I walked out of that office feeling, for the first time since the river, as if the weight had shifted. I was no longer alone with what I knew. A stranger with a steady gaze and a notebook had taken the case, and she believed that documents could speak louder than a son's lies. The tram carried me back across Vienna, past the cathedral spires and the river, and I held the logbook close against my coat. Octavia had begun. The investigation was real now, and it had a name, a face, and a plan. Landon had pushed me into the Danube believing the river would finish what he had started. He had not counted on Kieran, or on Wesley, or on forty years of ink. He had not counted on Octavia.
Chapter 20
— What Kieran Saw
Kieran did not want to testify. I knew that before Octavia even asked him, because I knew the man by then, and I knew how he lived. He kept a lock on the Danube, and he kept it alone, and he liked the quiet of the river at dawn, the gulls, the slow passage of boats, the work of his hands on the gates. He had pulled me from the water because that was what a lock-keeper does when someone is drowning, not because he wanted a place in a courtroom or a hearing room. When Octavia came to the cottage, he made tea and stood by the window with his back to the room, as if the river outside could give him the words he needed. She waited. She did not hurry him, and I was grateful for that, because hurrying Kieran would have closed him like a gate.
She asked him first about the night itself, and he spoke slowly, choosing each word as carefully as he chose his footing on wet stone. He had been on duty at the lock, he said, checking the gates before the night shift ended, when the Danube Empress passed in the dusk. The anniversary cruise, the lights along the deck, the music faint across the water. He had watched the boat because it was one of ours, one of the Haversham Danube Line, and he knew its shape the way a man knows the shape of his own house. He had seen a woman standing alone at the rail, near the stern, looking out at the Wachau Valley as the light faded. He had seen a man come up behind her. He had seen the man's hands, and the sudden movement, and the woman going over the side. He had seen the man look down at the water, and then step back from the rail, and walk away along the deck, unhurried, as if nothing had happened.
Octavia asked him to describe the man. Kieran turned from the window then, and his face was pale but steady. Tall, he said, dark coat, dark hair, the build of a man who sits at a desk more than he works on a river. He had not seen the face clearly at that distance, in that light, but he had seen enough. A man who had watched someone fall by accident would have shouted. This man had not shouted. He had simply gone. Kieran had run for his boat then, and he had gone into the water after me, and the rest of it I knew better than anyone, because I had lived it, cold and gasping, in his arms.
Octavia asked him what had happened next, and he told her about the search, or rather the absence of one. He had watched the Danube Empress continue downriver, its lights growing smaller, with no alarm raised, no boat turned back, no crew at the rail looking for a woman in the water. He had reported what he saw to the river authorities that night, he said, but his report had been filed away, a lock-keeper's note about a woman in the water, with no name attached, and no one had followed it up because the company had said, by then, that I had drowned and that the river had taken me. He had kept his own copy of that report, folded in a drawer in the cottage, and he brought it out now and laid it on the table. Octavia read it twice, and she asked him to sign a statement confirming that it was his, written that night, in his own hand.
Then she asked the question I had been dreading, the question that would decide whether his testimony could stand. Could he identify the man on the deck as Landon Haversham. Kieran was silent for a long time. He looked at me, and I saw the struggle in his face, the decent man's fear of saying more than he truly knew. He said he could not swear to a face he had seen only in the dusk, from across the water, at a distance. But he could swear to what he had seen, and to what he had not seen. He had seen a man push a woman overboard. He had seen that man walk away without raising the alarm. He had seen the boat sail on. And later, when Octavia showed him a photograph of Landon, taken from the company website, he studied it for a long while, and then he said, quietly, that the build was the same, the hair was the same, the coat was the same, and that he believed it was him. Believed, not swore. Octavia nodded, and she wrote down his exact words.