‘That’s kind of her. I remember the last time she looked after me, convalescing, and it did me good, but now I just want to go home.’
‘Well, the offer stands.’
They strolled across the lawn and Kathy looked down the slope to the dark water of the Thames. ‘So we don’t know where Tisdell has gone?’
‘No.’
‘I’ve been watching the river from my room, waiting for his boat to appear.’
Brock put his hand under her good arm and steered her back towards the house. ‘Change of scene, Kathy, that’s what you need, as soon as you’re fit to leave.’
‘Tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I’m checking out tomorrow.’
And so she did, the following morning at ten thirty, as soon as Dr Partridge had given her a final once-over and a list of things to avoid. ‘Don’t go jogging, or try to drive, or travel in a crowded tube train, or get hopelessly drunk any time in the next month. Protect your shoulder like a newborn baby.’
She smiled. She liked him. ‘Thank you, Doctor.’
‘Make an appointment on your way out to come back and see me in a fortnight.’
She did so and got them to call her a cab, leaving the Pewsey Hall grounds with a sense of intense relief. She gave the driver her home address in Finchley, but asked him first to drive along the river, stopping at the succession of piers and moorings she had seen on Google Earth. At each one she got out and checked the boats, asking anyone she saw if they remembered seeing a narrowboat recently, with the name Venerable Bede. Nobody had, and she was on the point of giving up when they came to the footbridge across to Eel Pie Island, where she could see the crowded boatyard.
She walked over to the island, her overcoat buttoned tight around her, limp left sleeve tucked into the pocket, and worked her way along the shore. Most of the boats were small leisure craft, but among them were scattered the long thin forms of narrowboats. She checked each of the elaborately painted names, but didn’t see the one she was looking for.
At a boatshed she saw a man working on an outboard motor. He straightened, wiping his hands on an oily towel as she asked her question.
‘Venerable Bede? He owes me money. You a friend of his?’
Kathy showed her police ID and he gave a grim smile. ‘In trouble, is he? Yeah, I thought as much when I saw him. I should have made him pay in advance but he said he needed to get some cash and I was soft-hearted. Gave him some diesel too.’
‘What name did he give you?’
The man consulted a thick diary of wrinkled pages. ‘Tisdell, Ned Tisdell. That mean anything to you?’
‘Yes. So when was he here?’
More checking in the diary. ‘Arrived last Friday afternoon, then disappeared during Sunday night. When I arrived at dawn on Monday morning, Venerable Bede was already gone.’
The day before yesterday, Kathy thought. ‘Any idea which way he was heading?’
The man shook his head. ‘He arrived from downstream.’ He pointed to the east. ‘But where he went, I’ve no idea. If you find him, tell him I want that seventy quid he owes me.’
As she returned to the taxi Kathy thought about the timing. Tisdell had arrived on Friday, after the Fantasyland explosion but before the ambush at Bragg’s house, so there could be no way that he could have expected to find ‘Mrs Bragg’, or Bragg himself, at the Pewsey Clinic. And yet he was there, Kathy hadn’t been imagining it. He had recognised her and fled, taking off on his boat into the night. The thing was incomprehensible. What had Tisdell to do with Bragg? It seemed that only Tisdell could tell her that.
She made one more stop on the way home, at her local bookshop in Finchley, where she bought a guide to the inland waterways of the UK. She saw that there were two ways by which the Venerable Bede could have made its way from Paddington to Eel Pie Island: either west along the Regent’s Canal to the junction with the Grand Union Canal at Hayes, then east to the River Brent and its connection with the Thames at Brentford, not far from Eel Pie Island; or, alternatively, eastward along the Regent’s Canal to its end at the Thames on the other side of the city at Limehouse, the longer route. But where would Tisdell have gone now? He could have continued up the Thames to Oxford, and then north on the Oxford Canal to the Midlands, or back along the Grand Union to Leicester and the north, or down the Thames to Limehouse and into the River Lee system. And if he didn’t want to be spotted, if he hid the name of his boat and didn’t stop at a registered mooring, it was hard to see how, long and slow though he was, she could track him down.
