Dead Alone

by Gay Longworth

  Twenty-four years ago an innocent passer-by was shot during a robbery. That man was Clare’s father, Trevor Mills. He’d been on his way home from a job interview. Carrying an innocuous brown paper bag. Sweets for his kids – he’d got the job. The stray bullet had been fired by a man called Raymond Giles, a notorious gangster of his time. At first the police thought Giles had fled to Spain, but after an anonymous tip-off he was found hiding out at a hotel in Southend. Eventually Raymond Giles was sentenced to sixteen years for manslaughter. The tariff was high because, although the prosecution could not prove intent, the judge knew men like Raymond Giles. Intent to harm was not specific. It was innate. His arrest was a coup for all concerned.

  But for Clare Mills it was only the beginning of the nightmare. Her large brown eyes were suspicious, she blinked nervously, continuously. The torn skin around her nails was bitten back to the knuckle on her long, thin fingers. Jessie followed Clare through to the surprisingly light, bright yellow kitchen and tried to break the ice as she made tea. ‘I don’t sleep much,’ was the answer she gave to most questions. Hardly surprising, thought Jessie as they returned to the small sitting room. The day Clare saw her father lowered into the grave was the day her mother committed suicide. She was eight when she found her mother hanging from the back of the wardrobe, the mascara-stained tear tracks barely dry on her cheeks. Even that was not the worst thing that was to happen to Clare Mills.

  Jessie tried again. How did she manage to do so many shifts at work and look after the elderly lady next door? How did she find time to draw and paint? The answer always came back the same. ‘I don’t sleep much.’

  It was different when they started talking about Frank.

  ‘My little brother. Five years younger than me. Their miracle child, Mum and Dad used to say. They were so happy. We were. He was a gorgeous kid, simply gorgeous. I played with him every day, every day until …’ Clare turned away from them and stared out of the rectangular window. The day after their mother died a car came to take the children into care. Except that two cars came. One took Clare and one took Frank. It was the last time she saw him.

  Clare’s pleas had gone unheard for years. Until she had begun chaining herself to the gates of Woolwich Cemetery, where her mother was buried. It had become a PR nightmare. The search for Frank had at last become a matter for the AMIT team, and Jones had been given the case. Now he was talking, apologising, trying to find the right words.

  ‘… and whatever happens, we’ll find out what happened to Frank and we’ll make those responsible for what has happened pay –’

  ‘There is only one, and you’ve let him out.’ Clare spat out the words. ‘The man who shot Dad. That thieving bastard, swanning about –’

  Jones leant forward. ‘He spent a long time in prison, Clare. He did his time. Let’s concentrate on Frank and the people who were supposed to be looking after him. And you.’

  ‘Mum and Dad were supposed to be looking after us.’

  ‘Clare …’ pleaded Jones.

  Clare turned to Jessie. ‘My mother sat by my dad’s hospital bed for three weeks. She didn’t sleep, she didn’t eat, she just sat there and waited for him to wake up. He fought, I’ve seen the records, I’ve spoken to one of the nurses who was there, she remembered my mum, sitting there, praying for him. Mum refused to leave, she wouldn’t let anyone in neither, except her friend Irene, of course. They remember Dad fighting to stay alive. He fought so hard he came round a few times, just to tell Mum he loved her, and us, but it was a losing battle. Stray bullet? Stray? Tell me, how does a stray bullet hit a man point-blank in the heart?’

  ‘We can’t change the law,’ said Jones. ‘He served nine years behind bars. That’s a long time.’

  So, thought Jessie, the man who ruined Clare’s life was out. A free man again. Jessie believed in repaying one’s debt to society. She believed time served meant a slate wiped clean. She actively dissuaded her team from reaching for the con-list every time a body appeared. But she could see in Clare Mills’ saucer-sized eyes that she would never be free of this crime. Her sentence meant life.

  ‘Not long enough for three murders.’ She was shaking now. ‘No, make that four.’

  Clare had no other family. Her father’s parents had died before she was born. Clare’s mother, Veronica, hadn’t spoken to her family in years. Clare had never met them, her mother had never talked about them. All the information Clare had came from Veronica’s best friend, Irene. A hairdresser who had never left the area.

  ‘They changed my name. Those people in care. Care! Don’t make me laugh. I knew I wasn’t Samantha Griffin, I was Clare. I kept telling them, “I’m Clare.”’ She paused. ‘I was punished for lying.’ Clare closed her eyes for a brief moment. The nervous energy was eating her alive.

