinor; something bad had happened after I left her to board the speedboat.
You should have stayed with her,
I told myself, as a hand touched my right elbow. It was Ronan’s.

‘Come on, let’s leave these four,’ he told me, signaling that we should exit the room. ‘Up to yours?’ he suggested and I complied with a nod.

I occupied one of three rooms on the top floor. The others were Elinor and Agnes’, although most nights Agnes sneaked into my room, into my bed, or vice versa. But that wouldn’t happen on this night; Agnes wouldn’t want to be with me in that way. I knew that even before Ronan confirmed what had happened.

Ronan gestured for me to sit down on my bed and he took the chair that accompanied the desk in the corner of the room. Dragged it to closer to my bed, leant in to make our exchange intimate.

‘Elinor has been missing all day. Didn’t make it to school. Hasn’t made it home, either.’ Ronan paused, letting the facts simply sink in. ‘I know you took her to the drop off point. The police have been by. They may want to talk to you. Been trying to get hold of you all day. Were you with Jessie?’

I nodded; I hoped the police wouldn’t want to know exactly where I was when they eventually caught up with me. I wouldn’t be able to tell them.

‘We suspected that’s where you might be – they called round and we’ve been trying him on his telephone all day. Couldn’t get through.’

‘The line has water damage,’ I commented, feeling I needed to contribute something to the drama. Then, the obvious question left my lips. ‘Did the police think we took her?’

Ronan shook his head.

‘They don’t think she was taken, Tristan. They know she wasn’t taken by anyone. You see, there’s been an accident. A tragic accident. You aren’t to blame yourself.’

‘Blame my-. Christ, Ronan, what happened?’ A key word he used caught in my throat as I repeated it: ‘Tragic – is she dead?’

Ronan looked to the floor and nodded, but he wouldn’t look at me.

‘It looks that way.’

‘And what accident? Why would I blame myself?’

It was then that he looked up at me, his grey-blue eyes magnified with tears.

‘The police were after you both,’ he told me. ‘After you and Jessie.’

Within five minutes, I was back in the boat.

‘Is he going to the police?’ Aunt Penny asked Ronan, as I descended the stairs.

‘No,’ he told her, before following me. ‘We’re going to the scene. Get Jimmy to try Jessie’s number again and, if you can get through, tell him to meet us there. There’s water damage on his line, apparently.’

Whatever Aunt Penny replied with, I didn’t hear. I was in the boat, ready to row, waiting whilst Ronan put on his protective gear.

‘Ready,’ he told me, finally stepping in and rocking the wooden vessel.

The area surrounding the speedboat stop felt very different at night. It was still, abandoned. Not just the water, but the buildings around us. Nobody lived here and nobody passed through, not in the dark, and you sensed the cold isolation. The lack of humanity there gave me a chill.

Jessie was already there when we arrived; living further away was no disadvantage when you had your own speedboat. As well as the lights on his boat, his torch beam gave him away. As we rowed closer, he flashed the beam towards us, momentarily blinding us. When we finally drew up against him, he was visibly relieved to see us.

‘Just had to check you weren’t the authorities,’ he said, his words projecting an outer organised calm. His eyes betrayed his inner turmoil. He continued speaking, his voice given a further clinical, emotionless edge as it vibrated through the gas mask over his mouth and nose. ‘Was it like this when you left her?’

To ensure I didn’t miss an inch of the scene, Jessie ran his torch beam over the area where the makeshift speedboat pick-up stop had been constructed. The platform was gone.
Washed away,
had been Ronan’s words back at the house; had been the police’s words before him; the words of a higher authority before that, I suspected.
Washed away.
‘How?’ had been my question. How had it simply washed away? It was secure; a firmly welded construction, the wooden planks that formed its floor treated to avoid rot.

‘Even the bolts holding it to that old shop front were treated with anti-rust,’ Jessie voiced, his breath jutting out of the face mask like smoke, as it hit the cold night.

You see, he had expert insight to the merits of this particular piece of work – Jessie and I had been responsible for its initial build several years back, one of our earliest jobs together.

‘Who knows what’s in this water,’ Ronan added, hoping to reassure us, I guess, but Jessie just shook his head. ‘Shall we carry on, get to the police station before they come out for you both again?’

‘It’s not the water,’ Jessie responded, shaking his head, running his torch over the scene again. He stopped on one particular spot. ‘Look.’ He illuminated one of the brackets, still attached to the boarded up shop front.

‘What are we looking at Jessie,’ I asked, wanting him to specify his point, sensing unease and impatience creeping across Ronan’s face.

‘I replaced them last week. Did a job with Bobby,’ he explained, moving the beam to another bracket. ‘So, no Ronan, it’s not the water. Look closer.’

We continued to stare. There was no sign of decay, it was true; no rusting, no ageing at all.

