A Dark and Twisted Tide (5 page)

‘
THOSE BUGGERS AT
Wapping been fiddling around with my corpses again?’ The pathologist strode into the examination room with a half-eaten fried-egg bap in one hand and a pair of scarlet spectacles in the other. He was a tall, barrel-chested man in his late forties, with thick grey hair and bright blue eyes.

‘If it floats, we fiddle,’ said Lacey. ‘Nice to see you again, Dr Kaytes. New glasses?’

Dana watched Mike Kaytes peer down at Lacey before tucking the glasses into the pocket of his scrubs. ‘I suppose I should be grateful you’ve brought me a complete one for a change.’

For a moment, Dana was lost. Then she realized Kaytes must remember Lacey from the case last summer, when he’d been asked to examine a series of body parts left lying around London. Well, of course he remembered her. Was there a man alive who forgot Lacey once she’d appeared on his radar?

Most women couldn’t see it, the appeal that shimmered below the surface of Lacey Flint. They saw a woman who wasn’t very tall, who hid her athletic shape beneath loose-fitting, plain clothes, who rarely wore make-up on her perfectly formed but largely unremarkable face, and who kept her long, fair hair tied back or
plaited. Lacey Flint, for some reason that Dana still hadn’t figured out, didn’t want to be noticed. Most of the time, with her own sex, it worked.

‘This one isn’t complete,’ said Lacey, indicating the black-bagged form on the examination table. ‘Most of the soft tissue is gone.’

Kaytes bit into his bap and Dana watched the egg yolk ooze perilously close to the point of dripping on the floor. Well, the drain had sluiced away worse things.

‘Well, far be it from me to argue with the experts,’ he grunted. ‘Can you get that bag off, girls?’

The two lab technicians, neither of whom looked under forty, were already waiting by the bagged corpse in the centre of the room. Together, they unzipped the bag and slid it out from beneath the corpse. One switched on the powerful overhead light. The other activated the drain that would make a low, hungry, sucking sound throughout the examination.

The smell of the Thames seeped into the room. Stripped completely of the linen wrappings that Dana had only seen so far in photographs, the corpse seemed small. The head and upper torso were almost completely skeletonized; more flesh clung to the lower extremities.

‘I hear you found it?’ Kaytes was still talking directly to Lacey. ‘Work for the river police now, do you?’

‘If David Cook hears you calling his unit the river police you’ll be the one needing the post-mortem.’ Dana took a step forward, to bring herself more obviously into his sight line. ‘I’m DI Tulloch, senior investigating officer. This is Detective Sergeant Anderson and Detective Constable Stenning.’

She didn’t expect him to apologize. They had all worked with Kaytes many times before.

‘Yeah, yeah. Can you hold this while I get my mask on?’ He was actually holding out the semi-masticated egg sandwich towards her.

‘I’m vegetarian,’ she said.

He looked offended. ‘It’s egg. Oh, for God’s sake, you take it, Jac.’

The technician held up gloved hands. ‘I’m covered in gunk, Boss.’

A pained expression on his face, as though resigned to the incompetence of those around him, Kaytes shoved one end of the
sandwich into his mouth and turned to a cupboard. He pulled a disposable mask from a box inside.

‘How are you planning to eat with a mask on?’ asked Dana. Kaytes turned back, chewing vigorously. The sandwich had disappeared. He pulled on his mask and stepped closer to the corpse. ‘I suppose you’d better tell me what you buggers did in that lean-to you call an examination facility.’

‘Photographed and measured the corpse,’ said Lacey. ‘Attempted to take fingerprints but were prevented by the absence of skin on the hands. Removed the burial-sheet-style wrappings, bagged them and sent them away. Set loose a bit of wildlife that had hitched a ride, keeping a couple back for examination. And then we ran out of sensible things to do so we fiddled a bit.’

‘Lacey,’ warned Dana.

The pathologist was walking from one end of the body to the other. ‘So what do you want to know?’

‘Name of the victim, cause and manner of death, time spent in the water and a good solid theory about how he or she ended up in the Thames wrapped up like a birthday present.’ Dana smiled.

Kaytes continued his slow and deliberate prowl around the corpse. ‘Probably female,’ he said, ‘judging by the height, the size of the exposed bones, the shape of the head and the remaining long hair we can see. No genitalia, but that’s often the first thing to go in the water. The soft tissue is still largely present around the abdomen, but we can run X-rays and examine the pelvis later to be sure. Almost certainly adult, given the size, but I can’t rule out a well-developed adolescent.’

