‘You see what I mean?’ Dudley said loudly to Mike. ‘That bloody woman always makes life awkward. Now she might be too late, the time she’s taking to get here.’
‘You’ve only just called her,’ Mike said in a colourless voice. ‘And the Soco. I doubt they’ll be that long. Dr Barnabas is usually very fast, as you well know.’
‘Is she so? Well, not fast enough for –’ He stopped as a car turned into the road behind him and drew up at the end of the tiny street. They could see it from where they stood, a small battered green Citroën, and Mike lifted one hand in greeting as the driver got out and stood for a moment peering down at the foreshore, her head up and some of her dark hair blowing round her ears in the slight breeze that was still coming up the river with the tide.
She squinted at the glitter that was beginning to show on the water’s ripples as the sun strengthened, lifted her own hand in recognition, and then dived back into her car to pull out a bag. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a loose white shirt tied into a knot by its tails at the waist, over bare tanned feet thrust into denim espadrilles.
‘Look at her,’ Dudley said in disgust. ‘Thinks she’s on a bleedin’ holiday, does she?’
‘Watch it, sir,’ Mike said, knowing he was sailing close to the wind. ‘Your fangs are showing.’ And he went up the foreshore to meet Dr George Barnabas and bring her to the piece of body they had waiting for her.
2
George Barnabas came down the little beach, her small site bag tucked under one arm and her hands in her jeans pockets, looking as cheerful and relaxed as though she were meeting friends for a holiday drink. Her hair, which was thick, curly and abundant, was pulled into a dark knot on top of her head, but there was enough of it loose to fly around her face and make her look very young, an effect increased by her big round dark-rimmed glasses. Sometimes she wore contact lenses, but this morning she hadn’t stopped to fiddle with them; trying to get herself dressed and out of her Bermondsey flat as fast as she could had been too important. The last thing she wanted was Dudley complaining about having to wait for her.
‘Morning, Roop,’ she said sunnily. She was rewarded with a black glare from Rupert Dudley, who loathed this diminution of his given name almost as much as he hated the way some of his junior colleagues referred to him behind his back as Rupert Bear. He was as powerless to stop George’s use of the nickname as he was to control the juniors’ private conversation and that did little to soothe his temper this morning.
‘Over there,’ he said, offering no other greeting, and led the way. Sergeant Slavin followed, as did Michael Urquhart, the uniformed constable and Sid Martin, and they all stood solemnly watching as she stopped beside the leg and looked at it.
‘Not a pretty sight,’ she said cheerfully and opened her bag to pull out her camera. The Soco would take pictures too, but she liked to collect her own as much as possible. One of these days, she had been promising herself for some time now, she would write a definitive textbook on forensic pathology and make her fortune. The nastier the illustrations the more value the text would have; even academics and students enjoyed having their withers wrung, as she told Gus Hathaway whenever he commented (as he often did) on her photographic efforts.
‘No need,’ Dudley said, falling into the trap as she set the focus and lifted the camera to her eyes. ‘Soco’ll have to do that – and watch out what you touch before he does get here. Can’t have the scene disturbed.
‘You go teach your grandma,’ George said, but without rancour. ‘I’ll just use my eyes till he gets here, scout’s honour.’ And she winked swiftly at Michael, not caring at all that Dudley saw her do it. ‘Taking my own pictures won’t do any harm. I like to have them.’ She concentrated, snapped the shutter, focused again, taking half a dozen pictures in rapid succession. ‘My God, this is a really smelly one, isn’t it? Just the job before breakfast. I’d recommend you order the eggs rather than bacon when you get back to the canteen – all this dead meat around can put you right off your chow.’
Sid Martin sniggered but Dudley chose to look affronted. ‘We try to show decent respect to human remains,’ he said woodenly. ‘If you’ll just do the necessary, doctor, we’ll get it bagged up and sent to the nick as soon as Soco gives the goahead.’
