A Dark and Twisted Tide

by Sharon Bolton

  ‘So that gang has been out of action for nearly a year?’

  Dale shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t read anything into that. These gangs employ any number of gofers and the people at the top never get their hands dirty. If whatever they’re doing is lucrative, someone else will have stepped in.’

  ‘What about the girl?’ A sudden flashback to that night last October. The cripplingly cold water, a desperate woman trying to pull her under.

  ‘Nadia Safi. According to this, she was sent to a hostel that takes in victims of trafficking. I can give you an address.’ He wrote something down on a Post-it note.

  Lacey took it. An address in London.

  ‘You made an arrest on Friday night, I understand. Did you learn nothing from him?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Lacey admitted. ‘He insisted he was alone in the boat and that he was just out for a spot of night fishing. Absolutely wouldn’t budge. We charged him with having an unauthorized craft on the river and causing a danger to other shipping, but that was all we could get him on.’

  ‘Frustrating.’ Dale nodded sympathetically.

  ‘Tell me about it. But I still don’t understand why they’re coming up the Thames.’

  ‘I’d say their initial destination is somewhere along the river,’ said Dale. ‘Otherwise it hardly seems worth the extra risks.’

  ‘What are we talking about? A brothel with a river view?’

  ‘Hardly. More likely to be some sort of holding facility. You know, a derelict building, maybe a lock-up somewhere. There’s still a lot of waste land and abandoned buildings along that stretch of the south bank. Somewhere between Greenwich and Rotherhithe would be my guess. Probably closer to Greenwich, if anything. Bringing them right into the city seems too risky.’

  Somewhere near Deptford Creek. Near where the body was found.

  The body of an immigrant?

  ‘I hope you find them, Lacey,’ said Dale, who didn’t look remotely laid back any more. ‘If women are being trafficked, they’ll be kept in conditions that would have the RSPCA baying for blood if it was happening to animals. They’ll be half starved, probably ill, and frightened out of their wits. And that’s while they’re still in transit.’

  Lacey felt a sudden urge to get up, out of the chair and the building, to get moving. ‘It gets worse?’

  ‘Oh yeah. And if you’ve seen two, the chances are there are a whole lot more.’

  35

  Pari

  Dear Mother,

  At last I have time to write to you. I have been a little poorly, but am much better now.

  Pari put the pen down. Her mother had always known when she was lying. Would she be able to tell now, across thousands of miles? And was it less of a lie, or more of one, if it were written down?

  This city is bigger than I could ever have dreamed. Every day I see something new.

  That wasn’t a lie. Every day Pari saw huge stone churches and elegant buildings like palaces, gleaming towers made of jewel-coloured glass. Always something new, and really no need to tell her mother that everything she saw was on television; that her only real view of this massive, alien city had been the night she’d arrived, along the dark river that ran through its heart.

  But I should not have believed the people who said this country would be cold. Since I have been here, the sun has shone hot and strong most days, like our springtime. All the time, I am warm as bread from the oven.

  Also true. Pari put her pen down. She was burning hot and it had nothing to do with the weather outside. Her room was actually quite cool. When she laid her forearms or her forehead against the whitewashed walls, it filled her with wonderful numbing coolness that never lasted quite long enough to make her feel better.

  She had a fever. In a little while, if she felt well enough, she’d stand in the shower and let the water run cold; anything to stop the fire that was smouldering away inside her, getting hotter with every hour that passed.

  My English is so much better already. I’m talking to lots of people, improving all the time. The different accents can be confusing, but I am getting used to them.

  That was true too, or almost true. A few weeks ago, when she’d first arrived, Pari could barely understand the simple sentence construction and continual repetition of the toddlers’ TV programmes. Some days now, if she wasn’t feeling too bad, she could follow the news.

  I’m sorry I haven’t written before now, I’ve just been so busy.

