The Boat House (25 page)

He took a cardboard coaster from the table, and started idly to pick it apart. He hadn't expected to be so calm. Perhaps something in him knew that this was finally going to be it, leaving him no room for anxiety.

Well, he could hope.

"Are you the one I'm here to see?" she said.

"The radio message," he said. "Yes, I'm the one." And he half smiled then, and could feel the ghost of a warm human being looking out from inside the automaton. Perhaps she sensed it, too, because she seemed to relax slightly.

They sat down.

"You're another Russian," she said.

"You know all about that?"

"Not from her, but I know about it. The one I don't know about is you."

"So, what can I tell you?"

"Exactly who you are. And why you're so desperate to find her."

The coffee tray arrived, set out for two. Pavel waited until the teenaged girl had withdrawn before saying, "Who I am is easy. I'm the policeman who was sent out to bring her back from the border, the first time she got caught. I was one of those who guarded her while she sat in a cell, waiting for them to decide what they were going to do with her. And after she'd been helped to escape from the prison hospital, I was the one that she went to for shelter."

"Why?"

"Because I'd all but begged her to. Like a dog. If I could have got her out of there myself, I'd have done it. Once she'd been freed, I risked everything to keep her. I helped to search for her by day, I went home to her at night. One evening when I went back to my apartment, I found her with a dead man in my bathtub. The dead man was a doctor named Belov - she'd once told him about me and he'd tracked down my address and she'd panicked. Later it came out that he was the one who'd forged her release papers. I took him out at two in the morning and dropped him into the river. I tried to make it look like a botched robbery. I didn't succeed."

The woman stared.

"My God," she said.

"I know," Pavel said. "I know."

"What will you do when you get to her?"

"I don't know. So much depends. Is she happy?"

"She seems to be getting along. You're not doing all this because it's your job. Are you doing it because you're in love with her?"

He looked down, smiled, and rubbed at his forehead with the back of his hand. "Love," he said. "I don't even know what it means, any more. Being so miserable you'd be happy to die rather than go on living with loss, is that love? Because then I suppose you could say that I am."

"This man who died. This doctor. Something went wrong for her, didn't it? I mean, how responsible was she?"

"She murdered him," Pavel said.

"But was it because he was threatening to take her back to prison, or what?"

Pavel looked at her. She was intent, very serious, and he felt like a man who'd travelled far and seen desperate sights that he could never quite communicate to those who'd stayed at home. Whatever he told her, he could recount only a small part of his vision.

He said, "Do you know what a
Rusalka
is?"

The woman shook her head.

"You'd call it… you'd say it was something from a fairy tale. A female spirit of the water. Very beautiful, and very deadly. They carry people away to live with them under the sea or in a lake or in a river. It's an old, old story."

"I grew out of fairytales a long time ago."

Pavel looked straight into her eyes.

"Alina never did," he said.

He told her what he knew about Alina as a child; about the unwitnessed death of the simpleton named Viktor and the explanation she'd constructed to defend herself of blame - a story that she'd clung to even harder the more they'd tried to prise her from it - and how, years later, it had been tied in with the incident at the school that had led to the loss of her job, then her apartment, and finally to her first, unsuccessful attempt to cross the border. She'd always said that the reason for her dismissal was a mystery but Pavel knew that it was due to a parents' petition over the suitability of
Death by Drowning
as an essay subject not once, but more than five times in the course of a school year. The children were having nightmares, and Alina's long fall from grace had begun.

"I still believe she'd have been all right had it not been for the hospital," he said. "The hospitals then were used for punishment, not for a cure. I believe that she was sane when they took her in. There was a line, and she wasn't yet on the wrong side of it. That changed."

"Are you trying to tell me she's dangerous?"

"Belov was like a door that she opened. There was no going back. When we were together, she used to put bread outside the window; one time, I found her trying to drown a cat that she'd lured in. She was ashamed and wouldn't talk about it. But I don't know that it stopped her. Have there been deaths?"

He saw her ready to make a denial.

