The city was split by a river.
Running from the hills in the north to the sea in the south, it traced a boxer’s broken nose through the city and named her; the river was the Onward, the city Onwardston.
The Onward sprang from the earth in these northerly hills thousands of years ago, unseen and unremarked upon. Now though her every drop was recorded and analysed, and the hills that begat her were designated as national parkland. At the topmost point, around the source, access was limited to those the locals referred to as ‘Water People’, and the occasional visiting dignitary. Lower down though, below the baffles and stripes of wire fencing, the public were free to ramble and roam. On the eastern side of the river the hillocks were dominated by one steep hill known locally as ‘The Bluff’, it was visible from any approach, and on a clear day could even be seen from the harbour and the sea.
It was on this national parkland, in the shadow of the Bluff that the body was found just after daybreak on a summer’s day. The morning was brushing against a body lilac with exposure and rigor mortis, the purple of pursed lips, it was found by a runner rushing past, pushing through the silt, soil and grass, almost treading on the creeping wrist, camouflaged within the surrounding palette.
Protocol dictated that there were two Investigators called to the scene, two men, approximately the same height, just under a decade apart in age. Both of them wore suits, one blue, the other grey, they were approximately the same build but the elder, Morandi, was slightly broader, with a beard that he ran his left hand across as he looked at the body: The body of a woman, a rough estimate placing her age in the mid-forties.
The younger, Cotan, clean shaven, stood with his hands in his trouser pockets trying not to look at the body, not to look at the woman’s mouth fixed into an ‘O’. He felt that in the peaty darkness behind her teeth, the darkest thing he could see on the hill, he was looking at where and when her soul had escaped the body. He forced his attention elsewhere.
‘What’s that?’
The lifeless figure was completely naked, engaged in an undignified swimmer’s crawl. The only thing adorning the body was a small cardboard red fir-tree dangling from the big toe of the left foot.
‘It’s an air-freshener for a car.’
As if shy of the scrutiny the tree slipped from the foot and fell to the floor, the investigators watched it in silence.
They walked the 300 yards to where the Immediate Response team were stood with the jogger, wrapped up, drinking tea from a disposable cup. Under the restorative blanket she was wearing luminous fitness gear that though mostly covered, still dazzled in its contrast to the countryside and to the corpse. With the shock of her grisly discovery she’d gone chatty rather than quiet though that hadn’t stopped her vomiting, which Cotan noticed glistening at their feet, caught in the shrubbery like lamb’s tails.
Natalie Whitaker told them that she went running every other day, apart from weekends. She left her husband Nathan, an engineer, in bed and set off across the moors, in summer at least. In winter she preferred the streets and street lamps. She was home before her children had to be readied for school. She always carried a phone with her, this was how she had called the police, and she indicated a zipped pouch strapped to her left upper arm as she talked.
She had seen nothing out of the ordinary except perhaps more tyre tracks than normal around the entrance to the park. She had put this down to joyriders, who often left evidence of their exploits in the form of drained beer cans and the occasional burnt out shell of a vehicle.
In the morning sun the tyre’s impression was crisp and sculptural, Morandi studied the hollows and the glinting granules of the silt within these tiny peaks, the sun was rising, pulling shadows across the vanillary ground. He instructed Cotan to make sure someone photographed them, and “something sensitive of the body that we can show people.”
Morandi stood up with a sigh and clicking in his knees. He looked back along the footpath to the jogger, staring into a maudlin middle distance, and beyond her to the dead body; he could just see the upturned left foot. It reminded him of the few times he had played golf, approaching a flag beyond a bunker. He felt guilty at the thought and looked beyond it to the bluff, a brooding lunar triangle.
In the park the day felt empty and useless. The sun seemed to be speeding up in its ascent and was causing him to squint. Turning anticlockwise he saw a building. It was a solid looking stone cottage, one of many that were built when the land became parkland, part administrative centres part accommodation for people working for the National Parks. Morandi set off down the driveway. He looked down at the silt rolling into his shoes and thought about the beach and getting sand in sandwiches and the bitter crunch that followed. He thought about the grains of silt he’d seen around the dead woman’s mouth, he’d first thought it the burr of a friction burn. Reaching the building he banged on the door but there was no answer, though he thought it looked occupied, there was something about the way the curtains had been drawn in the windows, they must have started work early today he thought.
