‘What can I smell?’ she asked, as Thessa positioned herself at a small cast-iron table.
‘Thyme. The wheels of my chair crush it and release the scent. Come and sit down.’
Lacey looked down to see that plants grew along every crack between the paving stones. Some looked like wild daisies, with long, rangy stems and yellow-tipped white flowers. Mostly, though, they were a shrub-like plant, with tiny green leaves and pink or purple flowers. Then different smells took over. Lacey recognized one as lavender; she wasn’t sure about the other, but it was making her think of roast lamb.
‘Those are chives.’ Thessa was pointing towards long thin leaves and a mass of purple flowers. ‘I don’t crush those. They smell of onions.’
‘So what’s so special about elderberry?’ Lacey sat, wondering if she were really going to drink a homemade brew offered by this strange woman.
Thessa leaned forward in her chair. Her dark eyes weren’t brown, as Lacey had thought at first, but the deepest possible shade of blue. ‘The elder is one of the most important plants in herbalism. It’s like a whole medicine chest in one plant. On the other hand – and this is what intrigues me the most – it’s almost universally feared.’ She sat upright again and looked round the garden warily.
You old ham, thought Lacey.
The old ham was on a roll. ‘Few plants feature more in legend and folklore than the elder. They used to say that if you were standing near a tree at midnight on Midsummer night, you would see the Faery King ride by. That’s tonight, by the way. And almost bound to happen, the moment of the solstice being exactly a minute before midnight.’
‘I’ll look out for him.’ Lacey smiled as she thought of Joesbury in the guise of the Faery King.
‘You should.’ Thessa had a perfectly straight face. ‘I swear that man gets more beautiful with every passing decade.’
‘So what are its medicinal properties?’
‘Guards against infection. Very good for flu and colds, and helps relieve coughs.’
‘I have neither cough nor cold,’ said Lacey, ‘but I appreciate the thought.’
‘You’re coming down with both,’ announced Thessa. ‘Your voice is hoarser than it naturally is, your breathing is shallow, meaning the bottom of your chest isn’t working properly because it’s fighting off an infection, and you’ve sniffed four times since you’ve been here. I bet you’re also more tired than usual and your chest feels a bit heavy.’
Complete rubbish. Except, ‘I’ve not been sleeping well lately,’ admitted Lacey.
‘You haven’t been sleeping well for years, not since the great sorrow, whatever that was. Don’t tell me, dear, we don’t know each other nearly well enough for that yet. But I can give you something.’
She reached into her pocket and pulled out three small bottles.
‘Hawthorn tincture.’ Thessa twisted the lid from the first and tipped three drops into the jug. ‘Made in two stages: from the flowers and the leaves in spring, and then by adding the berries in the autumn. Excellent for the heart and circulation, which you don’t need, but also for calming and reducing anxiety, which you certainly do. It also helps with bad dreams and insomnia.’
Elderberry and hawthorn? Didn’t sound too bad. If that’s what they really were.
‘This is linden.’ Thessa opened the second bottle and added it to the jug, like the first. ‘You might know it as lime. Not the citrus fruit – the English tree. This is made from the flowers. It soothes irritation, boosts the immune system and helps you relax and sleep.’
‘I’ll be falling asleep by midday,’ said Lacey. Not that she had any plans to drink the stuff.
‘This last one is mugwort. Not a pretty name, but a very good herb for us women. It’s been used for centuries in healing and magic. It’s known as a protector of women and travellers.’
The tops back on the three bottles, Thessa lifted the jug and poured the drink into Lacey’s glass and then her own. ‘Mugwort’s good for female problems. Not that I can see any sign of those, but it’s a good all-round tonic. Let’s see how you get on with these three. You can take them home with you.’ She slid the bottles across the table to Lacey.
‘That’s very kind, but—’
‘Drink up.’
Thessa nodded at Lacey’s glass, where the cordial that might or might not be elderberry had gained the addition of nine drops of heaven only knew what. Was this how dreadful things happened, then? Out of politeness?
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’
Quick as a flash, Thessa picked up her own glass and downed half of it. Then she set it down on the table and looked expectantly at Lacey.