Kathy sat at the window of her flat on the twelfth floor of her apartment block, staring out at the familiar view across the city. Somewhere out there, below the lowering grey clouds, within that endless crust of buildings, the Venerable Bede might still be lurking, tucked into an unobtrusive canal basin perhaps, or chugging slowly out towards open country. She tried to picture it, the dark paintwork, the small windows, something stacked on the roof at the stern end—what was that? A couple of rusty fuel drums, she remembered, and beyond them a shapeless pile of stuff trussed up beneath a bright blue tarpaulin. A very bright blue tarpaulin that should be visible from the air . . .
She got on the phone to Zack’s mobile.
‘Kathy! How are you? We’ve all been worried about you.’
‘Much better now, thanks, Zack. I’m back home, taking it easy. Listen, there’s a little job you might be able to help me with. I’m trying to trace a boat that’s somewhere on either the Thames or the Regent’s Canal or the River Lee. I haven’t got much to go on, but it’s just possible that I could identify it from an aerial shot, and I wondered if you could access film that the helicopters of the Air Support Unit may have shot during the past seventy-two hours.’
‘Shouldn’t be a problem. Could be a big job sifting through it all though.’
‘I’ve got nothing else to do. Could you send the relevant stuff through to my computer? Just those three waterways, nothing south of the river.’
‘What case number do I put it down to, Kathy?’
‘Oh . . . do you have to?’
Zack laughed. ‘No, don’t worry, I won’t let D.K. Payne-in-the-butt find out what you’re up to, whatever it is.’
‘Thanks, I’ll owe you one.’
The first downloads arrived on her computer the following morning and she immediately began to work through them. They were dated from the previous weekend and were mostly close-range clips from the helicopters’ cameras of crime scenes in action—tracking a speeding car, searching waste ground around which a couple of patrol cars were circling, observing a fire, a traffic pile-up, a crowd scene. There were occasional shots of the Thames, but none at all of the Regent’s Canal, and no sign of a narrowboat with a blue tarpaulin on its roof. She kept working through the day and in the late afternoon, as she was about to take a break, came across a night sequence in which an infrared camera followed the white blob of a running man across a black screen. The picture jumped abruptly to the same figure running across a scene brightly illuminated by the helicopter’s Nitesun searchlight, towards some sort of geometric pattern laid out on the ground. It was the Pewsey maze, Kathy realised suddenly; she was witnessing the cornering of Jack Bragg. She saw other figures running towards the maze, and watched as they all converged. Then the clip came to an end.
She rubbed her eyes and went out to get something to eat. When she returned she loaded up the film shot on Monday and Tuesday, working more quickly now as she skipped quickly through long sequences in which there were clearly no signs of a waterway. By midnight she couldn’t focus any more, and took herself to bed.
She woke to find more downloads from Zack, and went back to work, trying to ignore her growing feeling that this was a waste of time. She finished the Tuesday film, then Wednesday, skimming faster and faster, then stopped for a quick lunch before moving on to the last set, taken the previous day, Thursday. The weather changed in rapid time across her screen, from dark morning to grey afternoon, brightening suddenly towards
evening. Now the camera was gazing down at the towers of Canary Wharf, glinting in a golden light from the west. The view moved on to the broad shimmer of the Thames as it curled around Limehouse Reach, and panned over the enclosed pool of Limehouse Basin carved into its northern bank. This marked the eastern end of the Regent’s Canal, she knew, the basin like a kind of mouth clamped onto the flank of the river. Kathy froze the image. Three long marina jetties lined with boats extended into the green waters of the lagoon, the most westerly jetty harbouring the long pencil forms of narrowboats. One of them, tightly tucked into the pack, displayed a blob of blue at one end. Kathy zoomed in to the limit of legibility, and saw two shapes like fuel drums behind the blue rectangle. She checked the time on the image—it had been taken just twenty-four hours previously.
