Prologue
There has always been the river. Sometimes it comes at a canter, sometimes in a torrent, depending on weather and whim. This early evening, it is placid and smooth, a blue-grey snake that lies more or less still, ready to strike.
A woman, hot from her run, takes off her shoes and socks and cools her aching feet in the satin chill of the water. The air is thick, the river is inviting. Around her is the peace that comes just before dusk in the countryside, the day all but over, the swelter gone, the breeze rising to greet the beginnings of night.
Elsewhere a man, also warm from his constant movement, backpack cutting into his shoulders in familiar – and welcome – thrum of pain. He moves down the river path, up again, never still. At night he sleeps nearby, watches the insects settle and swarm above the surface, little motes of life. Above him bats flit, soundless, twisting and swerving into the living clouds. If you only eat midges, he thinks, you must need to keep hunting the long night through, just to fill your tiny bat belly. Larger creatures appear too, especially if he doesn’t move much: big fish rise up gulping to the surface, mouths puckered; voles and shrews, ratty and swift, dart in and out of the water, slick and slippery as if they have been oiled. Once he saw an otter, incongruous as if from a picture book, resting on the bank, paws across its chest.
People are drawn to water, day and night. To eat and drink, to gather and stare. They ignore him, mostly. If he is walking, head down, they let him go by, a figure lost in his own private world. Sometimes they jog past him, huffing at the temerity of his existence, daring to slow them down for a micro-second. As dusk comes, and he finds his spot for the night, he becomes completely unseen, ignored. A part of the landscape, the unconsidered backdrop. He witnesses romantic assignations, kisses and cuddles, hungry hands clawing atop scanty summer clothes. Skinny-dips in the river: shrieks of joy and cold, bright flares of flesh in the gloom.
Not just joy, of course. There is never just joy in the world. He sees fights, hears shouts and curses, wounding words that can never be taken back. There is danger here. The river, which loops and bends, bracketed by thick lines of trees and vegetation, is always both public and private. You can do all sorts, especially in those moments of half-light early and late.
And whatever else happens, the river keeps going, ever onward. Unlike life, which can be suddenly stopped when you least expect it.
Book One: Watershed
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies.
John Keats, ‘To Autumn’
Chapter One
Jake Jackson, happy, is standing in a second-hand bookshop, lost in thought. His fingers trace the spines of books that all bear the scars of reading. Softly battered, marked by time and use. Shabby, like him. Outside, through the bay window, the afternoon looks mild and warm and sleepy, a final soft exhalation of summer. No cars move down this cobbled street. Not that many people either.
He is in Meryton, the largest town near Little Sky, the farmhouse where he lives. Three streets of shops, a school, two churches, three pubs, and mostly small, snug cottages, built for local labourers over the past few centuries. Jake doesn’t come here often, but he loves books, especially detective books, and can’t be without access to a bookshop. He enjoys the randomness, the serendipity of visiting a place where he can’t predict what exactly might tempt him, stocked as it is by the whims and subjective tastes of those unknown folk who live close by. He likes objects that have been given up, spurned even, something he can reclaim. In any case, he has no choice. Little Sky is not on a postal route, and so he cannot receive deliveries by men in shorts representing faceless companies. His house has no internet access either, so the world of online shopping is removed entirely.
Every couple of weeks, he gets a lift the ten miles or so along meandering lanes to Meryton, buys a few books, and runs them home, following the route of the river that lies across the landscape like a solid line scribbled on a page. It has become a pleasant ritual in a life where such minor moments of routine are plotted and treasured.
Jake hears a gentle cough and peers over his shoulder, pushing his long, sun-streaked hair clear to meet the eyes of the man standing behind the cash register. The bookseller is entering late middle age, thick-rimmed black glasses contrasting with a pale and freckled face, his hair grey, his cropped stubble white as chalk. Behind him is a sign with the name of his establishment in ornate lettering: BOOKS DO FURNISH A ROOM. Some sort of literary joke.
Sam Fryer (‘I should’ve opened a chippy,’ he once told Jake) has been running the shop for decades, having fled his former life in the city as a teacher. He had a radical background there: was a marcher, a heckler, a self-righteous protester on behalf of social justice, but had eventually grown worn down by his failure to change the world, and worn out by the demands of teaching unwilling children. His shop was his passion, his escape.
