A Dark and Twisted Tide (14 page)

Lacey tried to remember how far away the lavatories were, and whether she’d make it there before she threw up. Cook handed Wilson a photograph.

‘Sergeant Mick Jackson,’ he told him. Lacey didn’t need to look. She knew the alias Joesbury used on undercover jobs.

‘He was undercover,’ she said, to no one in particular. ‘Pretending to be a bent copper.’

‘Undercover or not, you don’t shoot a fellow officer.’ Cook’s look of sympathy had gone now. ‘The two arresting officers weren’t armed. I’m sorry, both of you, but there’s a warrant out for Mark Joesbury’s arrest.’

27

Lacey

LACEY WALKED ACROSS
the yard, alert to any sign of movement, any hint that someone might be waiting in the shadows.

The tide was out. Some time in the last couple of hours, her boat had settled in the mud, making that sound, somewhere between a squelch and a sigh. She always liked to hear it in the middle of the night, found it soothing, restful. Next time, though, it might sound like someone suffocating.

He’d shot someone? Killed a young constable who’d had the nerve to attempt an arrest? And this just hours before showing up on her boat? Had she missed him washing the blood off his hands?

She had a long climb down to the first boat. It was late, not far off midnight. All the lights were out on this boat and the next.

There was no coming back, not when you killed a fellow officer. He’d told her he was innocent. He’d looked her in the eyes and lied. Or had he just said the minimum he thought he’d get away with? Had he only come to her, rather than to Dana or any of his mates, because he knew she was the one who wouldn’t ask questions, the one most anxious to believe whatever he told her?

Her phone ringing. Joesbury? There’d be some explanation, there had to be.

‘Lacey, it’s Dana.’

‘I don’t believe it.’ Too loud. She was on someone else’s boat, she had to be quiet. She had to watch where she was walking or she’d fall overboard.

‘Are you OK?’

‘No, I’m not OK. I don’t believe it.’

‘Lacey, calm down. Where are you?’

She stepped on to her own boat and leaned against the forestays. ‘I’m home. I just got back. It isn’t true, is it?’

The sound of Dana catching her breath. ‘I’ll tell you what I know and that’s not much. The operation Mark was involved in was something to do with national security. It was a joint initiative with MI5.’

‘What, like a terrorist threat, Al-Qaeda or something?’

‘Possibly. I think some sort of attack on London was being planned, and Mark was supposed to be an enabler, someone who oiled the wheels. Half of this is what I’ve surmised myself, you understand?’

‘Go on.’

‘He was spotted last night by some uniformed officers. Doing what, I haven’t been able to find out. He resisted arrest and shot one officer in the chest. Emergency services got to the kid pretty quickly, but the bleeding into his chest was too extensive. Scotland Yard are trying to keep it quiet to give themselves time to find him. Or for him to give himself up. If he gets in touch, you have to make him do that, Lacey.’ Dana muttered goodnight and hung up.

‘Lucy!’

Lacey looked up at the woman who’d appeared on the next boat. Ray’s wife, Eileen, appeared to believe that names she’d never heard before couldn’t possibly be real, and that the young woman who’d been her neighbour for the past few months must be called something more conventional than Lacey. Lucy was her favourite. Lizzy sometimes. Even Stacey or Tracey occasionally.

Eileen had been in bed, and was wearing a quilted purple dressing gown around her ample frame. Lacey could never see her and Ray together without thinking of the old nursery rhyme about Jack Sprat eating no fat and his wife eating no lean. She was bigger than
her husband, taller, with a greater body weight. With wheezy asthmatic breathing and a smoker’s cough, she struggled with simple actions like getting around the boat and climbing ashore. In her day though, according to Ray, she’d been an excellent swimmer. Far stronger and faster than he.

‘Were you here a few hours ago?’ she asked Lacey. ‘Around seven o’clock? On your boat?’

‘No. I’ve just got back.’

Eileen frowned. ‘Well, someone was. Expecting visitors?’

Yes, she had been expecting visitors. One in particular. Had he been, after all? ‘Not especially,’ she said. Calm. She had to act calm. ‘Did you see who it was?’

