The Mudlark

Nobody notices the woman on the mud. The river does. Lou Gambrill has walked the Hard at the mouth of Oxfleet Creek at every low spring tide for twenty-eight years, in waders, before it is light. She knows what the estuary keeps and what it gives back, and in which order. Every find goes in a margarine tub with the date and the height of the tide on the lid. There are nineteen hundred tubs in her shed and a human bone in most winters, because the island across the creek has been giving up the dead of the prison hulks since 1830. So when the river gives her a wedding ring, bright, with the mud still in the engraving, she knows three things the town does not. It went in inside the creek, not out on the sands where its owner says he lost it eleven years ago. It went in within the month. And a fortnight later, on the same bank, so did a finger with a surgeon's wire in it. Nobody wants to hear it. Not the coroner's officer, who has a box for bones like that and a word for them: non-recent. Not the police, who have a text from the missing woman saying she is safe and well and would like to be left alone. And not Oxfleet, which has already decided that Gemma Tappenden left her kids and went off over the water, because that is the kind of thing Gemma would do. The only people who will listen are a fifteen-year-old who logs every light on the creek and is not supposed to be where he sees them from, and the coxswain of the inshore rescue, who brings Lou tea on the sea wall and says he will ask around, because Gemma was his crew. Mud. Fog. The lights of Southend over the water. A completely standalone novel of tide tables, margarine tubs and the things a town prefers not to find, from the author of The Warden and The Allotments.