A Dark and Twisted Tide (17 page)

‘It’s possible, isn’t it?’

She made it to the lift lobby. Silence fell. ‘Perfectly possible. But still quite a stretch at this stage.’

‘I know that. But do you remember that DI Joesbury and I were involved in an arrest last October? A young woman called Nadia Safi, who was entering the country illegally? She was picked up in the company of three men with a history of people-trafficking. They’re all in the Scrubs right now.’

Suddenly Dana was more interested. ‘And the woman?’

‘This is where it gets interesting. I’ve just left the hostel where she lived for a few weeks, but as nothing really traumatic had happened to her – well, not that she was admitting to – she was sent to a detention centre in Kent. I just called them. They were cagey about giving me details, but once I started talking about warrants, they did admit that someone had sponsored her.’

‘To do what? Run the London Marathon?’

‘Illegal immigrants can be released into the care of others, for a limited time, as long as they prove they have the means to look after them and agree to put them on a plane home at the end of the given period. This bloke turned up, claiming to be a relative of Nadia’s and agreeing to look after her for a couple of weeks and then take her to the airport. He did. He had photographs of the two of them together, including at the airport, and a receipt for her plane ticket back to Iran, which is where he claimed she came from. Trouble is, she never boarded the plane.’

‘It was a set-up?’

‘Probably. But he’s claiming ignorance. Says he has no idea where his wife’s second cousin is, and the Border Agency have no means of proving otherwise. It seems to me someone went to a lot of trouble to keep her in the country. So why is she worth so much and to whom?’

‘You think she was destined for the same place as the girl you pursued on Friday night?’ said Dana.

‘Two gangs smuggling young women up the Thames,’ said Lacey. ‘How likely does that seem?’

‘Not very.’

‘So I’m thinking we need to find this Nadia.’

‘Probably easier said than done if she’s somewhere in London’s underbelly, but I’ll get people looking into it tomorrow. Thank you, Lacey, that is actually very helpful.’

‘There’s something else.’

Dana smiled to herself. ‘I’m all ears.’

‘The same day I found the body, last Thursday, I was talking to Sergeant Wilson – you know?’

‘Uncle Fred, I know.’

‘And he mentioned finding a young woman’s body about a year ago.’

‘Lots of women end up in the Thames, Lacey.’

‘I know, but what if that’s the problem? What if, because there are so many, we don’t see the connections when they’re there?’

‘The connection being . . .?’

‘Young, female, illegal immigrants who are murdered. Dana, what if there are more of them?’

37

Lacey

WHAT IF THERE
are more of them?

In the last five years, 415 bodies had been pulled from the tidal Thames and taken to the shallow bath not far from where Lacey was sitting. Typing ‘unidentified’ into the search facility soon reduced the 415 cases down to just thirty-five. Thirty-five people who’d been pulled from the river in the last five years remained unidentified. She only needed the women. She ran another search and the thirty-five reduced to fourteen.

But God, it was hard to concentrate. The heatwave was showing no sign of abating and Wapping police station was an old building, in which air-conditioning meant opening a window or turning on a fan. She stood up, wafted the open neck of her shirt, retied her ponytail and sat down again.

According to the post-mortem reports, four of the women had been over fifty, taking the group down to ten. Two of the ten were of African or Caribbean origin, one was Oriental.

Seven left, thought Lacey. What else? She got up, left the room and found herself heading for the jetty that took her down to the water. One of the unit’s fast-response boats had just left its mooring and was skimming over the water like a dragonfly. Lacey watched as the RIB followed the course of the river. The RIBs had
a top speed of 45 knots. It wouldn’t take long for it to reach the lowest curve of the river where Deptford Creek emerged and a body, long since hidden, had finally found the surface again.

And that was the next search: length of time in the river. Her corpse had been in the water for several months, according to the pathologist.

Back inside, she ran another search, this time ruling out bodies that had been found quickly after being immersed. Three of them had been pulled out of the water after two weeks or less. That left four.

Four unknown young women who’d spent some months in the water before floating up to be found.

Found where?

