Edie Investigates Page 2

  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.

  The investigating officer’s name was Bright, and he was kind enough to pretend that he had not identified the man who brushed past him in search of a place in which to be noisily sick. He went so far as to shake hands, albeit wit
h some caution; to repeat that he had been told to extend Rice every courtesy; and to ask earnestly for any details or impressions Rice might have formed of the scene which could be of use. He pondered aloud the significance of a man from London coming down to quiet Shrewton for what was, yes, a grisly but probably not nationally significant death. He smiled benignly when Rice said that he couldn’t really talk about that, and agreed that that was for the best, in the grand scheme of things, and with respect to the big picture, but somehow from that point cooperated in an open and helpful way which nonetheless was completely obstructive.

  “Do you have any suspects?” Rice asked.

  “Well, we’ve always got a few, but I think the important thing here is to establish a timeline.”

  “Oh, right. Of course. So what is the timeline?”

  “Pretty clear, I think, though we’re awaiting corroboration. That’ll be easier if we can track down a few witnesses.”

  Rice did not ask if there were any witnesses. He just nodded, and waited. Not for nothing his years as a civil servant: he knew how to make a silence stretch.

  “Yes,” Bright said at last. “I mean, there’s a lad from the butcher who delivered last night, and another fellow who cuts the trees. Some domestic staff and so on.”

  Rice let his eyebrows suggest that there must be more than that, that a man of Bright’s ability would have some idea, by now, of where to look for less mundane information.

  “And …” Bright muttered unwillingly, “there’s word of a car seen leaving late. Very fast. Probably nothing.”

  “Word from whom?” Rice asked.

  “A lady in the town. Bit of a busybody, to be honest. Neighbourhood-Watch sort, you know, with that picture of the meerkats on the window.”

  Rice did know: an orange sticker, designed some time in the last thirty years—probably after the BBC made meerkats famous, but long before an insurance website brought them to life in little dressing gowns as some sort of bizarre celebrity. The sticker came in a variety of flavours, and was supposed to let you know you were under the eye of the community. When he had first seen them, as a student, he had thought them a little Orwellian, but that was before Britain became the most surveilled and monitored nation on Earth. What’s a granny twitching at the curtain when every bank cash machine and every traffic light has a little eye which peers out at you?

  “And she saw this car?” Rice asked encouragingly.

  Bright gave a nod. “But she’s not what I look for in a witness.”

  “Unreliable?”

  “Not as such, no.”

  “Fanciful? Or short-sighted?”

  “She’s an enthusiast,” Bright said shortly. “Keen. It doesn’t look well in court, keen.”

  Court, Rice reflected, was a long way away. He’d settle for a few facts. Or he would, if investigating this was his job. But he wasn’t sure that it was. “Natural causes,” the man from the Legacy Board had told him.

  “It’s been very helpful talking to you,” Rice said neutrally, and saw Bright flush as he registered the careful phrasing.

  Yes, well. Screw you very much, he thought, as he shook Bright’s hand and departed.

  “This is Lizard,” Tom Rice said into his phone, “for Gravesend.”

  “Gravesend,” the familiar voice replied. “How’s your wife?”

  “Fine,” Rice said vaguely, because he was finding he had to concentrate quite hard not to mention or even imply food poisoning, and had a recurrent waking nightmare of tanks rolling down the main street of Shrewton blowing up whippets. The people of Shrewton seemed to be overly fond of whippets. Rice himself could take or leave them, but he did not wish to be responsible for a kind of doggy Culodden in which hundreds of innocent sighthounds were exploded by a battalion of armoured vehicles.

  Gravesend gave a sort of sigh.

  “Oh,” Rice said, remembering. “Yes, I mean, when I say she’s fine, I mean she’s not really fine at all, you know, got La Grippe, I’m afraid, still ailing somewhat. How are you? How’s that charming husband of yours?”

  “Still in prison,” Gravesend replied quellingly. “What about the job in hand?”

  “It’s not really in hand,” Rice said. “There was a definite thrust to my instructions, if you take my meaning, a will for simple resolutions implied if not actually stated.”

  “Yes, there was.”

  “Well, it’s reasonably clear that this isn’t that sort of job.”

  “How clear?”

  Tom Rice recalled the bits of head stuck in the wall.

  “Pretty clear,” he said.

  Gravesend seemed to ponder this. “Are the people on the ground taking it seriously?” Meaning, Rice assumed, the police.

  “Yes, they are. They’re not happy to see me, either.”

  “They wouldn’t be. All right, go and find somewhere to sit. I’m going to send you something.”