  Jessie and Jones exchanged knowing glances. The seventies were not childcare’s proudest era. ‘We’ll start with his birth date and the day he was taken into care. I don’t know who has tried to help you with this, but the truth is that you’ve been misdirected at every turn, and for that I am truly sorry. You have my word,’ said Jones, ‘we’ll find him.’

  Clare seemed to retract into herself. ‘Dead or alive?’

  Jones nodded. ‘Dead or alive.’

  The timer on the video switched itself on to record. Clare stared wide-eyed at the empty television screen. ‘I’m not normally here in the daytime,’ she said, sounding far away again. ‘There are certain programmes I can’t miss.’

  Jessie wondered which daytime host held Clare’s attention. Kilroy. Oprah. Trisha. Vanessa. Ricki. Springer. Pick a card. Any card. ‘I’m surprised you ever get time to watch television,’ she said.

  Clare bit at her forefinger. ‘I don’t sleep much.’

  CHAPTER 3

  ‘Pull. Pull. Pull. Three, straighten up.’ The tip of the boat cut through the deep cold water, parting the mist. ‘Three, are you listening?’ Oars collided. A whistle blew long and loud. The boat started to drift out of line, carried along by the rush of the tide. The muddy brown water slapped heavily against the fibreglass hull. Cold spray covered the girls’ bare pink thighs, mottled with exertion. ‘What on earth is going on?’

  ‘I thought I saw something on the shoreline. I’m sorry, it looked like …’ the girl paused, her fellow rowers peered to where she was pointing, ‘… bones.’

  ‘Oh God,’ said the cox. ‘Any excuse for a break! It’s pathetic – get rowing.’

  ‘No, I swear. I think we should turn around.’

  They rowed the boat round and backed towards the muddy stretch of bank. The tide was rushing out, they had to fight it to stay still. The five girls stared over the water. Patches of mist clung to the river, reluctant to leave.

  ‘There!’ shouted the girl.

  There was something lying on the thick, black, slimy surface. Strange outstretched fingers, poking out of the mud like the relic of a wooden hull.

  ‘It’s just wood,’ said the cox.

  ‘White wood?’

  ‘Yes. Let’s go.’

  The girl at the back of the boat was closest. ‘I think I can make out a pelvis and legs.’

  The girls began to row away from the bank. They didn’t want to get closer. They didn’t want to get a better look.

  ‘What do we do?’ asked a shaky voice from the back of the boat.

  ‘Row. We’ll call the police from the boathouse. Get a marking so that we can tell them where it is.’

  ‘It’s right below the nature reserve. We’d better hurry, it’ll be open soon.’

  ‘Oh shit. Okay, okay … um, pull, pull – fuck it, you know what to do …’

  CHAPTER 4

  A fully decomposed skeleton had been found in the mud on the bank of the Thames. No skull. No extremities. Probably a forgotten suicide. A local PC was on site. It warranted nothing more from CID than a detective constable. It was perfect. Jessie was early to work, as usual, and when she asked what was in, as usual, all he had to do was obey.

&nb
sp; ‘Headless body on a towpath,’ said the duty officer, crossing his fingers. Her leather-coated arse didn’t even touch the seat.

  CHAPTER 5

  Jessie parked her motorbike on Ferry Road in south-west London. Here, secreted between a man-made nature reserve and a primary school, was a little-known cut-through to the Thames. As pavement gave way to mud and puddles, and buildings became trees and brambles, Jessie had the distinct impression of being drawn back in time, to Dickensian London. She feared the worst. A young woman, sexually assaulted on this heavily wooded, unlit, desolate path, strangled and then dumped. Decapitated.

  She marched on through the puddles, the swirling Thames far below her. She saw DC Fry up ahead, sipping coffee from a Starbucks cup. He was chatting to five women all wearing matching tracksuits. Jessie assumed he had his back to the body. His eye on the girls.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said loudly.

  Fry turned and looked at Jessie.

  ‘Morning, ma’am. What are you doing here?’

  Another police constable she didn’t know hovered nearby. Jessie beckoned Fry over. ‘Where is the body on the towpath?’

  ‘There’s another body?’ he asked, excited. Bones in the Thames were too run of the mill to be inspiring.

  ‘What do you mean, another one? Where’s the first?’