He turned to see Cotan on the phone; he would be reporting back to the Consultants. He then started waving to Morandi, who met him by their car.
‘There’s a man lives down in the valley, says his wife is missing. Apparently she never made it home from work. We’re to wait around, see what’s happening,’
They weren’t allowed to go talk to the man themselves, which is what Morandi’s instinct told him to do, and so stood there a moment. He had grown accustomed enough to his work in Onwardston that he recognised this sensation of stifled inclination, when he didn’t do what he would naturally do and instead went somewhere else. They decided to go for breakfast, which was, Morandi reflected, what they often did in this situation.
Since management of the police force had been ceded to private companies and individuals, Morandi had worked for a few forces, had seen it as way of getting to see the country. Nationally over 50% of the police force was privately funded but it varied from region to region and city to city. The government’s policy had been that a company could take over the ‘security and wellbeing’ of an area if the local council thought it a good idea. The new privately funded forces tended to have inscrutable sobriquets like the Firm, the Force, the Organisation, that simply served to underline the suspicion with which they were now held. Cotan and Morandi worked for Albert Mond; a local man who had made his fortune through systems engineering and had tendered for the opportunity to run the force in late middle age. He had applied the deconstruction of process of his previous occupation to the business of investigating crime and there were strict divisions of labour. This meant that Morandi and Cotan weren’t considered sensitive enough to interview this man; if he had simply been a suspect it would be fine but because he was potential widowered as well it meant the Bereavement team had to go, “the grievers” as they were known in the office.
They drove down the hill. After a quarter of a mile a reservoir appeared in sight on their left, hunkered behind the moorland. A few cars passed them going the other way; commuters were beginning to head to work. Anyone that looked into their car may have assumed that Cotan and Morandi were brothers such was their similarities in height and dress. Next to the reservoir was where the Water had carved out half a hill to build their local research headquarters. On one side the hill was as normal but the other was a gleaming rectangle of steel and glass, brutal in its corners, it dominated the landscape.
‘It’s a real fuck you to the countryside isn’t it?’
‘Yeah but who argues with the Water these days? People are so scared, they’ve tipped money into the Water and its “potential solutions”.’
National concern over the increasing scarcity of water had lead to the development of a government department dedicated to the issue. As its work was considered so important it tended to operate unhindered by inspection, and because of this autonomy had gained a reputation as a shadowy organisation that the electorate simply referred to as The Water, held accountable for any number of perceived iniquities or adverse developments in the city. Because of Onwardston’s location; on the coast and matured around a big river it was chosen as their operational headquarters and a number of other sites and plants were built.
‘They don’t scrimp on promotion either do they?’
Morandi was referring directly to the signs that they passed on the way up past the crystal building. Blue billboards reading H₂OPE lined the road, the new slogan of the company, encouraging investment.
The cafe where they went for breakfast was just below these headquarters and they mingled with workers about to start and those who had finished their shifts. Whilst Cotan ordered at the counter Morandi found them a table. Sitting at the window he looked out onto the dry patch of earth that had been cleared to make a car park. Every car he could see parked beneath the youthful birch trees had the emblem of the Water stuck to the windscreen.
He thought about his position as an Investigator in Onwardston. It was taking some getting used to, it was the first job he’d had where he’d taken an interest in the organisational-structure chart. It was complicated and he’d limited himself to getting to grips with the departments that he’d have most regular dealings with. There was the Immediate-Response (or IR) team whose job was self-explanatory; ‘first there, last to leave’ was that department’s motto. Then the Investigators would arrive next. They might just be there to look, they might be there to talk to people, or just generally soak up the scene, report back before moving on, to wherever the Consultants, who were the next level of the organisation, but who never really left the office, directed them to, they were about analysing data. The way Morandi thought of it was the IR was simply physical presence, Investigators were the senses and Consultants were the brains. There were other departments like the Bereavement Team and those responsible for such things as interviewing and the analysis of evidence but Morandi hadn’t extended his corporeal metaphor to cover these yet; that was the type of conversation he could imagine having with Cotan over breakfast.
