A Dark and Twisted Tide

by Sharon Bolton

  ‘I’ll assume you didn’t intend that to sound as obscene as it did. How do you think they’re getting on?’

  Turner handed over the binoculars he’d forcibly removed from her twenty minutes earlier, when she hadn’t been able to take her eyes away from the operation half a mile up-stream. She adjusted the focus and fixed them on Sergeant Wilson’s Targa, the lead boat in the operation. It was directly in the middle of the channel, feet away from the lead dive boat. Tulloch and Chief Inspector Cook were in the cockpit, Wilson on the fly bridge.

  On the dive boat she could see the skipper, the sergeant in charge of the dive and other team members milling around. One officer, wearing the customary black diving suit, was getting ready to go down, his orange, spaceman-like helmet on the deck close by. He was being hooked up to the multicoloured air-supply tube and to the harness that would keep him anchored to the boat all the time he was below.

  Turner spoke, making her jump. ‘So where do we think these women are coming from? Middle East covers a big area.’

  Lacey bit back her irritation. She didn’t want to talk. She wanted to watch and worry. ‘Could be bigger than that. According to the staff at the hostel I went to, some of the people we see trafficked could have come here legally. We could be talking about any of the poorer countries in the European Union. Other parts of Eastern Europe. They also talked about a big influx of people from the Stans. You know, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan.’

  ‘And they’re being brought here for what? The sex trade?’

  Lacey put the binoculars back to her eyes. ‘Probably. Although the Border Agency said we shouldn’t rule out organ-trafficking. It’s very rare in the UK, but not unheard of.’

  ‘Jeez, what sort of organs?’ Turner was actually looking down at his genitals.

  ‘Nearly always the kidneys. People can manage with only one, so no messy dead bodies to deal with.’

  ‘Yeah, but we do have messy dead bodies, floating about all over the place, so it can’t be about kidneys.’ Turner was looking smug.

  ‘Unless they took both.’ Lacey looked at her watch. The oper ation was planned to last for six hours. Given that rainfall had been unusually low throughout the Thames catchment for three weeks now, water levels in the river were as low as they were ever likely to get. ‘If there ever were a good time for such a foolhardy operation, it would be today,’ David Cook had told them during the briefing earlier. He hadn’t tried to hide that he was glaring at her specifically.

  ‘How will they do it?’ asked Dana.

  ‘Basically, in circles,’ Cook told her. ‘You see that yellow buoy?’

  Dana turned to the buoy close to the adjacent dive boat.

  ‘And the other two. Both next to dive boats?’

  Dana looked and nodded.

  ‘Keep watching – any second now you’ll see a diver go down below each of them,’ said Cook. ‘The buoys are weighted to the bottom with a straight line coming up to the surface. The weight marks the starting point. The divers will swim around the weight at a two-metre distance. When they complete the circle, they’ll move away and swim around it again at a four-metre distance, gradually widening out until the three of them are practically touching each other. That way, we’ll cover the whole area before we’re done.’

  ‘Is it dangerous?’

  Cook shook his head. ‘They need to know what they’re doing, but I’m not unduly worried about safety, not on a day like this.’

  Dana looked up at the sky. The day seemed fractionally cooler than they’d all grown used to. ‘What sort of depth are we talking about?’

  ‘About seven metres in the middle. Depth’s not the problem here so much as the fast movement of the water and the visibility.’

  ‘Visibility being?’

  ‘With the naked eye, zero. With strong searchlights they’ll be able to see a few inches. Largely they’re working on feel. I don’t envy them. You never know what you’re going to touch next.’

  Dana looked over the side. Seven metres wasn’t much deeper than an Olympic diving pool, and yet for well over a thousand years people had lived and worked on this river. There could be anything beneath them.

  ‘Ma’am, we’ve got the visual link up and running. Do you want to come and see?’

  At the chart table in the cabin, a young constable sat in front of a computer monitor. Dana stepped closer, conscious of Cook directly behind her. The screen showed swirling shapes of a green so deep it was almost black, occasionally interspersed with pinpoints of razor-sharp light.

