Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
December 30th, 1999. Two days before a momentous New Year and the media are ramping up the hysteria, indulging the public in equal parts of celebration and wary horror. The millennium bug may be a chimera or conspiracy theory, but the fear of it is fact. With the likelihood of computer crashes and all that that might entail: from nuclear weapons accidentally discharged to air liners falling out of the sky, precautions are being taken. As if any precaution could avert Armageddon.
Worn out by frustration, alcohol and an unrequited love affair star reporter Jonny Murphy snaps - and is sent to Essex to recover his equilibrium by writing a run-of-the-mill piece on a child found dead on an island in the Thames estuary. Paloma is to be his running mate: an American photographer, she is the woman he adores, so the assignment is timely; in the country they can spend time together, get to know each other, take moody pictures of salt flats….
Reality intervenes. This is a crime story, not just a missing child. And no one missed this one. A woman had alerted the police about finding his body but no one has come forward to claim or even to have known him. Blackwater Island is uninhabited and the public prohibited; it’s a peculiar nature reserve where there appears to be no information on the animal species, only the plants, which are toxic. How did the child get there? Who took him?
There is a straggling village and a pub, the landlady old, truculent, enigmatic, generous only with a powerful home brew and delicious oysters, and a story about a mermaid with silver hair who guards the island, armed.
The journalists overstay their time and have to put up at the pub in its one guest room with its one large bed. Jonny’s spirits rise; his ardour and Paloma’s proximity are a constant thread in this novel so reminiscent of John Buchan and his lovers stumbling through The Thirty Nine Steps, bracken and peat giving way to Thames mud.
Next day the couple trawl the village and learn about tides and the island’s causeway that is uncovered at low water; they discover how years ago another small boy walked out onto it and disappeared along with the dog from the pub. They learn about oyster farming and they watch container ships pass, going and coming from London to the world. They sense connections and they form a loose cabal with the cop and her friend, the pathologist. The cop is a DI but uniformed, the pathologist has a laboratory but no assistant but there, it was a different century. On New Year’s Eve the time lapse is phenomenal.
The Afterword is a spoiler if read first, and Blackwater isn’t a mystery but a thriller couched in a dim girlish style that never quite rises to the occasion. Good stocking filler however and nothing to scare the horses.