  He pointed over the edge of the wall. ‘Careful, it’s slippery,’ said Fry. Jessie left the path, crossed the few yards of brambles and low-growing branches, and stepped on to the stone wall. It was covered in a film of algae, as frictionless as ice. She felt the soles of her boots slip. Jessie grabbed a branch and looked over the edge. It was a twenty-foot drop to the mud. Down a steeply angled slope of greenish stone. Leading away from the base of the wall was a beach. A fool’s beach. The tide had gone out, leaving a wide expanse of deep, dangerous mud. Gulls criss-crossed it with their weight-bearing webbed feet, searching for titbits, leeches, worms, tiny spineless organisms on which to dine. By the look of the algae-coated wall, Jessie guessed the tide often reached as high as where she now stood. She looked back at the glistening mud. A semi-submerged ribcage jutted out of it. Was this her headless body on the towpath?

  ‘Is this it?’ she called back to Fry. He nodded. The DOA had been exaggerated. Grossly exaggerated. ‘Who are the girls?’

  ‘Rowers. They spotted the bones and called it in.’

  ‘And the PC?’

  ‘First bobby on the scene, local boy.’

  ‘His name?’ asked Jessie, getting impatient.

  Fry shrugged. ‘So, is there another body?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I have been –’ son-of-a-bitch ‘– misinformed.’ She turned back to face the river, then looked down. ‘So what have we got here, Fry?’

  DC Fry walked over to join her on the river wall. ‘I’m surprised fewer people fall in. This stuff is lethal,’ he said, sliding his foot over the slime.

  ‘Would you mind taking this a little more seriously?’

  ‘Aren’t we just waiting for the undertaker to arrive and scoop this thing up?’

  ‘You been down there?’

  ‘Are you joking? Have you seen that mud?’ Fry yawned.

  ‘You haven’t even been down there?’

  He handed her a small pair of binoculars. ‘I can see from here that it’s a fully decomposed skeleton, no doubt been there for years. Search the records and we’ll probably find it was some drunken fool who fell off a boat New Year’s Eve ten years ago and lost his head to a propeller.’

  Jessie looked at the perfectly formed skeleton, its grey-white bones the same colour as the grey-white sky. ‘Possibly,’ she said. She scanned the bank through the binoculars, across the water and over to the opposite side. A cyclist had stopped among eight tall larches. There was a depot of some kind. No visible signs of activity. To her right was the beginning of the small island known as the Richmond Eyot. The curve in the river restricted any long view of the beach below her feet. She’d have to get down there. She returned her sights to the opposite bank; the cyclist was already moving away. She lowered the binoculars and turned to Fry.

  ‘Then again, possibly not.’

  ‘There’s nothing here for you, ma’am. You can return to the station, I’ll deal with this.’

  ‘No. I will.’ If Mark was going to send her out on false pretences, she was going to call everyone else out on false pretences. ‘Right, got any wellies?’

  ‘No.’

  She looked down at DC Fry’s nice-boy leather lace-ups. ‘Shame.’

  ‘Oh, come on …’

  She took the coffee from Fry’s hand. ‘Cordon off an area around the body. Get that PC to keep an eye on it. I want all entries and exits to the site logged. Get the scenes of crime officers down here now and a pathologist, if you can lay your hands on one. I want them to see the body in situ. After that, you can follow me round and take notes. And tell forensics to bring a video. The tide will be coming back in, we don’t have long.’

  Fry’s frown deepened between his eyebrows. ‘You’re calling in the cavalry for that?’

  ‘This is a suspicious death, it will be treated like a suspicious death.’ He looked as if he thought she might be joking. She glared at him. ‘What are you doing still standing here?’

  ‘How the hell do I get down there? That’s a thirty-foot drop.’

  ‘Men and their inches,’ said Jessie. ‘Always exaggerating.’

  Fry was furious, but Jessie was his superior. No doubt he’d vent his spleen in the pub later, telling everyone what a bitch she was.

  ‘There are some steps in the wall about a hundred yards back.’

  Fry peered over. In some places the water reached the wall. ‘But …’

  ‘Be careful of the run-off channels. We wouldn’t want to lose you to a sudden gush of effluent.’

  ‘You can’t be serious, guv?’

  Jessie narrowed her eyes against the sun’s low-lying sharp reflection. ‘Deadly.’