When Cotan came over with their drinks he had obviously also been thinking about work, ‘I hear when you joined they offered you a position as a Consultant?’
‘Yeah, that’s right,’
‘Didn’t fancy wearing those slippers then?’
As might have been expected there was some mild resentment between the departments. The Consultants were pictured as wearing pipes and slippers, reluctant to get their hands dirty. Morandi believed that Mond encouraged this; it reinforced the need for the divisions of labour if the members of each department believed that they were somehow fundamentally different.
‘Not really no; I don’t like the idea of being stuck in an office all day long.’
Besides he thought to himself, he could do that in the future, that was what his partner Emily had said to when they’d talked about it.
‘It’ll keep you safe, when you’re getting too old to run down thieves.’
He had liked it when she had said that; there was the implication that she would be there with him, at that age, and the thought had relaxed and warmed him.
Cotan changed the subject,
‘Have you heard about the protests?’
‘In the Burh?’
The Burh was the most affluent area of the city, named after the Middle Ages fortification that used to dominate the area, and which was still evident in the gentle ditches, steepling banks and fragments of ancient walls, that now served to protect nothing but a sense of history in the city and a superciliousness native to any residents of that area.
Cotan nodded over his coffee.
‘Yeah that’s not going to end well,’
‘It’ll be interesting to see how old Mondy deals with it, him living round there,’
Cotan couldn’t help but informalise his employer’s name. It was a tactic of a lot of Morandi’s colleagues indulged in; maybe to distract themselves from how much of their own livelihood depended on the whims of one man.
‘He’s kept out of it so far,’
‘Yeah but I’ve heard one of his daughter’s is involved... you’re right though, it’s not going to end well.’
After breakfast they drove back to the office. The morning sun was pleasantly warm and they had the windows down, an early summer’s breeze refreshing enough to allow them to think of unrelated things.
‘Nice day for a pint.’
Morandi responded with a simple puckered-lip nod.
The office was an exemplar of Albert Mond’s taste; it was a former Victorian hospital, built to house and treat the insane, sympathetically converted at great expense to suit the purposes of his police force. As Morand and Cotan entered the building they passed under the Latin inscription that the well meaning Victorian philanthropist who had commissioned the building originally had chosen to sit above the entrance: Pro pulvis nos totus insanus; literally translating as ‘For aren't we all insane.’ The building the force had previously occupied, that Mond had moved them from, was now owned by the Water; it’s formalist angles further worrying the citizens.
After lunch they were called. The first victim had been identified as Eleanor Berbar, she was an employee of the Water and was indeed the wife of the man who had declared her as missing that morning. They were to visit her workplace. Cotan drove them now, back up the hill, back past the blue billboards. Morandi thought about driving the opposite way earlier that day.
The car-park was massive and though they parked as close to the building as they could they were still a few hundred yards walk away. The weather was still good and these few minutes it took to cross the car-park in the bright light only emphasised the surprise when they entered the building: Everything in the atrium was blue except the plants and a young black receptionist sat behind a royal blue desk. They felt the blueness wash over them. The walls were a gentle cornflower blue, the floor; a slick dark lead blue that rang with polish.
They walked up to the receptionist, magenta lipstick and turquoise eye-shadow screen-printed on. She quickly arranged for Eleanor Berbar’s assistant to talk to them.
They sat opposite one another on two cerulean pyramidical sofas that allowed four people to sit on them without the discomfort of touching knees or making eye contact. Their attention drifted to the Prussian blue television on which the news was being shown. The newsreader was signing off; a reassuring smile.
It was followed by the Water News, company news, specific to the firm, to the Water, presented by a younger, more attractive woman than her counterpart on the national news.
‘Welcome to The Water News; the news in our community. A year on from the fire in our Northern plant we remember the dead.’
Their viewing was interrupted by a tall, thin man, dressed in a black polo neck jumper, grey trousers and frameless spectacles; his short blond hair parted into submission in compliment to his ascetic wardrobe. This clerical impression was contrasted by an elaborate pair of burgundy patent leather boots that drew your eyes to them before his clipped voice brought you back to his face.
‘I’m Miles Onaway, I was Ellie’s assistant. I imagine you’ll want to see where she worked.’
