Water's Edge

Chapter VII

The Eddies Switch & Yawn

Leo Shanks told his men what they needed to do before taking me round the back of the managerial offices, a brown blot on the horizon for miles around. They had flattened the land to build a series of tributaries to siphon the water back towards the coiling hangnail of concrete that covered the Humber mouth. Part hydroelectric, part inspired by the Thames Barrier, it was a masterful piece of engineering. I asked if Leo felt proud of what they were building here. He just shrugged, or didn't hear me, and pointed to a kind of dune buggy that could navigate the mud, the marshes, the sludge.

We buzzed down over the muddy dunes that had formed over the try-hard farmland. Irrigation and microdams had saved some of the fields, but not for further agriculture; it was muck all the way down. Everything was coming to a head. These mud-laden embankments would be returned to glory, suitable for housing developments. Every few bumps, I'd see a sign stood in the middle of nowhere, like a scarecrow: Soames Housing Development, Spitfire Lawns. They looked more ritualistic than practical. Only people like Leo would see such a thing out here. A reminder, I guess. Don't forget who pays the bills.

We eventually reached the water's edge. Copses of trees had survived the first layers of flooding they had drained. They were as determined as I used to be. Leo explained how the dam would work, and why the area had these cut hollows, these fake barge-lanes that they used to move bags of concrete over to the site. I could see a barge bobbing a few feet away.

Leo kept a few yards behind. He spoke on his telephone. I thought it was to his boss for a while until I realised it was his wife. One missing boy and every child might as well have vanished overnight. The dark was still. The birds had stopped rustling the leaves. The water lapped at my feet and I didn't give a damn. Time for the sixth cigarette, I think.

The gloam had come in. My red ash must have looked like a firefly. It caught the attention of insects on the thick leaves of things not quite weeds, not quite anything. No garden would have them. My shoes were getting mucky, and if it got any darker I wouldn't see a damn thing. But twilight was always a good time to find bodies, especially drowned ones. The eddies changed, the currents switched and yawned—people check in the day and the bodies will hide in their usual haunts. At night they are invisible. At this time, there was a chance.

I blew the smoke out the corner of my mouth and watched it meet the mist on the estuary. I followed it for a short while coiling and sucked away.

"Why did it do that?" I called back to Leo.

"Did what do what?"

"The smoke—" I did it again and Leo watched it siphoned away.

"The barrier uses turbines, pulls the water under and through. It's so powerful it can make water flow upwards, I wouldn't be surprised it's dragging a bit of air with it."

"How do we get to the other side?"

Leo took us back around on the buggy to a make-shift dock. Motorboats with the Soames emblem bobbed on the waves, same as a body would. And we took one out. Leo knew what I knew. We could feel it. I wanted to ask how he had missed the obvious, but that was an obvious question in its own right: grief blinds.

The concrete, the siphoning pipes, the metal clang of internal works—it formed a dragon sleeping in the waves. I flicked my cigarette into the water, "What cha do that for?" Leo chastised but I pointed to the fleck of stub as it rolled through the waters. We followed it as it hit the edge of an artificial embankment before vanishing, "Where'd it go?" It did look like it hadn't taken a route into the mechanisms of the dam. We chugged the boat nearer.

Leo vomited over the side. I struggled not to. But I had to look.

Bodies always look relaxed, relieved. Even if the eyes are bulging from waterlogging, they seem freed of something. Blocking an unkempt, duckweed laden stretch of brackish water, a second dam had formed, preternaturally. Four bodies in a tableau of limbs, mirrored, a Rorschach blot of white limbs. And leant against them, like a throne of flesh, Hector Wharton. Five bodies in total.

Definitely a more than 12 cigarette kinda case.