She shouldn’t drive, of course, but her car was an automatic and she wasn’t going to get anyone else involved, not until she was more certain. Slipping on her coat she made for the door, pausing at the last moment to grab her phone, a camera and her extendable baton and stuff them into her pocket.
She headed south into the city, driving cautiously with her one good hand on the wheel, then east along Commercial Road to Limehouse, where she turned into the streets surrounding the basin. It took her a while to park and make her way down to the waterfront between the flanks of smart new apartment buildings that had been built around the old dock. The narrowboats were in front of her, ranged end-on along each side of the jetty she had seen through the helicopter’s lens. She hurried down the line, checking each boat, their names and roofs, and came to a halt at the end. No blue tarpaulin. The Venerable Bede wasn’t there.
There was a marina office beneath one of the apartment blocks and Kathy went inside to inquire. An elderly man wearing a boating cap was sitting behind the counter, talking to someone on the phone, a leisurely conversation by the sound of it; he waved to acknowledge Kathy but kept on talking. She took out her police ID and thrust it across the counter. The man’s eyebrows raised, he looked at her again, then said, ‘Anyway, love, have to go.’ He put down the phone. ‘How can I help you, officer?’
‘A narrowboat by the name of Venerable Bede. I have information it was here yesterday. What can you tell me?’
‘Hm . . .’ The man consulted his computer, slowly pressing keys. ‘Venerable Bede, registered owner Edward Tisdell?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Arrived Tuesday evening, five ten, through the Limehouse Lock from the river; left two hours ago, at two fifty.’
Kathy cursed herself for not phoning here before she left. ‘Where did he go?’
‘No idea, sorry. He wouldn’t have gone back out to the Thames or I would have spotted him.’ He pointed to a side window that gave a clear view of the lock on the short neck of canal connecting the basin to the river. ‘But there are two other ways out.’
He took Kathy over to a large wall map and pointed to a corner of the basin. ‘That’s the end of the Regent’s Canal, and over on this side is the entrance to the Limehouse cut. He could have taken either, around Central London one way or out to the Lee Valley the other.’
‘How far could he have gone?’
‘Not so far on the Regent’s Canal—there are several locks on the way. You might catch up with him at Johnson’s Lock or Mile End Lock with a bit of luck. No locks the other way till north of Bow, so he’d have got much further.’
Kathy was aware of the light beginning to fade in the late afternoon sky, and decided to go for the shorter bet, on the Regent’s Canal. She thanked the man and ran back to her car.
The satnav took her to Stepney, where Ben Jonson Road crossed the canal, her view blocked by the high walls on each side. She drove up onto the pavement where a footpath led down to the canal side, overlooked by new apartment buildings on both banks. Ahead of her the canal passed through Johnson’s Lock and continued into the distance between banks of trees still carrying the last of the red and golden leaves of autumn. There was a chill in the motionless air, and patches of mist were beginning to form over the surface of the water. There wasn’t a boat in sight.
She headed north, to Mile End Road, from which she should be able to see the next set of locks, and parked on a side street. From the bridge she could look down on the canal towards a weir and set of lock gates. In contrast to the road, roaring with evening rush-hour traffic, the canal, seen through the iron railings and half-shrouded now in fog, seemed eerily silent and secretive. And deserted. Kathy gave a sigh of resignation. The Lee Valley, then, although it would be dark by the time she got there, and her chances of finding him then seemed slight.
As she was about to turn away, a movement caught her eye, and she looked down to the water directly below the bridge and saw the prow of a boat slowly emerge from the shadows. Gradually its length appeared, a narrowboat, and spread across its roof a blue tarpaulin. Kathy felt a buzz of excitement. There was a figure standing at the tiller as the stern came into view, a man, Ned Tisdell, guiding the boat towards the lock.
Kathy ran back to the side street on which her car was parked and followed it down to the towpath alongside the canal. The Venerable Bede was ahead of her, steadily chugging towards the black lock gates. On the other side of the water the new buildings of the Queen Mary London University campus were brightly lit, but on this side the canal ran alongside the comparative gloom of Mile End Park, and Kathy jogged down to a clump of trees not far from the lock and watched as Tisdell manoeuvred to the bank.
