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Authors: Jo Bannister

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‘Which perhaps explains why she was naked,’ said Liz. ‘And why she didn’t see the hatch. But if she’d taken that much, how come she was still on her feet and clambering over boats? Shouldn’t she have been curled up somewhere snoring?’
‘Donovan thinks she had help - that someone wrapped a coat or a blanket or something round her and took her there. Which sounded reasonable enough until we got the blood-work. You’re right, she shouldn’t have been able to walk, even with help. And a man carrying a woman’s body through Mere Basin would have been as conspicuous as a naked girl.’
‘Maybe someone did see them. This is the Basin we’re talking about, the crowd that hangs out down there in the evening wouldn’t rush to call us if they saw something suspicious. Hell, if they saw a naked girl staggering about they’d give her some music and take up a collection.’ Barry Lacey had been right to
back away from The Fen Tiger: it wasn’t his sort of pub at all.
Shapiro rocked his head non-committally. ‘Apparently it was quite a fall. I know, you can break your neck tripping over a kerb-stone; but she didn’t break her neck, she smashed her skull. Crowe thinks she fell further than four feet into the bottom of the boat.’ He was too old to undergo metrication now. ‘Actually, a lot further.’
Liz frowned. ‘This is a canal boat we’re talking about, not a square-rigger. I mean, she didn’t fall from the yardarm.’
‘The highest point on the
Guelder Rose
is the top of the cabin roof, about four feet above the deck. If she’d fallen from there she could have managed about eight feet. It still isn’t enough. And how did she get there? She was too tripped out to walk; and if someone was trying to kill her, why risk being seen with her in a public place?’
‘Could she have fallen off something else? It’s a boat, it passes under bridges - could she have come off a bridge? If Lacey was busy steering he might not have noticed. Even if he felt the bump he might have thought he’d brushed against something: he’s a novice at this, after all, he can’t be too familiar with the boat.’
It sounded plausible, and there was room in the time envelope. Time of death had been narrowed to between seven and ten p.m.; the
Guelder Rose
arrived in Mere Basin after eight; if you could accept that a man busy steering a large unfamiliar boat through a narrow bridge could fail to notice someone
falling on to his foredeck she might have come aboard up to six miles short of Castlemere. Shapiro could believe that, but other parts of the theory still gave him problems. ‘If you’re trying to commit suicide you don’t wait till there’s a boat underneath you! Besides, we hit the same snag: she had too much cocaine in her to be doing more than crawling round the bedroom floor. Someone must have helped her. And if he helped her off a bridge that’s still murder.’
‘You said you’d learned something about how she lived as well,’ Liz reminded him. ‘Do you know who she is?’
Shapiro shook his head. ‘But I know what she is: a prostitute. Well, probably. Crowe said there was enough wear and tear, inside and out, that if she wasn’t being paid for it she should have been.’
Liz wasn’t surprised. Violent death takes people on the fringe of society much more often than it ambushes those at its cosy heart. And people who turn up naked anywhere but their own beds tend to be burning the candle at both ends. ‘Working as in, that’s how she made her living? Or working as in, that’s what she was doing when she died?’
‘Both, apparently. Read the report if you want the gory details.’
‘Then somebody’d better talk to the Toms’ Union.’ Queen’s Street, like most police stations, had an ambivalent relationship with the local prostitutes. The girls were committing an offence, and at intervals there would be prosecutions, fines and short, pointless prison sentences. But between times
hookers and coppers were a fact of one anothers’ lives, and there were benefits to be gained by keeping the relationship amicable. Sometimes the girls needed protecting, sometimes the police needed the sort of information picked up by women who made their living on the street. ‘Donovan’s off today, isn’t he? - shall I go?’
With his chin in his chest Shapiro smiled a secret smile. ‘Yes and no. Donovan
was
off; Donovan then heard about a body on a boat and all but beat me to the scene of crime; now he’s down at the Basin looking for someone who saw something.’
Liz elevated a surprised eyebrow. She was a good-looking woman rather than a beautiful one, tall and athletic, with strong features and a clear intelligence in her hazel-green eyes. She was forty-one: when she released her curly fair hair from its businesslike pleat and swapped her tailored clothes for a checked shirt and riding breeches she could pass for ten years younger. ‘Was that a good idea? He isn’t exactly Flavour of the Month at The Fen Tiger.’
