The Boat House

TWENTY-EIGHT

Ross Aldridge stood in the empty caravan, feeling like an intruder in a place owned by strangers. In fact it was owned by strangers, a family who lived more than two hundred miles away; they used the caravan for about six weeks of the year, on and off, and they rented it out for some of the times in between. The van was an old one, and looked it compared to some of the sleeker units on the other lakeside pitches. The site owner had told him straight, he wouldn't be unhappy to see it go; it lowered the tone of the place, he reckoned, and he knew that he could easily re let the pitch a hundred times over for something bigger, something newer… he handled sales, as well, so he'd make a two way profit on the deal.

Aldridge had disliked the man on sight. And the way that he talked about lowering tone and maximising profits hadn't made Aldridge like him any better, not when a five-year-old who'd probably last slept in one of these very bunks now slept dreamlessly in a mortuary cabinet.

One of three kids, altogether. Their father a one-time shipyard welder, out of employment for nearly two years now, their mother working half days as a checkout assistant in a retail cash and carry. This had been the family's first holiday in ages; the boy's first holiday ever. Aldridge sighed, and looked around. He knew that he was taking this harder than he ought to, but he couldn't help it. The whole thing was just too personal for him.

The curtains had been drawn against the world outside. They didn't fit too well. In the half shade he could see that the caravan was spotless, as if it had been scrubbed compulsively by whoever had occupied it last. He checked it over. There was a double bedroom at one end, a kitchen in the middle, and a lounge at the other whose uncomfortable bench sofas made up into equally uncomfortable beds. There was a chemical toilet in an adjoining shed, and for showers there would be the communal block at the other end of the site. He knew the kind of thing. Timer operated, and as cold and draughty as hell; a hook for your towel, and nowhere dry to put your clothes. It had been years since he'd done anything similar, but he'd been there. There couldn't have been many people who'd need to use the block, not these days; not when most had big vans with names like Mistral and Wayfarer with their own bathrooms and WCs built in. This van belonged to another, altogether less well appointed age. When he moved, the floor creaked and at one point he felt his head brush close to the ceiling.

It was the personal touches that got to him the most. The ornaments, most of them broken and then glued together again. The home made curtains screening open shelves. Stuff that should have been in a junkshop, but instead it was here. Two weeks of this had been the best that the family had been able to afford.

They hadn't even made it to the end of the first.

It had been a night time accident. Out of a family of heavy sleepers the boy had always been an exception, but this had never caused them any serious problem before. He'd get up and wander around a little, play with his toys, and they'd find him the next morning lying wherever sleep had caught up with him. Because he was too small to reach the light switches, this had usually been on the floor in front the open refrigerator with its interior light burning and the milk slowly going sour. He'd be there with a jigsaw, his toy trucks, a storybook. But the refrigerator here was a tiny benchtop unit tucked well back alongside the sink, so Aldridge could only assume that the boy had been forced to look farther afield for some night-time entertainment.

They were still arguing over who'd left the caravan's door unlocked. Both parents suspected each other and blamed themselves. The truth of it would probably never be established, not for certain, but when the one time welder had risen in the morning it had been to find the door wide open to the day and the boy missing. Also missing had been an inflatable crocodile that belonged to the caravan and which they'd stowed, fully inflated, in the space underneath rather than face the effort of pumping it up afresh for every lakeside play session. The crocodile, being bright green and buoyant enough to sit high in the water, had been spotted within the first half hour of the search. The child, floating low in his sodden pyjamas and looking more like a log in the undertow, had been found much later in the day.

Aldridge moved to the door, the entire van trembling at his every step. There was nothing for him here. He took one last look back, and then opened the door to fresh air and daylight. Now he could tell the owners that he'd checked out their property and that everything was in order; he could finish his report and then file it and move on. As he stood on the wooden steps outside and locked up after him, he couldn't help noting that the door was a poor fit. The catch barely held it. One sharp tug, and maybe…

He tugged.

The lock held. But only just.

But enough to keep in a five year old, he thought, and he turned and descended the steps. He walked down the dirt access track to the main paved avenue of the site, and when he reached the administration block he dropped the keys through the mail flap rather than talk to the site owner again. He could sense that the man was watching him as he crossed over to his car, but he didn't look back.

The lake was calm. Many of the vans overlooked it and the site had its own beach, of a kind; several tons of sand that had been trucked in and dumped at the water's edge. This for the kids, a Country and Western club for the parents. It was modest and inexpensive and probably a five-year-old's idea of paradise. What had happened here was wrong, in a sense that had stirred Aldridge deeply; almost as if Death had slipped in and stolen the child and then led it on a dance, over the hills and far away like some shadowy, irresistible piper. He couldn't help thinking back to the stillborn form that they'd let him hold, all cleaned up and wrapped in a shawl, in a room next to the hospital's chapel for all of half an hour; half an hour of fatherhood, spent with a daughter who would never know of his love. Whatever jealous force took children in this way, whatever face it wore — disease, accident, ill intent — he knew that there was only one somewhat old fashioned word to describe it, and that word was evil. True evil. He'd looked into the faces of regular murderers and seen only the commonplace; but in the death of children, he saw ultimate darkness.

He started the car. He had a thousand and one things to do, and not one of them seemed terrifically important to him right at this moment. Two days before he'd been giving his evidence in the Coroner's Court and his eyes had briefly met those of old Doctor McEnery up on the bench, and something had flickered between the two of them… nothing unprofessional that could have been seen by anyone else in the courtroom, but almost a recognition that they were occupying the same places and going through the same routines rather too often for comfort. The details changed, the form remained the same. The Hammond boy and his girlfriend. Walter Hardy, drowned in his own bathtub. The drunk who'd fallen overboard at a yacht party and whose disappearance hadn't even been noticed until the next day. The dinghy accident.

The others.

The verdicts of accidental death had come in, one after another, and nobody had known better than Aldridge how unavoidable these conclusions were. He'd checked out the scenes, he'd talked to the people. And yet…

Death by drowning, or something like it, again and again. Inevitable when you considered how much of the territory was taken up by a lake that was virtually an inland sea, but disturbing in its frequency. Maybe there was such a thing as luck, and its bad luck counterpart; he'd noticed it with air disasters and rail disasters, how they seemed to hit the news in clusters, and he wondered if something similar might be an influence here. If it was, it made him uneasy. Such things were fine for the pages of downmarket photo magazines, tucked in between the horoscopes and the sob stories, but the thought of something so hard edged and yet unknown entering his life was something else.

Coincidence, he told himself as he drove out through the site gates and rejoined the main road. Traffic wasn't too bad and, as ever, they all touched their brakes and slowed at the sight of his car.

Coincidence.

What else could it possibly be?