The Light Above the Floodgate

Leonie Shaw knew the notice was wrong before she reached its last line. It told the people of West Mere to assemble at the old riverside hall, a building whose roof had been removed three winters earlier. At the bottom was her father's name.

Her father had been dead for eight years.

The boy delivering the notices stood on her step in a raincoat that reached his knees. He said a man had given him a bundle outside the corner shop and two pounds to post them through doors. He did not know which man. Someone in a van.

Leonie asked him to stop delivering them. She took the remaining bundle and gave him an envelope on which to write the streets he had already visited. Then she called his mother, whose number was still on the fridge from a long-ago school lift arrangement.

The sky had the pale, crowded look it acquired before a storm. Leonie had come home for a weekend to clear her father's last cupboard, not to learn again how the river could change the sound of a town.

She rang Fran Moss at the local radio office.

"Are people being sent to the old hall?"

"Absolutely not. Give me a moment."

Leonie heard Fran put a hand over the telephone and ask somebody a question. When she came back, her voice was different: still familiar, but careful.

"There is a real weather response. The north school is the reception point. The control team is issuing the instructions. Don't send anybody anywhere on the strength of your leaflet."

"It has Dad's name on it."

There was a pause.

"Send me a photograph."

Leonie laid the notice on the kitchen table. Her father's printed name looked perfectly ordinary through the camera. That was what frightened her.

Fran called back with a number Leonie recognised from the council contact card on her father's old noticeboard. Leonie made the call herself rather than using the number printed on the new leaflet. A woman named Hale answered, took the report and asked where the bundle had come from.

"A boy was paid to deliver it. I've spoken to his mother."

"Ask her to keep him home. We'll need the streets, not another person out looking for the van."

Leonie read the street list. Hale repeated it back and told her that staff would correct the false instruction. The actual advice for Leonie's street was to leave by the signed uphill route before the lower road closed. The school had power, hot drinks and people keeping track of arrivals.

"Don't let the false notice make you ignore a real warning," Hale said.

Leonie put the leaflet and the boy's envelope in a document wallet. She packed her medication, a change of clothes and the charger she had nearly left upstairs. The cupboard could wait.

At the end of her street, a neighbour was trying to load a dog into a car. He held up the same leaflet.

"The hall's gone," Leonie said. "I've reported this. Please check the current instruction with the response team."

He looked from the paper to the traffic sign pointing uphill. "Who would send us down there?"

She did not know. She wanted to say something about fools sharing old notices. But the paper was new, and somebody had paid a child to carry it.

She walked uphill in the rain. Halfway to the school she saw her brother's white van turn off the upper road toward the floodgate. The left rear door still had the dent she had made, aged seventeen, with a borrowed bicycle.

Cal had posted in the family message group that he would be away for the weekend.

At the school, Leonie called Cal. The call went to voicemail. She left a short message asking where he was and saying that somebody was using their father's name on false notices.

Her last message to him, three months earlier, had not been short.

They had argued over the house. Leonie wanted to sell. Cal wanted her to understand that a decision which seemed tidy from a city flat could remove the place where he still kept the spare boots and the winter blankets. She had said he was sentimental when the truth was that he was the one who had dealt with the leaking roof.

He had said she photographed other people's troubles for a living and preferred not to look at her own.

Neither had called since.

Fran arrived with a recorder in one hand and a flask in the other. She was reporting from the school, not broadcasting instructions of her own. She showed Leonie the response team's current statement before recording a brief correction about the false leaflet.

Leonie did not hold the leaflet up for a dramatic photograph. Fran photographed it as evidence and kept the false destination out of the image she prepared for the public update.

"Could it simply be an old form?" Fran asked.

"The wording isn't the old wording. Dad would never have called the river path the main access."

"Would Cal know that?"

Leonie looked at her phone.

"Yes."

Fran waited.

"I've seen his van," Leonie said. "I haven't seen him."

It felt like an unnecessarily fussy distinction until she heard herself make it. Then she understood that it was the only honest sentence she had.

Elspeth Rowe's neighbour arrived at the school carrying a shopping bag with a toothbrush, a wool cardigan and a pair of slippers. Elspeth herself was not with her.

"She said someone was collecting her," the neighbour told the volunteer by the door. "I thought she'd be here already."

Leonie knew Elspeth from the days when her father worked at the floodgate. Elspeth's husband had been his colleague. She lived in the last cottage before the low riverside path.

The volunteer took the neighbour to Hale rather than asking the room at large whether anybody had seen her. Leonie followed only when the neighbour recognised her and called her name.

"A man came about twenty minutes before I left," the neighbour said. "White van. I couldn't see his face. Elspeth was on her doorstep, talking to him."

"Did you see her get in?" Hale asked.

"No. I saw her with her handbag. The red one."

Leonie's phone remained silent.

She told Hale about Cal's van and gave its registration from the insurance message he had sent when she borrowed it the year before. She also said she could not confirm who had been driving.

"Thank you," Hale said. "Let us make that check."

Leonie heard a promise she was not being given. Nobody had said Elspeth was safe, and nobody had said her brother had taken her anywhere.

Across the hall, Fran had placed two chairs beside a heater. One was empty. Leonie stood looking at it until Fran put the flask in her hand.

"Drink," she said. "Then tell me what you actually know."

The school stood on a rise above the town. From a covered corner of its yard, Leonie could see the roof of the floodgate house beyond the football field. She had photographed that view many times when the building still had a keeper.

Now a light shone in the upper window.

The floodgate house had been closed to ordinary use after the equipment moved to a newer site. Her father's desk had gone; the nameplate she kept in the cupboard had come from its door. But the upper room and its broad stairs were still there.

Leonie lifted her camera and made a photograph from the school yard. She did not cross the barrier at the bottom of the hill. Through the long lens, the light became a pale rectangle with a dark shape passing in front of it.

She called Hale outside.

"There's somebody in the upper room."

Hale looked through the camera, then spoke into her radio. She did not tell Leonie what the crew on the other end said. She asked for the photograph and went back inside to use a telephone.

Fran stood beside Leonie under the roof.

"When we were little," Leonie said, "Dad used to leave that light on if he was waiting for somebody. We could see it from our kitchen."

"It might be Cal."

"It might."

"And if it is?"

Leonie lowered the camera. "Then I wish he'd answer the phone."

She tried again. This time the call rang once before failing. An unanswered call had felt like anger. A call that could not connect felt like something else.