Silent Waters, page 3
Possibly it is also the undoing of Claudia’s life.
Idris’s voice jogs her out of her thoughts.
‘Jen,’ he says. ‘You’re OK to check the pipe? It’s small and you’re the smallest.’
‘Yeah.’ She nods.
She gets ready in the lorry. Liam is in charge of her equipment and clothing and he tugs at the zips of the dry-suit, wrenches her backwards. He needs to be tough – it’s to ensure no water can get in because no one wants to get into the water only to have to come straight out again and waste twenty minutes and a complete change of diver. He fits her mask, her fins, her gloves, everything – it’s like being a catwalk model or a child.
‘OK?’ he says eventually.
She nods and he helps her walk out – the kit on her back is heavier than her entire body weight. Gareth will be her attendant in the water, has already waded out and is waiting for her. Together they will go to the lip of where the marsh falls away into the stagnant pool so she can submerge and locate the entrance of the pipe. Idris and the others look on from waist-deep in the water.
‘Good to go?’ Idris asks.
Jen nods again, takes the jackstay – the line they use when they’re searching – and then submerges. As the water closes around her head, she is immediately transported into the ‘other world’, as she calls it. Her head, her hands through the gloves, and her ears become wet, but everything else remains dry. When she first started diving this was a strange sensation, but it’s normal now after so long in the job. She drops down to the bottom of the pool – it’s only a little over six foot – and feels the long weeds below snag at her legs. She knows the team are all up there, watching her bubbles, watching the lifeline, but she’s alone now and she likes this part the best – when she can only hear herself breathing and it becomes a new rhythm, like a heartbeat.
Usually, she loves water; the depth and the murk of it, the smoothness of it around her body and its rhythmic calm. She loves how the light plays on the surface of it, but conversely loves the darkness of it, too – in its blackest corners, she imagines that it’s a winged horse galloping through the night and she’s flying alongside it. She would give herself up to the water if that was ever her last option. People say that drowning is a horrible way to go, but for someone like her, who lives it and loves it, it would be the only way to end things.
Today, however, being in the water makes her lungs constrict with panic. Because she doesn’t want to find Claudia down here. She wants Claudia alive and well, because what would it mean if she were dead? Murdered? The victim is almost always killed by those nearest to them and the nearest person to Claudia is her husband, Mark Mason.
Focus.
According to the council plans, the entrance to the pipe is to her right. Jen feels blindly around, soft touches along the bed, and thinks of Sam.
‘Don’t they give you torches?’ he asked once.
‘It would be like putting car headlights on in fog,’ she explained. ‘A torch is useless in water.’
She locates the grating easily, feels the rust of the metal cross-hatch and the slime of the grasses that have been pulled in and have then webbed around the squares. She pulls on the lifeline to tell the team she’s found the entrance, and then she puts her fingers into the squares to check it’s secured. She knows before she pulls that it’s not.
This isn’t what she wanted to find – she wanted to feel it taut and bolted, but it swings loose and she knows she must open it out wider so she can fit into the pipe. She pulls the line again and goes inside. There’s a loud clanging in her ears as her equipment scrapes the inside of the concrete and the sound frightens her for a moment. Sound travels four times faster in water than it does in the air and it makes her diving sharper, but it can also make it confusing – sometimes you think you hear things that aren’t there.
She knows that the pipe is twenty feet along; it goes under the main road before it’s cut off. Her fingers graze along the metal. She could be upside down and she’d not know it for the blackness surrounding her. She must be especially careful down here; if the grate has been loose for a long time, there could be a whole collection of things that have made their way inside.
Through the thin gloves, her fingers feel the skeletons of leaves and twigs, feel the algae and clumps of vegetation. There are coins here, pieces of broken glass, a syringe. She’s ten feet into the pipe now and can feel vibrations from vehicles passing along the road above her. Sometimes she wonders if she’ll ever be crushed underwater doing this job, but there’s no point worrying about that now. Her breath is steady, her fingers still caressing the pipe, and then her head bumps into something.