‘I’m sorry to be rude,’ said Lacey. ‘But you are a little unusual and I’ve never come across a— Oh my God, what’s wrong?’
She was up out of her seat, bending over Thessa, who had convulsed in her chair before her head had fallen on to her chest. The old woman was shaking, her arms jerking at her sides, odd croaking noises coming from her throat.
‘Thessa, don’t be ridiculous,’ said a male voice from the doorway of the house.
Lacey spun round to see a tall, dark-haired man in his early sixties watching them with an expression on his face that said he’d seen it all before and it never got any funnier. She looked back at Thessa, who was upright again, grinning.
‘Gotcha!’ she said to Lacey.
‘What is she giving you?’ The man had stepped outside and taken a seat beside Lacey. He’d brought his own glass.
‘Umm . . . elderberry, hawthorn, lime and mugwort, I think,’ said Lacey.
The man shrugged, pulled a face, then poured himself a glass.
He drank and smiled at Lacey. ‘I’m Alex. Thessa’s brother. Delighted to meet you.’
‘Lacey Flint,’ she said, to the man with heavy eyebrows and a dark complexion who, at first glance, looked nothing like Mrs Nutty in the wheelchair. He was wearing neatly pressed trousers and an open-necked button-down shirt.
‘How novel to have a visitor arriving by boat,’ he said. ‘Although I rather like it. Puts me in mind of the old days, when the rivers around London were the main means of transport.’
‘I live on one of the boats in Deptford Creek.’ Lacey picked up her glass and risked a sip. ‘We all have canoes or small motor boats. But somebody here has a boat as well.’
‘That’s Thessa’s,’ said Alex. ‘I’ve been trying to persuade her that going out on to the Thames is ridiculously irresponsible, but she hasn’t listened to me in sixty years and I doubt she’ll start now.’
The cordial was rich and sweet, not dissimilar to blackcurrant, but not so sharp. Lacey drank most of the glassful in one.
‘A lot of the plants I need grow along the river’s edge,’ said Thessa. ‘Quite a lot of them in Deptford Creek. And I have very strong arms. When your legs are useless, your other parts have to compensate. And there’s always the engine if things get hairy. Do you know those skanky old lesbians on that naval ship at Skillions?’
Lacey glanced at Alex. He gave a small shrug as if to say, don’t look at me.
‘Well, I’ve not heard them referred to in precisely those terms, but I’m aware of two women in their middle years at Skillions Wharf,’ she said eventually. ‘My neighbour says they used to be actresses.’
‘The overweight blonde was a stripper,’ said Thessa. ‘The butch one was her pimp.’
‘Did they empty their septic tank when you were paddling past?’ asked Lacey, making Alex snort into his drink. When he stopped spluttering, he glanced at his watch. ‘You have twenty minutes to get out of our creek, Lacey, or you’ll be spending the day with us.’
Lacey stood up. ‘Well, that sounds lovely, but I do have to get to work this afternoon. Thank you very much for the drink.’
‘And the tinctures.’ Thessa was pressing the three small bottles into Lacey’s hands. ‘Three drops of each, twice a day.’
‘Is that an English accent, Lacey?’ asked Alex, as the three of them set o
ff down the flower-lined path towards the creek. A bee settled on Thessa’s pink blouse and she let it sit just below her shoulder like a decorative pin. ‘You have a lilt in your voice that I can’t quite place.’
‘I’m from Shropshire,’ said Lacey. ‘Very close to the Welsh border. People occasionally tell me I sound Welsh.’
‘And what do you do?’
‘I’m a police officer,’ said Lacey. ‘I recently joined the Marine Unit.’
‘Then I must ask you a great favour. When you see my sister out in that ridiculous boat of hers, arrest her.’
Thessa giggled in a way that was almost flirtatious. Then she actually started whispering to the bee on her breast.
‘Well, I’m hardly setting the best example,’ said Lacey. ‘But if you avoid the fast tides and stay close to the bank, it’s not too dangerous.’
‘Not for a healthy young person, maybe,’ said Alex. ‘But for a mad old woman in her sixties? I suppose I shouldn’t complain. If she goes under, I inherit all her money.’
