Low Water · Chapter 2

No Calder in It

Femi sent word that she would look at nobody until she had finished with the body, which meant evening. Senna Mattock got to him first.

She came up the forty-one steps to Rook’s office at six that evening, and stood in his doorway in a wet green coat with her hands in her pockets, and did not sit down until he had asked her twice.

She was forty or so, with a broad, sensible face and dark hair cut short for work, and she smelt faintly of the carbolic they used at the Sump clinics, which meant she was a nurse, or a cleaner at one, and from her hands Rook thought nurse. She looked as if she had not slept. She looked, too, as if she had decided some time ago that sleeping was a thing other people did.

‘They asked my husband to go and look at him,’ she said. ‘At the morgue. This afternoon.’

‘Did he go?’

‘He went.’ She looked at the window, where the rain was running down in threads. ‘He came home and said it was a stranger. Somebody with a face like his. He said Calder’s full of faces. He said not to worry.’

‘Are you worried?’

‘I’m not paying you to ask me that.’ She took an envelope out of her coat and put it on the desk between them. It was thick, and it was brown, and it was Morrow-Kade’s: the little sunrise in the top left corner, the words Survey & Contract Services under it in a typeface that had cost somebody a great deal. ‘I’m paying you to find out who he is. The dead man. His name. Where he’s from. Who his people are. So they can come and get him, and bury him, and so it stops.’

‘So what stops?’

She looked at him for a moment, very steadily, with tired brown eyes.

‘People staring at my husband,’ she said.

Rook opened the envelope. Inside there was a pay docket, a completion certificate, and a contract: twelve pages, closely printed, signed at the bottom by Idris Mattock in a cramped right-handed scrawl and countersigned by somebody whose signature was mostly an O and a long line.

‘Ossian Trell,’ Senna said. ‘His ring master. Idris has worked Trell’s crew for six years. They’re contractors. Morrow-Kade hires the crews, the crews hire the threaders, everybody gets paid.’ Her mouth moved slightly. ‘Nearly everybody.’

‘The completion bonus is good.’

‘It’s very good. That was the point. A survey of a shallow branch. Six weeks. Beaches and tide tables. Nothing dangerous. He said it would be like a holiday.’ She did not smile. ‘He came home three weeks late with a tan and a bonus and a cough. That’s all. Nothing’s wrong. Nothing at all is wrong.’

Rook turned the pages of the contract slowly. He read contracts as some men read the racing pages: for the small print, and what the small print was afraid of.

Clause fourteen was afraid of quite a lot.

14.1 The Contractor accepts sole liability for the safety of all personnel engaged by the Contractor in the performance of crossing operations. 14.2 The Company accepts no liability for any death or injury sustained in, during, or as a consequence of transit of the Shear. 14.3 In the event of the death of any member of the Contractor’s crew from any cause during operations, the Contractor’s licence to perform crossing operations shall be suspended for a period of not less than twelve months pending review.

There was more. There was always more. But that was the part that mattered, and somebody in a tower in the Lift had known exactly what they were doing when they wrote it.

‘Twelve months,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘If one of Trell’s crew dies on a job, Trell’s crew doesn’t work for a year. None of them. Forty men, fifty, sitting at home.’ He laid the contract down. ‘And the franchise doesn’t pay a penny for the dead one. That’s the contractor’s problem.’

‘Idris didn’t die,’ said Senna Mattock.

‘No,’ Rook said. ‘I can see that.’

He told her his rates. She did not blink at them. She counted out the first two days in scrip on the corner of his desk, the notes old and soft and carefully smoothed, each with its sunrise, and he wrote her a receipt, and she put it away in her coat without looking at it, as if it did not matter at all, and stood up.

At the door she stopped.

‘He’s a good man,’ she said, without turning round. ‘My husband. He’s a kind man. He’s the kindest man I’ve ever met.’

Then she went down the forty-one steps into the rain, and Rook sat for some time at his desk with the contract in front of him and listened to the water running in the gutter, and thought about the fact that in eleven years at Lin Ha’s counter, Idris Mattock had never once said thank you, and that people did not, in Rook’s experience, tell a stranger their husband was the kindest man they had ever met unless they were trying hard to convince somebody. He did not think it was him.