  Fry flounced off. Mark Ward, that bastard. Well, he picked the wrong girl to start a war with. She’d make him sorry he hadn’t simply put a bucket of water over an open door and been done with it. Jessie got on the phone to the riverboat police, the underwater team and the helicopter unit, then she went over to the first officer on the scene. ‘Hi, I’m Detective Inspector Driver, West End Central CID.’

  ‘PC Niaz Ahmet.’ He was lanky, with heavy hands that flapped like paddles at his sides. His narrow head was perched on a long neck, but his eyes were bright and alert.

  ‘Were there any markings when you got here? Tyre tracks, footprints?’

  ‘Indeterminate number of markings on the path. But the mud was flat as it is now. Except for where the water runs off the bank. Rivulets, I think they’re called.’ Jessie immediately warmed to the man. ‘Definitely no footprints, or tyre tracks down there.’

  ‘Anything resembling a skull?’ asked Jessie.

  ‘Not that I could see. But, like Detective Constable Fry, I haven’t been down there. Didn’t want to disturb the scene.’

  Jessie blew on her hands and rubbed them together. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘No. Few bits of debris, broken bottle, bit of metal pipe, trolley wheel, a dead jellyfish. But no footprints. I noted that especially.’

  ‘Follow me. I want you to take statements from the girls. And anyone else who turns up.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  She walked along the footpath to where the rowers still stood, huddled over cold coffee, exhaling clouds of expectant breath. Gold letters adorned the navy-blue tracksuits: CLRC. Jessie introduced herself and began her routine questions.

  Jessie climbed the frost-covered grass embankment on the other side of the pathway and peered over the iron railings. The so-called nature reserve looked like a filled-in chalkpit or a disused water reservoir. Steep banks surrounded the rectangular expanse of water. It seemed a desolate place, offering none of the comforts the name suggested. She turned away and walked back down the path after
Fry to the stone steps. Like the wall, they were covered in algae. The river’s mucus. Fry was f-ing and blinding as he fought through the mud. It was almost worth the humiliation to see him pick his way like a girl in Jimmy Choos. Jessie took a step down on to the slippery tread. The slightest pressure on her heel and she’d lose what little grip she had. There was nothing to hold on to and the stairs were very steep. If these remains had been brought to the river, they hadn’t come this way. Above her was a canopy of branches, stretching low and wide over her head. There was no lighting on the path above, nothing opposite and no residential buildings for a quarter of a mile. For central London, this was an extraordinarily deserted spot. Perfect. Suspiciously perfect.

  She rounded the wall and saw a tunnel entrance. No run-off channel emerged from the black mouth of the tunnel, but there was a silt fan. Did that mean the tunnel was active, or was the silt backwash from high tide? Jessie pulled a slim black torch out of her rucksack and pointed it into the darkness. Disturbed pigeons flapped past her. On the right was a raised stone walkway. Jessie mounted the slimy steps, stooped to the arc of the airless tunnel, and began to walk uphill away from the daylight. Below her on the gravel and silt floor were the beached whales of the river’s lifeless catch. A shopping trolley. A rusting bicycle frame. Two heavy-duty plastic sacks. There was something that looked like clothing caught under a plank of wood. Jessie jumped off the four-foot ridge and landed squarely on the solid ground. The cloth was a woman’s coat. She slipped on a plastic glove and took hold of the coat, gently tugging it free. She stared into the never-ending darkness ahead of her. Where would such a steep, dry tunnel lead?

  ‘Ma’am,’ shouted Fry. She could make out the silhouette of the lower half of his body at the tunnel entrance. He sounded anxious. ‘Ma’am, what are you doing in there?’

  She walked back down the tunnel. It got softer underfoot the lower she got. Jessie passed Fry the coat without saying anything, then picked a high ridge and walked down the sloping bank to the skeleton. The ground was still getting softer with every step. She stood over the bones. Slowly sinking. Thinking. What had bothered her about the bones when she’d studied them through the binoculars bothered her even more now. She looked back to the gaping archway of the tunnel, staring at her like a one-eyed monster. Dormant. But dangerous. Her eyes returned to the skeleton. It wasn’t what Jessie expected a river to regurgitate. Bodies pulled from the Thames were the worst kind. Like leaves left in water, the skin formed a translucent film over flooded veins. Bloated with river water, corpses would burst at the touch, emptying their contents like a fisherman’s catch. There was something about the whiteness of this ribcage, rising out of the brown-black mud like a giant clam, that made her think the river had not claimed this body. Human hands had put it there. Nature was never that neat.