Edie Investigates (2 page)

Simon Sharrow opened his mouth (the monks who were with him recorded that he “ope’d” it, in line with monkish grammar) and began a counterpoint. His voice rippled and frisked around the melody, dived deep into a mournful minor, and when the stable boy stopped out of sheer amazement, emerged full-throated and triumphant like a trumpet, a glorious halloo of love over all. There were no words—Simon Sharrow never spoke another actual word in all his life—but that was quite irrelevant. The music was clearer than words ever are, a statement of the moment and the soul, and the monks fell over on their faces to worship the angelic presence among them, and Simon Sharrow was deemed blessed among men. This lightning, heretofore thought a great misfortune, was
now understood to be the arrival on Earth of a quintessential being, an angel of God. The seraph (which might arguably be a Prince, Potentate, Throne, Dominion, or perhaps a more lowly cherub) rightly concerned at the horrid effect of matter on its sublime personage, had taken shelter within Simon Sharrow, and in a Godly mirror of more dread possessions, made of his body a redoubt against the crass elements of the material world.

Simon Sharrow was an intelligent man, and the people of his father’s holdings were wise enough in their own right. Simon’s acclamation as the voice of justice and sacred rulership created a realm of considered fairness to which neighbouring folk wished to add themselves, and good governance broke out like a plague across the region. Simon Sharrow’s accident ushered in five centuries of prosperity for Sharrow Town and its surroundings, and his descendants grew rich and were ennobled and ultimately moved away to a grand home in London. The good fortune of the town itself was brought to a bloody close during the Civil War of 1642 when a band of Roundheads burned the place to cinders, so that all that remained of the old settlement by the time Edie Banister got off the train was the name—now shortened to Shrewton—and an ill-considered statue of a boy being struck by lightning.

Edie Banister sat in the Copper Kettle and scowled at a piece of Linzertorte. Mrs Mandel, the cheery matron who owned the Copper Kettle, insisted it was a Raspberry Almond Lattice, and that it was a traditional local recipe she had from her grandmother. Edie had decided it would be unwelcome to point out to Mrs Mandel that both the slice and its maker were almost certainly of mitteleuropäisch descent. She had bitten down, therefore, on the information that Linzertorte was a respectable Austrian delicacy and that Mandel was itself the German word for almond, and contrived instead a genial murmur of little old lady thanks.

Coming here had been, Edie decided, a mistake. It had seemed vital in London, when she had heard that Donny Caspian was dead, that she should come and see fair play. One of the good men and true, was Donny, and if there was even a faint aroma of old business about this, then Edie would be there to sniff it out, and make damn sure it was sniffed in turn by the powers above. It had seemed, to be honest, like a bit of a last bow, a sort of Edie Rides Again. She would arrive, spot the hidden clue and read the scene in the light of her knowledge of the secret parts of Donny’s life, and pronounce gravely that these were matters to be dealt with at the highest level. Detectives would marvel and the aforementioned highest level would be reminded that some of the old guard were still around to be thanked for years of service.
Dame Edie, perhaps
.

But here in the Copper Kettle, locked in combat with tea made apparently out of sump water, and with the huge Viennese mirror on the wall opposite telling her she was past eighty and ought to be in bed—alone—she was suffering from an acute sense of dissonance and shame. It was hardly fair to Donny Caspian that she hoped to find in his
death the opportunity to shine. Her motives were murky, and she suspected they had much to do with the frankly alarming age she now was and a gnawing sense of—what? Abandonment? Not exactly. Say rather, bewilderment, and say it please in the fullest knowledge of the meaning of the word. Edie was not foggy in the head; she was not, in the polite language used to refer to seniors in the modern United Kingdom, confused. She was bewildered in the true Oxford English Dictionary sense of the word: lost in a pathless place. Or perhaps there was a perfectly clear path in front of her, and she just didn’t like it.

She had come here—leaving behind her one real friend still surviving on Earth, in the care of her neighbour Mrs Boyd—to try her ancient skills. To be a spy once more. She had seen herself, full of steely, silvered resolve, fixing local coppers with her old naval commander’s authority and getting the thing done right; playing the sort of retired but still forceful figure every British secret agent should eventually become. Instead, here she was reflected in the mirror as a cake-eating, gossipy Old Lady Detective, fit for the wheelchair and resolving the theft of inherited diamonds. The sort of old girl who knows the scullery maid is actually the heiress’s villainous half-sister, back from South America to steal the fortune, because of the way she positions a cruet.