Despite its prestigious location The Fen Tiger was a villains’ pub. It had been there since Mere Basin was a stinking sink, nine-tenths derelict, subterranean and all but forgotten between Castle Place and Brick Lane. Ten years earlier a go-ahead council with its eye on a European grant had restored the Basin, turning the warehouses into valuable canal-side properties and opening up the inland waterway to holiday mariners. For years before that the only people using it had been commercial carriers who travelled in convoy with someone riding shotgun on
the first boat. It had been a massive undertaking and, but for the occasional excess with the gold paint, a successful one. Castlemere had been built to serve the canal; now the canal served the shopkeepers and restaurateurs of Castlemere. It would never be a tourist magnet in the way that Cambridge and Norwich were, but a fair bit of money came through Mere Basin during the summer months.
And a fair bit of it got as far as The Fen Tiger and no further. The place was full of thieves, professional and casual, conmen, cloners of phones, hackers of hole-in-the-wall cash machines and dealers in outboard engines which had fallen off the back of a barge. Shapiro would have been glad to shut it down, but naive magistrates kept believing the proprietor’s protestations, that the nefarious activities of some of his clientele were not his responsibility, and renewing his licence.
Shapiro shrugged. ‘I’m not sure they hate Donovan any more than they do you and me. Anyway, the wharf’s his backyard - at least they’ll be talking the same language. Anyone else’d need an interpreter.’
‘So, shall I do the toms? Have we got a photo yet?’
‘Should be ready now,’ said Shapiro. He blew out his cheeks. ‘You’d better warn them this may not be an isolated incident. However she got on to the boat, she was beaten black and blue first. A man who hires a prostitute and keeps her quiet with cocaine while he beats the living daylights out of her does it because that’s how he gets his kicks. He doesn’t ever do it just once.’
The fact that a place like The Fen Tiger went quiet when he walked inside concerned Donovan not at all. He was a CID officer, and at any given time about half the Tiger’s clientele were wanted for something. He was quite pleased they considered him enough of a threat to fall silent as he passed: sometimes he felt that the best efforts of all Queen’s Street were as a flea-bite on the hide of Castlemere’s criminal fraternity.
What bothered him more was that perfectly respectable people, nice decent law-abiding citizens who were more likely to have a sixth finger than a criminal record, also went quiet as he passed. They’d done this since he was about fifteen. At the time, with the cocky innocence of youth, he’d taken it as a compliment, that they recognized him as an individual not to be trifled with. Later he began to wonder what it was they saw that made them mark him and stand back. He wasn’t a dangerous man. He wasn’t violent, or unhinged, or prone to sudden bursts of embarrassing eccentricity. He thought himself a pretty ordinary man on the whole: a bit of a loner, a bit of an outsider, but still an ordinary
decent citizen doing an honourable job. And yet other decent citizens looked at him and moved aside, and he didn’t know why.
But he didn’t spend much time thinking about it in a place where, on the law of averages, every tenth man would like to put a baling hook in his back.
Fortunately, with the lunchtime rush yet to start, there were only nine people in the bar. One was the potman Donny Toomes. Donovan didn’t have any friends in The Fen Tiger, but on the long list of his enemies Tbomes would have figured somewhere near the bottom.
He didn’t order a drink. He had no wish to appear part of this company; besides, mostly what he drank was non-alcoholic and he didn’t particularly want Toomes to know that. ‘Were you on last night?’
Toomes shrugged: a can’t-remember, don’t-care, wouldn’t-tell-you-if-I-was sort of shrug. Donovan rolled his eyes but hung on to his patience. It was a necessary preamble: Toomes would answer his questions eventually, but it was vital to his own credibility that he shouldn’t make it too easy.
‘Simple enough question, Donny: were you working here last night? Say, between eight and closing time - or midnight, whichever came first.’
Toomes sniffed. He was a sturdy middle-aged individual with the beer belly that’s an occupational hazard. Apart from the people he worked for and the company he kept, Donovan didn’t have much on him. A bit of handling, a bit of aiding and abetting, it was probably better not to enquire where the venison sandwiches came from, but nothing that
entitled the man to wear the hunt button of the Castlemere Mafia. Only habit kept him from answering fully and frankly.
‘If you’ve any complaints about us not closing on time, Mr Donovan,’ he said stolidly, ‘you’d better take them up with the management.’
‘Give me any of your nonsense,’ growled Donovan, ‘and I’ll sick the VAT inspectors on them.’ With the end of transportation and public flogging, this was about the direst threat that a public servant could legally issue.
Donny Toomes recognized the fact. He had nothing to hide, and knew he wouldn’t be thanked for holding out any longer. ‘OK, OK,’ he grumbled. ‘Yes, I was here. What do you want to know?’