He neared the head, bent and pushed one gloved finger into the mouth. Unasked, one of the technicians handed him a clamp and then a small torch. ‘Now I can,’ he said, a few seconds later. ‘Wisdom teeth are all through, indicating a probable age of at least eighteen. Once we get the flesh off we can have a look at the long bones. If they’re nearing the end of their period of growth, that would suggest someone around twenty-five. The extent of pitting and scarring on the sternal areas can be even more accurate. I’ll be surprised if this is someone even approaching middle age, though. The bones are in pretty good nick.’

‘What about race?’ asked Dana.

‘Less easy,’ admitted Kaytes. ‘Even with more time. There are basically only three racial types that are distinctive in the skeleton – Caucasian, Mongoloid and Negroid – so the best I could do is put it into one of the three. And that’s assuming we’ve got a pure blood – sorry to sound a bit Harry Potter. The difficulty comes with mixed-race subjects.’

‘Any initial thoughts?’ asked Dana.

‘The high, rounded skull, triangular eye sockets and protruding nose suggest Caucasian,’ said Kaytes. ‘On the other hand, the disproportionately short arms and legs compared to the trunk might indicate some Mongoloid ancestry. Now this is interesting.’

He was looking at the lower arm bone. ‘This is a pretty well-developed bone for a young woman. She was quite strong. Possibly evidence of manual labour at some point.’

‘Or gym membership,’ suggested Lacey.

‘Now that’s where you’re wrong, River Police. Because I’ve had a good look at her teeth and seen evidence of a couple of extractions. That’s pretty basic dental care. No fillings that I could see. And some crookedness that corrective dentistry could have sorted out. I don’t think our subject was affluent. And I don’t think she’s had a couple of decades’ access to what little NHS dental treatment is still available in this country. Developing world would be my guess. An immigrant.’

‘But a Caucasian immigrant?’ said Dana, thinking it wouldn’t narrow things down much. A huge chunk of the world’s population was Caucasian.

Kaytes inclined his head. ‘The X-rays will tell us whether she had a slight forward curve to her femur, again indicating Caucasian. The hair is pretty distinctive. May I?’ He stepped up to Dana and, before she had time to think about what he had in mind, reached out to the side of her head. She felt a sharp pricking sensation and then Kaytes was holding up one of her hairs to the light.

‘Very good example of Asian hair,’ he said, ‘although I think you’re mixed race, is that right? But can you see how straight it is? Pure black in colour. Quite fine though, that will be the European influence. Now if River Police . . .’ He looked expectantly at Lacey.

‘I’ll do it.’ Lacey reached to her shoulder blades where her hair hung in a ponytail. She found a loose hair and handed it over.

‘Come to the light.’

They all followed Kaytes to a counter, where he placed the two hairs on a sheet of white paper and angled a powerful lamp on to them. Then he picked up a magnifying glass.

‘Max, would you mind?’ He indicated that the second lab technician should do something with the corpse. She took up tweezers and extracted a long hair from the back of the dead woman’s head, before laying it down on the paper in between Lacey’s and Dana’s.

‘Right, what does anyone see?’ asked Kaytes.

‘Lacey’s is the finest,’ said Anderson, ‘followed by the boss’s. Lacey’s also seems to have a bit of curl in it.’

‘Classic Anglo-Saxon dark blonde,’ agreed Kaytes. ‘Dana’s, on the other hand, is as straight and black as you’d expect from a woman with some Asian ancestry. Our friend here, though, has hair that’s much coarser, longer and thicker than either. I’m thinking Middle East, Indian subcontinent, possibly some parts of Eastern Europe. Probably not the Orient. Still looking like an immigrant. Right, cause of death.’

Following Kaytes’s lead, they all moved back to the examination table and gathered around it.

‘The way she was so carefully wrapped up suggests she was dead when she went into the water,’ said Lacey. ‘Struggling of any sort would have dislodged the shroud.’

‘Probably.’ Kaytes nodded. ‘Although she could have been drugged or unconscious.’

‘There didn’t appear to be any lung tissue left,’ said Lacey. ‘Which would make it difficult to say whether or not she drowned, wouldn’t it?’

‘Difficult to say, even with two perfectly intact lungs.’ Kaytes turned to Dana. ‘I presume you’re funding full toxicology screening?’

‘Do toxins survive any amount of time in the water?’ asked Lacey.