He turned on his heel as soon as he had shook their hands and before the two investigators had chance to properly introduce themselves. He led them down a clinical feeling corridor; the palest blue Morandi could imagine striped sea blue with the freshness of toothpaste. Miles Onaway walked quickly, his long thin legs and elegant footwear beating a strident tick-tock rhythm. His effete machismo reminded Morandi of a matador, he shouted conversation down the corridor in an attempt to get Onaway to slow down.
‘Can you tell us the sort of work you and Mrs Berbar were doing?’
Whilst still maintaining a brisk pace Miles Onaway half turned his head, showing a raised eyebrow,
‘We have been working on some very, very complicated tests. Very high level. I’m not sure you’d understand. But to put it simply we are trying to thin water... I can tell by your faces this is over your heads. Eleanor has, I mean had, an idea that it may be possible, to use an idiom you will be familiar with; to cut it, like a drug dealer might cut cocaine, to extend it.
She has done some brilliant research so far. ’
Each doorway they passed was a different shade of turquoise and carried a number but no writing or signage, there were no windows, no clue as to what activity went on behind the doors. He stopped.
‘She’s here. She was here... She worked here.’
Onaway’s professional facade slipped for a moment. The door swung open. Eleanor Berbar had not kept a tidy office. Their eyes drifted over the foothills of paperwork and clutter; staring instead at the far wall, which was glass. Strong glass, looking out onto water, no life could really be seen though, just the profound and troubling murkiness that deep fresh water has. A grey shape flashed by; it might have been a fish or maybe just sand flopped up in the current.
‘Is that real?’
‘Of course it is. We are next to the river bed. That’s the Onward.’
They stood stupefied by this wall; the lighting in the room meant it was impossible to see much, it just swirled in front of them like a sonogram.
Eventually Morandi pulled his eyes from it, he realised they were in a very large office; about the size of a squash court. There were a number of desks in the room arranged in a grid, as may be set out for an exam. Each one was covered. Morandi idled over to a stack of clear plastic pouches, each containing a liquid that he took to be water. Onaway second guessed what they were thinking.
‘She was a genius. She didn’t have to be bothered by such trifles as clearing up; that was one of many tasks that I was happy to perform for her.’
‘If you could give us a minute please sir.’
Miles Onaway hesitated. He switched on some lights that muffled the strobing ambient light from the window onto the riverbed.
‘I will be waiting outside. I will know if anything is missing.’
With a raised eyebrow Cotan turned from Morandi and began studying one of the posters on the wall. A quarter of it was hidden beneath notes and Cotan couldn’t register what he was looking at.
He realised it wasn’t actually a commercially made poster but a large scale print that presumably Eleanor Berbar had done, it carried the ripples of cheap printing and like most things was printed on the back of something else to save paper, the ghost of this reverse was visible; a huge flow-chart with algebraic characters.
The image on the front showed a crater that ran the length of the image, covered in spidery cracks and was cleared in the centre by a huge vaulting structure that was clearly manmade, it reached two peaks and sagged slightly in the middle. Closer inspection revealed this to be a bridge and Cotan realised that the crater was a river bed, run empty and lifeless. He drummed his fingers against it.
Morandi was shifting piles of samples and experiments from one desk to another looking for something that seemed to matter, something out of the ordinary in a room in which practically nothing looked ordinary. He had in his hand a lump of thin acrylic sheets, each one dotted with fish eyeballs looking out at him, gormless in their liquidity. Everything he saw or picked up took longer to mentally process than normal. He felt slightly giddy with the bizarreness of their surroundings.
If they thought it necessary they could suggest to the Consultancy that further analysis be done. It wasn’t an easy decision to make it such an esoteric office.
Cotan tentatively lifted up a petrified seahorse, underneath was a hardback A6 notebook. It bore the bruises of numerous encounters with liquid. Splashes, stains and by the looks of it one attempted drowning. It was buckled and swollen. He flicked through the flabby pages casting eyes over dates and names.
‘Hey I think I have a diary.’
Morandi dropped the paper, liquid pouches and reed samples he was holding onto a nearby desk causing the collection on top to capsize. There was as much a squelch as a clatter as the contents bottomed along the floor. Onaway ran in.
‘What do you think you are doing? This is very important material.’