Going back the furthest in time, to four and a quarter years earlier, Jane Doe 645/01 had been spotted by anglers and pulled out of the water near Putney. That felt too far west. Jane Doe 322/92 had been found two years earlier beneath Pimlico Bridge and was probably the body Sergeant Wilson had referred to. Was Pimlico still too far west? Possibly.

The third on the list had been pulled out at Limehouse ten months ago, making her a possibility. The fourth had been found two months ago near the entrance to the South Dock Marina.

So she was left with two. Lacey opened the file reports on each to see if there was anything else she could learn. The Limehouse lady had been in the water several months. Soft tissue was almost completely gone but her skeleton had undergone minimal damage. The woman from the marina, similarly, had very little soft tissue but a skeleton that was largely intact. She wrote their case numbers on a Post-it note.

Together with the one she’d found, that gave her three young, unidentified Caucasian women who’d been in the water for some months but whose skeletons displayed little damage. Neither of the two she’d just found had been recovered with clothing of any kind, but that was to be expected. Clothes disappeared very quickly in moving water.

A voice behind her made her jump. ‘Haven’t you finished for the night?’ Sergeant Buckle was standing by her desk.

‘Yeah, I’m just going.’ As Lacey logged out of the programme, Buckle wandered over to a filing cabinet in the corner.

‘Sarge,’ she said, ‘where do we keep the pictures of dead bodies?’

Buckle took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes before replacing them. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘The files on the bodies we pull out of the river. I know we have basic details on the system but I was wondering about photographs, the actual reports made out at the time.’

‘Didn’t have you down as the ghoulish type, Lacey.’

‘What if that woman we found last week wasn’t the only one?’

Buckle’s eyebrows appeared over the top rim of his glasses. He folded his arms and waited.

‘I’ve been searching through the system,’ she admitted. ‘I was looking for similar cases and it’s just possible I’ve found two.’

‘How long ago?’

‘Not long at all. Ten months and two months.’

‘Young women, unidentified?’

‘Caucasian, been in the water long enough for soft tissue to have gone, but skeletons largely intact.’

Buckle stood up. ‘Come on,’ he told her.

Lacey followed Buckle out of the room and into another, where three sergeants had their desks. Buckle took keys from his own desk and unlocked a filing cabinet against one wall. Lacey handed over the Post-it note with the case numbers and waited. There were footsteps outside the door and then both Fred Wilson and Finn Turner came in.

‘Nobody got homes to go to?’ asked Wilson.

‘Nancy Drew here has a hunch she wants to follow up.’ Buckle held out a file and carried on looking, leaving her to explain.

‘Probably just being daft,’ she said. ‘But I was thinking about what you said the other day, about how you found a young woman in the river who was never identified.’

‘I imagine there are a whole load of blokes found in the river who are never identified,’ said Turner. ‘Or are they not important?’

‘Now, now, children. Here we go.’ Buckle carried two files across to the nearest free desk and put them down. He opened one, Lacey the other.

‘Oh, nice.’ Turner caught a glimpse of the photograph clipped to the inside cover of Lacey’s file.

‘Looks a bit like you first thing in the morning,’ said Wilson.

‘Sarge, I told you, that was our secret.’

‘My team found this one.’ Buckle was flicking through the Limehouse lady’s file. ‘I’ve got no real recollection, but I have processed a few in my time here. Some superficial damage, it says, dents in the skull, a couple of fingers missing.’

‘How did you find her?’ asked Lacey. ‘Where was she, exactly?’

‘Between the river wall and the piling of an old pier.’ Buckle stared at the report and the photograph for a few seconds longer. ‘She’d got trapped there as the tide went out.’

Lacey was looking through the second file. The body had been found floating around in rubbish that collected near a moored fuel station, spotted by a yachtsman who’d gone out to fuel up early in the morning. It was more badly damaged than the one in Limehouse. One hand was missing, and several ribs broken.

‘Long dark hair.’ Turner had been reading over Lacey’s shoulder.

Lacey was looking at the photograph. ‘What’s that?’ She let a finger hover above the woman’s left ankle.

‘Hard to say,’ said Buckle. ‘Could be a broken bone, bit of rubbish.’

‘That’s a piece of fabric,’ said Lacey. ‘Look at the frayed edge. In fact, I’d go as far as to say it’s linen.’

