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on cos it was . . . ridiculous . Ridiculously big.' She looked at him now, sort of angry, as if he'd said he didn't believe her. 'I'm not joking, you know. And I could tell he wanted whoever was in the Moat to look at it. Like he was trying to shock them.'

'And was anyone in there? Any lights on?'

'No. It was, like, two in the morning. Later I was sort of thinking about it and I thought maybe he was looking at himself in the reflection. You know – in the window? With the lights off inside he'd have been able to watch himself.'

'Maybe.'

In his head Caffery played it back: the restaurant deserted, the only illumination the coloured light of the optics and the Coors sign above the bar; outside the lights from Redcliffe Quay and the reflections in the water; a section of darkness between the river and the restaurant. He imagined the girl's blurred outline in the window as she walked across the floor with the bucket. He saw her face, white and shocked, ears tuning in to a small sound, eyes swivelling to focus out into the dark night. He saw a child's silhouette against the orange sky watching itself naked in a plate-glass window. A Priapus.

'Where do you think he came from?'

'Oh, the water,' she said, sounding surprised he hadn't figured that out yet. 'Yeah – that was where he came from. The water.'

'You mean in a boat?'

'No. He came out of the water. Swam.'

'To the pontoon?'

'I didn't see him arrive, but I knew that's where he'd come from because he was wet – just dripping. And that's where he went afterwards. Back in the water over there. There, where that red thing is now. Really quick it was, he was – like an eel.'

Caffery turned. She was pointing to the red marker buoy in the water. Sergeant Marley – Flea – must be underneath it by now, because the surface crew were standing on the pontoon peering down into the water. There was a life line snaking up out of the water to the surface attendant and Dundas was talking in a low voice into the coms panel, but it was a struggle to imagine anyone was down there: the water was smooth, featureless, reflecting the red sky. Someone had brought out a 'dead stretcher', a rigid orange polyurethane block, and it lay expectantly on the decking ready to be thrown in. There was a weird silence hanging over the scene in the fading light – as if they were all listening to the water, waiting to see something shoot out of it. A human that looked like a man but was small enough to be a child, maybe. A human that moved like an eel.

Caffery turned back to the girl with the red hair. Her eyes were watering now, as if she was reliving the fear, as if she was remembering something dark and wet slipping silently into the water.

'I know,' she said, seeing his expression. 'I know. It was the weirdest thing I've ever seen. I watched it for a while, moving along the wall and then . . .'

'And then?'

'It went under. Under the water without leaving a ripple. And I never saw it again.'

 

Flea and her unit did more than just dive: along with normal support-unit duties, riot control and warrant enforcement, they were trained in confined-space searches and chemical and biological clear-up. The spin-off of knowing how to use all that protective clothing was that if ever a rotting corpse turned up in the area – in or out of the water – Flea's team was drafted in to remove it. They'd got so good at moving decomposed corpses that in December 2004 they'd been sent to Thailand to work on the disaster-victim identification exercise: in ten days the team recovered almost two hundred bodies.

People couldn't believe she coped with it. Especially after the tsunami, they said. Didn't she have nightmares? Not really, she replied. And, anyway, we get counselling. Then they asked if she needed to do it, and wasn't pulling rotting bodies out of pipes and drains just wasting her talent? Surely, if she only had a word with her inspector and put in for her 'aide' transfer to CID, she could be in