But he also saw her hesitation.

"
Have
there?" he said.

He followed her up onto the deck, to the obvious relief of the staff in the bar below. They hadn't touched the coffee, but he'd picked up all of the Sweet'n'Low sachets from the sugar bowl.

Pavel knew that he hadn't entirely managed to get the woman onto his side. He wanted to grab her and face her again, to explain that she was making a big mistake; he wanted somehow to make her realise that he was worthy of her trust, to make her see that inside his raggedy-man exterior there was hope and pain and sorrow that deserved her understanding.

At the head of the gangplank to the shore, she stopped and turned to him. It was almost dark now, just a couple of lustrous grey streaks leaving a trace of the day in the evening sky, and strings of fairy lights in the overhead rigging had been switched on. A faint breeze blew across the deck.

"I don't know what I'm going to do about this," she said.

"You mean you don't believe me."

"Maybe I should go and tell her what you told me. See what she says about it."

"She'll run," he said. "And it'll start again somewhere else."

"Nothing's started," she said. "Now I'm starting to be sorry that I even told you all that stuff."

And it was clear to Pavel that neither of them believed it.

He glanced around, at the cobbled quay and the darkness of the harbour below. The harbour esplanade was still early evening quiet, just a few strollers browsing along the more expensive shops and about half a dozen teenaged kids sitting over at the non-functional fountain.

"She'll be somewhere close to water," he said. "Is she here? In this town?"

"I'm going now," the woman said.

He followed her down, descending with a steadying hand on the rope balustrade.

"Please, is she here?" he said again.

"I need time to think," she said. "Give me until tomorrow night. I want to talk to Pete before I do anything else. I'll leave you a message at the same number."

He stopped, knowing that if he pushed too hard then he'd lose her for good. She was his lifeline, he couldn't take the risk of that happening.

"Please," he said. "Be sure to call."

Without realising it, she'd given him a name. And now, she was walking back to a black car. It had been reports of a black car that they'd been following on the first night, all those weeks ago. Could it be? Could it all be coming together for him at last?

She'd parked at the end of the row on the harbour esplanade, no more than half a dozen spaces along from his own car; but of course, she'd have no way of knowing that. He could see that the interior light was on and that there was a child inside, sitting in the back, reading. The boy looked up as the woman unlocked the driver's door.

She glanced back once at Pavel, as he stood by the foot of the gangplank. She probably felt safer, now she was at a distance from him. She didn't smile, or wave, or anything. Her face was troubled.

Somebody called Pete. The car. The area.

Even if she gave him nothing more, he was getting closer.

THIRTY-THREE

Pete was working late that night; he'd stayed on at the yard to clear up a few small jobs, which included taking a look at Diane's Toyota after Frank Lowry had gone home. Alina wasn't working, but was up at the house; after their last serious conversation Pete felt a certain awkwardness when he was around her, and so it had been no tough decision to keep going. Instead of heading for the Step, he'd run the pickup onto the hoist and reached for the air spanner.

Ted joined him after a while. He came in through the side door, and he was carrying something that Pete recognised after a moment's lag; it was Wayne's radio-cassette player, Pete's present to him of two Christmases back.

"I came to give you a hand," Ted said. "It's too damn quiet over in the house." And he placed the ghettoblaster on the workbench, pulled out the FM aerial, and switched it on. It put out a lot of sound for such a small unit.

"Yeah," Pete said, wincing. "That ought to cure it."

Ted lowered the volume. He hitched up onto the bench beside the radio and watched for a while and then said, "Any problem?"

"Not for a mere expert."

Ted watched for a while longer. Then he said, "I've heard of enthusiasm, but this is ridiculous."

"Just a little after-hours special," Pete said, tossing the offending brake shoe onto the bench beside Ted. "I assumed you wouldn't mind."

"Mind?" Ted said. "Why should I mind? That's Diane Jackson's car, isn't it?"

"The man has brains as well as eyes."

"This has got to be the weirdest courtship in the history of sexual relations."

