A Dark and Twisted Tide

by Sharon Bolton

  The ceiling was lower here. There was a ventilation shaft only inches above her head. Cabins on either side, four in total. She walked forward, glancing to the right, to the left, seeing nothing. Eight minutes before Ray set off. A lot could happen in eight minutes.

  In the last cabin, something gleamed in the thin torch-beam. Torn, clear plastic. The wrapper from a pack of litre-sized bottles of water. Skin prickling with anticipation, she stepped into the cabin. Something about the air in here, whilst not fresh exactly, was different from that of the rest of the ship. A sleeping bag lay on the narrow berth. And there was a gym bag in the corner of the room, a huge torch by the bed.

  And something she recognized on the folded sweatshirt that was serving as a pillow. A pale-blue scrunchie. Hers. One of several she used to tie her hair back into a ponytail. Definitely hers – she remembered the way the seam had started to fray. Whoever was camping out here had been on her boat. Had helped himself to a very personal souvenir.

  Two thoughts, fighting for attention. The first – get out now. The second – too late.

  She spun round to see the dark silhouette of a man in the cabin doorway. A very large man.

  ‘I’m a police officer.’ The most aggressive, confident, assertive thing she could think of.

  ‘No shit,’ replied Joesbury.

  48

  Dana

  THE ROOM INTO which Dana and Anderson had been shown wasn’t quite a laboratory, nor yet an artist’s studio, but somewhere in between the two. Several computer monitors were on sleep mode and each displayed wallpaper that depicted the human head, slowly revolving. Images on the walls were likewise of the human head, some modern, some ancient.

  There were skulls in display cabinets, skulls on the worktop that ran two lengths of the room. There had even been a human skull on the coffee table in the reception area.

  Apart from Dana and Anderson, there were three other people in the room. The woman who’d met them at reception, who was also the director of the facility, and two men working at desktop computers.

  ‘Before we go any further, I would like to give you some idea of the limitations of the technique,’ the director began. ‘All too often people are disappointed because I can’t say, this is it, this is what she looked like.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Dana, although she wasn’t sure she did. She’d committed a significant part of the budget to the facial recon struction of the body Lacey had found in the river. If it took them no further forward . . .

  The other woman looked as though she rather doubted it, too. ‘What does work invariably well is when we have a suspected identity. If we have a photograph of someone who could have been the victim, the process of matching it to skeletal remains is relatively straightforward and conclusive. But that’s not the case here.’

  ‘It’s not,’ said Anderson. ‘We have absolutely no idea who she was.’

  ‘OK, so what we did with your subject,’ continued the director, ‘was first of all to carry out a full examination of the skeleton. We needed to be sure in our own minds that the details we’d been given in terms of sex, age and race were reasonably accurate.’

  ‘And were you?’ asked Anderson.

  ‘As far as age and sex are concerned, yes. Definitely a young female. Race is always a bit tricky, but taking the bone structure and the remaining hair into account, somewhere in the Middle East or South Asia seems the most likely.’

  She reached down and lifted a thermally controlled box from under the worktop. ‘This is your skull. We’ll be returning it to you now, there isn’t any more it can tell us.’

  Anderson took it and put it down softly by his side.

  ‘The first thing we do when attempting a reconstruction is to reattach the mandible to the skull,’ the director went on. ‘Then we clean it, and repair any visible damage with wax. We photograph each stage. Here you are.’

  She tapped some buttons on a keyboard. A second later, Dana was looking at the skull on the computer screen, cleaner and neater than she’d seen it previously.

  ‘At this point we make a cast that subsequently forms the basis of the reconstruction.’ The director flicked to a new screen that showed a clay-like substance being smoothed over the skull. ‘We build it up using data based on average tissue thickness for any given age, gender and racial group. In this case, we were particularly lucky that there was already some soft tissue remaining. This gave us much more to work with than we would otherwise have had. This next photograph shows you the pegs in place.’

