Silent Waters, page 1
Also By L.V. Matthews
The Prank
The Twins
To my husband.
You are the rock in the storm.
CONTENTS
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Forty-Eight
Forty-Nine
Fifty
Fifty-One
Fifty-Two
Fifty-Three
Fifty-Four
Fifty-Five
Fifty-Six
Fifty-Seven
Acknowledgements
About The Author
Copyright
ONE
Something wakes her; perhaps it’s a bird’s cry in her ears, or the pink of the sun that’s edged over the horizon and into her eyes. Or maybe it’s pain; her feet are hurting. She blinks, looks down and realises that her feet are bare and submerged in the cold shallow silt of the riverbank. She’s dressed herself in leggings and a jacket, but has removed her boots and socks, which are placed next to her on the wooden boardwalk. She took care, obviously, not to get them wet, but on closer inspection, they look muddy. She puts her hand to the pocket in her leggings and feels a key – she has brought it, thank God, but she hasn’t got her phone.
She knows where she is at least. For years, the water-meadows were a favourite place to come; a patchwork of wild-flower-rich grasslands and woodland, criss-crossed by waterways. When they were young she and her brother used to come to throw sticks into the water, watch the birds that would stalk through the reeds, and pick at the flowers that dressed the meadow like jewels. As teenagers, they used to swim further down, in the deeper part of the river opposite the farm, but those days are all long gone.
She needs to get home, quickly, before anyone sees her. She lifts her feet cautiously, wary not to disturb the river-bed any more than she has already done so. People throw anything into water and assume that whatever they wish to be hidden will be concealed forever, but she knows almost anything can be found beneath the surface if you’re trained in how to look for it.
She sits on the wooden boardwalk to try to get the worst of the dirt from her feet before shoving her boots back on, and then walking fast, squinting against the rising sun which stains the sky gold. The wind rushes through her hair, and the bulrushes, and there’s a humming in her ears, distant and insect-like. She wraps the jacket tighter around herself, starts to jog. She needs to get back to Sam before he notices she’s gone.
‘Mum?’
She’s woken him by enveloping his little body in her arms.
‘You smell of the outside,’ he says.
‘I know.’
She’s washed hurriedly, is wearing her pyjamas now, but he can tell that she’s been out. They share the same love of fresh air, of water, of the outdoors. Sometimes they talk about the smell of the grass, the sea, the soil. He shares her very soul too. She wishes she could jar the scent of him now; the damp sweetness of his hair.
‘And you’re cold,’ he says.
‘I know, sorry,’ she replies, but she doesn’t move her arms. She couldn’t even if she tried because he’s hugging them tightly and he doesn’t want her to move them – she’s never usually a ‘cuddly’ parent, so he’s milking it for all it’s worth.
Thank God, she whispers in her head. Thank God that she remembered to lock the door before she left the flat. She knows that there could have been anyone who had happened to step out of their flat at the same time as she had, and taken advantage of an open door. Because she has left it open before and this is the kind of place where a stranger might take the opportunity. She berates herself – all the locks on the property and for what? Her treacherous walking has her travelling open-eyed yet totally blind to the fact she’s left the only precious thing in her life, six-year-old Sam, alone.
‘Go back to sleep,’ she says softly and kisses him on the cheek.
‘You take Piggy,’ he says.
‘OK.’
She lifts the toy cow that he calls Piggy from beside him, and then she creeps out, goes to the kitchen. She’s starving, is always hungry after sleepwalking. She opens the cupboard, makes herself a Pot Noodle and then takes a carrot from the fridge, eats it raw, to balance the E-numbers.
The walking is nothing new. When Jen was around eight, her mother regularly used to find her standing by the fridge blankly eating bread and drinking milk straight from the carton, or in Bill’s room seeming to read books which were never even open. For a while, they all found it funny, but then Jen started walking further; round the block to her best friend’s house, to the park. When she was eleven, a neighbour just happened to find her walking up the middle of the road, wearing her pants and a hoodie and nothing else, and delivered her back, both of them in a state of absolute panic. Their mother started taking it more seriously after that, but however many locks she put on the door, however many obstacles she put in the way for Jen to potentially trip over and wake up, Jen continued to walk.
When she was thirteen, her brain found a loop it liked – through the little streets of the town, then following the lanes up into the belt of trees, out to the fields and past the big house on the hill, through the water-meadows and following the river, past the farm, and then back again. It’s where she thinks she’s gone tonight, but she’s never woken in the water before. She could almost laugh that even in her supposed sleeping hours, she had found the water again. She’s called to it like a lover. If she was a poet or writer, maybe she’d attribute her love for it as being an unconscious memory of her mother’s womb, but she’s not a poet and her mother is very much not in her life any more, so to hell with that theory.
