Using a pair of scissors to scrape beneath her fingernails, she watched the water running rosy at her feet. She closed her eyes. She listened to Daniel’s voice asking, What is wrong with you? and Deidre’s voice saying, Bridge, Philip, we’ve got bridge, and to her own. Set fire to things. Set fire. Set fire set fire set fire.
TWO
Every second Sunday, Miriam cleaned out the toilet. She had to lift the （always surprisingly, unpleasantly heavy） cassette out of the little toilet at the back of the boat, carry it through the cabin and out onto the towpath, and from there a full hundred yards to the loo block, where the waste had to be tipped out into the main toilet and flushed away, the cassette rinsed out to clear whatever remained. One of the less idyllic parts of narrowboat living and a task she liked to carry out early, when there was no one else around. So undignified, to ferry one’s shit about among strangers, dog-walkers, joggers.
She was out on the back deck, checking she had a clear run—that there weren’t any obstacles on the path, bicycles, or bottles （people could be extremely antisocial, particularly late on Saturday nights）。 It was a bright morning, cold for March, though white buds on glossy new branches of plane and birch hinted at spring.
Cold for March, and yet she noticed that the cabin doors of the neighboring narrowboat were open, just as they had been the night before. So, that was odd. And the thing was, she’d been meaning to talk to the occupant of that boat, the young man, about overstaying. He’d been in that mooring sixteen days, two full days longer than he was entitled to be, and she’d intended to have a word with him about moving along, even though it wasn’t really her job, not her responsibility, but she—unlike most—was a permanent fixture around here and that imbued her with a particular sense of public-spiritedness.
* * *
? ? ?
That was what Miriam told Detective Inspector Barker, in any case, when he asked her, later on, What was it made you look? The detective was sitting opposite her, his knees almost touching her own, his shoulders hunched and back rounded. A narrowboat is not a comfortable environment for a tall man, and this was a very tall man, with a head like a cue ball and a perturbed expression, as though he’d been expecting to do something else today, something fun, like taking his kids to the park, and now he was here with her, and he wasn’t happy about it.
“Did you touch anything?” he asked.
Had she? Touched anything? Miriam closed her eyes. She pictured herself, rapping smartly on the window of the blue-and-white boat. Waiting for a response, a voice, or a twitch of a curtain. Bending down when no such response came, her attempt to peer into the cabin thwarted by the net curtain coupled with what looked like a decade’s worth of city and river grime. Knocking once more and then, after a few moments, climbing up onto the back deck. Calling out, Hello? Anyone at home?
She saw herself pulling on the cabin door, very gently, catching as she did a whiff of something, the smell of iron, meaty, hunger-inducing. Hello? Pulling the door open all the way, climbing down the couple of steps to the cabin, her last hello catching in her throat as she took it all in: the boy—not a boy, a young man, really—lying on the floor, blood everywhere, a wide smile carved into his throat.
She saw herself sway on her feet, hand over mouth, pitching forward for a long, dizzying moment, reaching out, grabbing the counter with her hand. Oh, God.
“I touched the counter,” she told the detective. “I think I might have held on to the counter, just there, on the left-hand side, when you come into the cabin. I saw him, and I thought . . . well, I felt . . . I felt sick.” Her face colored. “I wasn’t sick, though, not then. Outside . . . I’m sorry, I . . .”
“Don’t worry about it,” Barker said, his eyes holding hers. “You don’t need to worry about that. What did you do then? You saw the body, you leaned against the counter . . . ?”
She was struck by the smell. Underneath the blood, all that blood, there was something else, something older, sweet and rank, like lilies left too long in the vase. The smell and the look of him, impossible to resist, his beautiful dead face, glassy eyes framed by long lashes, plump lips drawn back from even, white teeth. His torso, his hands, and arms were a mess of blood, his fingertips curled to the floor. As though he was hanging on. As she turned to leave, her eye snagged on something on the floor, something out of place—a glint of silver mired in sticky, blackening blood.
She stumbled up the steps and out of the cabin, gulping mouthfuls of air, gagging. She threw up on the towpath, wiped her mouth, cried out, “Help! Somebody call the police!” but it was barely seven thirty on a Sunday morning, and there was no one around. The towpath was still, the roads up above quiet too, no sounds save for the throb of a generator, the squabble of moorhens ghosting gently past. Looking up at the bridge above the canal, she thought she might have seen someone, just for a moment, but then they were gone, and she was alone, gripped by paralyzing fear.