  The image on the screen was now displaying several dozen small, thin tubes, a little like matchsticks, jutting out from the skull at intervals. Several where the lips would be, another at the nub of the chin, one on the tip of the nose, a line along the cheekbone.

  ‘So then you fill it in?’ asked Dana. ‘You just smooth clay along the skull until the pegs can’t be seen any more?’

  ‘Good God, no.’ The director looked shocked. ‘If we did that, the final bill would be a lot less, I promise you. We build the face up muscle by muscle. The thickness and length we make them depends upon the average data we have, the actual tissue sample we took and the small clues on the bones that tell us where muscle tissue was attached. That way, the face builds up slowly, but hopefully accurately. We insert eyes, attach ears and work on any indicated scars or abnormalities. The last thing we do is choose skin colour and attach hair. Are you ready to meet the lady you’ve been trying to help?’

  ‘We are indeed,’ said Dana, conscious of a nervous tickle in her stomach.

  The director took a large blue box from the worktop and carried it to the podium in the centre of the room. She placed it on top and unfastened the lid. The box’s sides came away separately and fell down to reveal the modelled head within. The sculpture was of the head and shoulders of a young woman with an emerald-green scarf around her black hair.

  Wow, thought Dana.

  ‘She was gorgeous,’ said Anderson.

  ‘Yes, I think she probably was,’ said the director.

  The sculpture’s face was oval, widening at the jawline and with a rounded, pronounced chin. Her nose was longer and wider at the tip than would normally be compatible with perfect beauty, but it was balanced by full lips and strong eyebrows. Her eyes were dark, kohl-rimmed with thick lashes.

  ‘Now you understand that a lot of subjective decisions led us here,’ said the director. ‘Based on the hair she could have been Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, or, coming further west, from Turkey, Morocco, even Greece, but something was whispering Persian to me.’

  ‘Modern-day Iran,’ said Dana.

  ‘Yes, or possibly Iraq, or one of the Stans. For one thing, the lower part of the face is quite pronounced – wider than you might see in India or Pakistan – and whilst the nose is notoriously difficult to reconstruct, there were indications that on this lady it was longer and wider towards the bottom than is average.’

  ‘Beautiful eyes,’ said Dana. ‘Not large, compared to some of her other features, but lovely all the same.’

  ‘Yes, almond shaped. You see it a lot in people from the East. And the eyes we can be reasonably confident about, because their shape is largely determined by the shape and slope of the socket. I’ve given her brown eyes, of course, because that’s far and away the most common colour in that part of the world.’

  ‘I feel as though we should give her a name,’ said Dana.

  ‘Yes, she rather had that effect on us too,’ said the director. ‘We’ve been calling her Sahar. It’s the Persian name for dawn, because that’s when you found her.’

  49

  Lacey

  LACEY STARED AT the man she loved, would always love, whatever he’d done. There was just enough light coming down the stairs for her to see him. He hadn’t shaved in days. His clothes looked as though they’d seen several days of wear.

  ‘I should arrest you,’ she told him.

  Joesbury’s eyebrow went up. ‘Try it,’ he countered. ‘
Might be fun.’

  Something about the half-twist of his lips hit her harder than anything. After everything he’d done, he could laugh at her.

  ‘I don’t know who you are any more.’

  ‘You’re putting us both at risk by being here,’ he said. ‘I need you to leave now and not come back. Promise me?’

  So cold. Had she fallen in love with a man who didn’t exist? ‘I think you lost the right to extract promises from me when you killed a man.’

  She could never look him in the eyes for long. Even here, when there was barely enough light to see them properly. Even here, where they were little more than a glint in the darkness. When Joesbury made a noise in the back of his throat, somewhere between a sigh and cough, and stepped towards her, she backed away, almost falling on to the bunk.

  ‘When I was on the brink of the worst thing that could happen to anyone,’ he said, ‘you asked me to trust you. Do you remember that?’

  Three months ago. A winter night. A bridge over the river. The man she adored on the point of despair. And he was asking if she remembered?