The morning light now slices through the kitchen window and she’s thankful that she’s got Sunday ahead of her with Sam, with no jobs to respond to yet because she just came off one yesterday – only nine hours ago. She’ll take him to the new climbing wall in the next town, and for a burger after. She prays Idris won’t text her.
But in less than forty-eight hours, he will text, and everything will change.
TWO
The message comes in as it always comes in – his name in capital letters on her phone screen, with the minimal, yet crucial, details.
Caucasian woman, blonde, 5’7”, 34, declared missing this morning. Suspicious sighting in the river by member of public an hour ago – matches description. Come to base.
It’s five in the evening on Monday and Jen needs to leave the flat as soon as she can. She flits between the kitchen and the bedroom, sorting the rest of the week’s school uniform for Sam and, with her phone clamped between her shoulder and chin, trying to sort childcare. Sam’s father is an impossibility, and her best friend Kerry isn’t answering her phone, but, to be fair, she’s looked after Sam enough over the last few months. Jen calls her brother even though she’d rather not because Bill’s stressed at the moment with the build he’s managing, and he stresses her out in turn. She has, however, limited resources, and clearly she’s stressed anyway because she’s sleepwalking.
‘Can you watch Sam for a bit?’ she says when he picks up. ‘It’s for a job.’
‘Hi,’ he says pointedly because she always forgets the pleasantries.
‘Yeah, hi,’ she says. ‘Is that OK?’
‘How long for?’
She looks at Sam, who watches Transformers and eats dry Shreddies from a bowl on his lap.
‘I don’t know, obviously.’
He pauses.
‘Bill? Is that OK?’
‘I’m sort of busy,’ he says. ‘The site, you know . . . but, no, it’s fine. I can help out. Where’s your job?’
‘Local apparently. A woman was declared missing this afternoon.’
The town and neighbouring villages are built on a complex system of waterways and it’s not uncommon that people fall into them by mistake or when drunk. She hasn’t dived here for a job for a year or so, though. Doubtless there will be a lot of wading tonight.
Bill asks her more questions, none of which she can answer, before there’s a bang on the door. She jumps, even though she knows it’s him.
‘Fuck’s sake,’ she says, and opens it. ‘You’ll take the door off the hinges.’
‘Not with the amount of locks you’ve got on it,’ he grins.
The phone is still at his ear, but now he drops it to his side. There are definite benefits to living minutes away from Bill, but there are also definite drawbacks. He comes
She looks to the living room, to Sam. ‘Keep your voice down.’
Bill was the one that suggested adding locks to her front door to prevent her from sleepwalking when it started up again nine months ago, and she did, but she opens them all in her sleep anyway – a padlock, a combination lock, a latchkey and a security chain.
‘Maybe I should lock you in from the outside,’ he muses. ‘Like a safe room.’
‘Sounds more like a prisoner.’
He wanders through to the living room and sits down, a Rottweiler of a man, next to her small son.
‘Thanks, I owe you one.’
‘You owe me so much more than one,’ he says.
It’s true, she does.
‘How long?’ he asks again.
She picks up her bag by the front door. ‘I really don’t know,’ she says. ‘Could be days? Could be a week? Depends what happens first – we find a body or we run out of the money funding the search.’
‘Hmm.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’ll work it out. With Kerry or whatever.’
‘Yeah, or Denise,’ Jen says. Denise is one of – actually, the only – school mum friends Jen has. She literally doesn’t have time to make any others. ‘I’ll email the school and ask if they can take him in for after-school club for a while.’
‘That would be good, yeah.’
‘And I’ll buy you a lot of beer. Actually, no, you drink enough. I’ll buy you chocolate.’
‘Right, give me high cholesterol instead.’
She smiles and thinks, not for the first time, that the closest person to her has always been, and will forever be, her big brother. The one person that she can call on night or day, the one person that would have her back in a fight even if she’d already lost it. The one person who understands her for all that she is.
‘You work out in the gym every day.’
‘Not because I want to,’ he says. ‘I hate the gym and all the tossers in it.’
‘It’s because they’re young.’
‘Fuck off,’ he mouths before turning to Sam. ‘What’s this, Samster? Optimus Prime? Awesome.’
‘OK, I’m going.’
‘Wait,’ he says. ‘You got any cash?’
She pauses. ‘Oh, I— Sure.’
He looks sideways, at her bookshelf. ‘For if I want to take Sam out or whatever? It’s not payday for ages.’
It’s his tell when he doesn’t meet her eyes. He’s never got any money, even though he earns probably three times what she does. Sometimes she asks him about it, other times she knows not to. Today is not a day to start talking about debts – not when she’s in his.
‘I’ll transfer some money into your account for some food and bits.’
He looks back at her then, flashes a smile. ‘Thanks.’
