A Dark and Twisted Tide

by Sharon Bolton

  Under the railway bridge. From this point on, the walls got higher and the creek deeper as it neared the Thames. More wharfs – Normandy Wharf, Saxon Wharf, Lion Wharf. Lacey had come across the creek earlier in the year, when it had been the focus of a series of child murders. Before then, like many other Londoners, even those who lived close by, she’d barely known of its existence. Once an important part of commercial life along the Thames, the creek was now largely forgotten, even by those who owned properties alongside. It was derelict, a borderland owned by no one, attracting no one’s attention.

  But it was also a wild space, where nature thrived. If the concrete crumbled, if the steel began to rust, if the timber showed any signs of rotting, plants sprang from the weakness and flourished. You had to admire their spirit.

  Lacey passed under the Creek Road Bridge and was just a short stretch from the Thames. She started taking in more air, braced herself for the effort. She’d go as far as the South Dock Marina, maybe a little further – the going would be easier in the canoe. She turned the bend and – oh!

  The river was pink, shrouded in mist, the early sun behind her casting its light over London, turning it into a city of coral and smoke. Great warehouses and huge chimneys along its banks were indistinct; like impressionist paintings, they merged together. Birds sat on the water, still and silent as toys in an abandoned paddling pool. The water itself seemed frozen; only the effort Lacey needed to propel herself forward reminded her that it was, in fact, flowing out to sea rather quickly.

  This! This was why she had to be out on the river at dawn. Swimming in the water, paddling over it – one way or another, this wasn’t something she could miss.

  She turned her head to see a small brown rat watching her from an outcrop of concrete. It nudged awake the fleeting memory of a dream that had all but faded. What had it been about? She never dreamed. Eyes watching. Eyes peering down at her. A sense that waking up was important.

  Except, had those eyes looked down at her? Or in at her?

  In at her. Through the small round window on the port side of the boat, the side that faced the open water. Well, that at least made some sense. She’d woken up in the mistaken belief that someone was swimming round the boat. She’d gone back to sleep – after a pretty eventful half-hour – and dreamed of a swimmer looking in at her.

  Lacey realized that her paddling had slowed down, that the river was pushing her back and that she was closer to the bank than she’d planned. She braced herself for a big effort and caught sight of the long, thin strip of white fabric floating towards her.

  No, no – oh, for God’s sake, it was nothing. Just a strip of fabric attached to a loose piece of wood on the piling of the wall.

  On the other hand, she was getting quite close to where she’d found the body yesterday, and if this was a piece of the shrouding that had worked its way loose, she probably should try to retrieve it. She struck out, aiming for the bank, hit it rather faster than she’d expected and grabbed at the fabric. It came loose immediately.

  OK, not good. That was the embankment wall she’d just been pushed against.

  She struck out hard and the river pushed her back against the slime-encrusted river wall. There was some sort of undercurrent keeping her close to the side. Realizing she was better off going with it for as long as she could to save energy, Lacey let the tide take her back downstream.

  Well, this was just great. She’d been swimming perfectly safely for weeks, and as soon as Joesbury put his foot down it was all going wrong. There was probably a lesson there, but in the meantime she was in imminent danger of being sucked into a storm drain.

  Except it wasn’t a storm drain. It was actually another creek, albeit a very narrow one – far too narrow for motorized craft of any size. Little more than five feet wide, it disappeared between two tall buildings. One of the buildings jutted out into the river a couple of feet more than the other, effectively masking the creek from downstream. Even upstream, you’d hardly notice it unless you were this close.

  A second later, Lacey had left the main river. Well, she had kept the canoe to go exploring.

  The sense of being cut off from the world, which was always a feature of boating down Deptford Creek, was so much stronger here. Along this creek, tall buildings lined every inch of the banks. Windows in the lower storeys were black and empty; higher up they gleamed in the early sun like squares of gold. Some she passed were barred.

  No sunlight made it down to the water. It swirled in dark shapes and shadows around her canoe, pushing her back, fighting her progress. In this narrow, confined space the water was faster and stronger than in her own creek. Were she to turn, or just give up paddling, it would sweep her back with force.

