Kissed a Sad Goodbye

by Deborah Crombie

  Finishing the piece, he drank from the bottle of water he’d bought at the refreshment kiosk a few yards away. He stood with his back to the spreading plane tree at the far end of Island Gardens. Behind him, just the other side of the tree, ran the river promenade. People strolled by at the undemanding pace dictated by the hot summer day, pausing occasionally to rest on the benches or gaze at the bright glint of the Thames. Directly across the river, the twin white domes of the Royal Naval College irresistibly drew the eye, echoed by the round dome of the Greenwich end of the foot tunnel.

  Between the Naval College and the tunnel rose the tall masts of the Cutty Sark, in dry dock at Greenwich Pier. The ship was the last survivor of the lovely clippers that had once unloaded their cargoes in the East End’s docks, and he’d often wished he had been born in time to witness the end of that era. But near the Cutty Sark, the much smaller, flag-bedecked Gipsy Moth proved that adventure was still possible, for in 1967, Sir Francis Chichester had single-handedly sailed the tiny yacht around the world.

  A voyage around the world would present an easy solution to his own present predicament, but Gordon knew even as the thought flitted through his mind that he was too well-rooted here, in the place where he’d spent his childhood, and that running away would solve nothing in the end.

  Squatting, he sloshed a bit of water into the bowl he always carried for Sam. “Thirsty, mate?” The dog raised his head, then lumbered to his feet with an air that spoke more of duty than desire. After a few obliging laps of water, he circled twice on the patch of bare earth he’d chosen as his bed and settled himself again, nose on his front paws. Sam’s movements were visibly slower these days, but it was hot, after all, and the heat made everyone lethargic. Still, Gordon had made up his mind not to take the dog down into the tunnel anymore—the seeping dampness couldn’t be good for the animal’s joints.

  Not that he wanted to play in the tunnel anyway, after what had happened last night. Of course, he’d known he would see her—it was inevitable, living and working in such close proximity. Yet he had stayed on the Island, playing in the park, in the tunnel, beneath the shadow of the cranes on Glengall Bridge, tempting fate. Even today, as good as this pitch was, there were places he might have done better. Maybe he should pack up and try South Ken, or Hampstead High Street, or Islington again.

  He knelt, hands on the clarinet as he prepared to break it apart, and before his eyes flashed an image of Annabelle’s face, white and furious. Last night, anger had stripped her of the cool veneer of detachment she’d maintained even when he’d told her he wanted no more to do with her. He’d thought that, perhaps for the first time, he’d had a glimpse of who she really was, what she really felt, but still he’d not been willing to believe her. Now, doubt gripped him and he wondered if he had been blinded by pride.

  What if he’d misjudged her? What if he had been wrong?

  JANICE COPPIN’S HEART HAD JUMPED WITH a peculiar mixture of dread and excitement when the phone rang. Getting called out on the job was always difficult on the weekends—with Bill gone, she had to send the children to the center, and at ten pounds per child, per day, she sometimes wondered if she’d be better off on the dole. Not that Bill had been worth much as far as looking after the kids went—or good for much of anything at all, for that matter, the big lout, except dropping his trousers and getting her pregnant. She should have listened to her mum.

  Her daughter, Christine, came in and sat on the edge of her bed, watching her with the intensity Janice always found a bit unsettling. The eldest of her three children, Christine was an awkward girl who took her responsibilities seriously, as if perpetually making up for having been conceived among the bushes in the Mudchute with Bill’s leather jacket for a bed. Her chubby body stubbornly refused to acknowledge the onset of puberty and her straight brown hair looked as if it had been cut using a bowl as a guide, but she seemed as yet oblivious to these deficiencies.

  “What is it this time, Mummy?” she asked, pushing her spectacles up on her short nose.

  Working one foot into a new pair of tights, Janice glanced at her daughter. A suspicious death, the duty sergeant had said, and as her guv was away for the weekend, the case would be hers. But she answered, “Don’t know yet, love”: she tried not to discuss cases she thought would upset the children. “Shit!” she added as she stood and the tights laddered. Last pair; they’d have to do. It was her day for the hairdresser’s, so it meant going at least another week without a cut or color. And it was too hot for her wool suit. She’d have to wear it anyway, no matter if she stank like a stevedore at the end of the day—it was the most professional-looking thing she had, and if this was going to be her big day she was bloody well going to look like it.