Something is lodged in the pipe, centimetres from her face. Her heart starts to pump wildly and she reaches out to touch it.
It’s rigid but simultaneously pulpy under her fingers and she knows from years of practice that this thing she’s found was once alive. There are bones – small and delicate – and then she feels herself relax because she knows what this is now. She moves her fingers to feel broken feathers floating in the dark, a long neck, a beak. It’s the carcass of a huge bird, perhaps a goose or a swan which has been here for God knows how long. She needs to move past it – just in case – but that’s a tricky business.
She manipulates its enormous body and squeezes past, tries not to think that its eyes might be open and that it might be watching her in death. One of its feet brushes her arm, feels like the splayed hand of a child stretching for her, as she goes deeper into the pipe.
But there is nothing else to find.
She comes up out of the water, doesn’t say anything to her team, but doesn’t need to because they know already that she didn’t find Claudia. Thank fuck.
She’s escorted by Liam to the back of the lorry to be hosed down before she can change out of the suit and get dry. Amir makes everyone tea – they drink a lot of tea in this job – milky, sugary tea that they call ‘shock-victim tea’. Idris makes more calls, makes more plans for another dive, and the others sit at the table, three aside.
She pulls clothes out of her rucksack, a heavy-knit jumper over jeans. She can smell the filth of the pipe still on her, wishes she could swim in a chlorinated pool to cleanse herself of it because she loves the chemicals, likes to feel she’s not only clean but bleached.
‘What now?’ Joe says and they all look to Idris.
‘We eat,’ he replies.
Oliver collects takeaway from the local chippy and they sit in the lorry with the comforting smell of grease and with mugs full again. Gareth texts his wife, whispers the words he’s spelling, ‘sorry, sorry, I don’t know when’. Jen eats in silence, lost in memories of Claudia swirling, dreamlike, around her head, while the others talk around her.
The sun has bled out into the sky now, it’ll be dark in the next hour, and Jen wonders what Sam’s doing. Has Bill found the bolognese she left in the fridge for the two of them? She forgot to mention it to him and she thinks that maybe he might have taken Sam for chips tonight, and that’s OK because she’s had the same too and for a moment, she feels closer to the both of them.
‘Here,’ Gareth says, nods at his phone. ‘Mason is doing another appeal for witnesses.’
Jen leans in to watch Gareth’s screen, sees the name Mark Mason appear below the image of Claudia’s husband. The transformation from his first appearance on Tuesday morning to now – two days later – is unreal. He looks like a completely different person; his face pallid, skin taut against cheekbones. His mouth and the lids of his eyes look weighted, everything pulled downwards to the hell of the unknown, and that’s always the hardest thing, Jen thinks, the not knowing. Claudia’s family are all stuck, fighting against a tide that’s dragging them out to a bottomless, answerless, sea.
‘Have the investigative team discounted anyone yet?’
‘If they have, they’ve not told me what’s going on,’ Idris says.
‘If not the husband,’ Joe remarks, nodding to the footage, ‘then who’s done it?’
‘If,’ Jen says. ‘If she’s dead.’
Joe guffaws. ‘What, you think she’s gone on holiday and forgotten to tell anyone? Taken none of her stuff?’
‘The phone and laptop are missing,’ Oli says.
‘Right, so she’s gone with no clothes but her tech? Come on.’
‘If the dog-walker was right about seeing something, maybe she slipped in?’ Amir says. ‘Maybe she was drunk?’
‘She didn’t drink,’ Jen says and they all look at her.
She swallows hard, realises her mistake.
‘I read it about her – in one of her interviews.’
‘If she’s left out of her own accord, no one in her circle of friends or family seem to know anything about it,’ Idris says. ‘Not that she had many friends, having lived away so long, and by all accounts, her mother lives abroad.’
