Strange Tide

by Christopher Fowler

  The shore of the Thames was inaccessible, sealed off by the glass edifice on one side and a tiny old stone house on the other. A wooden walkway led out to the T-shaped Tower Millennium Pier. The narrow gap beside the house – the only route of access – had been blocked by a two-metre-tall gate of polished black steel.

  But if you could still reach the steps, at the bottom you would find something unexpected; along with the green and white stones, pink chunks of pottery, cream clay pipes, weathered groynes, half-buried tyres and decayed chunks of wood there was sand – all that remained of Tower Hill Pleasure Beach, once London’s only seaside resort.

  In 1934 King George V promised the children of London that they could have ‘free access forever’ to this specially constructed sandy foreshore, and over the next five years half a million people swam and sunbathed among the vendors and entertainers, hiring threepenny rowing boats to go under Tower Bridge and back. On sunny days you could almost hear the echoes of their laughter.

  It was far too early on Monday morning, and a pale grey mist like a sea-fret had yet to dissipate from the shore. John May and Dan Banbury passed through the now-unlocked gate and stood at the top of the stone stairway looking down. A plastic marker topped with a small green pennant indicated the spot they were looking for. The police had been careful not to draw attention to the site. There was a constable on guard somewhere; they couldn’t see him but every few minutes his headset crackled.

  ‘I still can’t find her,’ said May, shielding his eyes. Watery sunlight was starting to spread out through the mist.

  ‘Let’s get closer. I’ve got what I need from here.’ Banbury unclipped his camera and folded up the tripod. The steps were slippery with grass-green algae. May steadied himself against the wall as they descended.

  ‘Keep to the stones,’ Banbury instructed. ‘Give me a six-metre perimeter, come in close behind me and try not to disturb anything. We haven’t got long. The tide’s on the turn. It’s a good job we haven’t got your partner with us. He’d be tromping all over the place and showing off his sandcastle-building skills by now.’

  The constable who had placed the pennant had reached the spot by stepping on a series of slippery stones in shallow water, but these were already submerged. May was wearing expensive handmade shoes from Church’s – his one great luxury in life – and he wasn’t at all happy about getting them wet.

  From here he could just about make out the body. Clad in dark fabrics, it was small and folded into a foetal position, and looked like nothing more than a bundle of wet rags.

  Banbury was nimble for his size and reached her first. ‘She was spotted by someone on a river bus,’ he said.

  ‘Must have had good eyesight.’

  ‘Camera viewfinder. He was enlarging the shot. Captain called the MPU.’

  The Marine Policing Unit took care of forty-seven miles of the river between Hampton Court and Dartford, and had been tackling crime on the Thames for well over two centuries. It had nearly eighty working officers, but few of the city’s employees were even aware that the unit existed.

  ‘How come they’re not handling this?’ May waited for Dan to finish photographing before he got closer to the corpse, then knelt beside it.

  ‘The foreshore here is in dispute,’ Dan explained. ‘City of London says it’s theirs. The MPU doesn’t agree but there’s not a lot that they can do about it.’

  May looked around. ‘I remember Arthur telling me he used to make pocket money renting out deckchairs down here.’

  ‘What, in the thirties? Blimey, how old is he?’

  ‘The beach didn’t close until 1971, just as the river finally got clean,’ said May, checking about for access. The beach felt oddly claustrophobic at the tide level, with the pier, the walkway and the stone wall hemming them into a small shadow-filled rectangle of shore. He looked up at the embankment offices above, but their opaque windows revealed no interior life. ‘In theory there’s still nothing to stop you from swimming here,’ he said, ‘but the beach is technically shut. Most people wouldn’t dream of doing it, anyway.’

  ‘Yeah, I had a mate who fell in and had to have his stomach pumped. I say “fell in” – he got chucked off the pier in a Hawaiian skirt and a pair of coconuts. Stag do.’