  It had never occurred to her to ask. She’d been amazed, just now, when they’d agreed. ‘I want to write to my mother,’ she’d said, expecting the immediate refusal that had followed all her previous requests. ‘Of course,’ they’d replied. ‘We’re only surprised you didn’t ask sooner. Perhaps you can write her a sentence or two in English. Think how proud she’ll be.’

  That was hardly likely. Pari’s ability to read and write her own language was limited. In her home province, most girls left school when they reached puberty. Even in the university city, they probably had half the school hours that the boys had benefited from, and less than half the teachers’ attention when they were there.

  She was glad, though, even for the little time she’d spent in school. Education was important, they kept telling her here. She’d need to be able to speak English well by the time she left.

  Soon now, I will be leaving this place and going to my new home and job. Then I will send you money. I will find a way to send it safely. They tell me this letter may take a few weeks to get to you, so I will try to think of you at the next new moon, opening my letter and reading all my news.

  All my love,

  Pari.

  36

  Dana

  WHEN HER PHONE rang, Dana started, as though she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t. She looked round and spotted an area near the wall where she’d be out of the way. Selfridges baby department. An hour to kill on the way home from work and this was where she’d ended up.

  ‘Ma’am, it’s Lacey. I’ve had an idea. I wanted to run it past you, is that OK?’

  Dana looked back at the rows of baby-grows, patterned with rabbits, mice, butterflies. ‘Go ahead.’

  Lacey talked fast, the way she often did when she was fired up about something. ‘You know how sometimes several ideas come together at once, and whilst none of them make sense individually, when you put them together, suddenly it all looks different?’ she began.

  The lift opened and three women came out. One was heavily pregnant. ‘I think so.’

  ‘OK, we have a problem of illegal immigrants coming into London via the Thames,’ Lacey went on. ‘I’ve been involved in two cases, and there are others on record at Wapping. The two I witnessed involved young women, probably from somewhere in the Middle East or Asia, which suggests people-trafficking, probably for the sex trade.’

  Lacey was almost certainly right. The sex trade was like the drugs trade, an ongoing, ever-present problem. The more beautiful of the women would typically start out in private harems, the property of one man, who would be pretty generous about sharing with his friends. The girls would be passed round, forced to take part in orgies, used to make pornographic material. Nothing much would be out of bounds.

  The less attractive would go to brothels where they’d be expected to service several clients nightly for twenty to fifty quid a time, of which they would see nothing. They’d quickly become hopeless drug addicts. They’d die, very young, in squalor. Met sources suggested that there were more than nine hundred brothels in London alone.

  ‘OK,’ Dana said, because to say anything else would probably take too long.

  ‘I was at the UK Border Agency earlier today,’ Lacey rushed on. ‘They think there could be some sort of holding facility on the riverbank around Deptford.’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  A toddler ran squealing past Dana.

  ‘Right, now, according to Dr Kaytes, the dead woman I found in the river at Deptford was an immigrant. A young woman, possibly fro
m somewhere in the Middle East or Asia.’

  Dana spotted a door and made for it. ‘And you’re thinking she was part of this people-trafficking operation you think is going on up the Thames?’

  ‘It’s possible, isn’t it?’

  She made it to the lift lobby. Silence fell. ‘Perfectly possible. But still quite a stretch at this stage.’

  ‘I know that. But do you remember that DI Joesbury and I were involved in an arrest last October? A young woman called Nadia Safi, who was entering the country illegally? She was picked up in the company of three men with a history of people-trafficking. They’re all in the Scrubs right now.’

  Suddenly Dana was more interested. ‘And the woman?’

  ‘This is where it gets interesting. I’ve just left the hostel where she lived for a few weeks, but as nothing really traumatic had happened to her – well, not that she was admitting to – she was sent to a detention centre in Kent. I just called them. They were cagey about giving me details, but once I started talking about warrants, they did admit that someone had sponsored her.’

  ‘To do what? Run the London Marathon?’