‘There was an incident on the dock. Did anybody see anything?’
‘What sort of an incident?’
Donovan bared his teeth in a feral grin. ‘The sort of incident where somebody ends up dead, Donny. A girl - blonde, about twenty-five, not wearing a lot in the way of clothes. Anybody see her?’
Toomes began to look interested.
‘How
little in the way of clothes?’
‘To the nearest round figure? - none. So if you saw her you’d tend to remember. I take it you didn’t?’
‘I don’t think anyone did,’ said Toomes regretfully. ‘They’d have mentioned it if they had. Where was all this going on, then?’ He craned his neck, looking out of the window as if there was a chance of a repeat performance.
The Fen Tiger enjoyed perhaps the best location
in Castlemere, with a street entrance just off Castle Place and a rear entrance, one storey down, on to Mere Basin. The lounge bar was upstairs; down here was where the hard cases drank. It wasn’t the view that attracted them so much as the fact that if someone you didn’t want to meet came in one way you could always leave by the other.
Hire boats mostly moored on the north side of the basin. Donovan pointed with his nose. ‘Over there somewhere. On a boat - the
Guelder Rose
, black hull, blue and cream upper-works. Did you see
her
?’
Toomes nodded. ‘I saw them tying up - about eight, eight-thirty? Man and a couple of kids. Didn’t see no twenty-five-year-old blonde.’
‘Did you see anyone else on the boat, a bit later? A couple of drunks, maybe - one wrapped up in a coat or something?’
But if Toomes had missed a naked twenty-five-year-old blonde he wasn’t much interested in anything else he might have seen. He shook his head glumly.
Donovan turned to face the room, meaning to repeat the question for general consumption. But the bar was empty. He gave a snort of scornful amusement. ‘Jesus, Donny, your customers are a shy lot. Anybody’d think they’d been up to no good.’
Toomes sighed. ‘Listen, Mr Donovan, don’t take this the wrong way but … You come swanning in here with your threats and your questions, you’d be sensible to bring somebody with you. To watch your back.’
Donovan’s dark eyes rounded in astonished indignation. ‘Are you telling me I’m not safe in here? Are
you telling me this dive is some sort of a no-go area?’
‘I’m not telling you any such thing,’ said Toomes wearily. ‘These are properly conducted licensed premises: you’re welcome to drink here, or to ask questions. You’re as safe here as anywhere in Castlemere. What I can’t vouch for is what happens after you leave. I wouldn’t like to think of you turning up face-down in the canal one night.’
‘Your concern’s downright touching,’ sneered Donovan. ‘This place has obviously changed since Jack Carney went down.’ The Fen Tiger never officially belonged to the old thug: it was held in his wife’s name. These days it officially belonged to the wife of a second cousin of Carney’s; but the only thing that had actually changed was the name above the door.
Toomes sniffed and said no more. His concern was genuine but not altogether altruistic. Odd jobs were always the preserve of the potman, and getting blood off wrought-iron railings was a bugger.
Donovan had one last question before he left. ‘So where did they tie up the
Guelder Rose?
’
Toomes stumped to the door and pointed. ‘There, in front of The Lock & Quay.’ It used to be Gossick’s Chandlers: folksy names came in with the redevelopment and the toy-town paintwork.
An arched ironwork bridge spanned the basin: Donovan preferred its old livery of black and rust to the council’s colour scheme of dark green and gold. But time heals all ills: he noted with satisfaction that the rust was beginning to make a comeback.
Tonight there would be another hire boat tied
inexpertly to the bollards outside The Lock & Quay, but for the moment the bit of dockside where the Laceys spent last night was vacant. Donovan took his time looking round but although it was now midday and the spring sunlight was pouring through the well of the buildings he could see nothing suggestive of a struggle, of an accident, of anything out of the ordinary. There was nothing that looked like blood, and no one had tossed a blanket into the deep shadows of the car park between the stilts of The Barbican.
When he had done with looking around, he went back to the quayside and looked up.
 
 
‘She didn’t fall through the hatch of the
Guelder Rose
,’ he explained, a thread of electric satisfaction running through his voice. ‘At least she did, but she wasn’t on the boat at the time. She fell off the roof of The Barbican.’
‘The roof?’ echoed Liz faintly.
‘Six storeys up,’ nodded Donovan. ‘She didn’t fall eight feet, she fell about eighty - of course she smashed her skull.’
‘Have you been up there?’ asked Shapiro.
