Beyond the placid shore

The very act of watching affects the observed. But what Detective Gizem Yilmaz doesn’t realise is that it can also affects the observer.

The van’s suspension groaned under Detective Yilmaz’s weight as she ducked into the dimly lit interior. Reported as suspicious three days ago, parked in front of a house, not moving. Dark finish to the paint-job, though this close it was clearly old and flaky, peeling off to reveal rust underneath. Not a matter for the police, but perhaps for the council, towing away abandoned, decrepit or illegally parked vehicles.

At least, that was the case until the address began returning flags in the system. Missing person, one bay Çelik Uzun, aged eighty-four and a retired foundry worker from the plant some way upriver. Moved recently into the neighbourhood, maybe for the water views or because it was quiet and rather secluded. The street itself popped a few more results - noise complaints, graffiti, someone had uprooted several meters of government embankment on the communal footpath that followed the river behind the houses. More missing persons, mostly teens and young adults. One of the residents had been caught dumping waste into the river - fined, returned home, and now missing. On their own, none of these were of enormous interest - missing kids turned up eventually after getting blackout drunk at a friend’s, the council cleaned up the rubbish, the older folks... well, it was sad, what happened when the mind began to slip away. The police did their due diligence of course, but often it didn’t amount to much.

But this was too big a cluster to be coincidence, and the truck with black panel sides and no apparent owner was, if not a starting point, then at least a catalyst. It drew focus, and that had brought Detective Gizem Yilmaz to the front of the investigation.

She wished she’d brought some perfume along with her investigative instincts; the truck smelled like silt and unwashed bodies. Muddy smears on the floor where the occupants hadn’t cleaned off their shoes before getting in and tracking dirt everywhere. No signs of recent activity, however, aside from the evidence tags and police paraphernalia. Whoever had owned this van, and the tens of thousands of lira of equipment it contained, hadn’t cared enough to take it with them, or even secure it against the elements. The techs had jury-rigged insulation, cradles, and holders for cables and cords to keep them free of the pools of water on the rusted metal floor. Gizem had asked if they couldn’t just email her the files, or give her a USB. But apparently the owner had been concerned enough to encrypt their data to kingdom come and back again; Gizem didn’t understand any of the techno-babble, but the gist of it was that short of either a miracle or three months of intensive work, that data wasn’t coming out of the van intact. 

Because she didn’t have three spare months tucked into her back pocket, but did have access to a car and a copy of the van’s keys, Gizem found herself spreading out a piece of tarpaulin over a seat and sitting down. There was a squelch.

A lot of the screens were waterlogged, fluid behind the glass making odd patterns where it settled and pooled over the delicate electronics. There was one screen that worked. Mostly. A tiny red light glowed on the corner, changing to green when Gizem pressed it and the screen flickered reluctantly to life. The top left corner had the same iridescence as an oil slick, and a fine crack wended its way across the glass.

Gizem settled back, thought better of it when her back touched something wet, and settled for hunching forwards and peering intently at the display from a distance of three inches. Terrible ergonomics, but a price she was willing to pay to remain relatively dry.

Detective Yilmaz watched.

Whoever had set up the surveillance had been serious about their task. No sound, though Gizem didn’t know if that made it more or less creepy. But she watched the street’s inhabitants go about their daily business in eerie silence, mouths moving, caught up in their tiny greyscale worlds. The family at 12 needed to control their dog better; it barked in furious silence from the moment they left until the moment they came home. Numbers 3 and 17 had a connection she was pretty sure their wives knew nothing about. 5’s teenage son had hosted a wild party, teens staggering through the bushes, mouths wide with unheard laughter. Bottles splashed into the river. Even after the party seemed to be over, it wasn’t - a girl clambered in through a window, came out with the son a few minutes later, his face slack with drink and his hands trying their luck. They vanished down by the riverbank, in the scrubby reeds and bushes, and Gizem grinned at the enthusiasm of youth. She was far too old for that sort of thing now; her back objected to getting up out of a nice comfy bed, let alone off a riverbank after a night of fun.

She found footage of bay Uzun easily enough - he took his little Spaniel for a walk every afternoon like clockwork. Drove the mutt at 12 insane.

He didn’t get up to much beyond that, at least as far as the cameras were concerned. The front doors weren’t watched, whoever it was had been more concerned with what happened in the privacy of backyards and open-curtained kitchens, and on the communal walkway that ran along the water’s edge. The small, semi-secret lives of everyday people.

She watched the chronic litterer heave another bag into the river. It sank for a moment, covered by the splash, then bobbed back to the surface. Bob bob bob it went, then some unseen eddy sucked it below the surface and it didn’t reemerge.

The quiet street really came alive at night, it seemed, and not just with a small pack of mangy strays rummaging through the trash. The parents at number 8 appeared to be gone more often than not, judging from the number of parties their daughter hosted; number 5 seemed to have become preoccupied and his erstwhile friends had gravitated towards the new fun on the street. Gizem wondered if it was his new girlfriend, or if his parents had grounded him until next century after the mess he’d left.

She grinned. Ah. Looked like his girlfriend wasn’t letting young 5 cramp her style; a familiar dark haired figured pulled a gangly youth down to the riverbank, and they disappeared into the shadows. Sordid secrets of suburban lives.

