Like This, for Ever

beach, it’s a mud bath,’ said Sam.
    ‘So he must be bringing them by road,’ said Lloyd. ‘If he’d come up the Creek by boat, he could have left Ryan anywhere, couldn’t he? By road, it had to be here.’
    ‘Can you even get a boat up here?’ asked Harvey, looking at water that didn’t seem more than a foot or so deep.
    ‘When the tide’s in, yeah,’ said Barney. ‘All the boats where we’re going next sailed up the Creek. In a couple of hours, this spot will be under four metres of water. It’s deeper further in.’
    There was a second’s silence, while all the children imagined the deep, narrow tunnel they were standing in filled to the brim with seawater.
    ‘I’m ready to go now,’ said Sam, who was looking nervously upriver.
    ‘It comes that way,’ said Barney, pointing under the bridge.
    ‘All the same.’
    ‘Thing is, though, even though Ryan was found here, he may not have been dumped here,’ said Barney. ‘Some newspaper reports said that the body was soaked in salt water, which it wouldn’t have been if it had been dumped at low tide. If it was soaked in salt water, that means it was dumped higher up and got washed down.’
    ‘But dumping bodies at low tide is what he does,’ said Harvey.
    ‘It’s what he does now,’ said Barney. ‘But what if, the first time, he just wanted to get rid of the body, but then when it was found and there was a huge fuss, he found he quite liked the attention?’
    ‘You’ve given this guy a lot of thought, haven’t you, young Barney?’ said Jorge.
    ‘This water is getting higher,’ said Sam. ‘Please can we go now?’
    ‘Right, we have to go over this gate and through the yard on the other side,’ said Barney. ‘Then we have to climb down a ladder to get to the boats.’
    Just before Creekside met the main road, the properties on the river side of the street became working yards and lock-up areas. High walls, higher gates, barbed wire and forbidding signs told them that security was taken very seriously.
    ‘How do the owners get to the boats?’ asked Sam.
    ‘They have keys to the gate,’ said Barney. ‘I couldn’t find ours. I tried.’
    ‘What if there’s dogs?’ said Hatty nervously.
    ‘There weren’t last time I was here,’ said Barney. ‘Just vans – ice-cream vans, builders’ vans, fish-and-chip vans. Nothing worth having guard dogs for. But if there are, they’ll go for Sam first.’
    ‘Hey!’
    ‘Once we’re over the gate, no one can talk,’ said Barney. ‘People live on most of these boats, and they’re not keen on people just wandering through the yard to gawp at them, so we have to be quiet.’
    Repeating the process that had got them over the fence at theEducational Trust building, the boys and Hatty clambered over into the yard.
    ‘Oh, well skanky,’ said Hatty, looking round. The quarter-acre-sized yard was little more than a car park for vehicles that owners didn’t feel comfortable leaving on the street overnight. Small Portakabins around the outside of the yard suggested that work of some kind went on here, but the general run-down feel of the place indicated that it probably wasn’t work you wanted to enquire too deeply into the nature of. Rubbish and discarded tools littering the ground made plain that no one ever gave a thought to clearing up.
    ‘I never said it was the Riviera,’ replied Barney.
    ‘I can’t see any boats,’ said Sam.
    ‘That’s because they’re still low in the water. Come on.’
    The children followed Barney through the yard to the moorings. Like everything else in the yard, the two-foot-wide strip of concrete that edged the Creek bank was strewn with rubbish, discarded tools and scrap metal, and Barney remembered another reason why his dad was often reluctant to bring him.
It’s too friggin’ dangerous for a kid
.
    Barney dropped to his knees, the others followed his example and they looked out across the eleven houseboats currently moored in this stretch of the Creek. Music was drifting from one of the boats. If they were lucky, it would mask the sound of them creeping across.
    ‘This isn’t part of the main channel of the Creek,’ said Barney. ‘This is an offshoot they call the Theatre Arm. Dad told me why once, but I wasn’t listening. Across the water is Lewisham College and there’s sometimes a nightwatchman, so we have to be extra careful.’
    ‘Which is your granddad’s boat?’ asked Hatty.
    Barney pointed to the left. Three large houseboats,