Stephen Gallagher - The Boat House

But, still…

He managed to pull her to the top of the stairs and then, with a little more dignity, to lift her up and carry her through to the bed. He laid her on top of the covers and then went back for the lost shoe. But then he couldn't get it onto her foot, and so he took off the other one and set the pair on the floor next to her. He avoided looking at her face. Her face was a stranger's now, too relaxed, and with its lines wiped like a tape. He ought to cover it with something, really, but somehow he couldn't bring himself to do it. Too much of an admission of the end. Too final.

He straightened her clothes. He crossed her hands and they fell into place quite naturally; by her hands, she might almost be sleeping. He kissed her once, on the forehead. Her body was warm, but the skin on her face was cool. The curtains were half open. He drew them shut.

From the doorway, he looked back. The way he'd laid her out, she looked like a Pope or something. A sudden rage turned in him like a beast in the deep, but within a second he'd fought it down. The surface remained calm. He went along the upper landing to the linen cupboard, and got out a folded bedsheet. It wasn't one of those they'd bought for the nursery; that had all been cot sized stuff. He wasn't exactly sure at which point she'd got rid of it; like everything else it had just gone, with no mention from either of them.

Like everything else.

This time, he looked at her face. All hurts forgotten.

And then he covered her.

He walked down the stairs like a man of twice the weight. He felt sick and impossibly, impossibly weary. His mind took in the details but made very little of them. Nothing stolen, nothing interfered with; to the unsuspicious observer, it might well have looked like yet another accident. No drowning element this time, though. She was widening her scope. One death by fire, another by falling.

For how long did the woman think she could go on like this?

Forever, in her own mind, perhaps; because Aldridge could see no end to it. He thought of the others. He thought of the children. And now this.

How was he going to tell anyone? You couldn't explain her. Not without looking into those eyes, and glimpsing what concealed itself behind them. Whatever it was, it was sharp and it was very, very clever. Whether it was really only a part of her, he couldn't say; expensive doctors argued over that kind of thing in courtrooms for days.

Mad dog , he thought.

According to procedure, he ought now to be calling his area sergeant. But he went back into the police office.

And there, without anger and without any obvious trace of passion, he got out the keys to his gun cupboard.

Ted Hammond's dream.

He's walking through the boatyard, while a mist is rising out over the lake. In the dream he comes across the dripping figures of Wayne and Sandy; they're down by the one of the docks, the one of the old dry docks that he's been cleaning out and restoring. Now that the boards are completely off, it's a square, dark pit that in certain light can look like an open grave. Although he's drained it now, in his dream it's still half filled by water and weeds. The two are stepping up out of the darkness of the pit.

His appearance is a surprise to them.

He says, "Wayne? Is that you?"

And Wayne says, "Go back, dad. You're not supposed to see us."

"But why, Wayne?" he says — the one, all encompassing question that he's been asking over and over since the day of their discovery. "Why?"

"She wouldn't like it," Wayne says.

"Come home," Ted pleads. "I'm sorry I got angry about your exams."

"No, dad," Wayne says, and he turns to look out over the water. There might be something in his expression, but Ted can't actually make out his face.

Sandy is beside him, saying nothing.

"I've told you," Wayne says. "We can't come home. We're with her, now."

It was getting late into the evening. Pete and Diane went to the restaurant, to see if Alina would be there. She wasn't, but Angelica explained how she'd borrowed the van and gone home. Diane glanced at Pete, and Pete said nothing. He hadn't seen Alina looking ill or unhealthy for some time, now; not since the evening of the big party. Then, she'd seemed to be struggling to hold herself together. After that night, it had never been an issue again.

And then, pressing them to complete secrecy — as she'd already pressed five other people so far in the evening — Angelica told them about Ross Aldridge's sensational new theory about the serial killer who had set up covert operations in the valley. Set up around the same time that Tom Amis had put in an appearance, she hinted heavily, and added that Aldridge had gone to interview him.

Again, Diane glanced at Pete.

Again, Pete said nothing.

Their next stop was at the yard for Pete to pick up his car; at this hour there shouldn't have been much of anything going on, just boat owners drifting in and out along the lakeside boardwalk or maybe using the laundromat or the vending machines. But the workshop lights were on, and Frank Lowry's car was still outside; for Lowry to stick around so late was pretty well unprecedented, and so Pete asked Diane to wait for a couple of minutes while he looked in to see if there was any problem.

"Ted's over at the marina," Lowry told him. "But don't expect him to make a lot of sense."

"What do you mean?"

"Don't ask me. I've given up trying to make him out. You're his friend, you take over. Something's wrong with him, and I'm sick of asking him what."

Pete went out between the workshop and the showroom, through an enclosed space that was crowded with big cruisers being stored out of the water. They'd been raised up on Valvoline drums and made secure with planks and wedges. They were crammed close together with a dozen well-used car batteries in the shelter under each of them, and the big hulls dwarfed anybody who walked through. He couldn't help feeling a little spooked. In daylight, he'd never given it a second thought.

Or in darkness, before tonight.

He could see Ted's lights out on the rough ground behind the house. They were the old incandescent gas-powered lamps with big reflectors that were hardly ever used, except in the winter time when they were handy for heating up the workshop. This part of the yard had always been something of a dumping ground for the relics of the trade — spare hulls and old skiffs, stacks of timber, cracked and useless celluloid windscreens, duckboarding… even an entire wooden building complete with windows, dismantled into sections and stacked for so long that they'd gone mossy and rotten. The lights were almost at the end of the property, where a row of fence posts and wire marched out into deep water to mark the boundary between the yard and the adjacent woodland.

The old dry dock, Pete realised as he drew nearer. The reflectors on the lights were angled into it.

All that Pete could see was the top of a ladder as he picked his way over the uncertain ground, but when he called Ted's name he saw the ladder move after a moment's delay. Ted appeared a few seconds later, clambering out of the dock as Pete approached. He stood looking flushed, slightly breathless, and — was Pete imagining this? — just a little wild.

"Ted," he said. "You've got Frank so worried, he won't go home. What's going on?"

"Nothing. I've told him as much."

Pete was going to take a look over into the dock, but Ted was somehow blocking his way. It didn't look deliberate.

Pete said, "So, what are you doing?"

"Cleaning it out, trying to free up the gear. There's thirty years of seepage and slime in there, but it's basically sound."

"Yeah, but at this hour…"

"When else?" Ted said. "What am I going to do, sit in the house and think? No thanks. It's difficult enough. Tell Frank to stop being such an old woman and get himself home. And you do the same."