  ‘Does one of the divers have a camera?’ she asked.

  Cook leaned closer. ‘These pictures are coming from the RV. Remote-controlled vessel. Bit like a mini submarine. Darren here is controlling it.’

  The young constable’s gaze never left the screen.

  ‘On the surface those torch beams will stretch a hundred metres,’ said Cook. ‘Down there, less than one.’

  Dana watched the dull glow of the torch beam. Particles of sand and grit floated across the screen, giving the impression that the RV was moving through soup. It was very close to the river bed. Shapes emerged from the gloom, vague and indistinct. Intermittently, a diver’s gloved hands came into view, creeping hesitantly along the bottom like a slow-moving river creature. Every time he touched something, a fine spray of silt sprang upwards, almost destroying what little visibility there’d been.

  ‘What’s down there?’ Dana muttered, not really intending that anyone would answer.

  ‘Nobody knows for sure,’ Cook told her. ‘Lot of building material – bricks, stones, stuff that’s fallen off bridges or riverside buildings over the years. Anything heavy that’s fallen off a boat. Any amount of stuff people have deliberately tried to get rid of. Unless it runs dry, we’ll never know. Even if we invent lights powerful enough to be able to see, most stuff will be covered in silt.’

  ‘So even if there are more bodies down there, the divers could swim straight over them and never know.’

  ‘Well, I like to think they won’t be that easily fooled. But it always was a long shot, you know that.’

  ‘I do.’ Dana looked down-river towards Lacey’s boat. A couple of times during the last half-hour she’d seen the glint of binoculars. It seemed safe to conclude that Lacey was as nervous as she was. Lacey, though, wouldn’t be the one to carry the can when it all went wrong.

  ‘What are you hoping to see down there?’ asked Turner, coming up beside Lacey on deck. She’d been leaning against the guardrail, staring down into the depths. River traffic had eased and the crew had taken a short break. Lacey took the coffee Turner was holding out to her.

  ‘You look like one of the legendary mariners of old,’ he told her.

  ‘Under the spell of a mermaid? Being lured to a watery grave by the siren sound of her song?’

  He caught her mood and went along with it. ‘I think women were largely immune to the magic of the mermaid.’

  ‘Let’s hope so.’ Lacey straightened up and followed Turner back to the cockpit just as Buckle was wiping ketchup from his mouth.

  ‘Another coffee, Sarge?’ offered Turner.

  ‘Aye, go on. You two realize we’re going to take a whole load of grief if that lot don’t find anything today, don’t you?’

  ‘The linen matched,’ said Lacey. ‘The sample we had in storage from a corpse retrieval two months ago was the same as the fabric wrapping the body we pulled out a week ago. That’s way beyond coincidence.’

  Neither man looked convinced.

  ‘The woman found at South Dock Marina was likely to have been an illegal immigrant,’ she tried again.

  The other two exchanged a sceptical look.

  ‘I don’t flatter myself they’re doing this to keep me happy.’ She nodded towards the three boats at the centre of the operation. ‘How much does an operation like this cost?’

  ‘I dread to think,’ said Buckle.

  ‘So Mr Cook and DI Tulloch would never have authorized it if they didn
’t think we’d find something.’

  ‘It’s a massive river, Lacey. We’re searching a fraction of it. There could be a dozen down there and we might never find them. What are the chances, realistically?’

  Lacey closed her eyes, feeling her face tighten. The chances were low to non-existent, everyone knew that. She wouldn’t officially be held responsible if the search turned up nothing, but it would be pretty clear what everyone thought of her.

  46

  Nadia

  THE CUTTY SARK, one of the last great British sailing ships, always made Nadia think of a tethered goddess, or a magnificent bird with its wings clipped. She liked to close her eyes when she was in its vicinity and imagine it in full sail, cutting through a rising storm, the scantily clad witch at its prow laughing in defiance of the weather. Instead, it was held captive in a dry dock, sails in storage, for tourists to crawl over.