38

Dana

THE GARDEN WAS
at its best on summer evenings, after the heat of the day had woken the scents of the flowers. Being in the garden at the end of the day had become something of a habit for Dana. Even after the worst of days, she found it soothing. There was an exception to every rule, she supposed.

‘Bloody Lacey Flint.’ She ran a hand over her eyes.

‘Tell me about it,’ replied David Cook. ‘None of the men can concentrate when she’s in the room. She has daft pillocks like Finn Turner jumping into the Thames just to impress her and now she’s got a bee in her bonnet about more bodies. And that’s before we get on to her little habit of taking morning dips in the ruddy river.’

‘You’re not supposed to know about that.’ Dana couldn’t help a smile.

‘We all bloody know about it.’ Cook seemed incapable of keeping his voice down. ‘Guys on early patrol have their ruddy binoculars permanently focused on the entrance to Deptford Creek. Christ, does she have any idea what people catch in that water?’

‘Have another beer, Dave.’

Cook reached out and helped himself from Dana’s cool box. The sky was finally starting to deepen in colour.

‘So, if I followed you correctly,’ said Dana, when Cook had
opened and poured his beer, ‘Lacey and the Scooby Gang found two more unidentified women who’ve been pulled out of the river in the past twelve months. Definitely young?’

‘Neither over thirty, according to the post-mortems.’

‘Both Caucasian, had little soft tissue, suggesting they’d been in the river for some months, but relatively intact skeletons, which would normally suggest they hadn’t,’ continued Dana.

‘What we would expect to see in a corpse that had been trapped somewhere.’

‘Or weighted down,’ suggested Dana. Cook inclined his head.

‘Both in a similar part of the river to the one Lacey found?’

Cook drank deeply. ‘Limehouse and South Dock Marina. The Scoobies found two others, apparently, but they ruled them out because they were up west. Most significantly, the one at South Dock had very long dark hair and a piece of white fabric wrapped around one ankle.’

‘How soon can we see this piece of fabric?’

Cook had a narrow briefcase with him. He pulled out a small, square plastic bag and put it on the table.

‘Looks very similar to me.’ Dana picked up the bag and held it up to the fading light.

‘I signed it out earlier,’ said Cook. ‘We haven’t taken it out of the bag yet. It will need to go back to the lab for testing, but it does look exactly like the sheets and wrappings we found on the one last Thursday. There’s even a bit of hand stitching.’

‘Shit,’ said Dana.

‘My thoughts exactly,’ agreed Cook, before ducking sharply. ‘Friggin’ hell! What was that?’

Dana smiled. ‘A bat. They nest in the trees just over the way. I quite like them.’

Cook was looking around in alarm. Several small, dark shapes had appeared, flitting around the trees and rooftops. ‘Each to their own. But it leaves us with a bit of a dilemma.’

‘There’s no dilemma, Dave. We have to search.’

Cook sighed and dug into his bag again. He brought out his laptop and logged on. After a few seconds of delay, he pulled up a map showing a section of the Thames.

‘Speaking purely hypothetically, if we start at Limehouse and finish just beyond Deptford Creek, we’re talking five miles of river, Dana. Not far off a quarter of a mile wide at that point.’

‘You’re just being grumpy because I’m going to blow your underwater search budget out of the water. Pun not intended.’

Cook got up and walked a few paces into Dana’s garden. ‘These tiles must take some upkeep to keep the moss off.’ He looked down at the smooth and shiny pale-grey stones that covered the patio and the steps down into the lower part of the garden.

‘There’s a chemical for everything these days,’ said Dana.

‘Lucky you don’t have kids,’ he said. ‘They’d break their necks clambering over those concrete boxes.’

He was coming back. ‘I can’t justify anything until we have the results back on the fabric comparison. If there’s no match, that’s probably the end of the matter.’

‘Fair enough.’

He sat back down beside her. ‘And Lacey thinks there’s a connection to our illegal-immigrant problem,’ he said after a second.

‘So I understand. Is it possible?’

‘Everything’s possible. Whether it makes sense is another matter.’

‘Bringing illegal immigrants up the Thames doesn’t make sense,’ said Dana. ‘Unless they’re heading for somewhere very close to the river. In which case, dumping the bodies when they’re done with them would be relatively easy.’