A Dark and Twisted Tide (21 page)

The woman’s pregnancy wouldn’t help. The chances of an illegal immigrant seeking medical attention early in her pregnancy were slim to non-existent. And, failed search aside, vulnerable young women were still being smuggled up the Thames, probably before being sold into modern-day slavery. Lacey had met such women in the past, girls who were a very long way from home, who quickly
became dependent upon alcohol or drugs, living from one fix to the next, willing to do anything to stave off the beatings, to bring on oblivion. She’d joined the police force to help such women. And yet, on the brink of a transfer into one of the specialist units set up to deal with victims of rape and abuse, she’d left CID, going back into uniform, knowing that all her colleagues, however sympathetic they might be, thought she’d wimped out.

Shit, she
had
wimped out.

She got up, climbed down the steps at the back of her boat and clambered into the canoe. The swans were still hanging around and as she pushed away they followed her, like some sort of queenly escort, down the water. At the end of the Theatre Arm her little flotilla turned left into the creek. Lacey paddled past Skillions, lifting her hand to Madge and Marlene on deck. Madge raised her phone and appeared to be taking a photograph of Lacey and the swans.

She’d wimped out. Trouble was, turning her back on the difficult stuff hadn’t helped at all. It had just come looking for her again.

Women were being brought up the Thames and kept somewhere along its banks. Somewhere derelict, where no one would think to look. Somewhere without power, water or comfort of any kind. They’d be locked up, twenty-four hours a day, hot, starving and terrified. And this misery was probably within a mile of where she was right now.

The flow of water was pushing her close to the abandoned dredger on the right bank. She raised the paddle and reached out to fend it off. Touching the cold, slimy hull, she heard something move inside.

The water whisked her past before she had time to think. She dug the paddle in and turned on the spot.

The old ship had been abandoned years ago, presumably because the cost of moving it outweighed the inconvenience of having it moored alongside the gravel works. No one should be inside it.

Somewhere derelict, where no one would think to look? Somewhere without power, water or comfort of any kind?

She made for the bank and caught hold of a mooring ring to
steady herself in the tidal flow. Tucked away between the dredger’s hull and the wall was a small boat, not much bigger than her canoe, but with an engine.

Lacey moved closer. The boat seemed to have been used recently. No rainwater in the bottom. No rust on the metal fittings. The engine looked clean, there were even traces of oil. She looked up and saw a boarding ladder that had been hung over the side of the dredger to allow access to the deck.

Someone was on board.

For several seconds, Lacey sat thinking. Did she call it in and risk being labelled an attention-seeking drama queen, or check it out herself first? Either way was risky. Finding her phone, she tapped out a message to Ray:

Checking the old dredger at Enfield gravel yard. Call out the cavalry if I don’t check in again in fifteen.

She sent it and waited. Not for long.

Fifteen and counting. Be bloody careful.

Ray had her back. She tied her canoe alongside the motor boat and climbed up to the empty deck.

Around 150 feet long, she assessed quickly, and 30 feet wide. She was at the stern. What was left of the crane was forward of the centre deck; the wheel house was at the far end, just behind the bow. Below her feet would be the hold, a vast storage space. If a large number of people were being held together, the hold would be the most convenient, if most uncomfortable place to keep them. To access it, she’d have to find a way below.

She crept forward slowly, her sneakered feet making no sound on the steel deck, an odd feeling of unreality creeping over her. All around her, the evening was so normal. Deepening blue sky, traces of gold light, birds, voices, traffic, and yet below her feet an unknown environment.

Even up top, there were too many hiding places: several storage crates, behind the crane, inside the wheelhouse. The boat rocked
against the enormous tyres that rimmed its hull and something moved below. Twelve minutes before the cavalry set off.

No one hiding behind the crates, nor behind the crane, but discovering nothing unsettled her more. If she had to face someone, better to do so up here, where she had room to move, where escape was relatively simple. Once she went below, it would be another matter entirely.