  It was also very close to the river. From the tip of Greenwich Reach, the old ship could see all the way to the city in the west, to the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf directly ahead, and to the Millennium Dome in the east. In the sun, the Thames was gleaming blue. It was nothing more than a mirage, Nadia knew, a sleight of hand, the reflection of the sky. The sun had only to slink behind a cloud and the water would revert to its normal state of moving, greedy, liquid mud.

  Fazil was sitting on the edge of one of the concrete flower-beds. Nadia pulled her scarf up around her head, hiding the sides of her face. She kept her eyes down until she drew close.

  ‘Uncle.’

  It was a courtesy title. Fazil was a distant relative, hardly family at all, but older than she. He wasted no time, pushing a folded sheet of paper into her hand. ‘The police are looking for you. What have you done?’

  Nadia opened it to see her own picture. She had to stop herself looking round, as though even here, already, there would be people pointing.

  ‘We printed it off the police website,’ Fazil was saying. ‘Your picture is everywhere. I can’t protect you from the police. Why are they looking for you?’

  The police would arrest her. Send her home. Or back to the house on the river.

  ‘I don’t know. I swear. I’ve done nothing wrong.’

  He leaned closer. He smelled of mint and tobacco. ‘You think they care? Just being here is wrong to them.’

  He was holding out a plastic carrier bag. ‘Jaamil sent you this,’ he said. ‘It’s not easy for us to help you.’

  Nadia took the bag. ‘I’m very grateful.’

  ‘Did you bring the money?’

  Nadia handed over banknotes. Fazil counted them twice. ‘Not as much this week.’

  ‘I broke a plate. I had to replace it.’

  He nudged the carrier bag, causing the plastic to rustle against his hand. ‘Straight away,’ he said, pointing to a door some twenty yards away. ‘Or I won’t be responsible. I’ll be here next week.’

  Nadia said goodbye and walked over to the ladies’ lavatory. Five minutes later, a burka-clad woman, her face entirely covered, emerged. She passed briefly through the evening crowds and disappeared.

  47

  Lacey

  IN HER BEDROOM cabin, Lacey changed into shorts and a T-shirt, then pulled her hair free from its pins. She found sneakers and climbed back up top. Ray was in the yard, chatting to one of the other boat owners. She could hear Eileen clattering about below. Good, she really didn’t want to talk.

  ‘It’s not over,’ Tulloch had told her, as the search had finally been called off and she and the MIT had said their goodbyes. ‘The pregnancy gives us a whole new lead. If she was treated in this country, she’s traceable.’

  The water was high, lapping against the hull of Lacey’s boat, gleaming an uncharacteristic blue beneath the evening sky. A family of swans sailed elegantly around the Theatre Arm. The younger ones had just a trace left of the grey plumage of cygnets. Lacey reached into the sealed box where she kept dried bread and biscuits and threw a handful overboard.

  The woman’s pregnancy wouldn’t help. The chances of an illegal immigrant seeking medical attention early in her pregnancy were slim to non-existent. And, failed search aside, vulnerable young women were still being smuggled up the Thames, probably before being sold into modern-day slavery. Lacey had met such women in the past, girls who were a very long way from home, who quickly became dependent upon alcohol or drugs, living from one fix to the next, willing to do anything to stave off the beatings, to bring on oblivion. She’d joined the police force to help such women. And yet, on the brink of a transfer into one of the specialist units set up to deal with victims of rape and abuse, she’d left CID, going back into uniform, knowing that all her colleagues, however sympathetic they might be, thought she’d wimped out.

  Shit, she had wimped out.

  She got up, climbed down the steps at the back of her boat and clambered into the canoe. The swans were still hanging around and as she pushed away they followed her, like some sort of queenly escort, down the water. At the end of the Theatre Arm her little flotilla turned left into the creek. Lacey paddled past Skillions, lifting her hand to Madge and Marlene on deck. Madge raised her phone and appeared to be taking a photograph of Lacey and the swans.

  She’d wimped out. Trouble was, turning her back on the difficult stuff hadn’t helped at all. It had just come looking for her again.

  Women were being brought up the Thames and kept somewhere along its banks. Somewhere derelict, where no one would think to look. Somewhere without power, water or comfort of any kind. They’d be locked up, twenty-four hours a day, hot, starving and terrified. And this misery was probably within a mile of where she was right now.

