A Dark and Twisted Tide

by Sharon Bolton

  5

  Lacey

  ‘YOU SURE ABOUT this?’ asked Sergeant Buckle.

  ‘I’m sure.’ Lacey watched three of her colleagues approach with the body, now decently enclosed within a large, zipped black bag. Their movements were slow and respectful, conversation kept low, mindful of the fact that the jetty at the back of Wapping station was open to public gaze.

  On the main arm of the jetty was a small, square building, painted deep blue. Within it were worktops, storage, and a large, shallow steel bath. Each body recovered from the tidal Thames was brought here for initial examination and identification if possible. An unpleasant, unpopular part of the job, it was highly unusual for an officer to volunteer, as Lacey had just done.

  ‘I can easily get someone else,’ Buckle tried again.

  ‘Got to do this sometime,’ said Lacey. ‘And I’ve seen her already, remember?’

  ‘It,’ corrected Buckle. ‘You’ve seen it. We don’t make assumptions about gender.’

  ‘Delivery for you, Sarge.’ The others left and Buckle looked at his watch. ‘Right, we’ve got around twenty minutes before CID get here. Let’s see what we can tell them.’

  As the sergeant supported the body around the upper part of the torso, Lacey unzipped the bag. She did so holding her breath, but the smell that came out was no worse than a sort of concentration of river water, with a trace of rotting organic matter. The upper part of the woman’s body – it was a woman, she just knew it – was largely skeletonized, but the cloth binding her was tighter around her abdomen and upper thighs and appeared to have protected the soft tissue in that area.

  Buckle had a recorder in the upper pocket of his overalls and he spoke into it, giving the date and time of the initial examination of DB 23, the twenty-third Dead Body to be pulled from the Thames that year. Lacey picked up the digital camera.

  ‘Corpse measures 165 centimetres and weighs just under 70 pounds,’ said Buckle. ‘Allowing for fairly advanced skeletonization, particularly around the head, upper limbs and torso, I’d say we’re looking at the remains of a small adult or teenager.’ From a few paces back, Lacey took full body shots of the corpse.

  ‘The size of the frame suggests it’s unlikely to be an adult male.’ Buckle glanced up and winked at Lacey. She moved up the side of the bath to take close-ups of the head. The weed coming out of the eye socket was vile, like something from a bad science-fiction movie. She was going to get rid of it as soon as she could. She photographed each hand in turn, then did a series of close-ups, starting at the head and moving down the body.

  ‘An unusual feature of this particular body is that it appears to have been wrapped,’ Buckle was saying, ‘head to foot, in some sort of fabric. Whatever the solution to the mystery, it seems highly unlikely this was an accidental death or an incident of self-harm. OK, let’s turn it over.’

  Lacey put down the camera and helped Buckle turn the corpse. A patch of scalp with long hair streaming from it was still attached to the skull at the back. Decomposition on this side of the body was less advanced and the flesh of the shoulders and lower back shone red and raw in the bright sunlight.

  ‘This side’s different.’ Lacey picked up the camera again.

  ‘Probably lay on its back on the river bed,’ said Buckle. ‘If it was in mud, it would have been harder for fish and the like to get close. They’ve had a go – look.’ He pointed to the left shoulder. ‘But only in the last couple of days, I’d say.’

  ‘Any idea how long it’s been in the water?’ asked Lacey. Buckle had worked with the Marine Unit for several years. He’d have seen lots of floaters over that time.

  ‘More than a month, less than a year. I’ll tell you what is striking me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s not been moving around much. Let’s get this cloth off to be sure, but I’d say the skeleton’s pretty much intact.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Lacey pointed to the middle of the corpse, where the waist would have been. Buckle bent closer. ‘Cord,’ he said. ‘Tied tight around the waist, possibly to hold this fabric in place.’

  ‘It looks like nylon to me.’ Lacey stepped to the foot of the corpse. ‘Which means it wouldn’t have been eaten away. There’s some around the ankles, too. Any up at the head?’

  ‘Not that I can see,’ Buckle told her after a second.