‘Changed my will last week,’ said Thessa. ‘I’m leaving everything to the dogs’ home.’
‘The canines themselves will handle it more responsibly than you do. Goodbye, Lacey. It was a pleasure meeting you.’
‘Come back next Thursday,’ said Thessa. ‘The herbs need a week to have an impact. But if you just want to chat, come any time.’
Lacey climbed into her canoe and untied the rope. Gallantly, Alex bent low and gave her a gentle push into the centre of the creek.
‘Goodbye,’ she called, as the returning tide pulled her back towards the Thames. She looked back just before turning the corner. Thessa and her brother were still on the creek side. Alex had crouched down to the same level as his sister and they were deep in conversation. Lacey wondered how she could ever have thought them unalike. From this distance, talking intently as they were, they looked like mirror images of each other.
21
Dana
‘THE PRACTICE OF shrouding a body before burial is common to just about every religion and culture,’ said Mizon from her place at the front of the room. ‘There’s even evidence of native North American tribes weaving shrouds out of vegetable material.’
Dana reached up and pulled the window blind shut. A little past noon, the sun had moved round to their side of the building and the temperature was climbing high. In the meeting room were Neil Anderson, Pete Stenning, Tom Barrett and Gayle Mizon. Her inner circle.
Thorough as always, Mizon had projected several images of bodies shrouded for death on to the white screen behind her: grief-stricken nuns carrying a long, thin parcel; the wan face of a child before his head was finally covered; row upon row of white bundles laid out on a tiled floor.
‘However people choose to dispose of their dead,’ she was saying, ‘there will be some ritualistic element to the preparation of the body and that will nearly always include a symbolic washing and then a shrouding.’
‘My dad was buried in his best suit,’ said Barrett.
‘That’s become quite common in Western cultures,’ Mizon agreed. ‘But only recently. Shrouding goes back to the days when clothes were expensive. By putting the deceased into a shroud, the family were freeing up a suit of clothes for another family member.’
Stenning was holding a Coke can against the back of his neck. ‘So, does the way she was shrouded give us any clue about her background?’
Two faint, parallel lines had appeared between Mizon’s brows. ‘That’s where it gets a bit trickier. From what I can gather, what we saw really isn’t typical of any recognized funeral etiquette.’
‘How do you mean?’ asked Dana.
Mizon glanced at her notes. ‘Jewish burial clothes are called Tachrichim. A tunic, trousers, belt, and a hood and scarf to cover the head. Then the whole body gets wrapped in another large piece of cloth that is effectively the shroud. The Jewish tradition dictates that everyone is equal in death. So Jewish burial clothes wouldn’t have zips, buttons, fasteners, or any ornamentation. No pockets, either, because personal possessions have no place in the afterlife.’
‘Not Jewish then,’ said Anderson.
‘Not typically Muslim either,’ said Mizon. ‘Muslim burial cloths are known as Kafan. Three pieces of cloth for a man, five for a woman. They’re not clothes as such, just large pieces of very simple cloth that wrap set parts of the body in a prescribed order. Again, modesty in death is important.’
‘Hindus use clothes too,’ said Dana, ‘with one large sheet to cover the whole body. My mother was cremated in her wedding dress. Which was red, by the way. Of course, all this doesn’t mean the victim wasn’t Muslim or Jewish or Hindu, just that her body wasn’t disposed of in a religiously orthodox manner.’
‘People were saying the body was mummified,’ said Barrett.
‘No,’ said Dana. ‘Though the way it was trussed up did give that impression. Can you find those first photographs, Gayle?’
They waited while Mizon found the photographs of the corpse taken by the Marine Unit, and then Dana stood and walked closer to the screen.
‘You can see that whilst the fabric has largely come away from the upper part of the body, the lower body is still mainly wrapped.’ Dana used a pencil to point to the image. ‘And if you look around the feet and calves, and then the waist, it does look a little like a mummy, but the way this woman’s been wrapped is actually quite different to the Egyptian process.’
‘How exactly?’ asked Anderson.