"Oh, no," Pete said. "Don't start that. I'm thinking of jacking it all in and becoming a monk."

"Why?"

"Diane won't come anywhere near me while Alina's around, but then every time Alina talks about leaving I get this strange feeling that I won't know what I'll do if she goes. Now, what would you call that?"

"A mess," Ted said.

"Exactly. So I'm going to be a monk. I'm going to wear a sack, and I'm going to shave the top of my head."

"Yeah," Ted said, leaning over to peer at the crown of Pete's hair. "I can see you've made a start."

He picked up the damaged pad and inspected it, turning it over like a valuer with some not-so-rare antique. The radio thumped away in the background.

And then he looked up and said, "Beer would help."

"Back in the seat, please, Jed," his mother told him as she indicated to pull off the road onto the forecourt of the last late opening petrol station before civilisation ran out and darkness began, and Jed did as he'd been ordered. He'd been standing up and hanging himself forward over the backrest of the passenger seat, swinging his arms like a monkey. This was great. Bedtime was sliding past, and no one had said a word about it. He was out on strange roads, at night, in the safety of an unfamiliar car; the world seemed to have lots of exciting new edges to it, and he was in no hurry to get home.

He looked out of the window. The forecourt was like a piece of a neon city, bright as day and utterly deserted. He could see the late night cashier in his booth, in the last lighted corner of one of those shops where they sold a few dozen things that had to do with cars and a few hundred that didn't. Sometimes his mother would let him go with her and browse around while she was waiting to get her credit card back. She never let him buy anything, but it was always interesting to look. There was no point in him even asking tonight; at this time the shop was all closed, the cashier sealed in behind a teller's window and a cheap intercom system. He was reading a magazine.

"Stay here," his mother said.

She got out and went over to unhook the pump nozzle. It looked like a weird kind of gun and she carried it two-handed, it was so heavy. Then she hunted around for the Zodiac's filler cap, located it, and a few seconds later the car started to hum with the transmitted vibration of the pump. Jed looked up at her through the rear window, but she was staring off into space across the roof of the car. Armed now with the knowledge that she wasn't watching, he squeezed forward between the seat backs and clambered into the forbidden passenger seat.

She'd now said exactly eight words to him since she'd returned from the big boat. Jed would have liked to have gone onto the big boat as well, but she'd told him that it was like a bar, no children allowed. They could always go on a different boat, another time.

No children allowed. The number of things they promised you, and always for when you got older.

Something was worrying her, which meant that Jed was uneasy as well. But at least she knew what she was worrying
about
, whereas for Jed it was just like some vague feeling that was in the air that he breathed and could do nothing to resolve. He could watch her for reassurance, and that was all. From the back of the car he'd been able to see her eyes in the mirror whenever she'd checked the road behind them; but she'd seemed to be looking directly at him, as if catching him out in his concern, and so he'd glanced away.

He liked the big Hi-Lux, especially on those rare occasions when his mother let him ride around the back in the open pickup area, but the Zodiac was even better because it was black and it looked mean. With that tape and stuff around the front, it was like a battle wagon straight out of
Mad Max
. Maybe he could have a crack at driving it, one day, somewhere around the estate roads where it wouldn't matter that he didn't have a license.

One day.

When he got older.

He heard the
klunk
of the nozzle being withdrawn. His mother hung it back on the pump and headed off to pay; from here it looked as if she had about an acre of empty, oil stained concrete to cross, stepping up and over one of the other raised islands when she was about halfway.

Jed turned around and looked back toward the road. There was another car entering the forecourt. It was newer than the Zodiac, but it didn't look in much better shape; it was so dusty that even from here you could see the Smiley faces that someone had drawn onto one of its doors, while vision through the windscreen must have been restricted to a couple of overlapping arcs where the washers and wipers had cleared it. He was expecting the vehicle to carry on across to one of the other islands, but it didn't; it made a sudden, tighter turn, and came in alongside so close to the Zodiac that there was less than an arm's length between them.