Sam had not given up his history in one conversation, but in several, over many months of Jake’s regular attendance. His voice soft and searching, his eyes calm, pale grey as pebbles. Jake had told him – in similarly protracted fashion – some of his own past: his life as a policeman, a detective in fact, a loyal member of an institution Sam had once so lustily reviled. Now both older, both removed from that urban world, they could be wry and understanding of one another’s former lives.
‘Jake, will you make your mind up and buy something? I’d like to close up in a second.’
There is a clock on the wall to the side of them, ticking thoughtfully. ‘It’s barely even five o’clock, Sam. I’ve no idea how you make this place pay.’
Sam is clearing his desk, stacking papers and books. ‘I overcharge the likes of you. It’s a seller’s market. If you didn’t have me, where would you go?’
Jake carries his book choices to the desk, well-thumbed paperbacks as ever, selected with no great theme in mind, with names that have grown familiar to him over time: Fred Vargas, Ellis Peters, Lucy Foley, Ian Rankin.
He hands over a twenty-pound note, and waves away the change. If you have money, he thinks, you should always share it generously with people who provide something you value. And Jake is, by any standards, wealthy. He inherited a
farmhouse called Little Sky from his uncle Arthur, along with his love of books, a library of thrillers, and enough money to live comfortably forever. Arthur’s death had defined Jake’s life, enabled him to leave the force and the city, embrace the rolling quietude of the deep countryside, seek peace.
Sam ushers him out of the door, where he nearly bumps into a solid figure walking swiftly past. He carries a heavy backpack, like a soldier’s, three or four times the size of Jake’s, and he is marching like a soldier, head down and fast, yomping along as if part of an invisible cohort somewhere on the moors. Jake’s impact moves him a fraction sideways, but scarcely checks his momentum. He does not look back, waves off Jake’s apology, and heads relentlessly on. His body is thick and trim, his T-shirt blackened with sweat, his hair shorn almost to the skin, like a penitent.
Jake shouts another apology, to no avail, and turns back to Sam, who looks rueful.
‘You’ll not get much out of him.’
‘I’ve seen him around the place, along the river. Always marching up and down.’
Sam is leaning against the doorway, rolling a cigarette. ‘That’s Martin. He buys the occasional book here, but I wouldn’t say I’ve got to know him. He always looks like he’s running away from something, and in a sense he is.’ Sam lowers his voice, rests a hand on Jake’s shoulder. ‘I hate to gossip, as you know.’ Jake grins at the manifest untruth. ‘But he left his name when he was waiting for a book, and I googled him. Martin George. There was a man of that name a few years ago, lost his wife and daughter. The youngster was killed, the wife assaulted, you know, raped, in their house while he was out.’
‘Jesus. Poor guy.’
‘It’s worse even than that. He was on early shift, left for work in the middle of the night, accidentally left the door open. Just forgot to check it properly, left it swinging, an invitation to the wrong person. Someone went in, opportunistic, I suppose. Wife never forgave him, moved away. It broke him, as it would, wouldn’t it? He gave everything up, lives more or less on the river now, spends his days walking about the place, sort of restless. He’s, I don’t know, empty when you speak to him, emptied out.’
Sam has lit his cigarette and taken several deep puffs, and now stubs it on the wall, red sparks careening to the ground. ‘Anyhow, I’ve not got time to
chat. That’s the whole reason I kicked you out in the first place.’ He pats Jake once more, a gesture of kindly solidarity, and heads inside.
Jake slides his purchases into his own backpack, and shrugs it tight onto his shoulders. It is a lovely late afternoon for a run, warm but not hot, the air a balm against his skin. He is wearing old cloth shorts, once blue but now grey with over-washing, and a dark green vest. His arms are well-muscled, a pale blue vein snaking across each bicep, his calves knotted beneath hairs that have been coppered by the summer sun. He walks in the direction Martin has gone, then takes two turns which bring him to the river’s edge.
He could hear the water before, but now he sees it, navy blue flecked with foamy white as it courses, heedless, past him. The low sun coats its surface like bronze polish. It is wide at this point, a hundred yards across or more, and in the distance to his left he can see the structure of a bridge, once stone now concrete, casting long shadows into the water. He sets his feet on the small pathway that borders the river. The ground in front of him is already a patterned carpet of discarded leaves, those freshly bleached greens and yellows mixed with umber and ochre, life’s rot, muddied and soft and scuffable.
Jake begins to jog, keeping the water to his right as he goes, a constant companion for the next ten miles. His stride is long and easy, his daily regime of running around the vast perimeter of his property making his legs feel hardy, his lungs full and wide. He sees almost nobody. A cottage, from which smoke snakes into the silvery blue of the early evening, the only sign of hidden life.
