A Dark and Twisted Tide

by Sharon Bolton

  Thessa seemed not to have heard, was telling the story in her own way. ‘I started singing to them as I went past in the evenings. I thought it would help, to hear a song from home, so I sang something I remember my mother singing to Alex and me when we were tiny. And then, one night, one of the women called out to me. Begging me to help her escape. I ignored her, just went motoring past, but all night I couldn’t get it out of my head. I kept thinking, I could, I could help her escape. I could easily find keys, attach them to a ball of cork so they wouldn’t sink, and throw them into an open window. After that it was easy. They’d creep down the stairs, let themselves out at the back, get into my boat and I’d bring them here. I gave them money and the details of some people I know who help them get settled.’

  ‘Four nights ago.’ Pari had twisted round to face the others. ‘I heard you singing and I saw you throw keys. I saw someone leave.’

  Thessa frowned and put her head to one side. ‘No, dear,’ she said, after a second. ‘I think you’re getting mixed up.’

  ‘How many did you help get away?’ said Lacey, as Pari began counting on her fingers. Thessa’s arms seemed frozen in the act of paddling.

  The question brought Thessa’s attention back. She started paddling again. ‘Only four. I’d have done more, but I could only leave the house when I knew Alex was out and not at the clinic. He doesn’t leave me alone very much.’

  Pari gave a little shrug and picked up her own paddle. Lacey paused a moment before asking the difficult question. ‘Why are some of them dying?’

  Thessa shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t know they were until a couple of weeks ago. When I found Anya.’

  ‘Who’s Anya?’

  ‘The body you found in the river, dear. When you were out swimming a week last Thursday. I found her in South Dock Marina just days earlier. She’d broken loose of her weights, somehow.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Pari. ‘Which of you found Anya?’

  ‘Thessa did,’ said Lacey. ‘And then she left her somewhere she knew I’d find her. What about the woman on my boat? Were you responsible for her, too?’

  ‘I’m sorry about that, dear, it must have been a dreadful shock. But you weren’t getting the message. I thought the crabs might do it, or the boats – that you’d make the connection with the marina – but I guess I was hoping for too much.’

  ‘How much further?’ Pari was looking ahead again. ‘I can’t see any ladder. I have good eyes. I can’t see anything.’

  Pari had good eyes. Four nights ago, she’d seen Thessa rescuing one of the other women from the building on East Street. Two nights ago, someone, whom Lacey now knew to be Thessa, had strung the body of a freshly drowned young woman up on Lacey’s boat. But Thessa had denied rescuing the woman. No dear, I think you’re getting mixed up.

  Suddenly Lacey was very conscious of being within striking reach of Thessa’s paddle.

  ‘I couldn’t let it carry on, dear,’ Thessa was saying. ‘Not when I knew the girls were being harmed. But it was beyond me, I’m afraid, to call the police about my own brother. I thought, if the bodies were found, if he knew the police were investigating, he might stop.’

  ‘Why pick me?’

  ‘I’d seen you swimming and in your canoe. And on your big, fast police boat. I knew you were the one.’

  So it had been Thessa, in her little boat, who’d been visiting Lacey’s yacht at night, Thessa who’d left hearts and crabs and, eventually, a corpse. In some ways, it made much more sense if the stalker had been trying to warn Lacey, rather than frighten her. Except—

  ‘But the women are being brought here to die. Nadia told me. She told me they’re tied by the neck to mooring rings and left to drown, just like I was. How can Alex be killing them, if he doesn’t know about this place?’

  ‘Nadia?’ Thessa looked genuinely surprised.

  ‘Nadia Safi. She was here with me today. She was at East Street, too.’

  Thessa’s big eyes opened even wider in astonishment. ‘Nadia was here?’ She turned back, to look along the long stretch of water.

  ‘Yes, she brought me. I didn’t want to say anything before because I didn’t want to frighten you. She was attacked. Someone pulled her out of the boat. I think she’s dead.’

  ‘Nadia was attacked today? I’m not sure that’s poss—’ began Thessa.

  There was a sudden sound, which none of them had made. The sound of something falling, or slithering, into the water.