A fate worse than death—at last.

Edie poked the Linzertorte with one of those three-tined objects some people insist on calling a runcible spoon, and wondered hopefully if the filling might be poisoned. She inhaled carefully, and detected a scent of almonds: the infamous tell-tale of potassium cyanide—albeit also and more commonly the tell-tale of marzipan. Putting the mouthful to the test, she established that it was not poisoned, and grudgingly acknowledged that it was in fact pretty good. Morose and unwilling, she settled down to enjoy it as little as possible, her eye drawn at each bite to the image in the mirror: an old woman slowly and painstakingly partaking of one of the few pleasures left to her. Moist, narrow lips and wattled neck working. She would not attempt to gain access to the crime scene—if that was what it was. She would not meddle. When this wretchedly acceptable bit of pastry was over, she would return to her hotel and gather her things. She would go home and do … whatever single old women did.

Between mouthfuls, memory took her, fond and merciless. Donny Caspian, not dead—not then—and superb in himself, even if not Edie’s usual cup of tea.

The boat is secure, a long line running from the stern to the reef below, the anchor lodged comfortably in a rocky outcrop rather than a piece of brittle coral. Edie Banister, not yet twenty and with her wartime commission newly minted, most secret and unconventional, checks her mask and puts a wooden clothes peg on her nose, then rides the plumb weight all the way down. It feels rough in her hands, old and pitted; although she made it a bare two weeks ago, repeated impacts with the sea floor, and the boat, and the beach, have
made it look ancient. This pleases her in a small way. Her plumb looks no different from Ancient Saul’s, and he’s a thousand years old if he’s a day and has been riding the same plumb since he melted it with his daddy before the turn of the century. Like everyone in his family, Saul Caspian dives for pearls. He will die underwater, he says. One day the sea will hold him, and he will go home.

The Caspians are pirates and lechers, but for all that they are powerfully, alarmingly devout.

Saul smiled at her this morning from his chair by the pier.
All right, girly, you’re ready. The Hollow’s waitin’
. When she came here, he told her she’d never ride the weight to Fender’s Hollow—too small, he said, too narrow, no legs to speak of and no chest. But Saul is an old mellow tree. He says that to everyone, secure in the knowledge the good ones will prove him wrong. His nephew Donny, barrel-chested and constructed entirely from some sort of essence of youthful maleness, is the same. Divers don’t like to be talkers.
The Hollow’s waitin’
. Edie nearly shouted in delight. Then she nearly fled. Fender’s Hollow is a long way down, and dangerous. It’s also the brass ring: if you can dive the Hollow, you can hold your head high anywhere there are divers, anywhere in the world. And you can—if you are Edie—undertake a particular task for your country. If, if, if.

Ba-boom
. Edie’s heart gives its first audible beat since she let go of the boat and started the dive. The water around her is blue, not green. Green water is shallow water, up in the first yards of the sea. It hardly counts. Blue water is the body of the ocean. When you can ride the plumb to blue water, to the place where you can’t see the green, that’s a start.

Ba-boom
. She dives, white limbs and red bikini. Edie is what they call a greyhound, which is a nice way of saying a stick insect or a garden rake. She waited bravely for the bosom fairy to arrive, to bring, along with the obvious, hips and pouting lips and bedroom eyes (which latter, Edie has observed, are associated almost exclusively with women possessed of the more notable sort of bust) and has realised at last that no such beneficence will be forthcoming. But here, it’s all good. No bust means no buoyancy, no hips means no drag. And Saul, bless him for a curmudgeon and an old stoat, was wrong about one thing: Edie has lungs to spare. Her whole chest is a compression tank, storing up the air and pressing it down to take in more. Edie Banister, a white arrow with red fletching, falling into the depths.