A new feed appeared in the mix at some point; someone had fixed a camera observing the van. It seemed to be high up; perhaps on the electrical pole a little way further down the street. From a distance, the van seemed in much better nick than it did up close. Drier, for one thing, and the paint looked sleek and new. No mud on the back fenders or caked on the doors up to hip height.

Gizem wondered why they had been surveilling themselves. Perhaps someone was getting greedy, fingers in the kitty or sending data elsewhere. She didn’t pay that screen much mind.

The litterbug was up to no good again, waiting until after dark to haul what looked like an entire metal bedframe down to the river. Deep furrows were carved into the mud, and he wound up in silt and water to his groin. She couldn’t hear his cursing, but she could see the annoyance radiating from every decrepit line of his body. Uzun’s little dog ran up and down the footpath, alone and barking, tail streaming like a banner behind it.

She trawled through the screens, looking for suspicious people. People being surreptitious and sneaky, and not in an ordinary every-day sort of way that one might adopt when, say, you were pushing fifty and hopping the neighbours’ rose bushes at eleven PM to meet the gentleman at 17. Uzun’s little spaniel certainly thought it worth remarking upon, though, and she stifled a giggle as lights went on and pants went up. Luckily no-one seemed to notice the legs sticking out of the shrubbery. Bay Uzun needed to keep a closer eye on his dog.

Actually...

She rewound. There was the spaniel, dashing up and down the path and picking fights with number 12’s dog. Every day, same time. But after a while, it was doing it alone - Uzun had vanished.

Gizem tried to pinpoint the day. The time. Perhaps nighttime; plenty of places to hide, in the dark. There was Uzun letting the dog out around three AM for one of nature’s unavoidable obligation. Was that someone lurking in the rushes by the riverside, or just a thicker patch of shadow? The dog thought it worth investigating, and despite his slippers Uzun thought enough of his pet to follow when it didn’t immediately return. 

Man and dog vanished into the shadows.

The dog came shooting out minutes later, dripping. It barked at the back door for a while, to no response. No-one was home, after all.

Gizem noted the date and time, and watched intently to see if bay Uzun reemerged. Nothing.

It was more information than they’d had previously, at least, although as information went it was still slim pickings. Practically anorexic. Man walked to riverside. Vanished. Foul play or just treacherous footing? A shadow was just a shadow, after all.

Detective Yilmaz sat up straighter and paid more attention to people wandering down by the banks.

Number 5’s girlfriend was back, leading a girl into the privacy of some damp vegetation this time. Perhaps the daughter of 8. Gizem almost overlooked it, but the teen being led turned her head just right as she tossed a wine bottle into the water, and something in the shape of her brow, the curve of her chin, caught in Gizem’s mind. She pulled up the missing persons cases.

Ah.

Well, that was interesting. What was more interesting was the fact that neither girl stepped back into the light; the night swallowed them whole, leaving behind no clues. And, yes, the boy at number five was among the missing, too.

Frown carved deep into her brow, Gizem watched the litterer toss a bag into the water without really focussing on him. Her mind filled in the splash. But the bag caught in the weeds, threatening to betray its owner like a nasty floater in a friend’s toilet bowl, and he grabbed a stick to prod it out into the current. He was up to his knees, which couldn’t be good for his health or his shoes, and the stick nearly reached the bag. Just a little further.

A shape erupted out of the river in a spray of water, refocussing Gizem’s wandering attention. She swore and paused the feed. Clicked through frame by grainy frame. The resolution was poor - churchmice were richer - and the darkness added whole new layers of obscurity to the proceedings, but she thought she could just make out a human figure. A head of tangled dark hair. Then the water closed up behind them and was still once more. The bag gave a forlorn bob and drifted out into mid-stream, leaving behind no sign of any human, litterer or otherwise. She checked the timestamp. Only a few days before the truck had been abandoned, according to forensics’ best estimates.

Gizem made another note and kept watching.

Her eyes were gritty with sleep, or more accurately a need for sleep, as she approached the supposed date of van abandonment. Could be a few days either side, forensics had said, citing something about larvae, sediment deposition and other things that held no interest and many mysteries for Gizem. She switched her focus to the feed observing the truck. Who ran, who stayed, how many corpses were dragged out in black bags - all of that would be valuable information. Not to mention stills of faces.

She got a few freeze-frames of the observers, blurry and low-res. Not the same quality of cameras for this feed as the others, which would make identification difficult, but Gizem liked a challenge. The nominated date passed by without incident, unless you counted a criminally late pizza delivery. From the gesticulating, it was considerably more than thirty minutes.

No hard identification on any of the perps, but Gizem recognised the dark headed person shambling towards the van the next night. They walked like they were drunk, stumbling and staggering, alcohol or drugs making their legs feel unfamiliar beneath them. Dark footprints marked where they had been. Their hair glistened wetly as they passed beneath a streetlight, approaching the van.

They leaned against the side, and a small pool of water spread out beneath them, dark against the road’s surface. Then the figure straightened. Raised a hand.

Knock.

Gizem turned towards the door.

Knock.

There was dirty water seeping under the door.

Author’s Notes: Inspired, very broadly, by water spirits like the nixie.  Since the story is, nominally, in Turkey we’d probably (maybe?) be talking about su iyesi, although finding any detail on those proved impossible for me. If anyone can point me in the direction of something more reliable or substantial than Wikipedia, I’d be thrilled.