  The flow of water was pushing her close to the abandoned dredger on the right bank. She raised the paddle and reached out to fend it off. Touching the cold, slimy hull, she heard something move inside.

  The water whisked her past before she had time to think. She dug the paddle in and turned on the spot.

  The old ship had been abandoned years ago, presumably because the cost of moving it outweighed the inconvenience of having it moored alongside the gravel works. No one should be inside it.

  Somewhere derelict, where no one would think to look? Somewhere without power, water or comfort of any kind?

  She made for the bank and caught hold of a mooring ring to steady herself in the tidal flow. Tucked away between the dredger’s hull and the wall was a small boat, not much bigger than her canoe, but with an engine.

  Lacey moved closer. The boat seemed to have been used recently. No rainwater in the bottom. No rust on the metal fittings. The engine looked clean, there were even traces of oil. She looked up and saw a boarding ladder that had been hung over the side of the dredger to allow access to the deck.

  Someone was on board.

  For several seconds, Lacey sat thinking. Did she call it in and risk being labelled an attention-seeking drama queen, or check it out herself first? Either way was risky. Finding her phone, she tapped out a message to Ray:

  Checking the old dredger at Enfield gravel yard. Call out the cavalry if I don’t check in again in fifteen.

  She sent it and waited. Not for long.

  Fifteen and counting. Be bloody careful.

  Ray had her back. She tied her canoe alongside the motor boat and climbed up to the empty deck.

  Around 150 feet long, she assessed quickly, and 30 feet wide. She was at the stern. What was left of the crane was forward of the centre deck; the wheel house was at the far end, just behind the bow. Below her feet would be the hold, a vast storage space. If a large number of people were being held together, the hold would be the most convenient, if most uncomfortable place to keep them. To access it, she’d have to find a way below.

  She crept forward slowly, her sneakered feet making no sound on the steel deck, an odd feeling of unreality creeping over her. All around her, the evening was so normal. Deepening blue sky, traces of gold light, birds, voices, traffic, and yet below her feet an unknown environment.
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  Even up top, there were too many hiding places: several storage crates, behind the crane, inside the wheelhouse. The boat rocked against the enormous tyres that rimmed its hull and something moved below. Twelve minutes before the cavalry set off.

  No one hiding behind the crates, nor behind the crane, but discovering nothing unsettled her more. If she had to face someone, better to do so up here, where she had room to move, where escape was relatively simple. Once she went below, it would be another matter entirely.

  The wheelhouse, too, was empty. The iron steps that led below were to the port side of the cabin. This was where it got tricky. She hadn’t even brought a torch. All she had was the minuscule light on her mobile phone.

  Attention-seeking drama queen or reckless, maverick idiot? No-win situation.

  Lacey crept down the steps. The door at the bottom opened silently and through it she could see the cabin that served as galley and relaxation room for the crew. Plastic, padded seats around a Formica table. A blackened range cooker. Pans still hanging from hooks on the walls. Coke and beer cans on the floor. The cabin smelled of creek mud, of rotting vegetation, of bilges.

  Most of the interior of the ship, including the hold, lay behind her, towards the stern, but ahead of her, beneath the bow, was a door and she had no choice but to check that first.

  Nervously, not liking to move away from her exit, Lacey stepped past rotting charts and log books piled high on a table, past a mould-stained pin-up of a topless model with 1980s hair, past a pack of playing cards scattered over the floor. The door was oval-shaped, small and narrow. Lacey pushed at the handle and it opened noisily. She jumped, spinning on the spot, waiting for an answering sound: a cry for help, investigating footsteps. Her heart beat out the seconds as she waited. Ten minutes before Ray set off.

  The stench coming from behind the open door, the unmistakable mixture of harsh chemicals and organic material, told her she’d found the heads. She shone the thin light around to make sure. Two cubicles. No one hiding. Letting the door close softly, she moved back through the galley, past the steps and into the narrow, dark corridor that took her, inevitably, towards the hold.