Stephen Gallagher - The Boat House

Now this. A bonus. An innocent who'd somehow wandered down into the rat run, just asking to get bitten. Gazzer only had to stand in the middle of the towpath and wait as the man approached him. There was nowhere else for the man to go other than back, or into the canal itself.

There were yellow sodium lights down here, but most of them had been broken by kids throwing stones. Odd survivors burned like overhead beacons; there was one under the bridge just ahead, and another one about a hundred yards beyond. They showed the narrow dirt towpath, the black water, the broken windows of empty warehouses…

And the silhouette of the stranger, still walking toward him.

Gazzer flexed his fingers. They cracked like static.

The stranger stopped.

"I'd like to pass, please," he said, and Gazzer's heart soared. A foreigner. He need have no trace of conscience at all.

"Only when I get your money and your watch, fuckface," he said.

"I need money myself," the stranger said pleasantly. "May I see your knife?"

"I don't need a knife," Gazzer said, and he took a step forward to close the gap between them.

Something went wrong.

Gazzer aimed his headbutt, and the stranger moved; he tilted his own head and Gazzer's brains exploded.

That was what it felt like, anyway. Gazzer's legs went and he sat down heavily in the dirt, his nose smashed and his eyes full of tears. The stranger stood over him. He was rubbing the top of his skull just at the hairline, but seemed otherwise unaffected.

Gazzer started to rise. But the stranger reached down and took hold of his nose.

"I wouldn't," he said, as he twisted the broken cartilage and Gazzer's brains went nuclear. His arms flapped in panic, and he screamed. The scream echoed in the depths of the brick canyon.

"The bone can work its way in, you see," the stranger explained as he knelt and checked Gazzer's pockets with his free hand. Gazzer felt the roll of notes being removed from his jeans, but only as some distant background sensation. He reached for the stranger, but the stranger gave his nose another warning tug.

He screamed again.

"I've been down here half the night, waiting for someone like you," the stranger said. "You can keep your watch, I already have one of my own. But I really do need the money."

Gazzer blinked away the tears, and looked into the stranger's face. He was fair, he was young, he was nothing special; but with rare insight, Gazzer saw beyond all of that.

He knew that this was no accidental encounter. He knew that he'd fallen for bait like a fool. And he knew with certainty that the stranger would be capable of doing anything that he threatened.

Anything.

The man released his nose, and straightened.

"Thank you," he said pleasantly.

Gazzer coughed, and spat blood in a terrifying wad.

But the stranger had already turned and walked off into the night, back along the towpath in the direction from which he'd come.

Angelica Venetz stands at the rail of the restaurant's terrace. She's watching Walter Hardy — seventy years old, and still the Bay's most reliable handyman — as he moves out with waders and a boathook to take a look under the terrace's decking. Walter is small, thickset, and white whiskered; he does everything with patient slowness and, once started, he's impossible to stop.

"Is there a problem?" a voice from behind Angelica says, and she turns in surprise. She hasn't heard Alina walking across the terrace, and hasn't even been expecting her for another half hour. Alina stands there, her hands in her overcoat pockets, hair tied back and ready for business. She's been with them now for just over a month, and Angelica has never known a worker like her.

"You can bet there's a problem," she says. "Something's stuck under the terrace, and it's drawing the flies."

"What is it?"

"That's what we're going to find out."

Walter, down below them and with the waters getting perilously close to the tops of his waders, says, "Something's rotten under here. You been burying the people you've poisoned?"

"Go on, Walter," Angelica says. "You know perfectly well we put them in the curry."

"Buryin' 'em at sea," Walter persists, and he lifts the boathook and starts to stir around in the darkness beyond the terrace's supporting pillars. The boathook is usually kept on the wall behind the bar. It's a relic from the building's yacht pavilion days, and was originally used for hauling drunks out of the water. Now it catches on something, and Walter's round face tightens with the effort of pulling it free.

"Something there," he says, and he plunges the hook in again, this time with the intention of getting a secure hold so that he can heave out whatever it is into sight. If he can't, Angelica's thinking, it's probably going to mean the expense of having a part of the terrace decking taken up and relaid.

Alina leans on the rail beside Angelica, both of them looking down on Walter as he makes another thrust into the darkness beneath them. Angelica's thinking that a bag of garbage has probably been carried along on the night swell and has become caught up amongst the pillars and the metal cross ties; there will always be somebody who'll think that a couple of heavy stones and a drop out over the deepest part of the lake are an adequate way of disposing of all their empty cans and peelings and plate scrapings.

Now the gulls are starting to circle, taking a big interest. Definitely a bag of garbage, Angelica is thinking.

Walter's managed to get the hold that he needs, but now he's tugging and nothing's happening. He calmly changes his grip, and tries again.

"Come on, Walter," Angelica says. "Put me back in business."

She wouldn't have believed that he could move so fast as, with a rushing like that of fluid from a punctured sac, the rotten body comes slithering out in a wave of its own juices. The boathook is planted deep in its belly, a grotesque fifth limb that rears up into the air as it turns over.

Not a bag of garbage, then. Not unless you're really prepared to stretch the definition.

Finding it difficult to believe how controlled she's being, Angelica says, "Alina, the police constable's car is just across the square. Can you go and get him for me?"

But there's no reply.

Alina is no longer on the terrace.

The dead dog under the restaurant deck was to be a talking point for a couple of days, and then interest would shift elsewhere. Walter Hardy used the boathook to push it into the shallows, and then went off to borrow a small motor cruiser so that he'd be able to tow the carcase out to one of the marshy islands further down the lake. Here it could be wedged among the reeds, and would eventually be picked clean. For now the dog lay there, skinless like a rabbit and bloated with decay, awaiting his return. Angelica tried to avoid looking at it, but like the village children who gathered on the bank she found herself almost fascinated. Apart from some of its bones showing, it could have been some alien kind of embryo.

"It was probably hit on the road and then somebody threw it into the lake," Ross Aldridge, the young constable, told her. He was fair and quite softly spoken and actually a little shy looking, and he'd made a point of taking off his uniform cap when he talked to her. "Or else it just died of old age and the owners dumped it. I'll mark it down as a stray."

"So," Angelica said, "nobody's lost a dog around here?"

"If they have, they didn't report it. Without a collar, that's as far as we can go."

Needless to say, the boathook didn't go back to its place on the restaurant's wall. The planking was washed down with Jeyes fluid, and the deck was reopened to take advantage of the increasingly fine weather.