  “Will you be home before the center closes?” Christine ignored her swearing, though the boys would have jumped on her because she was always on at them about it. “The boys won’t want to go to Granny’s.”

  “Tough on them, then,” Janice replied impatiently, and sighed. She slid her feet into her new navy shoes and put on her jacket. Already she could feel the wool scratching through the thin fabric of her blouse. “Chris, you know I’ll be home as soon as I can. I’ll ring the center, okay? When I see how it’s going.”

  Christine nodded, her eyes solemn behind the spectacle lenses.

  “You collect the boys from next door and take them along to the center—tell them I said to mind or else.” She grabbed keys and handbag from the chest of drawers on the way out of the room. Glancing back, she saw the unmade bed, the pile of dirty laundry she hadn’t found the time to wash; thought of the dishes waiting in the kitchen sink and the littered sitting room. You wanted this, she reminded herself. You wanted out of uniform; you pushed and stepped on toes to get here.

  Outside the door of the flat, she gave Christine a quick hug, then stood watching her as she ran next door. Across the street her neighbor washed his car, his bulging gut stretching his thin cotton vest. His trousers rode so low that when he bent over half his arse was exposed. Janice turned away, feeling slightly nauseated, knowing he’d smile and whistle if he saw her looking. The bastards; they thought you wanted them no matter how they looked.

  She hesitated, debating whether to walk across Glengall Bridge. It was the most direct route—taking the car meant driving right round the dock, but on the other hand arriving at a crime scene on foot wouldn’t do much to establish her authority.

  A few moments later she pulled her Vauxhall up beside the assembled pandas in the car park of the ASDA Superstore. DC Miller came to meet her, his spotty face pale—on closer inspection, he looked decidedly green about the gills.

  “Tell me this is a joke,” she instructed him. “Manufactured by that old fart George Brent just to ruin my Saturday morning.”

  Miller blanched a bit further. “No, ma’am. There’s a body.” He pointed at the slope leading to the park. “Just up there.”

  A derelict, thought Janice, just found himself a nice peaceful place to pass away. Inconvenient but not messy. Not on this weekend when her guv was off drinking himself into a stupor at his son’s wedding.

  “It’s a woman,” said Miller. “Young. Crime scene team is on its way.”

  Janice felt the prickle of sweat in her armpits. It was her show, then, ready or not.

  CHAPTER 3 The Mudchute is an area of land which originally belonged to the dock authorities. Covering about 30 acres, roughly square in shape, it has high clinker banks (on which grass and wildflowers now flourish). These banks were built to contain a lake of silt dredged up from Millwall Dock in the 1880s and 1890s.

  Eve Hostettler, from Memories of

  Childhood on the Isle of Dogs, 1870–1970

  Kincaid had to stop and consult his London A to Z twice, much to his chagrin, but it had been some time since he’d worked a case in the East End, and he’d seldom had reason to venture further east than Wapping or Limehouse. It was all called “Docklands” east of the Tower now, but not even the massive reb
uilding scheme of the last decade had managed to completely erase the character of the individual neighborhoods.

  A glance at his map as he passed Canary Wharf told him that he was entering the Isle of Dogs peninsula. He drove south on Westferry Road, following the line of new housing developments and unfinished building sites sprouting like mushrooms between the road and the shore. Many of the hoardings displayed the legend Finch, Ltd. in a bold graphic.

  Occasionally he caught a glimpse of the river between the buildings, and once a flash of an enormous passenger liner, white and clumsy as an iceberg. As he neared the bottom of the horseshoe he turned left on East Ferry Road, heading north again, up the center of the Island.

  To his left he saw a row of Victorian terraced houses that formed part of a prewar housing estate; to his right lay a wasteland of construction. This had to be the extension of the Docklands Light Railway he’d read about, which would take the train under the river to Greenwich, and then to Lewisham, but he hadn’t visualized the extent of the chaos the controversial project would generate.