‘Yeah, just to make sure. Then I called for a PC to preserve the scene. Immediately above where the boat was tied up, something’s been rested on the parapet. There’s a load of junk up there - dirt, bird shit, the lot. But not right there. SOCO’s on his way up there, but I’ll stake my reputation that’s where she came from.’
‘Then it really was murder,’ said Shapiro pensively. ‘She didn’t get herself up there, not in that state. Someone took her and threw her. She was meant to die.’ He stood up and reached for his coat. ‘I’d better get down there. Come with me, Donovan, show me what you found. What about you, Liz?’
She shook her head. ‘I’m seeing the toms.’ Castlemere didn’t have a red-light district as such: they’d arranged to meet, somewhat incongruously, in the Tudor Tea-rooms.
The three of them went downstairs together. When they parted at the top of Queen’s Street Liz murmured after Donovan, ‘You haven’t got a reputation to stake.’
He looked back with a grin. They’d known each other long enough to enjoy the privilege of a friendly insult. ‘Then I’ll stake your reputation,’ he said.
 
 
The local prostitutes may not have had a trade union as such, but they certainly had a self-help network. Girls who got little support from anyone else had to be able to depend on each other. So while Dawn and Zara avoided contact with the police in most circumstances, to help find the killer of a fellow working-girl they were prepared to break the habit of a lifetime.
If she was a fellow-worker. The two women pored over the photograph Liz put on the table, took the time to picture her alive, and in the end were sure they’d never seen her before.
Liz frowned. ‘She isn’t a local girl? The
pathologist who did the post mortem reckoned she was on the game.’
Dawn, who was the older of the two, shrugged. ‘I’m telling you what I know. She doesn’t work in this town.’
‘Could she be - I don’t know - an enthusiastic amateur?’
Dawn shook her head, a mass of coal-black curls dancing on her shoulders. ‘If she was enthusiastic enough for it to show up at the autopsy, we’d know her. I’m telling you: that’s not a local girl. She was brought in. Maybe for a special. They do that sometimes, if there’s a big conference or something.’
‘Conference?’ The Barbican Hotel was big enough for the conference trade.
Zara sniffed. ‘Think themselves a bit sophisticated, the conference trade do. A cut above the local talent. They come down from London in a coach.’
Liz blinked. But the principles of business are much the same whatever business you’re in: if you want work you have to put yourself in its way. ‘Are they in town at the moment?’
Dawn shook her head again. ‘We’d know if they were. There was some sort of a gathering at The Barbican this weekend - a few of us met up with guys there - but there wasn’t anything laid on in the way of entertainment. People were making their own arrangements.’
‘Maybe she knew one of the guests personally,’ Liz speculated. ‘Does that happen - a man calls a particular girl to meet him somewhere?’
‘Honey,’ said Dawn heavily, ‘in this business
everything
happens. Sure he could have called her. He’d got away from the wife for a long weekend, he had his own little friend, he told her where to come and they spent a few days together instead of the usual hour-and-a-bit. That way we wouldn’t even have known she was in town.’
‘He went to that much trouble so he could kill her?’ said Zara doubtfully. She had warm
café-au-lait
skin and blonde streaks dyed through her dark hair.
‘Maybe she threatened to tell his wife,’ hazarded Liz.
But Dawn wasn’t buying that. ‘No way. Not if she was a pro - it’s the one thing you never do. For one thing, you don’t
want
them to leave their wives. You don’t want to live with them, for Chrissake! - you want them safe at home, just restless enough to pick up the phone from time to time. If the wife chucked them out, they might shack up with someone who’d keep them happy, and that’s bad for business.’
Liz thanked them for their time and paid the bill. She didn’t envy these women their lifestyle but she didn’t condemn it either. She wished there was a way of keeping them safer, but suspected that, however liberal the law became, a working prostitute would always find herself beyond its protection. Not because she wanted it that way but because the clients did.
‘OK. Well, thanks for your help. And go carefully, won’t you? - till either we’ve got this man or we’re sure he’s left town. Just in case it wasn’t personal, and beating up on girls is how he gets his kicks.’
‘Wouldn’t be the first one,’ grunted Dawn. With a
hand decorated with blood-red talons she waved a cheery farewell to an outraged waitress as they left.
 
 
The
Guelder Rose
had been tied along the north wharf, under the angle of the northern and eastern blocks of The Barbican. The four buildings framed a great atrium with Mere Basin in the well, springing across the four canals on massive brick arches. They were built as warehouses when this was a main commercial artery: now they were shops and restaurants at ground level, businesses above, flats above that.

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