  “Shall I call in and tell you where I am?”

  “I know where you are.”

  Rice was about to clarify that he had meant to ask whether he should call her and tell her where he was after he had found somewhere to sit, but realised in time that she understood that and was telling him that she knew, all the time, exactly where he was. He held the phone out in front of him and eyed it somewhat suspiciously. When he lifted it back to his ear, the line was dead.

  He considered his surroundings. He could go back to his hotel, but if she’d meant that she’d have said, so there was an implicit instruction not to. Or possibly there wasn’t, and he was reading too much into it all, but given the choice of disobeying a sort-of instruction and appearing too willing to obey an imagined instruction, he chose the latter. Which left him with a small list of possible places to sit: a municipal bench in a bus shelter; a small local library; a pub called the Witch & Frog which he suspected had recently been modernised to provide a place for the young of Shrewton to spawn; and a tea shop called the Copper Kettle. He dismissed the bench out of hand—it was starting to rain—and considered the library before deciding that he would almost certainly draw the attention of the librarian in what was supposed to be a covert handover. The pub was not the sort of pub where a youngish man in a serious suit and shoes by Ducker’s of Oxford would go unremarked, leaving the tea shop, which had the added benefits that a) he could have tea and b) it was a place so appallingly quaint he was reasonably sure any actual spy would be prevented from crossing the threshold by pure, aching shame.

  He went in and ordered a cream tea, which turned out to be enormous, and was struggling with a second five-inch scone and a vast quantity of whipped cream when his anonymous driver came in and handed him an aged foolscap file with no departmental crests or Top-Secret stamps and the single word BARIKAD scrawled in black marker along the spine.

  “Background, Tommy,” the driver said. “For your soonest consideration. Don’t leave it on a bus.”

  Edie Banister had not been aware that she was watching the young man by the window. She had slipped into a kind of timelessness, a collision of past and present which had been occurring all too often recently, and her mind had been looking back and inwards rather than at the room. Meanwhile, though, some part of her had registered a new face in the Copper Kettle: a lanky, bilious creature who had obviously caught Mrs Mandel’s eye, because she positively covered his plate with extra goodies. Edie suspected the proprietress was something of a terror with a certain sort of male whose tastes ran to the Oedipal, but either this lad was not that sort or Mrs Mandel had accidentally overcooked the situation by giving him enough cream to choke a family of cats.

  So she was surprised to find that her entire attention was focused—in a most elliptical and abruptly very professional way—upon the conversation now taking place between him and a stout, balding man with a boxer’s nose and the kind of suit which said he worked for a living: a one-time sergeant, Edie rather thought, or a chief petty officer—and now, by the keys in his closed fist, from which dangled the badge of an upmarket car
maker, driver to the bilious eater of scones.

  Well, all right. A civil servant, with a driver to keep him out of trouble, though what trouble one might get into in Shrewton was hard to say. It did not necessarily mean there was anything of interest to her here. And yet, the watchful part of her had seen something already, or half seen it, and was clamouring for her to keep looking, to order another pot of sump water and persist in her cow-eyed gazing across the room as if she were a truly dotty old baggage. She reached into her handbag and fussed briefly, then tapped the lid of the pot significantly at Mrs Mandel and raised her eyebrows. Mrs Mandel, perhaps unused to people asking for refills, bustled over post-haste, just as the driver passed his master some sort of sheaf of documents whose very familiar anonymity made Edie yet more suspicious. She had seen files like that, had handled and even compiled them. She had been fired, ultimately, by a man who told her she was past her prime and signed his name to a paper held in just such a file. But there were, surely, many departments which used them, especially now, when British government ministers had developed the alarming habit of wandering around in front of the press brandishing highly confidential reports in transparent plastic envelopes. If only she had been closer, close enough to read whatever was written in black along the spine, or better yet to grab a glance over the young man’s shoulder. Child’s play, it would have been to the white fish girl. Not so now. Well, needs must.

  Mrs Mandel’s heavy foot became improbably tangled in the handle of Edie’s venerable umbrella, and she staggered. She caught herself with both hands, which meant that the contents of her tray flew up into the air, and then—inevitably—down. Edie leapt backwards with a shrill bleat of “Oh, my stars and garters!” and everyone stared. Her table was a mess, a soupy muddle of torte and boiling tea. Mrs Mandel demanded loudly to know if she was all right, and Edie averred that she was, but what a shock, how terrible, and it was all her fault. Mrs Mandel became competitively stricken and abject, and Edie after a few rounds parlayed this into a new table and a new pot.