  ‘I couldn’t think straight. I didn’t know how I was going to make it through the next hour and you asked me to trust you.’

  Joesbury, collapsing in front of her, sobbing. Was that the sort of thing she could forget? Ever?

  ‘You gave me no reason, no hope, just demanded unconditional trust. Ringing any bells for you?’

  She snapped at him, ‘Of course I remember.’

  ‘Good. Then you’ll also remember that I did.’

  He had, too. Do you trust me or not? she’d said to him. Because if you do, you have to let me go.

  He’d let her go.

  ‘I still trust you. So I’m going to tell you what nobody else can know. Not even Dana.’

  That pounding noise might be her heart beating.

  ‘Police Constable Nathan Townsend is as alive as you and me. Probably with a much better chance than either of us of staying that way, given the way you’re carrying on.’

  She’d heard the words, but the processing of them took a little longer. ‘What?’

  ‘Alive and well. Or rather, alive with a very sore shoulder and seriously pissed off with me.’

  ‘You shot him.’

  ‘Yes, that I do admit. If I hadn’t shot him, someone else would have done and they’d probably have been aiming to do a lot more damage. I shot the daft git to keep him alive, although I doubt he’ll see it that way.’

  ‘He’s alive?’

  Something in Joesbury’s face softened. ‘Alive and under guard at a convalescent home somewhere in Northumbria. Whilst the people I’m investigating think I’m a cop killer, they’re more inclined to believe I’m on their side. And for the time being, it’s very important they think that.’

  It couldn’t be true. She could not let herself hope. ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Has there been a funeral? Have you seen his weeping mother on television? Has there even been anything on the frigging news?’

  ‘You haven’t killed anyone?’ Shit, that was hope, wasn’t it? You just couldn’t keep it down for long.

  Joesbury sighed. ‘I haven’t killed anyone. I’m an undercover police officer on an excruciatingly difficult job and starting to feel a bit sore that the women in my life can give up on me so easily.’

  She sank down, the fabric of his sleeping bag smooth and slippery beneath her bare thighs. At her surrender, something in Joesbury’s stance seemed to relax. There was a softening, a warming about him.

  ‘I’ve imagined you many times in my bedroom. Never quite like this.’

  The cabin wasn’t much more than six feet long. Could he even stretch out his legs? ‘You’re actually living here?’

  When he sat down beside her, she took his hand, holding it tight between both of hers.

  ‘The people I’m dealing with need to believe I’m on the run,’ he said. ‘On the other hand, I can’t leave London and lose the chance of finding out what they’re up to. I need to lie low. I thought about this place the other night when I was with you.’

  She could smell sweat on him. Unwashed clothes. She thought about the cavernous space all around them, the darkness, the smell. ‘All this time, you’ve been just across the creek?’

  Those turquoise eyes were warm now. Even in the dark of the cabin, she knew it. ‘I creep on deck when it gets dark,’ he said. ‘Look for the lights on your boat.’

  Something was going to happen. Something she’d dreamed about so many times. Was she ready for it?

  ‘I should go.’ That was nerves talking. Leaving was the last thing she wanted to do.

  ‘You should.’ He ran a finger up the bare skin of her arm.

  ‘I’m putting you in danger.’

  ‘From the moment I first laid eyes on you.’ The finger had reached her neck. His hand cupped the back of her head.

  ‘Anyone could see my canoe outside.’

  His face was very close now. ‘Disaster,’ he said.

  She closed her eyes. So many times, alone in the dark, she’d imagined Joesbury’s lips on hers. It had never been like this. Who would have thought he’d be so gentle, that his lips would stroke hers so softly, brushing against first one and then the other? She’d imagined his hands pushing her roughly against a wall, his body heavy, crushing hers; never that his fingers would twist round in her hair, pulling her closer, or that the tips of his fingernails would feel so smooth running up her back.

  ‘Lacey!’ Someone was banging on the hull. ‘Lacey! Are you in there!’