‘I didn’t see anything.’ Eileen glanced uneasily over at Lacey’s boat. ‘I felt your boat move against ours, the way it does when someone steps on it, and I heard clattering around in the cockpit. It didn’t sound like you, so I came up for a look. No one around.’

It couldn’t have been Joesbury. He wouldn’t come back. Not when the news of what he’d done was out. Lacey carried on, heading for her own boat.

‘Hang on a minute,’ called Eileen. ‘Whoever it was, they didn’t come across our boat first.’

‘They must have done. There isn’t another way.’

Eileen pointed emphatically at the bow of her boat. ‘Nobody walks over my boat without me hearing it. Whoever it was must have come by water.’

Lacey turned to look at the creek. ‘There’s no boat there now,’ she said.

‘I didn’t see a boat.’ Eileen sounded annoyed. ‘Or hear one. I came up top pretty quick, it didn’t take more than a minute or two. There wasn’t time for a boat to turn the corner.’

Silence. A train passed overhead. Lacey looked towards the point where the Theatre Arm met the main creek. A small, fast boat would probably turn the corner in a couple of minutes. But a fast boat would have an audible engine. Unless it had coincided with a train going past.

‘Where’s Ray?’ asked Lacey.

‘In the pub. Want me to call him?’

‘Let me just have a look.’ Lacey stepped on to her own boat.

It
had
been Joesbury. There was his calling card on the floor of the cockpit. She counted quickly. Three shells, two pieces of green glass, one piece of blue, all polished smooth by the water, a broken fragment of a teacup, still bearing the pattern of a tiny pink flower, and several smooth white pebbles. Thirteen small objects arranged in the shape of a heart.

‘It all looks OK,’ she called back over her shoulder. ‘Cabin’s locked up. Thanks for waiting up.’

‘Are you sure you don’t want me to call Ray?’

Lacey glanced towards the pub. ‘He won’t thank either of us for that. I’m fine, thanks, Eileen. Get back to bed.’

She unlocked the boat as Eileen disappeared into her own cabin. ‘Hello?’

The air in the cabin had that tightly pressed concentration of leather, toiletries and river water it always assumed when it had been shut up all day.

‘It’s me. Are you there?’

No answer. There’d be some trace of him, surely? If he’d been here for an hour or more, she’d be able to smell him. That faint cologne he sometimes wore. His shampoo. The warm, salty smell of a hot male body. She knew the way Joesbury smelled. Lacey breathed in deeply through her nose. Nothing.

A minute later she’d checked everywhere – even the sail locker beneath her bed – and found no trace of him. Now she was back on deck, unable to cope with the warm, close air below. She sat and stared at the heart.

He’d been here and left a sign that only she would recognize as being his. If Eileen were right, he’d come by boat, which wouldn’t be unusual in itself. Joesbury knew boats. His grandfather had been an officer in the Marine Unit, and he and his brother had spent much of their childhood clambering on and off police boats. It would be nothing for him to drive a boat up the creek and moor alongside her yacht. But if he’d come by boat, why hadn’t Eileen seen him driving away?

Shells, pebbles, river-polished glass. How had he found time to collect these little treasures?

Beyond the heart shape on the cockpit floor were the two toy boats that had mysteriously appeared on her yacht. Had Joesbury brought those, too? Quirky little gifts were hardly his style.

This wasn’t Joesbury.

Now where had that come from? That voice in her head, as loud as if someone sitting right behind her had spoken? As if there were anyone else in the world who would come to her boat, surreptitiously by river, leave her a heart and then vanish.

28

Lacey

LACEY WAS FILTHY
. Unable to stay on the boat, she’d pulled on waders and walked the short distance down the creek to see if Marlene and Madge had seen anyone approach the Theatre Arm earlier. They hadn’t. She’d insisted on walking home, despite their warnings that the tide was coming in, that it was getting dangerously dark and that she’d be much better off staying the night.

They’d been right. The tide had been coming in quickly and she’d slipped. Now, as she climbed aboard her own boat, she was caked in mud. Giving a quick look around to make sure no one could see her, Lacey slipped off her shorts and T-shirt. She climbed back down the ladder to the narrow dive platform a couple of feet above the water line and pulled the swim shower from its socket.