  ‘That’s why the cloth has stayed in place around the abdomen and legs,’ said Lacey. ‘It was held by nylon cord that the river life couldn’t eat through.’

  She looked up to see Buckle watching her strangely.

  ‘Do we take it off?’ she asked.

  In response he reached behind him and took hold of a large pair of scissors. ‘Bag everything,’ he told her. ‘I’m going to try to get this off without cutting it.’ He was tugging at the wrapping around the feet, trying to find a loose end. Lacey labelled two evidence bags and put them down on the counter.

  ‘It doesn’t go the whole way up.’ Lacey indicated the upper part of the thighs. ‘There’s a bigger piece of cloth underneath these bandage-type things.’

  ‘And the bandages start again higher up, as though they’re keeping the cloth underneath in place.’ Buckle slid his hands beneath the corpse’s torso. ‘Right, I’ll lift, you unwind.’

  Lacey had unwound almost three feet when something sharp and cold brushed against her hand. She jumped back. ‘Jesus, there’s something in there.’

  Buckle, too, had started. He relaxed a couple of seconds before she did, and they watched the small creatures that Lacey had liberated scuttle across the corpse and try to climb the metal sides of the bath.

  ‘Mitten crabs,’ Buckle said. ‘The river’s full of them.’

  Lacey nodded. Chinese mitten crabs, with bodies that could grow to the width of a human palm, had first appeared in the UK in the 1930s, escaping from ships’ ballast. With few natural predators, their numbers had soared and they’d done untold damage to riverbanks, harbour infrastructure and native wildlife. Their distinguishing feature being thick, hairy front claws, at low tide they gave a creeping, constantly moving look to the river floor.

  Lacey had seen dozens since she’d been living and working on the river. Of course they’d be attracted to decaying flesh. But there was just something about the things – she could count six of them, racing in panic around the bath – that was creepy as hell.

  6

  Nadia

  THE RIVER SCARED Nadia. Even here, high above the city, it unnerved her. The rivers she’d known before hadn’t been like this one. In the countryside she’d left behind, rivers were fast and shallow, clear as glass and cold as night. They bounced over rocks and hurried through reeds, splashed and sparkled in the sun, gleaming like star-shine in the darkness. This river was massive: brown as old blood and unthinkably deep.

  She’d been staring too long. She leaned away from the telescope and let her stinging eyes rest. This early in the morning, with the wind on her face, her hair flying free and her eyes closed, she could almost believe she was home.

  At home, she’d sought refuge in the hills when the noise and anger of her war-beaten country had become too much. She’d fixed her eyes on the snow that frosted them for much of the year, breathed in air that was free of dust and smoke, and told herself that the muffled sounds and distant cries weren’t so very far from silence.

  Here, on the other side of the world, old habits were proving hard to leave behind and she’d taken to climbing high in this ancient parkland to find air and quiet. Even here, though, it was impossible to get away from the river; telescopes fixed along the highest points made it all too easy to look. It had tasted her, this big, pitiless river, rolled her around in its mouth, getting ready to swallow her down, when she’d been plucked free, like a kitten from the jaws of a hungry dog.

  Years ago, Nadia’s mother had told her a story of a big, greedy river. In the story, the river remembered everyone who ever came within its clutches. Once it tasted you, it never forgot. You were
marked, then, for life, and as the years went by, its hunger for you would grow, until the day came when, in spite of every effort you made to stay away, it claimed you, finally, for its own.

  The stinging in her eyes gone, Nadia leaned into the telescope again. Only one police boat left now. Half an hour ago there had been several, their blue hulls and white decks unmistakable as they formed a circle, holding their positions against the tide. The police boats were designed to be distinctive, even to people who’d never been on board one, had never been pulled from the freezing depths like a fish as its strength gives out. The night she’d been saved from the river.

  But not forgotten. The river spoke to her in the darkness, as her dreams turned into nightmares in which the water was all around her and the weed and the mud was clinging, pulling her down. It told her then that she would never be free, that one day it would come for her, and the next time there would be no escape.