The wheelhouse, too, was empty. The iron steps that led below were to the port side of the cabin. This was where it got tricky. She hadn’t even brought a torch. All she had was the minuscule light on her mobile phone.

Attention-seeking drama queen or reckless, maverick idiot? No-win situation.

Lacey crept down the steps. The door at the bottom opened silently and through it she could see the cabin that served as galley and relaxation room for the crew. Plastic, padded seats around a Formica table. A blackened range cooker. Pans still hanging from hooks on the walls. Coke and beer cans on the floor. The cabin smelled of creek mud, of rotting vegetation, of bilges.

Most of the interior of the ship, including the hold, lay behind her, towards the stern, but ahead of her, beneath the bow, was a door and she had no choice but to check that first.

Nervously, not liking to move away from her exit, Lacey stepped past rotting charts and log books piled high on a table, past a mould-stained pin-up of a topless model with 1980s hair, past a pack of playing cards scattered over the floor. The door was oval-shaped, small and narrow. Lacey pushed at the handle and it opened noisily. She jumped, spinning on the spot, waiting for an answering sound: a cry for help, investigating footsteps. Her heart beat out the seconds as she waited. Ten minutes before Ray set off.

The stench coming from behind the open door, the unmistakable mixture of harsh chemicals and organic material, told her she’d found the heads. She shone the thin light around to make sure. Two cubicles. No one hiding. Letting the door close softly, she moved back through the galley, past the steps and into the narrow, dark corridor that took her, inevitably, towards the hold.

The ceiling was lower here. There was a ventilation shaft only
inches above her head. Cabins on either side, four in total. She walked forward, glancing to the right, to the left, seeing nothing. Eight minutes before Ray set off. A lot could happen in eight minutes.

In the last cabin, something gleamed in the thin torch-beam. Torn, clear plastic. The wrapper from a pack of litre-sized bottles of water. Skin prickling with anticipation, she stepped into the cabin. Something about the air in here, whilst not fresh exactly, was different from that of the rest of the ship. A sleeping bag lay on the narrow berth. And there was a gym bag in the corner of the room, a huge torch by the bed.

And something she recognized on the folded sweatshirt that was serving as a pillow. A pale-blue scrunchie. Hers. One of several she used to tie her hair back into a ponytail. Definitely hers – she remembered the way the seam had started to fray. Whoever was camping out here had been on her boat. Had helped himself to a very personal souvenir.

Two thoughts, fighting for attention. The first – get out now. The second – too late.

She spun round to see the dark silhouette of a man in the cabin doorway. A very large man.

‘I’m a police officer.’ The most aggressive, confident, assertive thing she could think of.

‘No shit,’ replied Joesbury.

48

Dana

THE ROOM INTO
which Dana and Anderson had been shown wasn’t quite a laboratory, nor yet an artist’s studio, but somewhere in between the two. Several computer monitors were on sleep mode and each displayed wallpaper that depicted the human head, slowly revolving. Images on the walls were likewise of the human head, some modern, some ancient.

There were skulls in display cabinets, skulls on the worktop that ran two lengths of the room. There had even been a human skull on the coffee table in the reception area.

Apart from Dana and Anderson, there were three other people in the room. The woman who’d met them at reception, who was also the director of the facility, and two men working at desktop computers.

‘Before we go any further, I would like to give you some idea of the limitations of the technique,’ the director began. ‘All too often people are disappointed because I can’t say, this is it, this is what she looked like.’

‘I understand,’ said Dana, although she wasn’t sure she did. She’d committed a significant part of the budget to the facial recon struction of the body Lacey had found in the river. If it took them no further forward . . .

The other woman looked as though she rather doubted it, too. ‘What does work invariably well is when we have a suspected identity. If we have a photograph of someone who could have been the victim, the process of matching it to skeletal remains is relatively straightforward and conclusive. But that’s not the case here.’

‘It’s not,’ said Anderson. ‘We have absolutely no idea who she was.’