There is hardly any traffic on the river either. A man in an ancient rowboat, in the shade of a willow, thick-jumpered and still, a fishing rod leaning out precariously into the water. A single barge, grubby and water-beaten, huffing and puffing past, scarcely faster than his running pace. Quiet once more. The path follows the bends of the river, long and sinuous, like a casually outstretched arm. The light begins to fade with the afternoon, the water darkens, now chestnut-coloured, glossy as paint.
He can feel the pull in his muscles, the mild strain that makes getting to the end of exercise worthwhile in the first place. A larger boat passes him, a sailboat, broad and impressive, large-bellied and billowing with the insistent breeze.
That belly of the sail reminds him of pregnancy, makes him
think of Livia. He had met her three years before, the local vet, and they had fallen in love. He had never had children, not in his first marriage, which ended in a welter of miscarriages and regret. He thought he might never have them, but this last summer – amid an investigation into murder on an archaeological dig – Livia had shyly, magnificently confirmed she was having his baby. That fact is now the centre of his existence, something that he weighs continually, clutches in his mind, a blessing and a burden of responsibility. He is desperate for nothing to go amiss, for disaster not to strike. He feels always a second away from bad news, knows he has an endless foreshadowing of a flinch. It annoys Livia, he can tell, that he has this edginess, this fear that seems as solid and growing as the child inside her.
Jake shakes his head to clear negative thoughts. He is nearly home, the shape of his surroundings now recognizable: a hawthorn tree, trunk wizened and wrenched forward like an old man leaning on a stick, its berries already weighing down the branches, pinpricks of blood against the lush green of the leaf; the bank of cornflowers on a hummock rich with wild grass, a needless tuft in the landscape, shaggy and speckled with blue. He strikes off on a path that takes him past Livia’s house. He slows to let his breathing settle, the throb of his pulse loud in his ears.
Inside the garden, Livia is sitting on a chair by the door, her mind elsewhere, green eyes wide open, as she frets a piece of material in her hands. She stands as she sees him, her expression a little absent, preoccupied, her legs long and brown, still glinting in the incoming dusk.
‘Lovey, I was going to leave a message for you. That woman by the river, they’ve found her phone, her shoes, but no other sign of her. Do you think she’s lying somewhere? Do you think she’s dead?’
Chapter Two
The missing woman is called Claire Davidson, small, short-dark hair, early thirties, a nurse with a husband and two children. She had been gone a couple of days and already there was a hue and cry about her. Livia had followed the story from the outset, it had preyed on her mind, and she now spent too much time monitoring its progress, hungry for news of Claire’s fate.
Claire had been on a walk or run by the river, some form of exercise. She’d been wearing lycra, mainly pinks and purples, and had headed off on a route that should have taken her – according to her regular habits – no more than an hour or two. Then nothing. Disappeared from the land completely.
Jake knows most of this only from Livia herself. He tries to divorce himself from the news, in any form. At Little Sky, it is easy. Once he had lived an urban life as a detective, over-filled with incident, with events of cruelty and chaos. He had spent time trying to explain it all, to piece together what had led to disappearances and assaults and deaths, to make sense of what appeared so often senseless. Now, where he can help it, he no longer seeks information about what is going on in the world.
He leans forward into Livia’s hug, inhaling the cherry perfume of her hair, feeling that hard knot in her stomach nestling against him. ‘Liv, is this the hormones talking, d’you think? You seem very invested in that woman.’
She jabs him archly. ‘Well forgive me for caring about another human being.’ She sighs, as the jab becomes a stroke, her fingertips pushing down the fibrous hairs on his arm. ‘You’re probably right. But only a bit. I feel sorry for her, that’s all. In the photos, she has this kind, this searching, this – I don’t know – hapless face. And I hate the thought of something happening to her. What do you think’s gone on?’
‘It’s an odd thing, but people really do disappear, especially in places a little out in the wilds. She could’ve been attacked, sure, but she could’ve decided to go for a swim, people do, and just not been ready for the water.’
‘You swim all the time, it must be safe in summer, mustn’t it? I’m always walking past half-naked folk diving in the river.’ She sniffs at him. ‘And, by the way, you could do with some sort of plunge right about now.’
He pulls up a chair, mock-frowning, feeling the damp droop of his vest, smelling the animal tang of drying sweat. ‘That’s what comes from grabbing me as soon as I walk in.’ Livia has poured him a cold glass of home-made lemonade from a jug half-filled with ice and mint. It is sharp and herby. He swallows a large mouthful. ‘No, the water’s pretty cold even at this time of year. Definitely still dangerous.’