  The buildings were changing. The grey of those closer to the Thames had given way to a softer red brick. They weren’t as tall. Some of them had doors just above the waterline, and steps leading down to it. Mooring rings lay at intervals along the walls.

  There was a sudden burst of light ahead of her. She was about to paddle past the last of the high buildings and in their place, on both sides of the creek, was a stone wall, not much more than two metres high.

  The sudden influx of light did a lot to lift Lacey’s spirits. And the channel was getting wider. Soon she’d be able to turn. Beyond the walls on both sides of the creek she could see trees. To her left was an orchard. By this time, she’d travelled about a quarter of a mile since leaving the Thames and was nearing the end of the channel. The fresh water that fed it was coming through a sluice.

  A slipway ran from beneath large gates in the wall to her right and another boat bobbed against the bank. Of a similar size to her own, it was as different from it in style as could be imagined. The moored boat was made from wood. Its prow had been carved, like the sailing ships of old, into the shoulders and head of a woman with long, flowing hair. Carvings along its length looked like feathers. There were rowlocks, decoratively carved oars and a small outboard engine.

  A smaller gate stood just beyond the wide ones, for pedestrian access, and a second narrow slipway led to the water’s edge. Lacey pushed past the gates, catching a glimpse of a large stone house beyond the ornate ironwork. At the very end of the creek there seemed to be a turning circle. She spun the canoe and almost dropped her paddle in shock. In front of the narrow gate, which she was certain had been closed a second ago, sat a creature from a fairy tale.

  19

  Dana

  ‘RIGHT, THANK YOU for coming in early,’ said Dana. ‘Help yourself to breakfast.’

  The team had gathered in Dana’s office at Lewisham police station. It wasn’t a big room, but they were few in number. The woman in the river had died months ago, there was no real evidence of foul play and, until something changed, resources wouldn’t be thrown at them. For now, they were five. Anderson and Stenning, of course, and two other detective constables. Gayle Mizon, a blonde in her early thirties, had taken the spare chair; Tom Barrett, the joker of the pack, his dark skin gleaming like polished walnut, leaned against the far wall with the other two men. All had other ongoing cases. Hence the early meeting.

  ‘Thanks to Det— to PC Flint’s prompt report, we know the woman found yesterday is not among those known to have gone missing in the river over the last eighteen months.’ Dana picked up her coffee. Mizon was tearing apart a croissant; the men had gone straight for the bacon and egg sandwiches. ‘Lacey also went beyond the brief and produced a list of 102 young women, with a compatible ethnic background, who went missing in the UK over a similar period.’

  ‘Girl can’t help herself.’ Anderson was talking through a mouthful of food. ‘She’ll be back before the year end.’

  ‘Possibly.’ Dana handed him the box of tissues she kept in her top drawer. ‘But for now, we have to respect her decision. She’s had a tough time of it this last year and she needs to get her head together. We take it from here. We go through this list, find the women in their late teens, early twenties. Contact the rele
vant forces, get photographs and DNA wherever possible. Tom, I want you to handle that, please.’

  Barrett picked up a pot of yoghurt, pulled a face and put it down again. ‘Roger that. And if she wasn’t reported missing?’

  ‘I’m asking Mr Weaver to fund a facial reconstruction,’ said Dana. ‘We can do a TV appeal, but it will take some time. I may as well be honest, though – without ID, there’ll be very little we can do.’

  ‘Have we ruled out an honour killing?’ Mizon had finished her croissant and produced an apple from somewhere. Mizon was never without food.

  ‘I heard there was a survey recently that said two-thirds of British Asians support the idea of honour killings,’ said Barrett.

  Dana shook her head. ‘I read that, too. Just a bit more carefully than you did. What it actually said was that two-thirds of young British Asians support the idea of an honour code. Rather more worrying, I admit, was that around 20 per cent would endorse physical punishment for transgressors.’

  ‘Transgressors being female,’ said Mizon.

  ‘So how widespread do we think it is in the UK?’ asked Stenning.

