Annie was conscious of Gabriel standing in the doorway, with both children now crowded behind him, but she tried to ignore their presence. As there was no other furniture in the small cabin and she didn’t want to talk to Rowan while hovering over her, she sat down carefully on the hard edge of the box bed. Gabriel had made it himself, she remembered, a fine example of his carpentry skills.
“You’ve got yourself a boat now,” Rowan continued with a smile.
“You and your husband?”
Facing this woman who had given her entire life to her family, Annie found herself suddenly unable to admit she’d abandoned her husband on what she suspected Rowan would see as a whim. “Finding oneself ” was a strictly middle-class luxury. Nor, aware of Gabriel’s hostile presence behind her, was she sure she wanted to admit to being alone. “Yes,” she said at last, nodding.
“But yesterday you were working her on your own. And well, too.”
“My husband—he had some business at our house in Tilston.” The prevarication came a little more easily, but then she remembered she’d told Gabriel she’d gone back to using her maiden name. Well, she’d just have to bluff it out as best she could. “He’ll be back soon,” she said with an internal grimace, knowing she had just marked herself out as someone who used a narrowboat for an occasional second home, a practice that earned little respect from the traditional boater. “I’m surprised I—we hadn’t run across you before now.”
Rowan looked away. “We were up Manchester way for a while, but the jobs dried up.”
From the silence of the generator, the mean fire, and the slight shabbiness of the boat itself, things had not improved on the Shropshire Union. The boat was so cold that Rowan was covered in layers of blankets over the old woolen jumper she wore, and when she spoke, her breath made tiny clouds of condensation. Annie said,
“Rowan, if things aren’t going well, I could—”
“No.” Rowan glanced at her husband as she cut Annie off. “We’ll do fine. You should g—”
Annie wasn’t going to let herself be fobbed off so easily. “Rowan, you’re obviously not well. How long has this been going on? Have you seen a doctor?”
“I’m just a bit tired,” Rowan protested, but her voice was breathy, a thread of sound. “With Christmas and all. I’ll be fine when I’ve had a rest.”
It was a game effort, but Annie now saw things besides the pallor—
the hollows under the woman’s eyes, the protrusion of the bones from the stick-thin wrists, the lank hair that had once been glossy.
“Rowan,” she said gently. “I think you haven’t been well for some time. You must get some help.”
“You know I can’t.” Rowan sat up, grasping Annie’s arm with unexpected strength. “No doctors. No hospitals. I won’t take a chance with my children.”
Annie laid her hand over the other woman’s fingers, gently, until she felt Rowan’s grip relax. “There’s no reason why your seeing a doctor should put the children at risk. They’re both well. You must—”
“You know what my records will say.” Rowan’s voice rose with urgency. “It never comes
off—you told me that yourself—even
though I was cleared. Someone will come, looking, prying, and this time it won’t be you.”
Annie closed her eyes and took a breath as the memories fl ooded back. The case had landed on her desk, one of many, and she’d seen enough abuse in her years as a social worker that at first she’d been predisposed to take the report at face value, a fact that now shamed
her. She’d held such power, to have taken it so lightly. If her findings had agreed with the doctors’, the Wains’ case would have gone to the civil courts. There, the family, marginally literate and with no funds for counsel, would have been helpless against the unlimited resources of the state and the testimony of so-called expert witnesses. It was almost certain that both Joseph and little Marie would have been taken into foster care, and possible that one or both parents would have faced criminal charges.
She had first interviewed the Wains aboard the
Although puzzled as she continued to visit the family, as she watched them time after time with their child, Annie became more and more convinced that the charges against them were unfounded.
So she had gone with her instincts, but it had taken her months of investigation, of interviews, of sifting through medical records, to come up with the means to prove herself, and them, right.
Their nomadic life had made the process enormously difficult.
They spent little time in one place, had no extended family, no intimate contact with others who could substantiate their accounts of little Joseph’s illnesses. But during one interview, Rowan told her about Joseph’s first seizure.
They’d been on the Grand Union Canal, below Birmingham, moored alongside several other boats. Gabriel had been on deck and Rowan in the cabin with the sleeping toddler when the boy had stiffened, his back arching, his arms and legs flailing. Then the child had gone limp, his skin turning blue. Rowan had lifted him, shaking him frantically while shouting to Gabriel for help.
Gabe had come plunging down the hatchway with Charlie, a quiet, lanky young man who drifted from one mooring to the next on an old Josher. But when Charlie saw the still child in Rowan’s arms, his indolence vanished. “Ambulance training,” he’d said shortly. Taking Joseph from Rowan, he’d laid him out on the cabin floor, and after checking his airway, had given the baby a quick puff of breath, then pressed on his chest. Once, twice, three times, and then Joseph’s body had jerked in a spasm and he’d begun to wail.
They had never run across Charlie again, however, and Rowan didn’t even know if he was still on the boats.
But Annie was determined to substantiate Rowan’s story, and her search for the elusive Charlie proved her true introduction to the Cut. She’d begun by car, working in a widening circle from Cheshire, crisscrossing middle England as she tried canal-side shops and marinas, pubs and popular mooring spots, talking to anyone who might have had contact with the Wains or might have news of Charlie.
She soon discovered not only that had she set herself a well- nigh impossible task, but that there were places boaters congregated that couldn’t be reached by car. She had almost despaired when a boater told her he knew Charlie; had, in fact, recently seen him on the Staff and Worcs Canal, below Stoke.
The next day Annie had hired a boat with her own funds. She knew her department would never deem it a reasonable expense.
But she also realized that somewhere over the past few weeks, she’d slipped over the line between reason and obsession.
She’d had little idea how to handle the boat. Even remembering the mess she’d made of her first few locks made her shudder. Terrified and clumsy, she was kept from swamping the boat or falling from a lock gate only by blind luck and help from fellow boaters. But she had persevered, her enchantment with the Cut growing over the next few days as she worked her way south along the Shropshire Union towards Birmingham. She learned to recognize the Joshers, the restored boats that had once belonged to the Fellows, Morton, and s
Clayton carrying company, and when one evening she saw the distinctive silhouette of a Josher moored near the bottom of the Wolver-hampton , her heart had raced. As she drew nearer, she made out the faded letters on the boat’s side:
He was just as the Wains had described him, although not now so young, a thin, freckle-faced man with his sandy hair drawn back in a ponytail. When he understood what Annie wanted, he’d invited her into his tiny cabin for a beer, and he’d given her an account of the incident almost identical to Rowan Wain’s. Trying to contain her excitement, Annie wrote out his statement and had him sign it.
“Poor little bugger,” he’d said when they’d finished. “It was obviously some sort of seizure. Did they ever get him sorted out? The mother said he’d been unwell as an infant. Gastric reflux. I remember thinking it odd that she knew the term.”
Back aboard her hire boat, settled in her cabin with a celebratory glass of wine, Annie tried to work out what to do next. If Joseph’s seizures were real, why had the doctor been so ready to discount his parents’ accounts? And was there some connection between the problems he’d had as an infant and his later seizures?
