Strange Tide (24 page)

‘Other police units get financial and psychological support,' said Giles, placing a friendly hand on May's shoulder. ‘They have systems in place for coping when a senior team member drops out. Why don't you?'

‘Are you kidding? Nobody outside knows that Arthur's working on the case. They've been told he's on compassionate leave. And we still have nothing.'

‘Then maybe I can help,' said Giles. ‘Dan, perhaps you can assist? Come with me, you two.' He led the way back to the mortuary and started to pull open one of the body drawers. ‘Do you mind taking a shufti? Or is it a bit early in the day? He's not in terribly good condition.'

Giles and Dan eased out the tray. The drawer's runners squealed appallingly, as if the corpse did not wish to have its dark sleep disturbed. ‘What we have here is a short, stocky male of mixed race,' said Giles, ‘late thirties, heavy smoker. He appears to have died about three weeks ago, which accounts for his poor state, and as you can see he's missing his eyes and his left hand.'

‘You think it's the same—'

‘Oh yes, we have a perfect fit.' Giles pulled open a Mylar envelope and carefully lifted out the missing appendage, laying it next to the corpse's grey wrist-stump. ‘It wasn't the result of a medical procedure, but nor was it an industrial accident. I'm pretty certain a sharp knife was used to sever the tendons and cut through muscle and tissue, but the bone separation is quite clean. There are no chips or splinters in either section of the wrist. The saw-marks are short, indicating a short blade.'

‘So it was done deliberately but not by a surgeon?'

‘I suppose it would be consistent with torture or punishment. I can't think of a normal situation that would result in something like this.'

‘That stump – he didn't bleed to death?'

‘No, the severance looks as if it was sealed. It's likely that it occurred some time before his demise,' said Giles. ‘He quite clearly drowned. There's still evidence of mucus in his air passages, distension of the lungs, plenty of burst blood vessels. He tried to breathe. I'd hoped to find ventricular diatoms, bruises on the arms and the neck, but it's a bit late to find signs of a forced drowning.'

May turned to Banbury, who was digging around in his backpack. ‘Do you think he was killed at the bridge, Dan?'

The CSM found his notebook and stepped closer, examining the body with interest. ‘I think someone wedged him up in the rafters of the bridge and hoped he'd just stay there until he'd rotted apart or the seagulls had finished him off. The birds would have taken his eyes first. He was drowned and put up there immediately because his overalls were still wet. They shaped themselves to their drying position, which largely held him in place. Eventually he decomposed sufficiently to fall off his perch, but his boots got caught in some cabling.'

‘So someone hacked off his hand, then managed to stow him up there,' said May, puzzled. ‘The bridge rafters have to be ten or twelve feet above the top of the shoreline.'

‘I've done your work for you on that one,' said Giles. ‘A scaffold platform had been left there after the council carried out some rust-proofing. It was removed some time during the third week in October.'

‘The tattoo. Could you?' May pointed to the wrist. Giles carefully added the hand to it. Now the complete design could be seen, but it wasn't a lighthouse, as Bryant had suggested. It appeared to be a bulbous head with protrusions crushing a stack of bricks, but it still wasn't clear. ‘Could the hand have been severed earlier to hide the tattoo and delay identification?' asked May.

‘A bit of a melodramatic notion,' said Giles, who was used to such things from the PCU. ‘More likely he was punished for being a naughty boy, then sent for a swim.' He covered up the corpse.

‘Why was the hand so far away from the body?'

‘That might be to do with the tides,' said Giles. ‘It used to be said that a body thrown from one house in the Thames would be picked up and scavenged by another. There's a further possibility.'

‘What's that?' asked May.

‘Assuming the amputation and the drowning were carried out on different occasions, it might be that the hand was removed and chucked into the Thames at Tower Beach simply because it was expedient to throw it from a spot in that area. It was only because we were searching the Dalladay site that we found it.'

‘Maybe getting rid of the hand was a trial run for dumping Dalladay,' said May. ‘Which would mean that the two events are connected. Arthur would love that.'

The coroner had not been able to avoid noticing that there was something odd about Mr Bryant's reactions lately. They seemed delayed and unfocused. He would start suddenly, as if being reminded of his duties in the present. But as he continued to be spoken of as if he was still a fully functioning member of the unit, Giles decided to keep his counsel. At some point, May would be forced to acknowledge the truth; that his days of working with his old partner were finally over.

Arthur Bryant was getting better at evading his keepers.

He slipped out of the PCU by keeping to the edges of the stair treads and using the two Daves to create a distraction, which wasn't difficult as one of them was under the floorboards hammering on pipes like a tunnelling POW who'd made a wrong turn and the other was on the phone to his girlfriend while trying to light a cigarette with a blowlamp.

Bryant made his way through the rain to St Giles-without-Cripplegate in the Barbican. A church had stood on the site since 1090. The name referred to one of the gates through the old City wall, which had been built in Roman times to protect the settlement from attackers. The area of Cripplegate had once boasted residents of great importance, but the entire neighbourhood vanished in a single night when in 1897 an ostrich-feather warehouse caught alight.

St Giles was one of the few remaining medieval churches in the Square Mile and, unusually for London, was still used by a local community. Bryant had gone back on the promise he had made to himself and had arranged to meet Audrey Beardsley, a historian currently working with the British Geographical Society. They had met by accident several years earlier at a conference centre in Berlin. Bryant had gone to the toilet during a talk on the Würzburg Witch Trial of 1626 and had taken the wrong door back, only to find himself attending a Punjabi wedding. It was not the first time he had made such a mistake, and not the worst, which was erroneously projecting a film entitled
Autopsies: What Can Go Wrong?
to a darkened classroom full of terrified toddlers.