‘OK, so what we did with your subject,’ continued the director, ‘was first of all to carry out a full examination of the skeleton. We needed to be sure in our own minds that the details we’d been given in terms of sex, age and race were reasonably accurate.’

‘And were you?’ asked Anderson.

‘As far as age and sex are concerned, yes. Definitely a young female. Race is always a bit tricky, but taking the bone structure and the remaining hair into account, somewhere in the Middle East or South Asia seems the most likely.’

She reached down and lifted a thermally controlled box from under the worktop. ‘This is your skull. We’ll be returning it to you now, there isn’t any more it can tell us.’

Anderson took it and put it down softly by his side.

‘The first thing we do when attempting a reconstruction is to reattach the mandible to the skull,’ the director went on. ‘Then we clean it, and repair any visible damage with wax. We photograph each stage. Here you are.’

She tapped some buttons on a keyboard. A second later, Dana was looking at the skull on the computer screen, cleaner and neater than she’d seen it previously.

‘At this point we make a cast that subsequently forms the basis of the reconstruction.’ The director flicked to a new screen that showed a clay-like substance being smoothed over the skull. ‘We build it up using data based on average tissue thickness for any given age, gender and racial group. In this case, we were particularly lucky that there was already some soft tissue remaining. This gave us much more to work with than we would otherwise have had. This next photograph shows you the pegs in place.’

The image on the screen was now displaying several dozen small, thin tubes, a little like matchsticks, jutting out from the skull at
intervals. Several where the lips would be, another at the nub of the chin, one on the tip of the nose, a line along the cheekbone.

‘So then you fill it in?’ asked Dana. ‘You just smooth clay along the skull until the pegs can’t be seen any more?’

‘Good God, no.’ The director looked shocked. ‘If we did that, the final bill would be a lot less, I promise you. We build the face up muscle by muscle. The thickness and length we make them depends upon the average data we have, the actual tissue sample we took and the small clues on the bones that tell us where muscle tissue was attached. That way, the face builds up slowly, but hopefully accurately. We insert eyes, attach ears and work on any indicated scars or abnormalities. The last thing we do is choose skin colour and attach hair. Are you ready to meet the lady you’ve been trying to help?’

‘We are indeed,’ said Dana, conscious of a nervous tickle in her stomach.

The director took a large blue box from the worktop and carried it to the podium in the centre of the room. She placed it on top and unfastened the lid. The box’s sides came away separately and fell down to reveal the modelled head within. The sculpture was of the head and shoulders of a young woman with an emerald-green scarf around her black hair.

Wow, thought Dana.

‘She was gorgeous,’ said Anderson.

‘Yes, I think she probably was,’ said the director.

The sculpture’s face was oval, widening at the jawline and with a rounded, pronounced chin. Her nose was longer and wider at the tip than would normally be compatible with perfect beauty, but it was balanced by full lips and strong eyebrows. Her eyes were dark, kohl-rimmed with thick lashes.

‘Now you understand that a lot of subjective decisions led us here,’ said the director. ‘Based on the hair she could have been Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, or, coming further west, from Turkey, Morocco, even Greece, but something was whispering Persian to me.’

‘Modern-day Iran,’ said Dana.

‘Yes, or possibly Iraq, or one of the Stans. For one thing, the lower
part of the face is quite pronounced – wider than you might see in India or Pakistan – and whilst the nose is notoriously difficult to reconstruct, there were indications that on this lady it was longer and wider towards the bottom than is average.’

‘Beautiful eyes,’ said Dana. ‘Not large, compared to some of her other features, but lovely all the same.’

‘Yes, almond shaped. You see it a lot in people from the East. And the eyes we can be reasonably confident about, because their shape is largely determined by the shape and slope of the socket. I’ve given her brown eyes, of course, because that’s far and away the most common colour in that part of the world.’

‘I feel as though we should give her a name,’ said Dana.

‘Yes, she rather had that effect on us too,’ said the director. ‘We’ve been calling her Sahar. It’s the Persian name for dawn, because that’s when you found her.’

49

Lacey