Water's Edge

Chapter XXXIII

The Pen Is Mightier...

If Hector had drowned on a Thursday, if the other bodies had been tailored around that time, it hadn't been Barnaby Wharton if he had been at a meeting every single day. Edith at home (or elsewhere). And if Matthew had abandoned Hector after their argument—maybe, Hector had just slipped. The Saxons and Soames Construction workers just missing him on the embankment, slipping into the waves. All a horrible series of coincidences. Benny killed in jealousy. Winthrop for being the enemy of the left. I would hate it if that were true; if the communists had done it, that just fuelled the flames of Unionism and other fascistic tendencies. If the right did it, it confirmed in me that they were as evil as people like Wren proclaimed. Nothing good comes of murder. Nothing good comes from a boy slipping into fast waters. Am I just naïve? Am I just too hopeful?

"Fields?" Womack and Umberwood were stood side by side staring at me, "You were gone then, what were you thinking about?"

Umberwood looked concerned. Yazmin Womack, tired, "Detective, are you still with us?"

"Yeah." I finally said, letting go of the handle, "You talked to them yet?" I asked Yazmin.

"Prelim. Nothing more." She looked to Umberwood and back, "We have enough to charge them. Can't show you what we have, but we have enough."

"Yeah. Benny Harrison... fool."

"Yeah."

"And why are you here?" I asked Umberwood, ready to leave, ready to give up.

DCI and 'The Undertaker' looked to one another, "Wanna see something interesting?"

The two other bodies were sprawled out in the pathology lab. I stood at the corner of the room, not wanting to change, not wanting to contaminate. I was giving up. My next port of call would be Edith, and I'd tell her it was the hippie kids and go home. I felt like I was in a Scooby Doo mystery and it turned out to be Velma. Fuck my life.

But I had to keep watching, waiting. Umberwood had started waxing verbose about this & that principle of the art behind the science, but something caught my ear—

"Pen?"

"Yeah... on all the bodies, apart from Hector, traces of glyceride, a pyrrolidone, a resin and a colourant. Most of it gets washed away, and the oldest of the bodies, Winthrop Suggitt over there, barely anything. The colourant stays. It's like permanent marker, Sharpie."

"Someone is drawing on them?"

"I mean, it could be nothing, could be left over traces of an address they wrote on their hand. Like this one..." She walked past the younger of the two bodies, "We identified them, both. But this one had an address on their hand, just washed away in the currents."

"Who are they?"

"Well, this one, with the address, is Andrew Berg. The other is a young lad, who went by Poppy."

"Another environmentalist?" I was getting tired now. It felt like the victims pendulumed from all sides of the political spectrum. But with the anarchistic tendencies of the rebels, and with how little Wren seemed to think of Benny, maybe they just got rid of those who were too violent: the irony.

"And a journalist. Andrew Berg is a freelancer."

I came closer now. I could tell, from just past cases, that the bodies seemed to be approximately months apart in decay. Scott 'Poppy' Popperton and Andrew Berg seemed to be closer to one another. I wanted to give in and trust those who had taught me the very skills I was using now, but someone was using the privacy of that estuary to kill; Hector may have slipped and fallen, and perhaps this Poppy wrapped in their own clothes as if mummified, but I knew – knew – something else was going on here.

I was about to ask Viv what they thought, when the door opened. DCI Womack stood there, somewhere between embarrassed and steadfast, "You have to leave."

"Ma'am not happy with me being in here then."

"Not in the slightest."

I headed for the door immediately. No point rattling this cage more. I paused in the doorway though and gave Viv a look, as if to ask the question without words. She buried her head behind the bulk of the computers, and Umberwood sighed, exhausted, acquiescing.