Beardsley's spectral figure appeared on the steps of the church. As thin as a cherry tree, as pale as paste, as exsanguinated as Mina Harker, she looked as if she might not make it to the end of the week. ‘I'm glad you wanted to see me today,' she said, shaking Bryant's hand with an icy claw. ‘It's best not to leave it too long with me. I'm on the way out. The doctors gave me three months.'

‘When was that?' asked Bryant.

‘Three months ago. Dying is a pain in the arse. Quite literally, in my case. I've had the chemo and the radio but it made no difference. And even if I do go into remission it'll only come back at some point. There's no point in starting
Bleak House
now. Your Janice Longbright brought me a kitten to cheer me up but it got run over. I mean, what's it all for? What are we here for? My hair's coming out in clumps. Look.' She grabbed a dry grey tuft and pulled, unfurling her fist to release a fall of follicles. ‘I tried a wig but it made me look like Shirley Bassey. Look at you, though, the very picture of health. How are you?'

‘Oh, I'm losing my marbles,' said Bryant cheerfully. ‘I've gone totally East Ham. One stop short of Barking.'

‘I thought you had a very fine brain,' said Beardsley.

‘Yes, and shortly it'll be in a jar at the Hunterian Museum. My disease is incurable and getting worse by the day. I haven't quite started taking my plate out in public but it can't be long.'

‘I guess that puts us both in the same boat.' Beardsley shook her head so violently that Bryant thought he heard her teeth rattling in her skull. ‘It seems such a waste, doesn't it? We spend the whole of our adulthood accumulating specialist knowledge, forgoing the opportunity to have normal lives, and for what? To die without passing it on.'

‘But didn't you write a book about the Thames?' Bryant asked. ‘That's passing it on.'

‘Do you really think any one of them cares about such things now?' Beardsley gestured towards the unwary residents of the Barbican going about their daily lives.

‘Yes, I do,' replied Bryant. ‘Somebody somewhere will share the same passions. They'll want to use the information you leave behind.'

Beardsley sniffed. ‘I fear for today's teens. I look at them sending pictures of their dinners to each other on their phones and wonder what happens if they ever find themselves in a bookshop. They probably think they've accidentally gone back in time. I wish I had your positive outlook. I'm more a glass-three-quarters-empty kind of person.'

‘Then share your knowledge with me,' said Bryant. ‘I need your advice. Maybe I can put it to good use before either of us goes. Is there somewhere we can sit?'

They found a café across from the entrance to the church, on the other side of the fountains, and settled at a table by the window. Audrey lowered herself with a wince.

‘Is there anything you can't have?' asked Bryant, ordering.

‘At this stage? With my insides? The most I can manage is the odd mouthful of bircher muesli. A weak mint tea will be fine. And some cake. And perhaps a sausage roll.'

A Polish waiter shot over and took their order with smiling efficiency. While they waited, Bryant did his best to outline the case.

‘Interesting,' said Audrey when he had finished. ‘So you know it's considered a holy river. Anything with the word “Temple” in it, from locks to tube stations, is a sign that the Knights Templar were there.'

‘So I believe.'

‘Therefore baptism makes sense, even the baptism of an unborn child. But you say she was chained to a rock, which suggests sacrifice. The Thames is considered the spirit of London, its principal avenue, yet most of us take it entirely for granted. Technically speaking, it was always beyond the jurisdiction of the City.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘It's not policed in the same way. So few people use it now. And it's lost its distinctive smell, have you noticed?' Audrey scratched at her head, then checked her palm as if daring anything else to fall out. ‘The odour was of tar and rope, but mainly from hydrogen sulphide caused by lack of oxygen. In Victorian times there were so many chemical reactions going on in the water that it actually heated up.'

‘It's not the condition of the river I'm interested in but what it stands for,' Bryant pointed out as the waiter returned with a mound of food. ‘It may help me to understand why this young woman was so brutally killed.'

‘A bit of an unorthodox way to investigate a crime, isn't it? What about witnesses and fingerprints and DNA, things like that?' The academic crammed a doorstop of sponge-cake into her mouth.

‘It's not how I do things,' said Bryant simply. ‘We're assuming she was killed because she was pregnant, but why in such an odd fashion? We also found a man's severed left hand nearby. Any ideas about that?'

Audrey sluiced the cake down with tea. ‘This could be hotter. I know there were votive ceremonies connected to the Thames but those took place in Celtic and Roman times.'

‘What sort of things were offered up?'

‘Mostly small animals, bronze bowls, weapons and helmets, gold coins and figurines with amputated limbs. The waters were meant to transport heathen idols to hell. They were often found around the bridges – after all, there are twenty-four of them, and London Bridge is the oldest. It got so overcrowded with horses and carriages that in 1733 they put up “Keep Left” signs, which is why Britain still drives on the left.'

‘Offerings,' Bryant reminded her. ‘You were saying.'

‘Ah yes. In the sixteenth century witches' bottles were thrown into the tide at Southwark to ward off evil. And of course, there were always severed heads to be found, right through history.'

‘I thought they were just placed on tall poles at London Bridge.'

‘Oh no. We used to believe that the soul lived in the head, not the heart, so it was a way of sending someone to the underworld. Decapitations occurred around the site of the old Billingsgate fish market, just down from where you say you found the body. We probably get the name of the market from Belinus, one of the great gods of the Thames. And less than twenty years ago around fifty decapitated skulls were found in one of the Thames's tributaries, the River Lea. The heads on Traitors' Gate were stuck on pikes thirty at a time.'