  The engineers had managed, however, to keep East Ferry Road passable, and beyond a hoarding on his right the land rose steeply to the plateau of Mudchute Park. Kincaid bypassed the first entrance to the park, a steep, arched tunnel across from the Millwall Dock, and soon came to the entrance of the ASDA supermarket.

  As he turned into the car park he saw the pandas, blue lights flashing, clustered in front of the ASDA service station. Gemma’s battered Escort stood a little to one side; a pair of uniformed constables held back a gathering crowd of interested onlookers.

  Pulling up between Gemma’s car and a red Vauxhall, Kincaid got out and headed for the knot of people gathered at the rear of the car park. The bodies shifted and he had a glimpse of Gemma’s copper hair and green shirt as she turned to meet him.

  “Guv.” Gemma greeted him with a brief nod. “This is DI Janice Coppin. She’s the senior officer here.”

  Kincaid held out his hand to the woman in the navy suit, who gripped it as briefly as courtesy allowed. The expression on her blunt face imparted no more welcome than her handshake, and even her stiff blonde hair seemed to radiate displeasure.

  “What have we got, Inspector?” Kincaid asked easily, but he remembered his chief’s comment about the newly promoted DI not being considered up to the job, and thought it wouldn’t surprise him if Coppin felt hostile towards Scotland Yard for invading her patch.

  “Up there.” DI Coppin stepped aside so that he had a clear view of the entrance to the Mudchute, tucked away in the heavy shrubbery that lined the perimeter of the car park. “A woman’s body, exposed by the side of the path. We were waiting for you,” she continued. “The pathologist’s finished, but we couldn’t move the body until you had viewed it in situ.”

  Kincaid had no intention of apologizing to her for his tardiness. He said merely, “Let’s have a look, then,” and started towards the park entrance.

  The litter strewn over the car park tarmac spilled onto the ground, clustering thickly along the paved path that climbed towards the plateau and the entrance to the park. The rubbish made a mockery of the pastoral, wooden arbor built over the park’s swinging gate, and would prove a headache, he knew, for the team collecting evidence.

  The wooded slope was gentle, but by the time Kincaid had pushed carefully through the gate bars, he’d begun to sweat. The path forked before him, and even after the rains of the past few weeks, its surface was trampled hard enough to resist an impression from his rubber-soled shoes. Ahead and to the right it climbed towards a dividing hedge and beyond that the high open spaces of the park; to his left it wound along the edge of the steep bank, and a dozen yards along it he saw a cluster of white-overalled crime scene technicians.

  Kincaid slipped on an overall and started towards them. Out of long habit, he put his hands behind his back as he followed the line of the blue and white crime scene tape. It removed the unconscious temptation to touch.

  The technicians parted at the end to let him through, and he saw her then, half in the hedge’s shadow.

  “She was a looker, all right,” said Willy Tucker, the photographer, at his elbow.

  She lay on her back, between the edge of the path and the hedge that separated this alley of park from the higher ground. His first impression was that her clothes had been straightened.

  The short skirt hugged her thighs too neatly. The long, black linen jacket was still held together by its pewter buttons, though one cream satin bra strap showed where the jacket had slipped a little from her shoulder. She wore no blouse.

  Glancing at Tucker, Kincaid said, “Her tights—they weren’t disturbed?”

  “Not that we could see without moving her.”

  The tights were sheer, the merest whisper of black against her pale skin, and both legs had laddered. One foot was bare, the other encased in a black shoe with a high, chunky heel.

  Kincaid squatted, still keeping his distance, and at last looked at her face. It was a smooth oval, the skin unlined even in the strong light. The nose was straight, the lips well-defined. As the patch of shade retreated, sunlight sparked from the cloud of her red-gold hair. So alive did it look that if not for the slight congestion of her face and the hovering flies, one might have thought she had simply lain down for a rest.

  An earthy, spicy smell rose from the crushed vegetation beneath his feet and her body, making him think of lovers entwined in a hillside bower. “Have you found her other shoe?” he asked.