He put her scrip in the tin on the shelf, with the rest. The rest was not much. Then he put his coat back on and went up to the Shelf to see Femi.

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Femi Okafor-Lund kept the city mortuary on the second tier of the Shelf, in a basement that had been a bank vault before the Shelf had been the Shelf, and she kept it warmer than any mortuary had a right to be, because, she said, the dead did not mind and she did.

She was a short, heavy, deliberate woman in a cardigan the colour of porridge, and she had known Rook for twenty years, and she had never once, in all that time, been pleased to see him.

‘Tomas.’ She did not look up from the steel table. ‘You’re not CivicGuard any more. I checked. I was delighted.’

‘Ottley sent me.’

‘Ottley sends nobody anywhere. Ottley is a weather system.’ She pushed her glasses up her nose with the back of one gloved wrist. ‘Lin Ha sent you.’

‘Lin Ha sent me.’

‘Then you can stay.’ She drew the sheet back to the dead man’s chest. ‘Come and look. Don’t touch. Don’t faint. If you faint, faint backwards.’

Under the mortuary lights Idris Mattock’s face looked younger than it had on the floor of the pumping station, and more tired. Femi had closed his eyes. His hair had dried and was sticking up at the crown in a way that made Rook think, absurdly, of a boy who had slept on it wrong.

‘Drowned,’ Femi said. ‘Textbook. Water in the lungs, water in the stomach, froth in the airways, all the signs. He breathed it in, and he was alive when he did. No other injuries worth the name. A graze on the left shin. Some bruising on the upper arms, here and here.’ She pointed without touching. ‘Somebody held him. Or somebody tried to pull him out. I can’t tell you which, and I’m not going to guess.’

‘When?’

‘Yesterday.’ She said it with complete certainty. ‘Teatime, near enough. A day ago, give or take an hour. Look at the skin. Look at the eyes. Look at the state of him. This man was alive at teatime yesterday, and he was dead by supper.’

‘He was found at three this morning in a building that’s been bricked shut for twenty-two years.’

‘Then somebody was very quick with a trowel.’

‘Lin Ha says not.’

‘Then Lin Ha is wrong,’ said Femi, ‘or I am, and I am not.’ She went to the bench under the wall and came back with a glass dish. In the dish there was a little heap of pale wet sand, finer than salt. ‘This came out of his lungs. And his mouth, and his ears, and the cuffs of his trousers. I’ve got it in every pocket he’s got.’

Rook looked at it. Under the light, the grains were not all the same. Some were glassy. Most were pale and flat and faintly curved, like the edges of a baby’s fingernails, and here and there among them there was a tiny perfect spiral, white as a tooth, no bigger than a grain of rice.

‘Shell,’ Femi said. ‘Ground shell. Cockle, mostly, and something like a periwinkle. There’s diatoms in the water, too, living ones until he breathed them. And the water itself.’ She set the dish down. ‘I ran it. I wanted to see how much of Calder was in it. Diesel. Copper. Lead. The usual muck. You can tell which cut a man went into round here by what’s in his lungs.’

‘And?’

‘And nothing.’ For the first time, Femi looked at him directly. Her eyes behind the glasses were steady and puzzled. ‘It’s sea water, Tomas. Clean sea water, warmer than ours by a good few degrees. There’s no Calder in it at all. I’ve never seen water like it come out of a body in this city in twenty-six years. I don’t think there’s water like it anywhere on this coast.’

Rook looked down at the man on the table.

‘He was in the water three weeks ago,’ he said. ‘On a contract. His crew came home three weeks ago.’

‘Then he came home without him,’ said Femi, ‘because this man died yesterday.’ She drew the sheet back up, gently, over the tired face. ‘Write that down in your little book. I’ll sign it.’

He did not write it down.

On the tram back down to the edge of the Sump he sat by the window and watched the rain, and thought about a sea with no Calder in it, that nobody had seen on this coast in his lifetime, and a man who had come home three weeks ago and died yesterday. He counted the stops. There were nine. There were always nine. It was the only thing all day that had come out right.

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