Ba
 … 
boom
. Her heart is slowing. Good. Fender’s Hollow, like a basket of diamonds, spreads out beneath her. The line from the boat brushes her leg, and Edie flinches away. She wants no part of that line, not now. No desire to be tangled here, midway between the surface and the floor. She has a knife, sure, but who wants to test their own ability to saw through a rope underwater with dwindling reserves of oxygen? And maybe drop the knife, oh, yes, see life tumble off into the depths, winking like a firefly as you grey out and the drowning takes you. Mermaids and piskies in your eyes,
come to our water world, oh yes.

Ba
 … 
boom
. Fender’s Hollow is a cradle in the reef, a strange cup of white leaves and orange spires, one built on another on another over a dreadful abyss which turns black within an arm’s reach. Black water is a mystery. Oh, you can dive black water with modern equipment. You can take lights. But you haven’t seen it. Black water is like a shy shark, gone when you turn around, vanished when you shine a light on it. Black water is the water where the sun cannot go, shadowed and profound. The only people who see black water truly are the drowning men, fishers sucked under by the tide, careless oystermen and sailors on big ships shattered by the gales. Black water is, by definition, water you cannot travel. Or, cannot travel and return.

And there it is, like a wicked eye, peering out of the coral. She thought it was a wall or a wreck, but no, that’s it. The deep, in person.

Ba
.…
boom
. Edie Banister, white fish girl. Her feet touch the coral. She sets the plumb on the rock next to the anchor, and begins to look around. Down here, somewhere, Saul has left her something. She has a minute, maybe two, to find it and bring it back. Nothing.
Tick-tock, no time to be absent-minded. Focus. Where’s the geegaw?
She’s almost sure it will be a sparkling thing: Saul is always trying to get her to accept gifts. Wear this on your chest, girly. Let a poor old man imagine he’s touched that skin. Almost, she snorts. Bad idea.

Coral and weed, and bright, bold fish. No geegaw.

Or—yes. There. Over by the hole, the eye of the deep. In fact … through it. Something sparkles, hanging in the current. She darts for it, disturbs it, juggles it in her hand and loses it. A cheap thing, made of polished glass, shells and copper wire. It falls away from her, and she dives after it. Catches it. And cannot turn back. There’s no space to turn. She must go down another two yards into the dark, then up and around. It’s no distance at all.

It’s the most terrifying thing she has ever done.

Kick, idiot. Kick, go down or drown
.

She kicks.

Ba-boom. Ba-boom
. That’s fear. Ignore it. She wants to breathe to slow her heart. She wants her heart to slow so that she doesn’t have to breathe. The coral is above her back, and now she can use her arms. Below her is the abyss, bottomless and cold, and she can feel it reaching for her. Tendrils of current snag at her feet—but now she’s moving up and away, her face to the green water above. The water is filled with shadows, a school of fish? Or just spots in her eyes from the time without air? She doesn’t know. She’s breathing out, rising, grasping for the surface, bursting through the mutinous, flexible ceiling. She has her hands in the air but you can’t breathe through your fingers, can’t pull yourself up on air. Her head breaks through, and immediately she slams to one side. The sky’s in the wrong place. She’s turning over—when the Hell did the weather come up? The sky is what they call gurly, meaning bad things: a Scottish word.

A wave slams into her, fills her mouth with salt water.

White fish girl, dies in the gurly swell.

Bugger.

Donny Caspian’s corded arm catches her before she can subside into the sea again, hauls her into his boat, which is somehow lashed to hers.

“I got it,” she says to him, holding out the geegaw.

Donny Caspian grins and nods, turns the boat.

“What are you doing here?”

“Had a hankering to see you,” he says, and this explanation it seems he will stick to however hard she presses, as if he has not noticed—while he hauls on the tiller and drags the boat around—that the last of the blue sky is giving way even now to a ripe, roaring grey, and thunderheads are sweeping in over the water.

“Storm coming,” Edie observes, as if this is news. Donny nods.

“It’s
La Belle Dame
. She comes on that way sometimes, hides behind the cape until the last minute.”

Edie determines, there and then, to make herself his lover, but somewhere between the beach and her room above Saul Caspian’s bar she falls asleep, and when she awakes the next morning Donny has been called away. Called, in fact, from the islands to active service in diverse secret wars, and thence by routes discreet if well-travelled to the banking houses of London’s Square Mile, and finally to his own assassination.