Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
On a warm evening in Croatia a girl walked out of her home in the village of Misto and disappeared.
Silva’s people were neither strict nor indulgent, they were just an ordinary family. Her mother taught geography in the village school, father was an accountant; at seventeen brother Mate was aiming to become a ship builder. Only Silva, who was his twin, broke the mould; beautiful, seductive and careless, she was studying economics in the high school at Split, dealing drugs on the side - a fact that was known only to Mate and her peers before the police were called in two days after she vanished and a package of heroin was found, hidden in a drainpipe in her mother’s garden.
The year was 1989 and in the world beyond the village war was looming as Yugoslavia started to disintegrate. There was an air of hysteria abroad and panic was infectious; in the fevered atmosphere the police received an anonymous call from someone who claimed to have been present when Silva was murdered. The killer was identified and even the place where the weapon was concealed. A young inspector, eager to advance his career, recovered the weapon and arrested the suspect, but was forced to release him, tortured and beaten, when the bloods didn’t match. The phone call was spurious.
The police withdrew to Split; Misto was too small to have its own force. Only the inspector remained, stubbornly trawling the village, still suspecting murder - until a more reliable witness came forward who had met Silva at the bus station the day after she was said to have disappeared. Far from being harmed the girl had been carefree and talkative; she was carrying her passport and a considerable amount of cash and she confided that she was about to leave Yugoslavia for good, to make a new life for herself in the big city - any city.
So everything was resolved: Silva was no longer the innocent victim of a sexual attack but a druggie making off to profit from her gains. Only her family were obviously concerned: why, if she was alive, didn’t she make contact, at least with Mate? Where his father was to scour the countryside, pasting posters, questioning strangers, writing to authorities, Mate was obsessed. Convinced that his twin was alive and surely in need, now he embarked on a search that was to last for nearly thirty years, a search recorded in excruciating detail as he followed a trail through Europe from Barcelona to Gothenburg and points between, exploring dockland slums, sleazy suburbs and all the red light districts, anticipating that he was more likely to find Silva among the under-privileged than living her dream.
Mate travelled alone but Silva was gregarious and it was the other people in her life who now take over this long and meaty book, their progress strung like coloured beads along the thread of her twin’s weary quest. At the time, reading in exquisite and terrible detail of some horror in the South China Sea or Balkan minefield you appreciate the drama and admire the writing but ask “where is the relevance?" Where is Silva? Only nearing the end do you realise that everyone so carefully delineated in those early chapters: lovers, suspects, pimps, all were haunted, informed by Silva. Nothing was irrelevant.
This is an enthralling crime story contained in an epic covering three decades: the integrated tale of simple souls in an ordinary community racked and wrecked and surviving after a long war and its aftershocks. Red Water has everything from grandeur to depravity, bliss and loyalty and lust. There’s a lot of grief and guilt, but there’s acceptance too. As for the reader, you can only be seduced by empathy and a brilliant author.