  Lacey drew her legs up beneath her, wondering if rats could swim. Thessa had stopped paddling, was sitting bolt upright, her eyes flicking from Lacey to Pari and back again. ‘Put the oar down for a moment, Pari dear,’ she said.

  ‘We have to keep going,’ Lacey countered.

  Thessa ignored her, her attention still fixed on the noise they’d just heard. In the pale light of the lantern, she seemed to be changing. Her shoulders had drawn back, her head was up, her eyes shining again. She looked taller, younger, stronger. Then, too quick for Lacey to stop her, she reached to one side and caught hold of a mooring ring. In a flash, she’d pushed the boat’s rope through it and pulled it tight. They stopped dead.

  ‘Thessa,’ said Lacey, as cold realization sank in. ‘How could Alex have killed Nadia if he’s been in custody all day?’

  Fred and his crew were waiting at the jetty, the same one from which Dana had climbed aboard the traffickers’ boat not twenty-four hours earlier. As they ran down the riverside steps to meet him, Anderson got a call on his radio. He held up a hand, indicating that they should all wait.

  ‘Pete, Tom and Gayle are at the pumping station,’ he told them, after listening for a few seconds. ‘Uniform are on their way. As far as they can tell, it’s empty, but they can’t be sure until the door-breaking squad arrive.’

  ‘How far is it?’ Mark was looking round – back up the concrete steps, at the wide expanse of embankment, the nearby office buildings.

  ‘About two hundred yards down-river.’ Christakos used the hand that wasn’t cuffed to indicate almost due south. ‘The outlet that Thessa must use to access it is about twenty yards up-stream.’ He pointed in the opposite direction.

  Fred was looking grim. ‘I’m sorry, Dana,’ he said, before she could open her mouth. ‘There’s no way we can get in that tunnel until the tide drops a bit. Four more hours at least.’

  Mark strode right up to his uncle. ‘If they’re not in the pumping station, they have to be in the tunnels somewhere.’

  Fred didn’t back down. ‘Those tunnels are all but flooded. I’ve got a boat slap bang by the entrance and it can stay there till we know more, but there’s no way I can risk any of my officers going in.’

  ‘Give me a friggin’ dinghy, I’ll do it.’

  ‘Not happening, my friend.’

  Dana put a hand on Mark’s shoulder. ‘Get back in the car,’ she told him. ‘We’ll drive round there.’

  ‘How many women are we talking about, Mr Christakos?’ Back in the car, moving too slowly around industrial buildings, Dana had a sense of needing to keep the conversation moving, if only to keep Mark from exploding. ‘How many women did your sister help escape from the clinic?’

  How many more corpses were waiting for them somewhere on the river bed?

  Christakos closed his eyes, as though thinking hard. She heard him mutter the name Jamilla, then something that sounded like Shireen. Number four was a Yass, number five Ummu. Please let that be the last. They’d found five bodies. That was enough.

  She could see the pumping station. A small, neat, but otherwise unremarkable brick building not far from the river. Christakos had named a sixth, a seventh, more. Good God, there were nine. Four more somewhere. Except . . .

  ‘Mr Christakos, the third one you mentioned. Who was that again?’

  Christakos opened his eyes. ‘The third was Nadia Safi,’ he said. ‘A woman of twenty-eight. From Khost Province, in south-eastern Afghanistan. She vanished on the tenth of January this year, no
t long after she arrived.’ A spasm of what looked like pain passed across his face. ‘Is she one of the women you found? Is she dead, too?’

  94

  Lacey and Dana

  ‘YOU SAID YOUR brother has been with the police all day,’ Lacey reminded Thessa. ‘So he couldn’t have been here. He couldn’t have killed Nadia. He couldn’t have left me to drown.’ She looked round quickly, peering into the darkness, wondering how far away the ladder was and whether anything she’d been told in the last half-hour had been true.

  ‘No,’ agreed Thessa. ‘He couldn’t, could he? How silly of me not to think of that.’

  ‘Pari, can you get out of the boat?’ Lacey was moving again, making sure she was at least an arm’s length from Thessa. ‘Walk along the ledge until you come to the ladder, then climb it. I’ll be right behind you.’

  Confused, still frightened, Pari didn’t move. She trusted Thessa, not Lacey. It wouldn’t be easy to get her out of the boat.