‘Jess, let’s go. Let’s talk to the police. It was an accident,’ Ronan pleaded. ‘They just said they needed to talk to you both. Asked us to call them as soon as we got hold of you, so you’re putting us in an awkward position.’

Even through the dark and the obscurity of the gas mark, I could see the fiery glare Jessie shot Ronan.

‘There was nothing wrong with the work we did here,’ Jessie told him, matter-of-fact, a hint of hiss and spit in his tone. ‘I asked you to look and I don’t believe you have.’ He swung the torch back at the brackets, one at a time, and then swung it back at Ronan, lighting up his face as if in an interrogation. ‘Those brackets have been tampered with. Look again, Ronan. They were not worn away, or even torn away. They’ve been cut. The platform was sabotaged, and whoever did it is no professional. Or they are pretty certain they can place the blame elsewhere, because no honest police investigation is going to conclude anything else.’

‘Honest police investigation?’ Ronan uttered, trying to comprehend the wider implication.

‘We need to find her,’ Jessie said, just to me, but Ronan’s senses had perked up and, whilst he missed the obvious visual cues, he caught the auditory ones as they were formed.

‘Find her? Elinor? In this darkness?’

‘Yes, we do,’ I replied, knowing exactly what Jessie meant. Knowing exactly what he had concluded.

For a moment, I thought back to what Ronan had told me as I’d rowed us to the scene of this crime.
It was torn apart,
he had said.
It was just a wash of planks and scaffolding. It had come loose. A speedboat arrived to find just that. She was gone. Drowned, Tristan. They said Elinor had drowned.

But they haven’t got her body?
I’d asked.

She’s in the water,
Ronan had replied, as if that was obvious, as if somehow I was blind or deaf to the facts. But I wasn’t.

What about the other children?

Ronan had shrugged at this question, a hint of puzzle in his furrowed brow.

There were others waiting there. About three, I think,
I’d told him.

But he’d no prior knowledge of this; the police had only reported Elinor as missing. No other children had been mentioned by them.

They must have left some other way, or maybe you were mistaken?

But I knew that I wasn’t.

Later, at the scene, Jessie and I made no attempt to correct Ronan’s belief that our girl was dead. I knew the older man well enough – he wouldn’t want to accept the truth of what I and Jessie concluded; wouldn’t want to comprehend the horror of what we suspected had returned.

‘Okay,’ I stated, thinking through the practicalities of our next steps, ‘I’ll go with Jessie to the police. Ronan, you can row back to Agnes’, tell them where we are.’

‘And then?’ Jessie asked.

‘Then we find her,’ I told him, my words lending the outcome certainty. We
will
find her, I told myself, and, for the first time, I felt myself go, felt wetness about my eyes.

‘Not in this dark, you won’t,’ Ronan stated, grabbing the oars of Papa H’s boat and then rowing himself back in the darkness. ‘I’ll see you back at the house. And you’re not to blame, either of you,’ he added, as if we still had any doubts; as if he hadn’t heard or seen a damn bit of the evidence in the brutal beam of Jessie’s torchlight.

It was early hours when Jessie dropped me home and I was greeted by an unexpected welcome: our hermit neighbour, Papa H, was waiting on his front step for me. Dressed in his full protective gear, the significance of his appearance outside the confines of the outer walls of his house was not lost on me. He was waiting for news.

‘No charges,’ I informed him, quietly, once we were inside and stripped of our outdoor, government-issue protection. After a futile search for our missing girl in the darkness, Jessie and I had taken ourselves to the police as requested.

But that wasn’t what he was waiting to hear.

‘Tried to rap a charge on Jessie, discrediting his craftsmanship, but they couldn’t make it stick. Jessie puts in a good argument, you know.’

Before us, Papa H placed two warm mugs of milky cocoa on the table in his living room – another extravagance I’d been privileged to that day.

Jessie was our source, when it came to luxury goods. I didn’t know where he got his supplies, and didn’t usually ask, either – just grateful to have a share in whatever he could get his hands on. But it raised questions. Questions about what was out there, about a life that existed beyond our drowned surroundings. And, if Jessie had access to this other world through the contraband goods he got hold of, then there was a way in - and a way out. There was hope. But mainly, there were just questions.

‘Just a man who knows a man who knows a man,’ Jessie would say, if I ever enquired about his supplier, the nearest either of us got to an answer. Just a man hiding behind another man, hiding behind another man.

Papa H’s red-rimmed brown eyes stared across at me; we were seated on opposite sides of the table. He didn’t say a word, just stared. And, eventually, what he’d been waiting patiently for occurred. Like a flood – like the unexpected, overwhelming wave of the flood the police suggested might have caused the
accident
– the tears and the sobbing were upon me, eradicating my composure, leaving my steady bones rattling. Papa H stayed where he was – offered no words initially, no comforting-yet-manly tap on the shoulder to reassure me. He understood water; he understood my own small flood must be let before we could move or speak.