  ‘Estimates suggest around three thousand honour crimes per year, although it seems safe to assume there’s a lot we don’t know about,’ said Dana. ‘As to deaths, less than a dozen, but still more than anyone would want to see.’

  ‘And an honour crime is . . .?’ asked Anderson.

  ‘Beatings, even torture,’ said Mizon. ‘Keeping someone locked up, often without food or water. Denying them medical attention. Think of the worst atrocities you’ve seen inflicted upon abused and neglected children in this country. All of them can be applied to grown or nearly grown women from immigrant cultures who have no one to protect them and nowhere to turn.’

  ‘What I don’t need to tell you is that if this is an honour killing, we’re unlikely to crack it quickly,’ said Dana. ‘It can take years to get a case to court. If the physical evidence has deteriorated, and that certainly seems to be the case here, then you’re talking months of covert surveillance, cultivating family members, persuading them to turn on their own kin. You can even be looking at witness protection.’

  ‘You know what, Boss? I’m not sure we have an honour killing anyway.’ Anderson crumpled his sandwich wrapper. ‘That was an elaborate preparation of the body. Who does that for someone who dishonoured the family?’

  He threw the ball of cellophane at the bin. ‘Victims of honour killings get dumped, don’t they? That girl in Kent, wasn’t she found in a ditch? If you value your female relatives so little you can put a pillow over their faces, you’re not going to take any trouble over handling their remains respectfully.’

  Anderson’s aim was off. The cellophane lay several inches away from its target.

  ‘But if it wasn’t an honour killing,’ said Mizon, ‘then we have no idea what happened to her.’

  Dana picked up the discarded food wrapping and dropped it in the bin. ‘The one lead we can follow up is the shroud she was wrapped in. You still OK to work on that, Gayle?’

  Mizon nodded. ‘How happy are we to treat Lacey’s finding of it as coincidence?’

  Dana shook her head. ‘I’m not. But I’ve spoken to the dive team who retrieved the corpse and the photographs have been examined at length. It’s impossible to say for sure that she was tied to that wooden pile. It could have been coincidence, and do I need to repeat my point about Lacey needing time to get her head together? I do not want her freaked out over this. Let’s just hope she stays out of the river from now on.’

  20

  Lacey

  A WOMAN, SO old and crumpled that anyone might doubt her sex, were it not for the coral-pink blouse she wore and her very long, greying hair, was staring at Lacey. Her face was that of someone from a hot country who’d spent a lifetime in the sun, and her hands were liver-spotted and wrinkled. She sat in a wheelchair, perched at the top of the ramp, her legs hidden beneath a long, multi-coloured skirt.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  ‘Hello,’ replied Lacey, thinking, what now? Apologize for trespassing? Claim ignorance? Run for it?

  ‘Have you come for breakfast?’

  The tide was pulling Lacey back out of the creek. She was having to work hard not to go skimming past the unusually hospitable old lady.

  ‘Thank you, but I was just exploring. I’m sorry if—’

  ‘I do a lot of that myself. Exploring.’

  The woman looked as though getting in and out of her chair would be an effort.

  ‘You’d better moor up.’ The woman extended a long hand, with jewels on just about every finger, to point at an iron ring on the slipway. ‘You’ve got about an hour before the water gets too low. There’s a lock gate at the creek entrance. With the water this high, I expect you just paddled right over it.’

  Well, sometimes you just had to go with the flow. Lacey reached the bank and leaned forward to tie up the canoe, conscious all the while of the woman’s gaze on her. Once the canoe was secure, she glanced down at the piece of fabric that had led her here in the first place and realized that it was nothing like the bandages or the sheet that had wrapped the corpse yesterday. This was a man-made fabric, not even white, but a faded pink pattern. A woman’s headscarf. She got out of the canoe, noticing the house sign on the wall by the gates. Sayes Court.

  ‘I’m Thessa,’ the old woman announced once Lacey was on shore. ‘Short for something very long and Greek. And you’re . . .?’ She waggled long, curving fingernails that were painted pink to match her blouse.

  ‘I’m Lacey. It’s very nice to meet you, Thessa.’