Jen nods slowly. She knows that Victoria Franklin had emigrated to Canada years ago and forgot – or, more accurately, discarded – the child that had needed her so desperately.
‘Does she know?’ she asks.
‘Her mother? I guess?’
‘I don’t trust Mason,’ Joe says.
‘Why not?’
‘Looks shifty.’
‘I feel for him,’ Amir says. ‘If he’s innocent in all this, he’s got the world watching at exactly the wrong time.’
‘No one is officially a suspect, remember,’ Idris says. ‘There’s no body. And even if there is one eventually, our job is then done. We don’t investigate. We dive, we find. We move on to the next job.’
Jen gets up, walks out of the lorry, and goes to lean against one of the trees that lines the lane. She’s desperate to call Bill or Kerry, for them to give her some stability. Both of them have been lighting up her phone for days, the notifications stacking up like building blocks. She knows Bill is worried about Claudia, like she knows Kerry wants to gossip, but of course, she can’t call them back.
She closes her eyes, summons the mantra that she repeats from the app she uses, Tranquil.
I will take on any challenges with a calm head, with rationality.
She needs the headspace to think about the one person she’s worried most about in all this. It’s not Claudia, it’s Mark Mason, Claudia’s husband.
Sam’s father.
Mark has called her numerous times from the phone that he uses for texting her, one that doubtless he hasn’t let on to the police about having, but he hasn’t left Jen any voicemails or messages, and she’s thankful for it, because although she longs to hear his voice, she can’t. For one thing, she’s on a job and can’t be distracted. For another, she’s become increasingly worried that Mark has somehow got something to do with Claudia’s disappearance, because what else could have happened? And if he has, what would that mean for her, and for Sam? She’s mad that Mark doesn’t respect that she can’t talk to him and yet at the same time, it’s beyond frustrating that she can’t just pick up his calls and judge for herself if his voice sounds different, if he seems ‘off’.
She’s known Mark for years and although her heart is one hundred per cent confident that he would never hurt Claudia, her police head knows that anyone, if pushed to their limits, can tip into a state where primal emotions are unleashed. She’s witnessed the switch enough times during her first years on response.
Her police head also reminds her that Mark has only been back in her life for nine months after years of being away, and in those years she’s changed, so obviously he must have done.
But she’s seen him every month, she says to herself. He’s still the same magnetic, charismatic, man, isn’t he? The question mark floats above her head, the answer for now unknowable.
She hears footsteps behind her and she turns to see Idris is out of the dive lorry and walking towards her.
‘You OK?’ he asks.
‘Yeah. Taking a moment.’
‘You mind company?’ he says.
‘Sure.’
They stand together, both leaning against the coolness of the huge tree. She knows Idris doesn’t expect conversation – he’s happy enough to be quiet with her. She steals a look at him, feels terrible that she’s inadvertently lying to him by keeping her silence about Claudia.
‘Guv says we’ve got until the end of the week and then the money runs out,’ he says after a while.
She blinks. ‘We’re stopping?’
‘Either she never went into the water, or she did and now she’s moved because of water disturbance and we’ve missed her while we’ve been looking elsewhere. We can’t continue this indefinitely because of who she is.’
‘We’ll get some flack for stopping if we don’t find her, won’t we? She’s all over the press.’
‘That’s because she’s beautiful,’ he says.
She nods. There’s no denying that the beautiful ones always get more airtime – the injustice of beauty privilege.
‘Not only because of that, though,’ she says.
‘No, I know. She was famous, I get it.’
‘She was an Olympic diver, and she goes missing two weeks before the next Olympics. It’s big news. And fucking weird.’
She swears too much, even within her internal monologue, but it’s the job and the men that she works with. Cussing has become a way of releasing all the bad things they see every day and it’s cathartic, it’s collective bonding, and now she can’t seem to stop.
‘But we’ve looked, haven’t we?’ Idris says. ‘We’ve been out for days. Nothing is fairer than having done our best.’
