“I left,” Miriam told the detective. “I came straight back out of the boat and . . . I called the police. I vomited, and then I ran to the boat and called the police.”
“Okay. Okay.”
When she looked up at him, he was looking around the room, taking in the tiny, neat cabin, the books above the sink （One Pot Cooking, A New Way with Vegetables）， the herbs on the sill, the basil and coriander in their plastic tubs, the rosemary going woody in a blue-glazed pot. He glanced at the bookcase filled with paperbacks, at the dusty peace lily sitting on top of it, the framed photograph of a homely couple flanking their big-boned child. “You live here alone?” he asked, but it wasn’t really a question. She could tell what he was thinking: fat old spinster, tree hugger, knit your own yogurt, curtain twitcher. Poking her nose into everyone else’s business. Miriam knew how people saw her.
“Do you . . . do you get to know your . . . neighbors? Are they neighbors? Don’t suppose they really can be if they’re only here for a couple of weeks?”
Miriam shrugged. “Some people come and go regularly; they have a patch, a stretch of the water they like to cover, so you get to know some of them. If you want to. You can keep yourself to yourself if you like, which is what I do.” The detective said nothing, just looked at her blankly. She realized he was trying to figure her out, that he wasn’t taking her at her word, that he didn’t necessarily believe what she was telling him.
“What about him? The man you found this morning?”
Miriam shook her head. “I didn’t know him. I’d seen him, a few times, exchanged . . . well, not even pleasantries, really. I said hello or good morning or something like that, and he responded. That was it.”
（Not quite it: It was true that she’d seen him a couple of times since he’d moored up, and that she’d clocked him right away for an amateur. The barge was a mess—paint peeling, lintels rusted, chimney all askew—while he himself looked much too clean for canal life. Clean clothes, white teeth, no piercings, no tattoos. None visible, in any case. A striking young man, quite tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed, his face all planes and angles. The first time she saw him, she’d said good morning and he’d looked up at her and smiled and all the hair stood up on the back of her neck.）
She noted this at the time. Not that she was about to tell the detective that. When I first saw him, I got this strange feeling. . . . He’d think she was a nutcase. In any event, she realized now what it was, what she’d felt. It wasn’t premonition or anything ridiculous like that, it was recognition.
There was an opportunity here. She’d had that thought when she first realized who the boy was, but she’d not known how best to take advantage. Now that he was dead, however, it felt as though this was all meant to be. Serendipity.
“Mrs. Lewis?” Detective Barker was asking her a question.
“Ms.,” Miriam said.
He closed his eyes for a moment. “Ms. Lewis. Do you remember seeing him with anyone? Talking to anyone?”
She hesitated, then nodded. “He had a visitor. A couple of times, perhaps? It’s possible he might have had more than one visitor, but I only saw the one. A woman, older than he was, closer to my age, perhaps in her fifties? Silver-gray hair, cut very short. A thin woman, quite tall, I think, perhaps five eight or nine, angular features . . .”
Barker raised an eyebrow. “You got a good look at her, then?”
Miriam shrugged again. “Well, yes. I’m quite observant. I like to keep an eye on things.” May as well play up to his prejudices. “But she was the sort of woman you’d notice even if you didn’t; she was quite striking. Her haircut, her clothes . . . she looked expensive.” The detective was nodding again, noting all this down, and Miriam felt sure it wouldn’t take him long to figure out exactly who she was talking about.
* * *
Once the detective had gone, officers cordoned off the towpath between De Beauvoir and Shepperton, moving along all the boats save his, the crime scene, and hers. At first, they’d tried to persuade her to leave, but she made it clear she’d nowhere else to go. Where were they going to house her? The uniformed officer she spoke to, young, squeaky-voiced, and spotty, looked perturbed by this shifting of responsibility, from her shoulders to his. He looked up at the sky and down at the water, up and down the canal and back to her, this small, fat, harmless middle-aged woman, and relented. He spoke to someone on a radio and then came back to tell her she could stay. “You can go back and forth to your own . . . uh . . . residence,” he said, “but no further than that.”