  ‘Illegal immigrants can be released into the care of others, for a limited time, as long as they prove they have the means to look after them and agree to put them on a plane home at the end of the given period. This bloke turned up, claiming to be a relative of Nadia’s and agreeing to look after her for a couple of weeks and then take her to the airport. He did. He had photographs of the two of them together, including at the airport, and a receipt for her plane ticket back to Iran, which is where he claimed she came from. Trouble is, she never boarded the plane.’

  ‘It was a set-up?’

  ‘Probably. But he’s claiming ignorance. Says he has no idea where his wife’s second cousin is, and the Border Agency have no means of proving otherwise. It seems to me someone went to a lot of trouble to keep her in the country. So why is she worth so much and to whom?’

  ‘You think she was destined for the same place as the girl you pursued on Friday night?’ said Dana.

  ‘Two gangs smuggling young women up the Thames,’ said Lacey. ‘How likely does that seem?’

  ‘Not very.’

  ‘So I’m thinking we need to find this Nadia.’

  ‘Probably easier said than done if she’s somewhere in London’s underbelly, but I’ll get people looking into it tomorrow. Thank you, Lacey, that is actually very helpful.’

  ‘There’s something else.’

  Dana smiled to herself. ‘I’m all ears.’

  ‘The same day I found the body, last Thursday, I was talking to Sergeant Wilson – you know?’

  ‘Uncle Fred, I know.’

  ‘And he mentioned finding a young woman’s body about a year ago.’

  ‘Lots of women end up in the Thames, Lacey.’

  ‘I know, but what if that’s the problem? What if, because there are so many, we don’t see the connections when they’re there?’

  ‘The connection being . . .?’

  ‘Young, female, illegal immigrants who are murdered. Dana, what if there are more of them?’

  37

  Lacey

  WHAT IF THERE are more of them?

  In the last five years, 415 bodies had been pulled from the tidal Thames and taken to the shallow bath not far from where Lacey was sitting. Typing ‘unidentified’ into the search facility soon reduced the 415 cases down to just thirty-five. Thirty-five people who’d been pulled from the river in the last five years remained unidentified. She only needed the women. She ran another search and the thirty-five reduced to fourteen.

  But God, it was hard to concentrate. The heatwave was showing no sign of abating and Wapping police station was an old building, in which air-conditioning meant opening a window or turning on a fan. She stood up, wafted the open neck of her shirt, retied her ponytail and sat down again.

  According to the post-mortem reports, four of the women had been over fifty, taking the group down to ten. Two of the ten were of African or Caribbean origin, one was Oriental.

  Seven left, thought Lacey. What else? She got up, left the room and found herself heading for the jetty that took her down to the water. One of the unit’s fast-response boats had just left its mooring and was skimming over the water like a dragonfly. Lacey watched as the RIB followed the course of the river. The RIBs had a top speed of 45 knots. It wouldn’t take long for it to reach the lowest curve of the river where Deptford Creek emerged and a body, long since hidden, had finally found the surface again.

  And that was the next search: length of time in the river. Her corpse had been in the water for several months, according to the pathologist.

  Back inside, she ran another search, this time ruling out bodies that had been found quickly after being immersed. Three of them had been pulled out of the water after two weeks or less. That left four.

  Four unknown young women who’d spent some months in the water before floating up to be found.

  Found where?

  Going back the furthest in time, to four and a quarter years earlier, Jane Doe 645/01 had been spotted by anglers and pulled out of the water near Putney. That felt too far west. Jane Doe 322/92 had been found two years earlier beneath Pimlico Bridge and was probably the body Sergeant Wilson had referred to. Was Pimlico still too far west? Possibly.

  The third on the list had been pulled out at Limehouse ten months ago, making her a possibility. The fourth had been found two months ago near the entrance to the South Dock Marina.