‘Hard to believe an impromptu swim could be deadly, though. And where’s her body?’
Jake stands up and stretches. ‘You’d be surprised. Water’s never really safe. And you’re always telling me not to see conspiracies everywhere.’
The garden is small, and overlooks fields that stretch into the distance, pale greens, stubbly browns, and one shock of yellow, a wide patch of rapeseed that has not yet been harvested. In the apple tree above them, a solitary cuckoo offers a modest serenade, two paired notes floating gently down, simple as a flute. Behind them, in the kitchen, he can hear Diana, Livia’s daughter, singing less tunefully to herself as she does her homework. She was a welcome product of an unwelcome liaison with a father she has never met, and is now eight, a big fan of Jake, somewhat changeable on the subject of a new sibling on the way.
Her head pops out from the open door for a second, an animal from its burrow, hair wild with dark curls, her eyes green like her mum’s but paler and softer, a washed-out watercolour.
‘You look like a right sweaty mess, Jake.’
‘Afternoon to you, little one.’
Chapter Three
Water is still on his mind when he gets home. The sky has paled to ballet-shoe pink. There is still welcome warmth in the air and the ground. Jake drops his backpack by the door, kicks off his clothes and walks to the pier that stretches into Chandler Lake. The name is a deliberate nod to crime fiction, as it is with the other landmarks of his vast, undulating, isolated property: Agatha Wood, Poirot Point, fields called Bosch, Morse and Wimsey.
He had always been suspicious of wild swimming, and the online trumpeting and tribalism that seemed to accompany it. But the shock of chill water to the body has become an experience he craves, pitched somewhere between therapy, trial, and sensory jolt. It’s like a proof of living, as he now leaps in and feels his breath torn from his body, the enveloping velvet of coolness, the dark depths beneath the soft-hued sky. There is danger here, but also release. He wonders how Claire had felt about the same sensation, if indeed she had.
The next morning, Livia is waiting for him and together they drive in her battered Volvo to a hamlet called Westerby, a scattering of houses in one of the bends of the river. It was here that Claire Davidson had last been seen, and where her belongings had been found. There is another search planned for this morning, and they can see when they arrive a gathering of volunteers, many clad as if for a summer picnic: bare legs and sunhats, bottles of water and dark glasses. Some are brandishing their phones, complaining about a lack of signal.
Jake recognizes some of the locals. Families from Parvum, a dad he half-knows from Diana’s school. Sarah from the village shop, the Jolly Nook, is closest to the river, slightly aloof, arms folded and apprehensive, kicking the turf as she waits and listens to a suet-faced, lumbering figure who is probably a farmer. Rose and Lily are there too: brother and sister, he a harmless scoundrel, she an archaeology student, both sitting on the damp ground, faces raised in anticipation of the heat of the day. Livia greets them with hugs and flops down beside them. Jake’s progress is checked by a hand to his arm. He spins round and sees another familiar face, Jo, one of his closest friends in the area. She is a journalist, reluctantly running the news operation of a local newspaper that has mostly become a vapid and garish website, a cantankerous, charming, loyal figure, who had long been close to Livia and has warmed to Jake since his arrival.
Her face is closed, disgruntled. She has a cigarette in one hand, and expels smoke as she talks. It feels fitting, she is fairly smouldering with annoyance.
‘Jakey, I thought you and Liv would come along to this. There’s a pretty good turnout of the local citizenry, mostly good sorts. But there’s a few strangers too, look yonder.’
A group of people standing on the wall by the bridge. Young, at least younger than Jake, the men in T-shirts with the arms rolled up to their shoulders, hair fluffed up at the front in poodleish fashion, the women in tiny shorts and long shirts. They are filming each other and themselves on their phones, a general hubbub of singsong narration audible even at this distance.
Jo snorts with derision. ‘This whole story is getting too big already. It’s partially my lot’s fault, I know. We’ve all been pitching the tale of the bouncy white nurse and her mysterious disappearance, real heartstring stuff. The nationals have got excited, there’s a broadcast truck somewhere blocking the road into the village. Hairy-arsed engineers sipping their tea in the street. I can handle that; I’m used to it, I’m part of it, if I’m honest. But this shower over there really boil my piss. Influencers. They’ve come here to solve a mystery for their fucking TikTok following.’
Jake is quiet, as Jo runs slightly out of steam. ...
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