‘I’ll have it in my own mortuary, if you don’t mind,’ George said. She was now peering at the severed surface of the leg without touching it in any way and the young constable averted his eyes. ‘Now, there’s an odd thing …’
‘What?’ Michael said and crouched down with her, braving the stink. It couldn’t be much worse close up than it was standing a few feet away. ‘Something useful?’
‘It’s so clean,’ George said. ‘The cut. The leg muscles are thick, you know, hellishly hard to get through in one swipe, but this swipe not only cut the muscles and fat off clean, it sheared the bone. Hardly a splinter there.’ She was squinting through a large magnifier now, leaning so close that her nose was almost in the muscle, much to Mike’s admiration of her cool. Didn’t the woman have a nose like other people? Or was she just hardened to it by her job?
‘Christ, that’s disgusting.’ She leaned back and waved her hand in front of her face. ‘I’ve dealt with a few nasties in my time but this really is … Well, there you are. It’s an oddity in that it’s been severed clean. I can’t say more at this stage, not till I examine it more carefully. Doesn’t look like a propeller injury to me, though.’ She looked up then. ‘Anyone here from the river police?’
Slavin stepped forward a little self-importantly. ‘Morning, doctor.’
‘Morning,’ she said. ‘Have there been any vessels big enough to have a propeller that could do this? It would have to be one hell of a big one, I suppose, to make a cut like this and not be fouled in the process. Any reports?’
Slavin shook his head. ‘The river’s been a bit thin of heavy stuff upstream. Tourist vessels, of course, lots of them, but they don’t carry that big a screw – and anyway, we’d have heard sure as sure if they’d hit anything really big, like a body. I mean, they’d have known it if they had.’
‘I would have thought so.’ George was looking at the leg again, and frowned. ‘Do they always report accidents and so forth? I mean, if a vessel does have propeller trouble and they think they might have hit something, would you know?’
‘Not always – but we’re around all the time. There isn’t much that gets past us.’ He preened a little. ‘Like I say, we’d have known if anything big upstream had hit a body, I reckon.’
‘What about downstream?’
‘Most of the stuff that comes ashore like this goes in the water upstream,’ Sid said unexpectedly, pushing himself forward with an air of great superiority, clearly regarding himself as the expert witness on the issue. ‘You ’ave to go right down the estuary to get the stuff what goes in down there.’ He jerked his left thumb eastwards. ‘I start well downstream when I goes out on me trips for that very reason.’
Slavin looked at him, sniffed and nodded. ‘He’s right,’ he said grudgingly to George. ‘This fella was most likely thrown in somewhere upstream of here. Of course, wind speed and the height of the tide come into it, but it’s odds on this went in on an ebb tide and came back up with the next turn of the water.’
‘Hmm,’ George said and looked again at the leg. ‘Where’s Soco? I want to take the shoe and sock off.’
‘I’m here,’ someone muttered and the little group opened up to make way for the new arrival, a tall thin man with a quiff of hair that stood up in a surprised sort of fashion over a slightly pockmarked face. ‘Sorry to keep you. Bit o’ trouble starting the car.’
Mike grinned, knowing a lame excuse for falling asleep again after being called when he heard it, and Dudley just stared hard at him.
‘I’ll get on then,’ the man muttered, sliding his eyes away from Dudley, and they all stood back and let him go to work. There wasn’t a great deal to do: photographs to take, samples of the shingle underneath the leg t
o collect, and a few measurements of such things as the distance from the leg to the water’s edge, as well as to the embankment to be taken. (‘Not much point in that,’ Sid said loudly. ‘Seein’ as ’ow the tide’s still runnin’ up. Must be a foot or more ’igher’n what it was when that there thing landed ’ere an’ I spotted it.’ No one paid him any attention.) Less than fifteen minutes later, Soco indicated George could do as she chose with the leg.
Perversely, she chose to remove the sock and shoe there and then. She had the necessary equipment – the mat to catch any detritus that fell from them and bags to seal away any findings – so although it might have been just as easy to let the Soco bag up the leg and have it sent up to Old East, the hospital where her mortuary was, Dudley’s even more obvious than usual hostility had hardened her. He was looking a touch green at the putrid nature of the leg, and she knew it would be even more unpleasant when it was moved. So move it she would, and if it made Dudley throw up, it would serve him right. She wanted to grin at herself for being so childish, but all the same went ahead, kneeling on the rough shingle comfortably, and spreading her gear.