  ‘My brother is a good man, Lacey.’ Thessa unfastened her cloak and let it fall from her shoulders. ‘A little misguided, perhaps, but a good man. I’m sorry for what I said about him.’

  She was unbuttoning her blouse. Lacey opened her mouth to ask her what the hell she thought she was doing and realized it was hardly top of the list.

  ‘Thessa,’ she said instead. ‘Did you kill them?’

  Thessa was pulling off her blouse, revealing the flat, empty breasts of an old woman and the well-developed musculature of someone who had been swimming for years. ‘Yes.’ She stretched out her arms, rotating each shoulder, like a swimmer before a race. ‘I am entirely responsible for their deaths. How’s the water, dear?’

  No, no, not her friend Thessa. Christ, she couldn’t panic. ‘Whatever you have planned, Thessa, I’m stronger than you are. You can’t even walk.’

  ‘True.’ Thessa’s left hand reached to her waist and unfastened her skirt. She unwrapped it, letting Lacey see what was beneath. ‘But I can swim.’ She gave a big, happy smile.

  Lacey said nothing. She couldn’t see much. She could see enough. Behind her, she heard Pari mutter something in her own language that sounded as though it might be a prayer.

  ‘Well?’ Thessa looked down at her own naked body, then back up at Lacey. ‘Aren’t you going to say, “What are you?” That’s what they always say.’

  ‘You’re the mermaid.’

  Thessa positively beamed. ‘How sweet of you. I’ve always loved mermaids. Did you know Alexander the Great’s sister was a mermaid called Thessaloniki? That’s how I chose my name. My real one is quite different. But you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?’

  Lacey was suddenly conscious of shivering violently. ‘You know nothing about me. You killed all those women. You tried to kill me in the marina.’

  The naked old creature at the stern of the boat smiled even wider. ‘My darling girl, if I’d wanted to kill you I would have, trust me. I was simply trying to show you what you and your colleagues were incapable of finding for yourselves.’

  As Lacey tried to process what she was hearing, Thessa sighed. ‘But in the greater scheme of things you’re right. About not really knowing you, I mean.’ She nodded, then seemed to leap from the seat. A second later, she’d vanished.

  ‘Pari, get out of the boat. Now!’ Holding the bow in place against the wall with one hand, Lacey pulled at the terrified Afghan girl with the other. ‘Come on. We have to find a ladder.’

  As the other girl wobbled and scrambled to get from the small, unsteady boat on to the narrow, wet ledge, Lacey kept her eyes on the water all around them. Thessa was down there, probably very close. She gave one last shove on Pari’s backside, kicked the boat away and prepared to pull herself out of the water.

  Just as something dragged her beneath the surface.

  The water was dark. She struck the smooth wood of the boat. As she pushed away from it, her shoulders bounced against the rough brickwork of the walls. She used it to navigate, to get herself to the surface, to start breathing again.

  Pari was inching along the ledge, towards the ladder that would take her to safety, but her terrified eyes were fixed on Lacey. She wasn’t moving nearly fast enough.

  Lacey looked back at the tunnel. Nothing to see but the troubled water steadying itself. Nothing to hear but dripping from the arched roof, and the splash of waves against the walls.

  Then a crippling weight had attached itself to her legs and was dragging her down again. Lacey went below the surface in an instant. Something was clawing at her, trying to get a tighter grip. She kicked hard and broke free for a second, before teeth sank into her thigh. Lacey almost forgot she was submerged in the instinct to howl. She bent herself double and struck hard with her right fist, her strongest hand. She hit hard and felt the grip on her loosening. One more, and she broke the surface again.

  The ledge was close. Anything to be out of the water. She was on the point of reaching the slime-encrusted stone when two strong hands closed around her throat and she was going under for what felt like the last time.

  This was it. She’d be the next body they found. Shrouded in white linen. Or maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe she’d lie at the bottom of the river for all time. Thessa seemed to be everywhere, to have grown in size, to have numerous limbs, to be doubly strong. For a second, Lacey even wondered if there were three of them in the water, if Pari had jumped in to help. Yes, definitely three of them – she was being held by more than two hands. Then one pair of hands let go and the body that they might belong to – almost impossible to tell – had flung itself at the third person. It was one mass of wriggling, kicking, biting limbs. In a last effort to be free, Lacey twisted round like an eel.

