by Jane Casey
It.
‘And it was just lying there?’ I checked.
She looked baffled. ‘What else would it be doing?’
‘No, I meant – it wasn’t buried, or wrapped in anything?’
‘No, no. It was lying there on the shingle. I thought it was a tree root at first – you do get them washed down the river from upstream where the banks are overgrown. I was going to take a picture of it to put on my Facebook page, because it looked like a hand. But then, when I got a bit closer, I thought it looked a bit too much like a hand. And then, of course …’ She shrugged. ‘It was a hand.’
‘Did you touch it?’ Derwent asked.
‘Before I knew what it was. I turned it over. It was palm down, with the fingers curled under it, you see.’ She held up her own hand to demonstrate, a loose fist with knuckles to the sky. ‘Then when I felt it, I knew it couldn’t be a root. Too soft. Too much give in it. But it wasn’t until I saw the fingernails that I was sure. It was such a strange thing to find that I couldn’t quite admit to myself what it was. I took some pictures of it and where I found it and then I picked it up. I was afraid it would be washed away before anyone came to recover it.’
‘You must have had a shock,’ I said.
‘Well, you expect to find bones here – this was London’s rubbish dump for thousands of years, and this area in particular was full of markets. But the bones tend to belong to sheep or pigs or cows. Sometimes you find a bit of a fox. I’ve never found a hand before.’ She faced into the breeze and smiled. ‘But then you never do know what the river will give you.’
At the top of the stairs, the Marine Unit were packing up to head back to their base at Wapping.
‘Finished for the day, lads?’ Derwent demanded as they went past us.
The sergeant stopped. He was mid-fifties and serious. ‘Tide’s coming in. We’re not going to find anything else here today.’
They had found three other pieces of tattered bone and flesh that had all been carefully preserved in coolers for transportation to the mortuary along with the hand. Thinking of what Kim Weldon had said about animal remains, I asked, ‘Are you sure that what you found is human?’
‘No idea.’ He heaved a bag onto his back. ‘But the pathologist will tell you if it’s not.’
‘Where’s the rest of the body?’ Derwent asked. ‘In the sea?’
‘Could be. Could be we’ll find some more bits in the next few days. We’ll be looking. Where we find things has a lot to do with the tide and the shape of the river. The way the water moves through it depends on whether the banks are concave or convex. You get lots of stuff washing up around Greenwich, for instance, and at Wapping, and at Tower Bridge. You won’t find as much on the opposite banks. So we have a few places to look.’
‘I never really thought about the tide coming up the river,’ I said. ‘I thought it flowed out to the sea and that was it.’
He shook his head, not even trying to hide his scorn. ‘Why do you think the flood barrier exists? There’s a clue in the name, love.’
‘I’m not saying I couldn’t have worked it out,’ I protested. ‘I’ve never thought about it before.’
He grunted. Clearly I was worth even less of his time now, which was a shame because I needed his expert knowledge.
I tucked a stray curl of hair behind my ear, widening my eyes to play up the helpless look. ‘As you can tell, I don’t know much about this. The river flows in both directions, so does that mean we can’t tell where the body parts might have gone in? Could they have been moved up here by the action of the tide?’
He wrinkled his forehead, considering it. ‘The tide moves things up but then it moves them back again on the way out, if you see what I mean. That makes it hard to pinpoint where items enter the water. They sometimes wash around the same area for a while.’
‘Could they have been dumped off a boat?’ Derwent asked.
‘Yeah. But why draw attention to yourself by hopping in a boat to dump body parts when you could slip them into the river from the shore? No one would have noticed if it was small parts, which is what we’ve found. People don’t realise but the river is a busy place. You wouldn’t want to be out there midstream and not know what you’re doing.’
He was right. I’d never realised how busy the Thames was with constant boat traffic: commuter boats, tours, barges loaded with building materials, small speedboats and larger vessels crewed by competent-looking people in high-vis overalls.
‘If the body parts turned up in this area, does this mean they were all thrown in the river here?’
‘I wouldn’t want to try to guess, love. But we only found four pieces. Better hope there’s more to come.’ He nodded briskly and strode away.
‘Thanks for the help,’ I called after him.
‘I don’t know much about this,’ Derwent cooed in my ear. ‘Please explain it to me, Mr Police Diver.’
‘And did he explain it to me?’
‘Sort of.’
‘So it worked.’ I put my notebook away. ‘But don’t get used to it.’
Rumours …
Everyone’s heard the rumours about elite gentlemen’s clubs, where the champagne flows freely, the parties are outrageous … and what goes on behind closed doors is darker than you could possibly imagine.
Scandals …
Paige Hargreaves was a young journalist working on a story about a club for the most privileged men in London. She was on the brink of exposing a shocking scandal. Then she disappeared.
Secrets …
DS Maeve Kerrigan must immerse herself in the club’s world of wealth, luxury and ruthless behaviour to find out what happened. But Maeve is keeping secrets of her own. Will she uncover the truth? Or will time run out for Maeve first?
Click here to order a copy of The Cutting Place
About the Author
Jane Casey has written ten crime novels for adults and three for teenagers. A former editor, she is married to a criminal barrister who ensures her writing is realistic and as accurate as possible.
This authenticity has made her novels international bestsellers and critical successes. The Maeve Kerrigan series has been nominated for many awards: in 2015 Jane won the Mary Higgins Clark Award for The Stranger You Know and Irish Crime Novel of the Year for After the Fire. In 2019, Cruel Acts was chosen as Irish Crime Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. It was a Sunday Times bestseller.
Born in Dublin, Jane now lives in southwest London with her husband and two children.
@JaneCaseyAuthor
Also by Jane Casey
THE MAEVE KERRIGAN SERIES
The Burning
The Reckoning
The Last Girl
The Stranger You Know
The Kill
After the Fire
Let the Dead Speak
Cruel Acts
The Cutting Place
STANDALONE NOVELS
The Missing
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