  Joesbury was on his feet, out of the cabin. Needing a second longer to get her head together, Lacey followed him.

  ‘It’s Ray,’ she whispered. ‘I told him where I was going.’

  Joesbury’s shoulders dropped as the tension left his body. He adjusted the waistband of his jeans and sighed. Then he shook his head. ‘Better go call off the dogs,’ he told her.

  She pushed past him, ran up the stairs and across the deck. Ray was steering his way around the stern of the dredger. Another couple of seconds and he’d see Joesbury’s boat.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she called down. ‘False alarm. Sorry.’

  Saying nothing, Ray gave her a wave and turned his boat around.

  Joesbury was on the steps, just out of sight. She ducked down to join him.

  ‘There’s something I need to ask you. That night you stayed over, you left a heart on the table. That was you, wasn’t it?’

  Joesbury’s eyes narrowed. ‘I couldn’t find a pen. Why, who else—’

  ‘Sshh. Did you come back the next day and leave another one?’

  Bewildered was quite a good look for him. He looked younger, rather cute, when he was baffled. ‘I haven’t been back since. It’s too risky for both of us. What’s going on?’

  She stepped down until their faces were level and kissed him, lingering against the skin of his face for just a second longer than felt wise. ‘I have to go. Can I at least phone you?’

  He was holding her again. ‘Phone calls leave a trace. Too risky.’

  She sighed, could almost see her breath wrapping itself around his neck. ‘Any chance this will be over soon?’

  ‘God, I hope so.’

  If she kissed him again, she’d never stop. Lacey turned, ran up the steps and across the deck. As she climbed over the side and back down to her canoe, she looked back. The deck of the old ship was empty.

  50

  Lacey

  AS THE SUN disappeared behind the old mill building and the golden light started to fade, Lacey was sitting on the deck of Madge and Marlene’s naval ship at Skillions, thinking about toy boats, shapes made out of pebbles and glass and whether she’d boxed herself into an untenable corner by not mentioning them sooner.

  And yet there was no way of telling Tulloch about them now without explaining why she’d kept quiet for so long. I’m going to tell you what no one else can know. Not even Dana.

  Three toy boats now. One yellow, one
blue, one red. What the hell was all that about? She took another sip of the gin mojito she’d been offered on arrival, which was definitely a lot stronger than she’d been promised. Ahead, she could see the Theatre Arm, her own boat rocking against its moorings. If she turned her head to the right, which she was trying not to do every couple of seconds, she could see the dredger. And you know what? She was not going to worry about toy boats. She was not going to sweat the small stuff. Not tonight.

  ‘What are you doing tomorrow, Lacey? Would you like to come and have lunch with Alex and me?’

  Lacey turned to smile at the old lady by her side. Just minutes after she’d got back from the dredger, Thessa had pitched up in her small, pretty motor boat, hammering on the side of Lacey’s yacht, insisting they’d both been invited to a party by the skanky old lesbians and there was no way she was going alone. When she’d run out of arguments, Lacey had locked up her boat and climbed down. The two of them had motored across and then Thessa had been hauled aboard by means of a harness and pulley, with every appearance of having done it many times before. Madge and Marlene had even produced a wheelchair for her.

  The party was small but noisy. Around two dozen people, all of whom seemed to work in the theatre, and many of whom looked as though they’d come straight from a performance. Also, to Lacey’s surprise, Eileen, Ray’s wife. There was no sign of Ray. A little further along the deck, a wind-up gramophone was playing Buddy Holly tracks and a small, thin person of indeterminate sex was swaying to the music.

  And Thessa had just invited her to lunch.

  ‘That’s really kind,’ she said, ‘but tomorrow I have to be on a train to Durham.’

  ‘Long trip. I expect that takes most of the day. Or do you stay over?’

  ‘No, I always come back the same day. Four hours there, four hours back, one hour in the visitors’ suite.’

  She waited for the question that didn’t come. Thessa wasn’t entirely lacking in tact.