Not His Hands

Okafor wanted to call it off. I set that down first, because everything that came after has a way of making everyone look wiser than we were, and the truth of that evening was two women in a dark chandlery having the argument of their lives in whispers over a tide table.

Her position was arithmetic. The terms changed the ground. A trap depends on the trapper knowing one thing the quarry does not, and the woman in the slate coat had stood on the front at dusk and recited our early-tide plan back to me like a menu, which meant they had eyes inside our preparation, which meant the one thing we knew was now a thing everybody knew, and you do not stake a living woman out at the full of a spring tide for the education of professionals who are holding better cards face down. Her voice never rose. Only the words did.

My position was the boatbuilder. They had named him. The sea takes who it's given, and they had told me who they would give it, and I had watched enough of their promises mature by now, the tin, the cologne, the cards each one a paid instalment, to know the naming was not rhetoric. If I hid that night, if the wall stayed empty at the full and their window closed with the moon, they would not shrug and book another fortnight at the guest house. Patience is a budget, Okafor herself had said so, and when a budget runs out the spending gets ugly. They would take Callum on his own slip some ordinary Tuesday, not for the file, for the leverage, and I would walk into the sea for them after all, obedient as a summary, and everyone would have died in the correct order with the correct verdicts, and somewhere south a dying ledger would balance.

So we did the thing neither of us wanted, which is what compromise means at the sharp end. I went out at the full. Alone, visibly, past the wall, onto the shingle spit where the bar begins, exactly as instructed, a woman keeping terms. And the ground went with me anyway, rearranged. Callum's dinghy lay off the spit in the last light, hull down behind the moored crabbers, with Callum flat in the bilge under a tarpaulin that smelled, he told me afterwards, of every fish since the coronation. Okafor stood inside the dark of the harbour office window with her borrowed constable, a big slow-spoken lad called Prewitt who had driven four hours on his rest day and asked one question the whole evening, which was whether he was allowed to hit anybody who touched her, and who took Okafor's no with visible regret. The tide came up the bar with that sound big tides have, less like water than like a crowd, and the light went, and the moon did its cold administration on the water, and I stood on the shingle at the edge of the world I had died out of once already, and waited to be collected.

I was not brave. Plain words for it, then. I stood there with my hand steady and everything behind it in flight, and I passed the time the way the condemned and the painting-trained pass it, by looking. The sea at the full of a spring tide, at night, from its own edge, is not paintable, I have tried since. It is not a colour. It is a disclosure. The bar roared white where there was no white to see, only a sound with salt in it arriving out of a blackness that moved, and the moon laid one long cold seam down the middle of the black like a scar that would not stay still, and under all of it, felt through the shingle in the soles of my feet, the tide worked at the land with that patience I had come to know socially. I stood in the noise and understood, in the last way I ever needed to, that this had been the plan for me since a fine blade went through three quarters of a brake line in the dark of a garage two hundred miles ago. Not rage. Not even hatred. Water, chosen for its professional discretion. Somebody had looked at the file of my life and picked, out of everything on earth, the one murderer that leaves no prints because it has no hands.

Not his hands. I had cleared my husband that morning over a plan chest by the cold reasoning of data and habit. On the shingle, at the full, I cleared him again in an older court. Gideon was a man who could not release what he loved even to save it, and the sea is release itself, the one owner that keeps nothing, gives nothing back but also holds nothing, and no version of the man I was married to would ever have handed me to it. He would have built me a colder vault. Whoever chose the water for me had a mind with an entirely different grain, a mind that wanted me not kept but concluded, filed shut, and the distinction between those two cruelties was the whole difference between my husband and my killer, and I stood on the spit in the crowd-roar of the bar and knew it as you know a hand you have shaken.

Nobody came.

The tide stood at the full for its long slack quarter hour, the highest water of the month, the kill-depth over the bar that all three of their cards had promised me, and the front lay empty and orange under its few lamps, and no coat moved anywhere along it, and slowly, degree by degree, the sea began to give the land back, and the roar changed key, and it was over. Whatever had been bought and scheduled for that water did not arrive to collect. Prewitt walked me in off the spit at one in the morning with his torch off, too disappointed to speak, and Callum rose out of his bilge like the drowned man none of us said he looked like, and Okafor stood on the slip staring south down the black coast with an expression I could not read at all, and said, mostly to the tide, "No. They don't miss appointments. They moved it."

The card was on the boatyard door at first light. Cream, good stock, set square behind the hasp where the first hand of the morning would find it, and the morning's first hand was mine, because none of us had slept. The southern slope, patient as ever, arranged even now into the right shape of a thing it was not.

Such a production, my love. The constable was a nice touch. Don't fret, we were never coming, tonight was wanted elsewhere. That's the trade's one secret, since you're a student of it now: never let them choose your tide. And do stop frowning at the husband. It was never his hands. You've known that since the verge. Ours are older, and better, and nearer than you think, and the moon is patient too. It always comes round again.

I read it twice on the cold slip with the gulls starting up, and the second time, under the taunt, I heard the sentence they had actually sent, the one fact in it dressed as comfort. Tonight was wanted elsewhere. The full of the spring tide, the best killing water of the month, and the two best hands in their trade had spent it somewhere that was not Cold Harbour, on something that outranked me. They had used my trap night, all our watching eyes pinned to one lit spit of shingle, as their cover for it, the way they had used Gideon's grief, the way they used everything. Somewhere south, while I stood in the roar being bait for nobody, the water they answered to had been given someone else.

Okafor's burner rang at ten past eight. I was there. I watched her listen, and I watched her twenty years of face fail her by one muscle, which for Okafor was a scream, and she thanked whoever it was, some old debt in some old records office keeping an ear open on her behalf, and she put the phone away and stood a moment with her back to me, squaring something, before she turned round and paid me the courtesy she had paid me since the workshop, which was the truth, level and at once.

"A lock-keeper on the Ashford Cut found a man in the water this morning. Went in at high water last night, they think, no witnesses, no marks that argue. It's being written up as a drunk's misadventure, and it will close by Friday, because the man was old and had no people and a record from before my time. Forgery." She watched me the way you watch a wall you have seen crack once already. "The name is Edwin Vale."