Misery was like mud, she thought as she turned on the water. It was greedy and jealous, grabbing hold and sucking you down. Misery stank like mud. It got into your eyes, making them sting and smart, and into your throat, drawing it closer and tighter so that you wondered how you’d ever breathe again.

The big difference being, of course, that you couldn’t strip down to your underwear and wash away misery under the shower at the back of a boat.

She held the nozzle high with her eyes closed, letting the water wash over her, feeling the mud stream down her body and back into the creek. She moved her head this way and that, knowing she’d need to shampoo it when she went below, but at least this would get the worst of the mud off, and – for the love of God, what had just crawled across her hand?

Lacey dropped the shower and opened her eyes. Hanging above her head was a roughly tied bag of linen, about the size of a grapefruit.

Linen?

It was hard to tell, but the fabric looked similar to the one the river corpse had been wrapped in. And that wasn’t a grapefruit in there – that was something alive.

The makeshift bag billowed out and then in again, bumps forming at the top, where it had been tied loosely, and at the bottom, where most of its contents were gathered. The constant movement of whatever was inside was working the ties loose. Just as Lacey realized she was directly underneath it, the bag broke open.

The crabs tumbled out, many of them striking her wet body, hitting her feet as they landed on the platform, before disappearing into the water.

29

The Swimmer

SHE WAS BACK
. Safe. Her strong, shining body washed clean, her footprints still visible on the back of the boat. Others were coming, the light-flashing, rough-shouting, electric-screaming ones, so keep low, keep still, keep to the shadows.

It had been close, just now. Lacey had been distracted by a noise on the old dredger, spinning round in alarm, her feet sliding beneath her, falling flat. It was a miracle that she hadn’t hit her head in the fall, that she hadn’t drowned in the mud, never mind the tide, coming in fast and angry like an avenging army.

Beautiful, bright-haired Lacey could have drowned in the creek tonight. Her body could have been picked up and washed out into the river, and what a waste that would have been. Because there were other plans for Lacey. Other plans entirely.

Something was tickling the swimmer’s arm. It was a small crab, its funny little fists clenched up tight like those of a boxer.

‘Good job,’ whispered the swimmer. ‘Now, go play.’

SUNDAY, 23 MARCH

(thirteen weeks earlier)

30

Samira

‘
I’M GOING TO
get a job in a carpet shop,’ says Samira, by way of an experiment, to see if she will be hushed again. No reply. They must be far enough away now. ‘That’s my plan,’ she goes on, encouraged by the silence at the stern of the boat. ‘Carpets are what I know. It was my job at home. Making carpets with my mother. Since I was five or six years old.’

The driver of the boat doesn’t reply, but the engine revs and they pick up speed. To Samira it feels encouraging, not that she ever needs encouragement to talk, but she sees in the gathering speed, the growing bubble of water at the bow, the trail of white at the stern, a means of getting to her new life faster.

The river surges over the bow and she feels a pang of alarm. She isn’t used to boats. There are no oceans in her country and her home was nowhere near a lake. Not counting the night, several months ago now, when she arrived, she’s never been in a boat before.

She looks back, but the house she crept out of minutes earlier can no longer be seen. The keys that were thrown to her lie gleaming in the bottom of the boat, close to the driver’s feet.

‘When I got here, I thought they wouldn’t like me. I have this thing with my spine, you see. It’s round when it should be straight and they kept asking if I was born with it. If it was a problem in my
family. And I told them it was, but we aren’t born with it, it comes from leaning over the looms all day. None of the men have it. Just the women. The men have better lungs than we do, too, because they’re not breathing in carpet dust all day long. I told them that and then they were worried about my lungs. They did all sorts of tests. That’s why I had to stay there so long, I guess. They had to do the tests.’

She’s talking too much. She always does when she’s excited. Or when she’s nervous. Or bored. All the time, really. ‘Samira, stop talking for just a few minutes,’ her mother would beg. ‘My ears are hurting.’

‘Where are we going?’ she asks, suddenly conscious that they’ve moved much closer to the river’s edge, and that the wall beside them seems immeasurably high and dark.

‘Not far now,’ says the driver, steering them directly into the wall.

Samira clamps one hand over her eyes. With the other she holds the boat tightly, bracing herself for the shock of a collision that doesn’t come.