It was an elaborate process, Kathy realised, to take a boat through the lock, especially if, like Tisdell, you were on your own. Having tied up at the shore he walked to the lower gates and put his weight against the long balance beam of the paddle to open them. He returned to the boat and steered it into the lock and tied it up again, then climbed out and closed the lower gates. He was carrying some kind of tool, she saw, a windlass, which he took to a pedestal near the upper gates, inserted it and began to turn. Kathy heard the rush of water as the lock began to fill to the level of the upper reach, lifting the boat slowly up to the new towpath level.
Kathy wondered what to do. If she approached him on her own he might turn violent, and she was in no state to fight back. Yet she had no grounds for calling for assistance—he would deny having been in the clinic and she wouldn’t be believed. Yet she couldn’t just let him slip away into the night. She needed answers, and it seemed to her that the only weapons she had were surprise and persuasion—and, if the worst came to the worst, the ASP in her pocket.
She watched Tisdell heaving on the upper beam to open the gate, and while he was engrossed in doing this, she ran out from her cover to the stern of the boat and dropped down into the well. The rear doors were open and she slipped inside.
18
Kathy was becoming familiar now with the interiors of narrowboats, and the way in which their owners adapted them to fit their lifestyles. She had expected Tisdell’s to be as chaotic and disorganised as he had appeared, but the opposite was the case. In fact, the more she took it in—the table set for a single meal, the clothes hanging on a rack to dry, the computer set out on a small workbench—the more she got the impression of an obsessive neatness and symmetry underlying everything. She worked her way down the length of the boat, checking cupboards and storage chests as she went. Around her she heard the groans of the boat as it settled at the new level in the lock, and then felt the throb and lurch as Tisdell began to move it forward into the canal, followed by silence as he cut the engine and tied the boat up once again so that he could go back to close the upper gates.
She had returned to the living area at the stern, and was searching under the cushions of the built-in seating along one side when she heard his feet thump on the steel plate and his sudden shout, ‘What the fuck?’
She looked up and saw him standing at the bulkhead staring at her, the bent steel bar of the windlass gripped in his hand. Then he must have recognised her, for he took a sharp breath and went pale, and put out a hand to
steady himself against the doorframe.
‘What do you want?’ he croaked. ‘You’ve come to arrest me, haven’t you?’
‘Not necessarily,’ Kathy said, speaking more calmly than she felt. ‘Depends what you have to tell me. Come in and sit down. We need to talk.’
Remarkably, Tisdell complied, edging over to a chair and sitting down, still gripping the iron bar. His body gave off a rancid smell of sweat from his exertions at the lock.
‘Let’s start with the Pewsey Clinic,’ Kathy said. ‘What were you doing there?’
He gave a little grunt and fixed her with a defiant glare.
‘Do they do animal experiments there? Were you back to your old tricks, Ned?’
‘No!’ The denial was explosive and seemed credible.
‘Okay, what about Jack Bragg? What do you know about him?’
She was met by a look of total incomprehension. ‘Who?’
‘Well if it wasn’t for animals or Jack Bragg, what were you doing there?’
‘They do the devil’s work.’
‘What sort of work?’ She stared at his face, trying to interpret the tangle of calculation and madness. Then she lifted her right hand, showing him the pad of flesh between thumb and forefinger. His eyes widened immediately. ‘The mark of the beast, Ned? Do they have something to do with it?’
He didn’t reply, mouth tight.
‘And how did you get in there? How did you get through the security?’
Again he didn’t answer.
‘I could arrest you for trespass.’
The resistance seemed suddenly to drain from Tisdell. His shoulders sagged and he shook his head wearily. ‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘Why don’t you?’
Kathy still couldn’t read his reactions. They seemed inscrutably childlike, as if he were responding to a wholly different framework to her own.
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