A male tawny owl hoots in the woods behind the towpath. Jake gets up from his desk and walks out into the cockpit. The sky is scattered with stars, partly hidden by clouds. Is Kate looking at the same sky tonight? They used to lie on their backs in the summer, on top of the boat, making plans and dreams as they spotted the Space Station circling the earth. Two children, a country cottage with her artist’s studio in the garden, the boat kept as his writer’s retreat. It never quite worked out like that.
A sound further down the canal. Metallic. Unusual. It’s hard to see anything in the dying light. A figure crosses the bridge by the lock gates. Someone returning from the pub, perhaps. A late dog walker. He thinks of the barman he saw today, the way he threatened him. Either he was lying and knew about Kate, or there’s something else going on at the pub that they don’t want journalists to discover. It had a strange vibe. All those CCTV cameras.
Back inside the boat, Jake reopens his laptop. The beginning of a chapter stares back at him. He doesn’t know why he bothers to turn a good sentence these days, or agonise over an alliteration. It all gets lost in translation. Learning Finnish might be easier. Save everyone a lot of time.
He hears another noise, closer now. Muscles tensing, he steps back out to the cockpit, stands on the seat and peers into the darkness. He’s just imagining things. It’s happened a lot recently. The boat feels so empty without Kate. Sometimes he talks to her when he’s writing, as if she were in the galley. Snippets of dialogue, passages of descriptive writing. His account of what she saw that night on the CCTV. She’s never given him a chance to explain.
Below deck again, he calls up a photo of Rob, Kate’s new partner, trying to ignore a tightness in his chest. There are always noises on the canal at night. He holds his fingers out above the keyboard. They’re shaking. He dislikes Rob with a passion and hates himself for it. A better person than him would get on well with his successor. A man who has brought happiness to the woman he still loves, happiness that he was singularly unable to provide. He should be pleased for her. There are enough sickening reasons to like the guy – the tech fortune and his love of art, the unique blend of geekiness and entrepreneurism, his random acts of bloody philanthropy. Jake knows he ought to accept them all with equanimity, but he’s consumed with a jealousy so intense that it frightens him.
More noise outside. This time he forces himself to sit still and listen, straining his ears. Silence, only broken by a return hoot from a female tawny owl, further away. His own breathing has become shallower.
There’s one thing about Rob that troubles Jake more than anything else. The first occasion he met him – the first time Kate met him – was at her hospital bedside, when the two of them were deep in conversation about art. Kate had already told Jake on an earlier visit that it was over between them and his arrival was clearly an unwelcome interruption. It wasn’t that, though. It was the ineluctable feeling that Jake had seen Rob somewhere else, a few weeks earlier. Before the accident.
He’s thought about it a lot since, wishes he had Kate’s powers of recognition, but he can’t remember where he could have seen him. Maybe in the Slaughtered Lamb, the village pub? He’s done a lot digging online, dusting down his old journalism skills to search through Rob’s various companies and high-profile life, but with no results. Perhaps it doesn’t matter if he’s seen him before. It just makes the apparently chance nature of Rob’s first encounter with Kate seem less serendipitous.
Another sound outside, this time followed by a telltale seesaw rocking motion. No imagining this time. Someone has either just stepped on or off the boat. Jake rushes out into the cockpit and sees a shadow disappearing down the towpath. He shouts after it, a deep, guttural roar. No response. And then a strong smell of petrol. The strike of a match.
Out of the darkness, a line of flames licks into life, racing along the towpath towards him like a burning snake, slithering up the mooring rope and onto the bow, where it rises into a fireball that lights up the night sky.
Jake is thrown backwards by the sudden heat, holding up his arms to shield his face. Instinctively, he grabs the rusty fire extinguisher from the locker under the seat, praying that it’s not too old, and tries to approach the fire on the foredeck. He knows already his efforts are futile. The fire is quickly taking hold of his old wooden boat, wrapping it in its flaming embrace. He curses himself for stacking so many logs on the roof to season.
And then he is aware of people on the towpath, rushing towards him from other boats moored along the canal. Some are calling out his name, others beckoning him to come ashore. He’s not abandoning his old boat yet. He’s had her for too long to let her go down without a fight.
‘Buckets!’ Jake shouts as his extinguisher runs out. ‘Get some buckets!’
He ducks back inside the cabin, now swirling with thick black smoke. Struggling to breathe, he grabs a rusty bucket from under the sink and goes back outside. The heat is intensifying, the bow of the boat starting to drift away from the shore, no longer held by the burnt-out rope. He leans over the stern, scoops up the canal water and hurls it onto the flames, desperate to save his beloved boat.
To his relief, other people on the shore have started to fill buckets too and are throwing water at the fire. A human chain of sorts has formed and with it a kernel of hope.
‘More buckets!’ Jake shouts, encouraged, ignoring the heat. The fire can be beaten, his boat saved, but then a man’s thick arm is stretching out into the cockpit. Jake grabs hold of it and is pulled onto the towpath.
‘Is there anyone else on board?’ the man asks close to his ear, an arm round his shoulders. It’s a fireman. ‘People? Any pets?’
Jake shakes his head, watching as the whole boat starts to list and drift into the middle of the canal, shrouded in smoke and flames like some ancient fireship. He needs to talk to Kate.
19
Kate
‘Don’t answer it,’ Bex says as Kate’s phone vibrates. It’s Jake.
Bex and Kate are sitting in wicker chairs on the terrace, watching the moon rise above the horizon like a polished sixpence. Her phone is on the glass table between them.
‘Ignore it,’ Bex urges as the phone starts to vibrate again. Her voice reminds Kate of when she was training Stretch. ‘I’ve switched mine off for the weekend and I suggest you do the same. How often does he ring you?’
‘He hasn’t for a month or two,’ Kate says.
They’ve had the occasional terse text exchange about practical matters – could he return an overdue book to the library, can he remember to forward her mail once a week – but no conversation in months. She’s still too angry.
‘So why’s he suddenly calling you now?’ Bex asks. ‘At eleven o’clock at night?’
‘I’ve no idea. That’s why I want to answer it.’
‘Well don’t. He’s a two-timing little—’
‘Please, Bex.’
Kate knows Jake must be calling her for a good reason. He rang her once, a week or so after she’d left hospital and was living with her mother. It was late at night and he was drunk, on his way back to the boat after a session in the pub. He was asking her to come back, let him explain, give him another chance. She told him never to ring her again.