Neila sat in the cabin and cut the hair of old Mrs. Lude, whose long white tresses hadn’t been touched for nearly two years, and who let only Neila cut them, and who burbled excited to see her friend and exclaimed:
The flowers! So beautiful in the spring but first the snowdrops the snowdrops as they emerge the whiteness beneath the trees
the bluebells in the forest
the daffodils, first sign of spring, great fat bunches of daffodils getting everywhere how the bulbs spread how they
the bees as they come to life for the lavender the…
and Mr. Lude sat at the back and read his newspaper and smoked terrible, disgusting cigarettes that turned the roof of the cabin sticky and brown, and pretended not to enjoy his wife’s endless happiness.
Once, Neila heard it said, Mrs. Lude caught a sexually transmitted disease which damaged her brain and left her perpetually upbeat, but if she caught it from her husband then it clearly hadn’t achieved the same effect on his disposition.
Anyway, Neila didn’t believe a word of it. Some people were just delightful. Some people simply saw beauty in the world, even the winter, for the winter was nothing if not a promise of spring.
Neila cut her hair, and did an okay job at it, and Mrs. Lude was ecstatic, and Neila returned to her own boat quickly, a bag of coal on her back, and sat up with one light on and watched the towpath, and did not see Theo.
Lucy
Rainbow Princess Lucy Cumali where are you now in his dreams the man called Theo watches the water and sees in its reflection…
father and daughter there was so much he missed but in his dreams he holds her the day she is born he holds her and she is sleeping and so tiny yet oddly heavy too and there’s that thing that babies do that weird strength when they hold your little finger in their fist and they’re so strong it’s just incredible they’re…
In his dreams Theo can skip over certain details. Someone else can clear up the baby poo. He heard that it can come in every imaginable colour, someone he knew once said her child’s poop was bright blue.
In his dreams Theo pushes Lucy on the swings
picks her up from school
hides £1 under her pillow when her first tooth falls out, keeps hiding £1 until all her milk teeth are gone even though she long ago stopped believing in the tooth fairy
helps her do her maths homework, he’d be good at that
(very few fathers are good at that he knows this really but he’d be the exception because of how he’d respect her as a person as well as love her as his child)
Someone else can tell Lucy about puberty all that business with sanitary towels and tampons. Obviously he’d help out if wanted, but not intrusively—by this time Lucy is becoming her own woman, she should be allowed to make her own choices and just know that her dad is there for her to love her no matter what.
Funny thing. In his dreams, Dani isn’t there at all.
Neila sailed, and out of the darkness there he was.
A man sat on a bench by a lock, and did not smoke, and did not drink, and had no bag, and wore a coat very similar to the one that Theo wore, wool and fine and dark. For a moment her heart soared; but then look again. Not Theo. This man’s coat fitted him, and he had black leather gloves, and wore black leather shoes and he studied nothing much in particular until the Hector sailed into view, and then he studied it very much indeed, and studied her standing at the back, and as she approached he rose and called out, “Neil Madling?”
Neila slowed as she neared the lock and didn’t answer. He stepped a little closer to the edge of the canal, watched patiently as she hopped down towards the low bollards, began to tie off, quick and sharp with the fraying blue mooring line.
“Mr. Madling?” he repeated when the first rope was on. “My name is Markse.”
“Neila,” she replied sharply, and the man called Markse looked again, and was briefly embarrassed, and nodded once.
“I do apologise, ma’am. Is this your barge?”
“It’s a boat, not a barge.”
“A very beautiful vessel. Is there anyone else on board?”
“No.”
“Do you mind if I check?”
“Yes.”
“Ah. I’m afraid I may not have—”
“I don’t know you.”
“I am… still currently just with the Ministry of Security, I am—”
“There’s no one on my boat except me.”
“May I look?”
“Why?”
Markse hesitated, studying her face, watching as she tied off the second line, stepped back onto the boat, one hand on the rudder, holding tight, an instinctive comfort. She glared into his silence, and for a while he seemed to contemplate several different answers before with an almost-shrug declaring, “Because in Northampton you helped a woman by the name of Marta, who stabbed one of the children in the middle of the night. You told the police you were alone, and Marta told the police nothing, but on the knife there were two sets of fingerprints. The second of these belong to a man called Theo Miller. I think he’s on your boat. May I come on board?”
He came on board, starting at the prow and walking through to the stern.
“Well, I do apologise for taking your time it would appear that—”
“So get off my fucking boat.”
He got off the fucking boat, stood on the bank, hands in pockets, smiling patiently. He was, Neila decided, a deeply ugly man, too tall, too thin, too pale. His hair was thinning on top, prematurely, and he didn’t have the grace to attempt a comb-over but just let the few limp strands that remained droop around his pale, pin-poked face. His nails were buffed and polished, a gentle vanity, and as Neila looked at him she realised she had seen him in the cards, and he was the Tower, and he was destruction, and he was the eye of the storm.
They looked at each other and understood each other perfectly.
“If you meet Mr. Miller will you tell him that I called? It concerns his daughter.”
He held out a business card.
It had his name and a telephone number on it, and that was all. She took the card, put it in her pocket and turned away.
He waited a moment to see if she would look back, and when she didn’t, he nodded once and drifted back down the canal.
Three hours later, she found Theo, sitting on the frozen grass by the water.
He’d walked nearly fifty miles. In the end the cold had slowed him, and the thirst had brought him to a standstill.
She slowed down, let the Hector’s momentum carry her past him to a stop.
He looked up, slow and tired, saw her looking back and smiled.
Wordlessly, she opened the stern door to the cabin, and he climbed on board.
Chapter 37
Nine days after Theo Miller’s body was buried in an unrecorded ceremony beneath a beech tree the headstone was removed and smashed.
The boy who would be Theo watched, and didn’t speak, because this too was part of the discretion clause, this was what they had agreed to, no name, no body, no sign that Theo Miller had ever died.
Fifteen years later the man called Theo Miller cycled to work and the work was:
value of property stolen: £13,492
value of life taken: £93,410
value of rape: £8452
value of sexual harassment: £3451.50