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It’s like a sodding Greek myth – in every third one some poor living soul has to pay the ferryman and go across the dark and dodgy river to save some other hapless individual.
There are moments in all our lives when we hold in our hands the fate of others; the words we say will set in motion a series of events which cannot be undone, however much we might later wish it could. We are not always aware of that responsibility at the time, but Smith was on this occasion.
It's a blend of things, he’d said to Jason Diver, like a good whisky – the things that make a good detective. Active attention – concentrating, focusing, looking instead of just seeing. Then the informed expectation – using one’s experience and memories to forecast precisely, to make guesses that are intelligent. And the final thing? He had concluded, having thought about the matter too often over too many years, that it was ambition of imagination, by which he meant the critical ability
to question, to doubt what has been accepted, what others believe has been established.
He watched Layla searching through the margins of the creeks, nose down, tail up and wagging. She would be happy doing that for hours on end. She never found very much but that wasn’t the point – she was just a dog doing what a dog is meant to do. Few people are as lucky as that.
Fate? Destiny? Coincidence? Smith swung the tiller round and began to tack the boat back towards the entrance into the channel and the marshes. He’d spent enough of his life trying to puzzle out the meanings of words like those. Things are what they are, and the sooner we can accept that, the happier we will be.
He could have slowed her a little but Layla was snapping at the droplets in the air and Jo was looking back at him and laughing; an image caught by the shutter of his mind, a moment captured like a
photograph – one he would remember often in the years to come.