  And she was loose. Feet away, Pari was still crouched against the tunnel wall, her hands clutched to her face in horror. Her clothes were dry.

  Lacey gave the biggest leap she was capable of. With Pari clutching her shoulders, it was the work of moments to haul herself on to the ledge and stagger to her feet. On impulse, she reached down into the boat and pulled out the nearest oar. A weapon of any kind felt like a good idea right now. Pressed against the slime-damp wall of the tunnel, she tried to get her breath, cough out river water and locate the woman who’d attacked her, all at the same time. At her side, Pari was pointing at something.

  There she was, not three yards away, head rising out of the water, hair spreading out in every direction. Shoulders that looked impossibly wide and strong. A terrifying creature, teeth bared in a snarl, staring at her with the huge eyes of a mad woman, climbing out of the water, staggering to her feet on the ledge, getting ready to attack again. A woman who – and this was just about impossible to process in the circumstances – was most definitely not Thessa.

  ‘Nadia Safi was a very troubled young woman,’ said Christakos, as Anderson drew up on the concrete embankment by the pumping station. Two patrol cars and an unmarked Toyota that Dana recognized as belonging to Mizon were already parked next to the building.

  Dana had altered the seating arrangement in the car, mainly to separate Mark from Christakos. She was now in the back seat, cuffed to their prisoner. She nodded for him to go on.

  ‘We could see that from the moment she arrived,’ he said. ‘We put it down to her exceptionally traumatic journey, even by the standards of what our guests usually have to undergo.’

  ‘Are you talking about her arrest?’ said Anderson, an edge in his voice.

  ‘I’m talking about the fact that she nearly drowned that night,’ Christakos countered. ‘Your officers made the people bringing her panic. They tried to flee, their boat overturned. Nadia nearly died. She was still having nightmares about it when she came to us.’

  ‘She didn’t die, because PC Flint leapt in after her and pulled her to safety,’ snapped Mark. ‘Risking her own life in the process.’

  ‘Was that Lacey?’ For the time it took to blink, Christakos’s face lit up. ‘I had no idea. But back to Nadia. We soon realized it was more than the
shock of recent events. This was something that ran very deep. How much do you know about my country, Detective Inspector?’

  Out of the corner of her eye, Dana saw Stenning and Mizon get out of their vehicle. Both Anderson and Mark opened their doors. She held up her hand for them to give her a minute. ‘I’ve visited India several times,’ she said. ‘I have family there. But I’ve never been to Afghanistan. I just know what I’ve heard on the news.’

  ‘Then you’ll only really know about events in Helmand Province. Khost is on the Pakistan border. It’s unusual among Afghan provinces because many of its men go abroad in search of work, typically to Pakistan, sometimes further afield, leaving the women at home to raise their families and tend the farms. Nadia was the oldest of a family of girls. Her father worked away until he died, and, as is the tradition in that area, she was brought up as a boy.’

  As she awkwardly followed Christakos from the car, Dana saw that both Anderson and Mark were looking puzzled. She straightened up and turned to Mizon. ‘Talk to me.’

  ‘We can’t see anything inside, Ma’am. Windows all boarded up. And we haven’t heard anything, but I wouldn’t like to say one way or another.’

  ‘How long before the trolls get here?’ asked Mark.

  ‘Few more minutes,’ Stenning told him. ‘Those big wooden doors are old. We should be able to go straight in.’

  ‘Tell everyone to wait,’ said Dana. ‘But keep listening and let me know the second you hear anything.’ She turned back to Christakos. ‘What do you mean, brought up as a boy? Nadia didn’t say anything about that to us. We have her on tape talking to Lacey, saying that she married young, into a good family, but her husband divorced her because she had three daughters and because there were some spurious doubts about her virginity. It was a very convincing story.’

  ‘Nadia had never had a child,’ said Christakos. ‘I’m quite certain about that. She was still a virgin when she came to us. I’d go so far as to say she would never have been allowed to have a child. Her village treated her as a man, you see. She was expected to work in the fields like a man, provide for her family, make decisions, help govern the village. She even dressed as a man.’