Dana nodded at Mizon to explain. ‘An Egyptian mummy would be completely wrapped in bandages,’ Mizon said. ‘Each individual limb, even each finger and toe, would be wrapped separately. You’d be talking hundreds of yards of fabric. On this woman, the bandages were just at certain points – ankles, waist, neck.’
‘So, if there’s no real link with customs in Islam, Hinduism or Judaism, what about Christianity?’ asked Anderson.
‘Similar, but not quite,’ said Mizon. ‘If you’ve seen images of the shroud of Turin, you’ll know it was a piece of fabric just wide enough to cover a body but at least twice the body’s length. It would have been fastened in place by some means, quite possibly long thin strips of the same fabric. What we have is one very wide strip of fabric and several much thinner ones that were used to tie the main shroud in place.’
‘So, however she died, her body was prepared for burial by someone from a Christian tradition,’ said Dana.
Mizon shook her head. ‘I’m not sure I’d say that either. Certainly not one of the more contemporary branches because, as Tom points out, Christians these days typically dress their dead in normal clothes. On the other hand, Orthodox Christian burial shrouds are quite ornate.’
Several pictures of shrouds appeared on the screen. They showed arches, the sun’s rays, the holy cross, Christian icons, even a resurrection scene.
‘No one wanting to conceal a suspicious death would use one of those though,’ Dana pointed out. ‘They’d be too easy to trace.’
‘True,’ said Mizon. ‘To be honest, Ma’am, I don’t think the means of wrapping this corpse was about religious observation.’
‘What then?’
Mizon switched the screen off, as though rejecting all the in formation she’d just shown them. Or maybe she was just getting too hot. ‘Some killers display their corpses and some conceal them, isn’t that right?’
Stenning’s head lifted. ‘Those who display them are proud of what they’ve done. They want us to find them.’
Mizon nodded. ‘Conversely, those who don’t are ashamed.’
‘This woman was wrapped up like a parcel, weighted down and dropped into one of the biggest, deepest rivers in the world.’ Anderson, too, was looking more alert. ‘I’d say that puts our killer in the ashamed camp.’
‘Deeply ashamed,’ Mizon agreed. ‘I know you don’t like us to jump to conclusions too early, Ma’am, but I’d say the shrouding and the dumping in the Thames are about concealment. In other words, shame. I t
hink the bandages were just to make sure the shroud stayed in place. A burial in the ground wouldn’t need them, but one in fast-moving water would be much less stable. I think the bandages were to maintain the shroud – in other words, the concealment.’
‘So the shrouding gives us no pointers to the killer’s background?’ asked Dana.
‘I didn’t say that,’ said Mizon. ‘He didn’t use a couple of bin-liners, fastened tight with parcel tape. The linen suggests a culture that treats its dead with respect. I think our killer is probably someone from an Eastern background, one more dominated by religious beliefs and practices than the Western world.’
‘I’ll tell you what’s worrying me more.’ Even Barrett was excited now. It took a lot to get him fired up. ‘It wasn’t driven by panic. It was planned. Careful. It was like—’
Dana never normally stole thunder from a team member. This time, though, she couldn’t help herself. ‘Like they’d done it before,’ she said.
22
Nadia
THE SUN WAS low in the sky and Nadia walked quickly. She’d had to queue for the showers, making her late leaving the pool. She’d promised to be back by six because that was when they were leaving and Gabrielle needed the sunscreen.
‘You wouldn’t mind popping into Boots on the way back, would you?’ Always it was the same. ‘Can you drop by Sainsbury’s? Can you pop into the Body Shop? Can you stop off at Majestic and pick up some wine?’ As though Gabrielle felt a continual need to remind Nadia that time off wasn’t a right, merely borrowed and subject to being reclaimed at any time.
The class had been busy. She was becoming one of the better ones. The one the instructor sometimes turned to when she needed a demonstration.
‘Elbow out of the water first, then stretch the arm out. You use less energy and move faster. Watch Nadia.’
She could swim front crawl now, with her head in the water, coming up intermittently to breathe and moving at speed. Who would have believed it, months ago, when she could barely manage a panic-stricken dog-like stroke?
A Dark and Twisted Tide Page 9