‘I know.’
‘And since when did you ever care what people thought?’
‘I don’t.’
He grins. ‘Getting soft in your old age.’
‘I’m fifteen years younger than you, Idris.’
He scoffs. ‘Haven’t seen your name on any of the Ironman boards.’
‘Because I’m an Ironwoman,’ she says.
‘That you are. You want another brew?’
‘Thanks,’ she says and he nods, and leaves.
She tilts her head up to the branches above her, exhales, and thinks about Mark, and the swan mangled in the darkness of the pipe. She thinks also about the early pink of that Sunday dawn, waking at the water-meadows.
FIVE
Every evening, Bill is the last on site to lock up the offices and the gates that give access to the road, but on a Friday he leaves with all the other men and they go out for a drink at The March Hare. On the way tonight, a few of them – including Bill – stop at the bookies and Bill wins eighty quid on the virtual horses, and then loses a hundred. He’s twenty down but feels fine about it. Jen tells him, often, that he’s a dick for gambling.
‘It’s a spiral,’ she says. ‘That goes straight to the fucking bottom.’
Jen, the solid, stable one out of the two of them. It shouldn’t be like that, should it? He’s older by two years. But how can Bill explain it to her? The fizz of his heart transcends anything else as he guns for the win. It’s living in the moment, it’s pure in the way that a drug high is, and wouldn’t they rather he was putting the odd tenner down than doing drugs? Christ, he thinks suddenly, what amazing life choices he’s given himself.
‘I’ve lost too much,’ Jonny says. ‘Let’s go.’
Bill nods his agreement, but right now he’d rather be anywhere else than walking to the pub. He wants to be with Sam in Jen’s flat. Sam is with Kerry tonight, though, and they’re probably watching a movie.
He’ll have one or two drinks, he thinks, as they approach the pub. He’ll go to the bar afterwards, to look normal, and then he’ll slip away.
The March Hare is a squat building nestled between the Tesco Express and the garage. In the front is a well-kept lawn, tables with umbrellas, where they usually order burgers from the barbecue, but it’s started to drizzle, so today they’ll all go inside and eat nachos.
Andy goes straight to the slot machines. Jonny sits back with two of the older guys and they watch some of the younger lads play pool. Bill sits with his pint, stares at the TV for the news, even when the channel is firmly on sports, and tries not to think about Claudia, but, of course, by trying not to think about her, he’s thinking about her, willing her into existence.
By rights, they never should have crossed paths. She went to a private all-girls school a few miles away where they all wore dark green blazers and boaters with the school-colour ribbon around them, little patent buckle shoes and knee-length white socks. He and his friends saw groups of them in town on Friday afternoons and it was his friend Jackson who pointed Claudia out to him.
‘That one,’ he’d said with an appreciative whistle.
She carried a little satchel around with her, battered tan leather, and she always wore it across her right shoulder. Bill watched the way the light played with all the colours of her golden hair, he studied the way she laughed with her friends, and he lay in bed imagining that those eyes would one day be made at him. He overheard people use her name and thought it was the most beautiful name he’d ever heard. He wrote it on his wall behind his bed, in black biro. He wanted to draw a heart around it but thought Jen would laugh at him for it.
Claudia’s life was a repetition of pony club meets, swimming galas and sampling different hummuses, whilst he came from the estate, rode a grubby second-hand bike and genuinely believed that the limp gherkins in his McDonald’s burgers would see him through his five a day. She didn’t have the hard weight of finance pinning her down like he did, but instead of resenting her for it, he’d always loved that about her – she was like something otherworldly, and the very thought of her was his own piece of escapism.
He still remembers the first time he talked to Claudia properly. It was the sixteenth of April 2004, when they were both fifteen, and she’d dropped a book she was carrying and he’d shouted out to her before his brain told him not to.
‘Hey, Claudia!’