Within a few minutes, though, she had forgotten that she wanted to discomfit Dudley and was absorbed in what she found. ‘The sock’s made of silk, I think,’ she said. ‘Expensive, certainly. Very damaged and holey but –’
‘Fish,’ said Dudley loudly to no one in particular. ‘Water rats. There are plenty of scavengers that do that sort of damage.’
‘Yes,’ George said equably. ‘You’re probably right. I just mentioned it for the record.’ She lifted her brows at the little tape recorder she had set up and which was collecting her comments. ‘Now,’ she went on. ‘The shoe. Let’s see …’
She peered inside, handling the sodden leather gingerly, her rubber-gloved finger probing gently. ‘I think … Yes, that’s it. Harrods. Pricey fella. Gets his shoes at Harrods.’ She turned it over and looked at the design judiciously. ‘It’s a fancy design, for all that. What say you?’
‘Flashy,’ said Mike.
‘Flashy it is,’ she agreed, shutting the shoe into its own plastic bag and sealing and labelling it. She turned then to the now bare leg. It looked forlorn in its nakedness.
‘Nails.’ She peered closer. ‘Well, well, manicured, no less. Soft skin, if a bit macerated in the water. A rich man’s foot, I’d say, then.’ She added more details about the skin to the little tape machine and then concentrated her attention on the severed end.
Now she could actually touch the flesh she was able to see it more clearly, using instruments delicately to explore the edges of the wound. She asked Michael to hold her magnifying glass while she did it, and was oblivious of the greenish tinge that showed round his lips and the rims of his nostrils as he gripped it close to the cut side.
‘It was one swipe,’ she said after a while. ‘I’ll double check with the big magnifier and get good pictures at the mortuary but it’s pretty clear to me. The skin and the edges of the subcutaneous tissue are folded in here on the calf. I’d say he was lying face down when the whatever it was attacked his leg, and it went through from above. See?’
No one responded and she went on, directing Mike how to turn the glass to improve her vision with little jerks of her chin. He watched her face with gritted teeth and managed to control his nausea. He didn’t miss a single one of her signals, either, which made her grin up approvingly at him before she went on.
‘He had to be lying on his front when it happened, or the wound would be different. It must have gone through very fast – that degree of power implies speed, of course – so he wouldn’t have moved. If he’d been in a state that made movement possible, that is. We can’t know that till we find the rest of him. Or some of him.’
She straightened. ‘I’ll need to see the bones under a higher magnification, but I’ll bet they’ll tell the same story. OK, Roop. Get it back to the mortuary, will you? I’ll have a report for you as fast as I can. We’re not too busy this morning, to the best of my knowledge, so unless something horrendous happened in the night – and you’d know if it had, wouldn’t you – I can see to this this morning.’
‘Not all your bodies come through us,’ Dudley said. ‘Do they? And I wish you’d remember I’m to be addressed as Inspector, doctor.’
‘Oh, you can call me George!’ she said, smiling. ‘Or Dr B., the way Gus does. I don’t mind a bit.’
Dudley snapped an order at the uniformed constable to call back to the station for the van to remove the remains to Old East. The young policeman crunched gratefully up the beach, clearly glad to get away from the scene. He didn’t come back, but waited in the street for the van to arrive. No one else seemed to have much to do until it got there, and they stood watching the Soco finally pack his gear away and depart, at which point Sid could remain patient no longer.
‘Yer gotta let me go now,’ he said pugnaciously. ‘Ain’t yer? Don’t I ’ave no rights? ’Ere it is well on to seven and the river as busy as bleedin’ ’yde Park Corner and not a penny of business likely to be done this mornin’ in consequence. You gotta let me go now or it amounts to whatsit, don’t it? Harassment.’ He said it with a marked American twang and George grinned at him.
