The community fell apart after the gnomes were found. The same gnomes that had pulled it so tightly together. It didn’t happen in an explosion of emotion. It happened quietly. A collection of private choices. Nobody was blamed. Nobody had the energy to solve the crime. It was all just too disappointing. Too deflating. Too sad.

People drifted away with little pause, and even less discussion. Jess had no opportunity to confess, explain, salvage, or sacrifice. She wasn’t sure she could anyway.

Jess felt like an intruder when she first took the empty mooring. A floating home was expected to be a way of life, not a flight of fancy. It wasn’t for tourists, or teenagers. Jess didn’t see herself as a tourist but thought the others would. She was just someone who could get a bank loan but would never have a deposit.

Any relief Jess felt at learning it wasn’t her against them was chased away by the disappointment of realising it was everyone for themselves. The canal was no more a community than the flats she’d moved out of. The only difference was a committee rather than a landlord set the rules.

The lines of ‘them’ and ‘us’ needed to create a community were only drawn after accusations of ornament pilfering were levelled at the village’s waterborne residents by those whose gardens backed onto the towpath. Little in this life bonds a group faster than being treated as ‘other’. Every unfounded assumption brought the community closer, and Jess loved it.

Only, it was them. At least, it was one of them.

Jess stole her first gnome after an unexpected lock-in at The Bridge. Its big eyes had winked in the moonlight and the rum inside her had responded. She separated the little fisher from its friends, carried it home, placed it on the bow, stumbled inside, and passed out.

She woke after a few hours, the same night but a different Jess, consumed by the torment of a clenched pelvic floor. She rushed to the head and released. As the pain flowed out, guilt rushed in. In fuzzy-headed panic, Jess gave her diminutive figurehead a maritime burial and returned to bed.

Fergus the Fisher was Jess’ first victim, but far from her last. More than a dozen clay characters were sent to sleep with the fishes by Jess’ nocturnal cycle of theft and fear. If it hadn’t been for the search and rescue operation when Bert’s granddaughter dropped her pet terrapin into the canal, Jess might have drowned the entire population.

The first boat sailed away the day after the underwater cemetery was discovered. By the end of the month, only Jess and Bert remained. Bert was too old to make changes and his grandkids lived too close. The final pair sipped homebrew under the stars, their Sunday night tradition. Jess felt as though she’d swallowed an anchor.

“You made it special here, for a while,” Bert said without looking at Jess. “And I always hated those gnomes.”