  The photographer shook his head. “Not so far. The uniformed lads have started a radial search.”

  All dressed up and nowhere to go, Kincaid thought as he stared down at her still body. He stood, resisting the urge to smooth the fine wayward hair from her cheek. “Maybe she left it at the ball.”

  GEMMA WATCHED KINCAID MAKE HIS WAY back down the cordoned path, his face shuttered as always in such circumstances. “Have we got ourselves a nutter, then, guv?” she asked when he reached them. You didn’t say “serial killer,” not when there was the remotest possibility of being overheard by the long ears of the press, but it was always the first thing you thought with a young woman murdered like this.

  Glancing back at the crime scene technicians crouched like strange white insects near the corpse, Kincaid shook his head. “I think her killer knew her. It looks as though someone arranged her clothing, and if she was sexually assaulted it’s not obvious. We’ll know more after the postmortem.”

  “I’ll arrange for the mortuary van now,” said DI Coppin. “If that’s all right with you, sir,” she added with unconcealed hostility.

  Kincaid’s eyebrow lifted a fraction, but, once again, he didn’t rise to the challenge. “Go ahead, Inspector. The sooner the better, in this heat. It’s a good thing the temperature dropped last night.”

  Coppin made an awkward descent, hampered by the narrow skirt of her wool suit. Gemma watched her until she’d cleared the swinging gate and vanished from sight, then turned to Kincaid. “Listen, guv—”

  Before she could continue, Kincaid motioned her into a small patch of shade, away from the uniformed officers. “It’s too bloody hot to stand about in the sun,” he said, pulling a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and blotting his forehead with it.

  A curving, split-rail fence separated the grassy area bordering the path from the sloping ground that marked the park’s edge, and from where Gemma stood it drew her eye towards the entrance. The flat, trellised top of the wooden gate gave it the look of a Japanese shrine; beyond the thick screen of trees, the gleaming buildings of Canary Wharf rose incongruously against the pastoral view.

  The comfortingly familiar smell of bacon and eggs cooking in the ASDA’s cafe reached them on a faint puff of breeze and Gemma’s stomach rumbled loudly in response. Too nervous to eat before her piano lesson, she’d meant to treat herself to a late breakfast afterwards. But she should have known better, as her mobile phone had rung before she and Wendy Sheinart had finished their hal
f hour’s conversation.

  “About the DI, guv,” she said, glancing at the uniformed officers to make sure they were out of hearing. “Her chief inspector’s off at his son’s wedding this weekend, and it seems he called us in without informing her. She feels it should have been her case, and I can’t say I blame her. Maybe if you could go a bit easy on her—”

  “Sets a bad precedent,” Kincaid said, grinning, then sobered. “It’s a tough break for her, but if she’s going to be an effective officer, she’ll have to learn to cope.”

  Gemma’s own experience was proof enough of that, but she felt sympathetic nonetheless. “Still, I’d not like to be in her shoes.”

  “My guess is they pinch,” he said under his breath, for Coppin had finished with the radio and begun the climb back up the hill from the gate.

  Reaching them, the DI made a visible effort to regulate her breathing before she spoke. “They’re on their way. What next, sir?”

  “Tell me what the pathologist found.” Kincaid pulled his small notebook from the pocket of his trousers.

  Coppin consulted her own notebook. “The pathologist estimates that the victim died sometime in the night or the early hours of the morning—can’t have been much longer than that in this heat or the deterioration of the body would be marked. There are no outward signs of sexual assault, but there is some obvious bruising on the throat.”

  “Any identification?”

  “No, sir. We’ve not found her handbag, nor any obvious dry cleaner’s markings in her clothing.”

  “Who found her?”

  “A pensioner, sir. George Brent. Lives in the council flats down the bottom of the park. He was out walking his dog when he saw her at the edge of the shrubbery, but I’m surprised no one called it in sooner—she was visible as a bloody beacon.”

  “Has he been interviewed?”

  Coppin frowned. “No—I didn’t see much point. I know him—he’s a harmless old man, not likely to have noticed anything important.”