‘Love you,’ she says to the both of them and she kisses the top of Sam’s head. She feels the immediate crushing guilt for leaving him and for keeping such odd hours, for sending him to Tea and Toast Club in the mornings and to clubs after school, for asking her brother to pick him up, or Kerry to have him. ‘Be good for Bill, OK?’
‘Love you, Mum,’ he replies, but his eyes don’t leave the screen and she’s glad of it. Let him live in a world of Transformers able to save the day.
It’s all about touch. Under the water where a diver goes, there is little to no visibility at all. You are alone in the black and in the cold, often pitted against tides or risk of entanglement and knocking debris, and you can’t even rely on your own eyes to help you. A diver recovers things with their fingertips: lost property, sunken vehicles, weapons, bodies.
‘If you’ve got an overactive imagination, you’ll be in trouble,’ one of her dive instructors had laughed, and in the years since, that’s proved definitely true. She’s lost count of how many branches or reeds under the water have touched her on the shoulder in the blackness and she’s almost freaked out.
Jen would make for an interesting dinner guest, if she ever had time for it – she could tell people about the time a letter was found in a bag that had lain for three weeks underwater and a laser was able to read fingerprints on it, how she uncovered a murder weapon, a knife that, despite being underwater for two months, had samples of the victim’s blood on it. It didn’t wash away. The truth rarely does.
She would never recount what they think they want to know about – the times where she’s dived for bodies.
‘Come on, you can tell me,’ Bill often says. ‘I’ve seen loads of shitty things.’
But she doesn’t, and she won’t. Even Bill, with the tattoo on his back, the highest grading in karate, a man who prides himself on being unshockable, wouldn’t be able to stomach Jen’s experience with the little girl who fell overboard from a barge and got caught up in a motor. He wouldn’t want to know about the teenager who was playing dare with friends and got swept away down a weir. He wouldn’t hear about the baby who had drowned when a car went over a bridge. No, Bill wouldn’t want to know any of that. Who would?
Jen has been a full-time police diver for nine years – qualifying after the expected two-year stint on police First Response. She never wanted to be a normal police officer, the goal was always to be in the water because she simply loves it: the variety of environments, the variety of cases. She’s never involved in the ‘whys’ of an investigation, only the hunting of what’s crucial to solve them. Divers do a job and then they move on, rarely finding out the resolutions of a case they’ve searched for, and Jen likes it that way; she likes being part of the police force but minus the relentless and depressing day-to-day grind.
That’s not to say that they don’t become emotionally invested whilst on the job. She doesn’t forget the bodies and she often dreams about the first time she was called out to find one. There was a fire at an abandoned mill where five kids had escaped the flames they had started by jumping out of a tall, glassless window into a fast-flowing river below. The dive team searched for hours, and found them all in various places down the river – one boy was found alive, mute with shock and cold, and clinging to rocks. When they were done, they went to the fire station with the fire crew and they all slept on the floor. Jen remembers crying until dawn broke while one of the firefighters stroked her hair.
There’s nowhere underwater you can think of that a diver hasn’t been or won’t go: the sea, in lakes and rivers, canals, sewers and wells. A police diver is someone who craves a very particular type of challenge, and who has a deep drive for success against the odds. A person who is comfortable being claustrophobic. Jen’s unit covers a vast area, so she’s away a lot, which she loves and hates in equal measure since having Sam. She aches with the decision of if she should change to go to a part-time unit elsewhere, or go back to being a regular police officer and work in a less demanding role.
‘But then you wouldn’t be Superhands,’ he’s said before when she’s asked him. ‘I like telling my friends about you. Their mums do boring jobs: you’re the coolest one.’
She loves his pride in her.
‘Make us a cuppa, Jen?’ Joe says when she steps up into the dive lorry.
She rolls her eyes. ‘You think you can treat me like you treat your long-suffering girlfriend?’
He laughs.
‘Are we waiting for Gareth?’
‘When are we ever not waiting for Gareth?’ Idris mutters.
Gareth is on his third marriage and this one is looking perilous too. It’s only been three months, but they’re taking bets on when he requests an MSD – a Marriage Saving Day. When she first joined the force, she thought an MSD was a joke. It’s not. Lord knows this is a tough job to do while you’re married, not that Jen would know.
‘And me,’ Oliver pipes up. ‘Extra sugar.’
‘I’ll take one and all,’ adds Liam.
‘Joe’s volunteered himself,’ Jen says.
Joe sighs, gets up, but makes it only a step to the kettle before Gareth crashes inside the lorry.
‘Sorry, sorry.’
‘Tea is off the menu, boys,’ Idris says.
He always calls them all boys, forgets Jen isn’t, but she doesn’t care. These men have all seen her naked when they’ve been changing in the lorry, seen her at her absolute physical and mental and emotional worst, just as she’s seen them at theirs. They’re all immune to one another, in the way family are immune to the bad bits. Like Bill, they’ve become her brothers, and they take her the way she is.