  ‘Come on.’ Thessa spun round and pushed herself up the ramp at speed, and with a strength that suggested she wasn’t nearly as frail as she appeared. Lacey followed and stepped into a buzzing mass of colour.

  The garden was large by London standards and laid out as parkland, grassed and interspersed with trees.

  Both sides of the path were lined with the slender silver-green leaves and purple buds of lavender bushes. In front of the lavender were tiny white flowers, gleaming like stars against a background of deep green. Beyond it were taller plants that bloomed deep pink, with leaves so huge they wouldn’t have looked out of place in a rain-forest. Bees and butterflies were everywhere.

  ‘Leave the gate,’ called Thessa.

  Lacey picked up her pace so that she and the old lady were almost side by side. ‘Is this your house, Thessa?’

  ‘Yes,’ Thessa replied. ‘Been in the family for generations. That’s what you’re supposed to say, isn’t it? Not true, of course. We were dirty immigrants who got lucky and made a pile.’

  The house they were approaching looked Georgian, with two main storeys and a series of gabled attic windows. Stretching along most of the back wall was a conservatory.

  ‘This is where I work,’ said Thessa, charging in through the open door. ‘Come in.’

  If I’m offered gingerbread, I’m out of here, Lacey told herself, as she stepped inside the building and the wall of heat hit her like a furnace blast.

  Lined along the glass house’s central table, set low to accommodate Thessa’s wheelchair, were trays of young plants. Others grew from baskets suspended from the ceiling. Around the walls were low counters, similarly filled with plants, except where they’d been cleared as work-stations. Lacey saw knives, scissors, string, pestles and mortars, weighing scales. Beneath the counters were wooden chests with small drawers, each labelled in a handwriting she’d struggle to decipher.

  ‘I’m a herbalist,’ announced Thessa. ‘What will you have to drink? Elderflower cordial? Damson? Hemlock? . . . Just kidding. The damson wasn’t very good last year . . . Still kidding.’

  Lacey made a mental note to keep the open door between herself and this strange woman.

  ‘It’s too hot for you in here. Come on through.’

  Not sure whether it was a good idea, but strangely compelled, Lacey followed Thessa into a room that wasn’t quite a kitche
n, but not quite anything else either. There were crude wooden worktops, two huge Belfast sinks and several large fridges, all but one of which appeared to be locked.

  To one side of the sinks was a row of tall glass bottles, each containing liquid of a different colour. ‘We’ll try that one, I think, Lacey,’ said Thessa. ‘Third from the left. You’ll find a jug in the cupboard under the sink and ice in the fridge. The tap water’s fine, there’s a filter built into it.’

  ‘Elderberry,’ said Lacey, reading the label.

  ‘Picked them myself last September. That’s the last bottle till the autumn. Now, about an inch in the bottom of the jug, then fill with water. Come on, or you’ll miss the tide. I love that, don’t you? Miss the tide! Sounds like we’re seafaring folk of old, off on adventures to the far side of the world. That’s it, not too weak.’

  Thinking that, sometimes, eccentrics just had to be humoured, Lacey opened the unlocked fridge and found it full of more bottles, tubs and jars, all labelled in Thessa’s sprawling, difficult handwriting. As she added ice to the jug, she saw Thessa rummaging around in several of the drawers. The elderberry cordial, thick and purple in the bottle, turned the palest shade of mauve when she added water.

  ‘To be honest, the wild cherry is a little sweeter,’ said Thessa. ‘Tray on top of the fridge, glasses in the cupboard nearest the door. And everyone likes the bilberry. But there is something rather special about the elderberry. Seems right for your first visit. OK, if we’re done, we’ll go outside again. Wagons roll.’

  There was a short ramp between the kitchen and greenhouse and Thessa sped down it with glee, spinning her wheels at the last second to avoid hurtling into the glass walls. She went out through a side door.

  When Lacey followed, she found herself in a sun-trap. Walled on two sides by the stone of the house and the glass of the conservatory, the paved area faced south-east and Lacey could see across the garden, through the iron gates, down to the creek. The area was filled with the scent of flowers.