Kaytes pulled an odd face, as though he were thinking about it. Or maybe he just had some egg stuck in his teeth. ‘The rate of
decomposition tends to slow in water. If she was poisoned, drugged or drank herself to death, we should be able to find out.’

‘And if she didn’t?’ asked Dana.

Kaytes shrugged, as though it were really of no concern to him. ‘Well, in that case,’ he said, ‘you’re buggered.’

10

Lacey

FORTY MINUTES LATER
, they were back at Wapping. ‘So, we have a young woman, likely to be in her twenties, more accurate age-estimate pending a boiling up of the bones, to quote our friend back at Horseferry Road.’ Tulloch looked up from her laptop at the two men across the table and then at Lacey in the small kitchen area on the ground floor. ‘Is it me or does Kaytes get worse every time we see him?’

‘He does it for effect,’ said Anderson. ‘The lads back at Lewisham have a sweepstake running on who’s going to be the first to land him one.’

‘Yeah, well they might want to increase the odds on me.’ Tulloch rubbed the back of her head. ‘Right. Lacey has kindly agreed to run a Missing Persons Search for us, concentrating on young women who’ve been reported missing on or near the river in the past two years.’

‘What can I get you, Ma’am?’ said Lacey. ‘Coffee?’

‘Do you have decaffeinated?’

Lacey picked up the packet of ground coffee and looked at the sell-by date. ‘If caffeine disappears with the passage of time, then yes. I think this came out of a crate that fell off a barge back in the nineties. The tea’s a bit fresher. Or orange juice.’

‘Freshly squeezed?’

As Lacey shook the small bottle of orange-coloured liquid the sediment spread from the thick glass base upwards. ‘I’m not sure it was ever inside an orange. Water?’

‘Filtered in any way or straight from the river?’

‘Highland Spring,’ said Lacey. ‘We have three crates of it in the basement. We don’t ask where it came from.’

Tulloch gave a heavy sigh. ‘Water will do fine, thank you. Right, let’s focus for a few minutes, before we leave Lacey to enjoy her new life as a beachcomber. We may never have a cause of death because of the almost complete disintegration of the soft tissues.’

‘Has anyone thought of an honour killing?’ asked Lacey, as she brought the drinks to the table.

Anderson looked up from his notes. ‘Christ, I bloody well hope not.’

No one seemed inclined to disagree. Honour killings were notoriously difficult to solve, usually because entire families, often whole communities, joined the conspiracy of silence.

‘Can’t rule anything out for now,’ Tulloch said. ‘Right, I want to hear what Lacey isn’t telling us about what happened this morning.’

Lacey stopped in the process of passing Stenning a mug. ‘Sorry?’

Tulloch wasn’t having it. ‘I hate to break it to you, Lacey, but you’re not half as good a liar as you think you are.’

‘I’m not?’ When had that happened? She’d been an excellent liar once.

‘No, you have this way of stiffening up, your chin starts to crinkle, and your eyes become just that little bit fixed,’ said Tulloch.

‘And you drum your fingertips against the nearest hard surface,’ Stenning added. ‘Table top, worktop, even your own thighs.’

‘And your nostrils twitch,’ said Anderson.

Lacey shook her head. ‘You three are hilarious.’

‘We’re detectives, they send us on courses.’ Stenning picked up his mug. ‘You’d probably have done one yourself if you hadn’t bailed on us and joined traffic. Christ, was this made with actual coffee or gravy granules?’

‘I’ll just check.’ Lacey turned back to the kitchen area so that they could no longer see her face.

‘Never thought I’d see Lacey Flint rejoining the wooden tops,’ said Anderson.

‘Putting aside Lacey’s powers of deception for a moment,’ said Tulloch, ‘what you three don’t know yet, because I had the news from Chief Inspector Cook directly, is that the two pieces of nylon cord that we’re assuming tied the corpse to weights on the river bottom didn’t fray loose. They were cut, very recently, with a sharp implement.’

A few seconds, while they all thought about it. The corpse hadn’t worked its way to the river surface accidentally. Someone had set it free.

‘Blimey,’ said Anderson.

‘So come on, Lacey, out with it.’

Was there any point holding out? Once Tulloch got the bit between her teeth it was only a matter of time. ‘What if I said it had absolutely no bearing on the case?’ she tried.

‘We don’t have a case yet, we have a body. And we still want to know.’

Better just get it over with. ‘I was swimming.’

‘You were what?’

‘Swimming. You know, raise one arm, then the next . . .’