‘You’ve seen too many episodes of NYPD Blue,’ she said. ‘English police never harass anyone, do they, Roop? Inspector Roop?’
‘No,’ Dudley spat. ‘They just get harassed, that’s all. Hey, Urquhart!’
Mike, who knew that Dudley only used surnames like that when he was livid with rage, sighed and turned to look at his senior officer. ‘Sir?’
‘Get a written statement from this man, and then check every detail in it. You hear me? Every single bloody detail. I want to know exactly what he was doing on this foreshore at five a.m. I want to know that every single thing he’s told us is true.’
‘By my life!’ Sid Martin cried shrilly. ‘By my bleedin’ life –’
‘It will be if you’ve lied,’ Dudley said. ‘Right, Urquhart. Get on with it.’
‘I’ll do it here,’ Michael said after glancing at Sid Martin. ‘Quicker than taking him back to the nick.’
‘You can’t check his statement from here, you bloody fool! Take him to the nick and get on with it! And check with the Missing Persons Register for any leads as soon as you get there. On your way.’ And he turned and stamped back to Sergeant Slavin, whom he clearly regarded as the only person on the scene with whom he could bear to have any conversation.
While Michael Urquhart managed to persuade the still loudly protesting Sid that he might as well give in and helped him draw his boat safely up the little beach to be tied to a great iron ring set in the concrete stanchion at the foot of Gaverick Street, George followed Dudley. She wasn’t going to be put down by him, she told herself. Not this morning or any other morning.
His hostility, it seemed to her, had grown over the time she had been in her post as Forensic Pathologist, Home Office approved, working at Old East, the large district hospital which, despite severe shabbiness and a chronic lack of resources, managed to look after the health needs of most of the local population. It was a hard patch to work, as she had discovered. Was that what made Rupert Dudley so unpleasant and so dismissive of her? She doubted it. His boss, Gus Hathaway, hadn’t become unpleasant. Rude sometimes, bloody-minded usually, difficult undoubtedly, but plain nasty? No.
Her lips curved a little as she thought of him. Gus, the absurdest policeman she could imagine. Detective Chief Inspector at Ratcliffe Street nick, and as near a millionaire as made no matter. None of his colleagues had been able to comprehend why he hadn’t retired from the Force when his old dad had died and left him the very lucrative chain of fish-and-chip shops and restaurants that dotted the East End, but he hadn’t. He liked the job too much, he had told them – and George – and that was that. So he stayed in it, while running the business in whatever time he could salvage round the edges of his police day, and living life as fully as he could.
That full life
included George. They’d been an item for – she thought about that as she made her way across the beach towards Slavin – eighteen months. A year ago last Christmas, after the affair of the dead babies on which they’d worked together so hard. And in which, she now remembered, Dudley had been involved. It had not gained him much glory. She’d scooped what glory there was going from under his nose, and Dudley, she told herself, has a long memory.
Ah well, why should she worry? She had won that round, and more. To have Gus Hathaway as her lover was much the most satisfying part of the outcome of that case; Dudley would get over his loathing of her in time. She’d just have to let him get on with it. ‘Horse’s ass, Roop,’ she murmured to herself and beamed sweetly at the man as she reached the place where he was standing talking in low tones to Slavin.
‘Sergeant,’ she said winningly to Slavin. ‘Tell me about the tides hereabout. I’ve lived here a while now and I have to say I’ve not paid as much attention as I might to the timings. I’ve only noticed that they happen.’
Slavin grinned. ‘It’d be hard to miss it, living right by the river as we do. Old Thames is a busy river. Right, the tides. Twelve and a half hours apart they are, roughly. Creep up a bit over the year, like. Right now … let’s see.’ He reached into his pocket, pulled out a battered notebook and riffled through the pages. ‘High tide today at London Bridge this morning’ll be nine-fifteen a.m. Low tide three-fifteen this afternoon. The water turns around – oh, tennish, I dare say. And then again this afternoon around four o’clock, to go back upstream again. So, high water tonight at the Bridge’ll be at nine-thirty p.m. and –’
Third Degree Page 2