  7

  Lacey

  ‘I SEE YOU didn’t stay out of trouble for long.’

  Lacey started. She and Buckle had become so engrossed in the task of unwrapping the corpse that neither had noticed the two men who’d joined them on the jetty. Detective Sergeant Neil Anderson and Detective Constable Pete Stenning of Lewisham’s Major Investigation Team. Seeing her for the first time in uniform.

  Anderson’s stomach was straining against his waistline. He seemed to have put on weight, and he hadn’t exactly been a lightweight to start with. In his mid forties, he had thinning red hair, an indistinct chin line and a florid complexion. He was one of those officers who didn’t take the stresses of the job in their stride. Stenning, on the other hand, was looking good. Of a similar age to Lacey, he was tall, in good shape. His dark curly hair was held in place with gel and he was wearing an aftershave or cologne that smelled of spice chests.

  Back in March, on the brink of leaving the police service for good, Lacey had taken the highly unusual step of requesting redeployment. She’d turned her back on a promising career as a detective, on the hint of an imminent promotion to sergeant, and gone back into uniform. Several colleagues, including Anderson and Stenning, had tried to persuade her otherwise. They’d talked about the unprecedented bad luck that had brought her into the midst of three difficult cases in a row, of the unlikelihood of anything similar happening again in her whole career, had told her she’d be wasted in uniform. And bored witless. Still she’d clung to her decision.

  Preventing crime, that was what she needed to do now. She’d patrol the river, inspect craft, check licences, persuade the drunk and the reckless that the water might look inviting but really wasn’t that hospitable, and every now and again she’d help haul a body out of it. She’d leave solving the more serious crimes to those who still had a stomach for it.

  It was funny how it could be both nice and awful to see people. These two had almost become friends. Almost, because Lacey Flint didn’t really do friends. ‘Good morning, Sergeant.’ She straightened up and forced a smile. ‘Morning, Pete.’

  Anderson stepped awkwardly towards her, and seemed about to give her a hug before realizing her overalls were smeared with river water and decomposing flesh. He raised his hand instead. Stenning smiled and mimed blowing a kiss.

  The three men exchanged greetings, then Anderson turned to Lacey. ‘You OK?’

  ‘I’m fine, Sarge,’ she said quickly.

  ‘What have you got for us?’

  Out of politeness, Lacey glanced at Buckle, who nodded for her to go ahead.

  ‘Body found in the river just before six o’clock this morning,’ she began. ‘Found by me, for what it’s worth. It was caught around an old wharf on the south bank, just up-river from Deptford Creek. The most unusual feature is that it appears to have been wrapped, head to foot, in that linen-like fabric that Sergeant Buckle is putting in a bag. There was a large piece, roughly the size of a single bed sheet, and then several metres of a much thinner strip of the same fabric. The strips are just over nine inches wide, some sort of densely woven cotton. It’s hand-hemmed on either side, not just an old sheet ripped up.’

  ‘Male or female?’ asked Anderson. ‘Young? Old? Dead or alive when it went in?’

  Buckle put the evidence bag containing the fabric behind him. ‘Very little we can tell you at this stage. No fingerprints left and certainly no identifying marks or documentation. The size of the skeleton and the presence of some long hair remaining would suggest a female, but I can’t rule out the possibility of a young Sikh male, for example.’

  ‘She couldn’t have been alive when she went in,’ said Lacey. ‘The burial cloth was wrapped with absolute precision. We can show you photographs when we go inside. That would be impossible if the victim were fighting for her life.’

  Buckle frowned but didn’t comment upon Lacey’s insistence that the corpse was female. ‘Also,’ she went on, ‘there was no evidence of bloodstaining on the fabric. It was discoloured, obviously, but that was the work of the river and the mud.’

  ‘That is a good point,’ said Buckle. ‘Also, while decomposition is advanced, the skeleton is largely untouched. That is highly unusual for a floater.’

  ‘The tide and current batter them against hard objects, is that right?’ said Stenning.

