The Boat House

THIRTEEN

Angelica Venetz stands at the rail of the restaurant's terrace. She's watching Walter Hardy — seventy years old, and still the Bay's most reliable handyman — as he moves out with waders and a boathook to take a look under the terrace's decking. Walter is small, thickset, and white whiskered; he does everything with patient slowness and, once started, he's impossible to stop.

"Is there a problem?" a voice from behind Angelica says, and she turns in surprise. She hasn't heard Alina walking across the terrace, and hasn't even been expecting her for another half hour. Alina stands there, her hands in her overcoat pockets, hair tied back and ready for business. She's been with them now for just over a month, and Angelica has never known a worker like her.

"You can bet there's a problem," she says. "Something's stuck under the terrace, and it's drawing the flies."

"What is it?"

"That's what we're going to find out."

Walter, down below them and with the waters getting perilously close to the tops of his waders, says, "Something's rotten under here. You been burying the people you've poisoned?"

"Go on, Walter," Angelica says. "You know perfectly well we put them in the curry."

"Buryin' 'em at sea," Walter persists, and he lifts the boathook and starts to stir around in the darkness beyond the terrace's supporting pillars. The boathook is usually kept on the wall behind the bar. It's a relic from the building's yacht pavilion days, and was originally used for hauling drunks out of the water. Now it catches on something, and Walter's round face tightens with the effort of pulling it free.

"Something there," he says, and he plunges the hook in again, this time with the intention of getting a secure hold so that he can heave out whatever it is into sight. If he can't, Angelica's thinking, it's probably going to mean the expense of having a part of the terrace decking taken up and relaid.

Alina leans on the rail beside Angelica, both of them looking down on Walter as he makes another thrust into the darkness beneath them. Angelica's thinking that a bag of garbage has probably been carried along on the night swell and has become caught up amongst the pillars and the metal cross ties; there will always be somebody who'll think that a couple of heavy stones and a drop out over the deepest part of the lake are an adequate way of disposing of all their empty cans and peelings and plate scrapings.

Now the gulls are starting to circle, taking a big interest. Definitely a bag of garbage, Angelica is thinking.

Walter's managed to get the hold that he needs, but now he's tugging and nothing's happening. He calmly changes his grip, and tries again.

"Come on, Walter," Angelica says. "Put me back in business."

She wouldn't have believed that he could move so fast as, with a rushing like that of fluid from a punctured sac, the rotten body comes slithering out in a wave of its own juices. The boathook is planted deep in its belly, a grotesque fifth limb that rears up into the air as it turns over.

Not a bag of garbage, then. Not unless you're really prepared to stretch the definition.

Finding it difficult to believe how controlled she's being, Angelica says, "Alina, the police constable's car is just across the square. Can you go and get him for me?"

But there's no reply.

Alina is no longer on the terrace.