‘It’s alright Mr. Onaway we were on our way out but we are taking this. My colleague will furnish you with a receipt. Expect more of our colleagues tomorrow; we’ll want to have a good look around.’
Morandi took the diary off his colleague, he saw Onaway watch the book, his eyes flickered and his lips grew taut, though he didn’t say anything, it seemed he was more bothered by this than the idea of more intrusion into Eleanor Berbar’s office. He silently lead them back down the corridor to the reception where he left them, they walked outside.
They examined the diary on the roof of the car, it could be the only chance they had to look at it, it would be taken in and poured over, examined, the findings passed to the Consultancy, little bits of information might trickle down through the database to investigators like Morandi and Cotan, or they were free to examine them in their spare time if the material was available; Mond had no problem with voluntary overtime.
It wasn’t a bought diary; separated into days, weeks and months but a blank notebook that had been used for the purpose, dates were entered whenever something had been happening in Eleanor Berbar’s life that required remembering. What struck the pair immediately was the consistent initials. She’d had two appointments with an L every week, two with an X and one with a G.
They informed the office about their find and were told they had to wait for a courier to come collect it. In a moment of quick thinking that Morandi was grateful for, Cotan told them they’d be waiting at the cafe they’d had breakfast in. They waited in the car-park, eating ice-creams, leaning against the car. They were both smiling, buoyed by their decision to get the desserts. The frivolity seemed to announce better weather, or vice versa. They started talking about Miles Onaway;
‘Do you think he did it then? They must’ve been lovers.’
‘Yeah that seemed pretty clear didn’t it. But then he seemed pretty cut-up, genuinely sad.’
‘Remorse? Guilt?’
‘Who knows,’
They were interrupted by a call telling them that the courier had to be diverted; though they weren’t told where. But they were to continue waiting and that after that they were to return to the national park to see what their instinct told them. They got coffees and talked about work and their wives.
It was almost evening when they drove away from Water HQ. They headed up to the park and walked the silt path to where Eleanor Berbar had been found. The late afternoon sunlight dazzled and forced their gaze downwards. There was a bunch of lilies approximated to the spot the corpse was found, their cool whiteness almost unnatural against the off white of the silt.
‘How long have we been away?’
’Ten hours?’
‘I wonder whose been along with these?’
‘Husband, probably’
Morandi wondered if they’d ever find out; only if he asked the Consultants he thought. They drove home, Cotan dropping Morandi off.
Morandi went in to Emily. When he had first started seeing her, and it had begun well, and he had found their shared sense of humour promising, his delight at the easiness of their relationship was always tempered with the thought of her two children. Not that he didn’t like children, or that they stood in the way of anything he had in mind but he just couldn’t imagine what it would be like becoming the surrogate father to two young children, he couldn’t conceive how it might work. As it was he surprised by just how effortless it was and had been, typified by evenings such as this, when he would come home and one would be reading or drawing and the other watching TV and he would engage with them rather than them occupying him, which is what he’d expected, he guessed. He had been seeing Emily about a year, having been in Onwardston six months before that. And touch wood it was going well, he thought, rapping his fingers on the banister in the hallway.
-
In bed that night he was woken by a phone-call from Cotan, telling him they had to go to work, that Miles Onaway had committed suicide, had blown himself up in Eleanor Berbar’s office; the same office they had stood in ten hours previously, and that he, Cotan, would pick Morandi up in twenty minutes.
As Morandi got dressed, clumsily pulling on socks and trousers he pictured the blast, Onaway stood in front of the window, the river pulsing in front of him, waiting for the water to take him in the room where he’d known his lover. Morandi imagined the water’s belly flop as the river dashed him against the wall before clumsily forcing his struck body out of the room; like bouncers carrying a drunk reluctant to leave a nightclub, pummelling through corridors of euphemistic blues idiotic against real water, through and out, weeping all the furniture out into the car park. He imagined the building crouched within the hill seeming to swallow itself with the explosion of a lover’s self-righteousness, before dispersing down the hill, his eyes pricked with the amount of water he was picturing.
Of course the window onto the river, like the rest of the office, was blast-proof so Miles Onaway had just succeeded in spreading himself amongst Eleanor Berbar’s affects, becoming them.