  So she was left with two. Lacey opened the file reports on each to see if there was anything else she could learn. The Limehouse lady had been in the water several months. Soft tissue was almost completely gone but her skeleton had undergone minimal damage. The woman from the marina, similarly, had very little soft tissue but a skeleton that was largely intact. She wrote their case numbers on a Post-it note.

  Together with the one she’d found, that gave her three young, unidentified Caucasian women who’d been in the water for some months but whose skeletons displayed little damage. Neither of the two she’d just found had been recovered with clothing of any kind, but that was to be expected. Clothes disappeared very quickly in moving water.

  A voice behind her made her jump. ‘Haven’t you finished for the night?’ Sergeant Buckle was standing by her desk.

  ‘Yeah, I’m just going.’ As Lacey logged out of the programme, Buckle wandered over to a filing cabinet in the corner.

  ‘Sarge,’ she said, ‘where do we keep the pictures of dead bodies?’

  Buckle took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes before replacing them. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘The files on the bodies we pull out of the river. I know we have basic details on the system but I was wondering about photographs, the actual reports made out at the time.’

  ‘Didn’t have you down as the ghoulish type, Lacey.’

  ‘What if that woman we found last week wasn’t the only one?’

  Buckle’s eyebrows appeared over the top rim of his glasses. He folded his arms and waited.

  ‘I’ve been searching through the system,’ she admitted. ‘I was looking for similar cases and it’s just possible I’ve found two.’

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘Not long at all. Ten months and two months.’

  ‘Young women, unidentified?’

  ‘Caucasian, been in the water long enough for soft tissue to have gone, but skeletons largely intact.’

  Buckle stood up. ‘Come on,’ he told her.

  Lacey followed Buckle out of the room and into another, where three sergeants had their desks. Buckle took keys from his own desk and unlocked a filing cabinet against one wall. Lacey handed over the Post-it note with the case numbers and waited. There were footsteps outside the door and then both Fred Wilson and Finn Turner came in.

  ‘Nobody got homes to go to?’ asked Wilson.

  ‘Nancy Drew here has a hunch she wants to follow up.’ Buckle held out a file and c
arried on looking, leaving her to explain.

  ‘Probably just being daft,’ she said. ‘But I was thinking about what you said the other day, about how you found a young woman in the river who was never identified.’

  ‘I imagine there are a whole load of blokes found in the river who are never identified,’ said Turner. ‘Or are they not important?’

  ‘Now, now, children. Here we go.’ Buckle carried two files across to the nearest free desk and put them down. He opened one, Lacey the other.

  ‘Oh, nice.’ Turner caught a glimpse of the photograph clipped to the inside cover of Lacey’s file.

  ‘Looks a bit like you first thing in the morning,’ said Wilson.

  ‘Sarge, I told you, that was our secret.’

  ‘My team found this one.’ Buckle was flicking through the Limehouse lady’s file. ‘I’ve got no real recollection, but I have processed a few in my time here. Some superficial damage, it says, dents in the skull, a couple of fingers missing.’

  ‘How did you find her?’ asked Lacey. ‘Where was she, exactly?’

  ‘Between the river wall and the piling of an old pier.’ Buckle stared at the report and the photograph for a few seconds longer. ‘She’d got trapped there as the tide went out.’

  Lacey was looking through the second file. The body had been found floating around in rubbish that collected near a moored fuel station, spotted by a yachtsman who’d gone out to fuel up early in the morning. It was more badly damaged than the one in Limehouse. One hand was missing, and several ribs broken.

  ‘Long dark hair.’ Turner had been reading over Lacey’s shoulder.

  Lacey was looking at the photograph. ‘What’s that?’ She let a finger hover above the woman’s left ankle.

  ‘Hard to say,’ said Buckle. ‘Could be a broken bone, bit of rubbish.’

  ‘That’s a piece of fabric,’ said Lacey. ‘Look at the frayed edge. In fact, I’d go as far as to say it’s linen.’