  ‘Causing extensive damage,’ agreed Buckle. ‘And that’s before you factor in things like boat propellers. After a week, we almost never pull out a corpse with an intact skeleton.’

  ‘She was weighted down,’ said Lacey. ‘Somehow she broke loose, but the cloth got caught around the pier. Sometime in the night would be my guess, or someone would have spotted her yesterday evening.’

  ‘And your evidence for this?’ asked Buckle, who was looking amused now. So were the other two. Well, she couldn’t just forget she’d once been a detective.

  ‘The nylon cords around her waist and ankles were to hold the weights in place,’ said Lacey. ‘The synthetic cord was chosen because it wouldn’t get eaten away. We weren’t supposed to find her.’

  ‘Is that so?’ asked a new voice.

  They all turned to the woman who’d crept softly down the gangway. A young, slim woman in a pale-green trouser suit, her shoulder-length black hair lifting in the breeze. ‘Hello, Lacey,’ said Detective Inspector Dana Tulloch.

  ‘Good morning, Ma’am.’ Lacey watched the DI glance down at the corpse then back up at her.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Tulloch asked.

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Lacey, and wondered if that had been a fraction too quick and too bright to be entirely convincing.

  ‘You just about done here, Scott?’ Anderson, Lacey realized, was glancing from one woman to the other and looking nervous. Not without reason. The last time he’d seen his boss and Lacey together he’d practically had to hold them apart.

  Buckle held his hands out in an it’s all yours gesture, before turning to Lacey. ‘You need to get home. I’ll see if one of the boats can drop you off. Tide should still be high enough.’

  ‘Actually,’ Tulloch was giving that small, precise smile that Lacey had come to dread, ‘if Lacey’s up to it, I’d like her to come with us to the mortuary.’

  Lacey glanced at Buckle. ‘Me?’ she said to Tulloch.

  ‘Yes. I want to know exactly what you were doing on the river this morning. Shall we go?’

  8

  Pari

  THE HEADACHES WERE getting worse. The pain was bad this morning, had woken her before dawn. Pari had lain with her eyes closed, waiting for the throbbing in her head to reach the stage where she’d have to be sick, or subside sufficiently for her to leave her bed. She still hadn’t moved.

  The window was open. She never closed it any more. Partly because then the sense of being imprisoned became almost too much to bear, and partly because sometimes, on the breeze, she’d catch a scent – of hot oil, oranges and cardamom, or just the simple smell of frying lamb – that reminded her of home.

  Through the open window came the sound of the river. The engines of a powerful boat
, orders being called across the water, a noisy gull wanting to know what all the fuss was about.

  Pari pushed herself up and climbed on to the bed. She stretched up to her full height, which wasn’t great, and pushed her face out of the small wedge of space that was the conduit between the room and the world she’d lost.

  Early-morning sun gleamed on the windows across the narrow stretch of water outside, but only those on the upper storey. The creek below her was too deep and narrow for the sun ever to reach the water. But the lower windows acted as dark mirrors and one of them occasionally allowed her to see what was happening on the river.

  A boat with a blue hull and a white cabin, holding its position in the river. A police boat.

  I’m here! Help me!

  The words didn’t leave Pari’s head. These foreign police wouldn’t help. The police in her own country hadn’t; why should these? She took one last breath of fresh air, turned back to the room that had greeted her so cheerfully in the beginning, like the down payment on the promise of a better life, and wondered whether she might die in it.

  9

  Dana

  ‘THOSE BUGGERS AT Wapping been fiddling around with my corpses again?’ The pathologist strode into the examination room with a half-eaten fried-egg bap in one hand and a pair of scarlet spectacles in the other. He was a tall, barrel-chested man in his late forties, with thick grey hair and bright blue eyes.

  ‘If it floats, we fiddle,’ said Lacey. ‘Nice to see you again, Dr Kaytes. New glasses?’

  Dana watched Mike Kaytes peer down at Lacey before tucking the glasses into the pocket of his scrubs. ‘I suppose I should be grateful you’ve brought me a complete one for a change.’