  ‘He’s lucky he lived. Once you get out there the riptides are pretty treacherous.’ A tug passed them, giving a mournful hoot.

  ‘Besides, hell, look at it,’ said Banbury. ‘It might have been all right before they built the pier, when it still had a decent view of Tower Bridge, but now it’s all boxed in by supports. You wouldn’t if you had any sense, would you? OK, it looks like she’s in one piece. I want to try and move her.’

  Banbury pulled out his pocket recorder and crouched down. ‘We’ve got a female Caucasian aged around twenty-four, brown eyes, black hair, around five foot two, about a hundred and fifteen pounds. Two tattoos on the backs of the legs, a little man—’

  ‘That’s Gautama Buddha, the Enlightened One,’ said May. ‘The other one’s Parvati, the Indian goddess of love and devotion.’

  ‘Thank you, Einstein – and a possible TBI to the back of the skull. There’s a bruise behind the left ear and the skin’s broken.’

  ‘A contusion like that could have caused a haematoma.’ May hitched his trousers and leaned forward to examine the wound. He’d seen something like it before, usually on gang members who’d been in confrontations. It looked as if she had been jabbed with a spike, something blunt-sided but sharp at the tip. Teen gangs kept screwdrivers on them, but the bruising and force from this suggested the weapon was bigger.

  ‘Giles is your man for the effects of a knock on the head. What have we here? Her hand’s held down by something.’ Banbury carefully pulled back a waterlogged cardigan sleeve and turned a pale left wrist with his gloved forefinger, pointing it out to May. A length of thick silver chain had been pulled around it and passed through a rusty iron ring embedded in a rough circle of stone, which was in turn partially buried in the sand.

  A chill wind whipped along the foreshore. Dan rocked back on his heels and took more shots. ‘Quite a distinctive chain,’ he said. ‘Hallmarked, with a crescent moon at one end. Did the Met officers even see this? They couldn’t have or they’d have gone for it like a rat up a drain. Stands to reason, a nice juicy homicide.’

  ‘Show some respect, Dan.’

  ‘Sorry, John, no disrespect intended.’ Banbury took a plastic spatula from his portable kit and began probing beneath the chain. The tide bloomed around the corpse’s free arm, momentarily restoring it to life.

  Considering the location, it was an oddly lonely spot. ‘I’m not sure I can get this off.’ Banbury raised the links of the chain with his forefinger.

  ‘There’s a trick to it,’ said May. ‘I used to have one when I was younger. One of the links is on a spring. If you’re not familiar with this type of chain you’ll never get it off.’ He pushed on the links, found the one that opened, removed the chain and handed it to Banbury for bagging. ‘It should be traceable,’ he said. ‘Funny thing to use. Strong, though. I suppose it came readily to hand.’

  At moments like this, Banbury was grateful for being with the PCU. He wouldn’t have been allowed to touch the chain under regular City of London jurisdiction. The site would have been swarming with technicians, officers and various surplus jobsworths building timelines and photographic records. CoL had a court history of prosecutors accusing officers, so every stage had to be documented in great detail. Against this was the need to act fast. Banbury could load stats online with the contents of his case, which removed the need for couriers. He had a grey plastic body tray, a laptop and a fold-up forensics tent so it was possible to carry out his report without anyone on the shore spotting any activity, not that they could see much down here. The one thing he hadn’t allowed for was the unimpeded wind.

  May must have been thinking along the same lines. ‘If she was here for a while, why didn’t anyone notice her?’

&n
bsp; ‘She’d be pretty invisible from up there,’ Banbury answered, studying their surroundings. Above, an office worker stopped at the railings and looked down, but only for a moment, as if realizing that his non-productive time was being wasted.

  ‘I’ll try the river-facing offices, see if there was anyone working overnight.’

  ‘Look at her, John, she’s dressed in green, grey and brown. She blends in with her surroundings. Nobody comes down to any part of the shore when it’s cold; why would they? Besides, they can’t even get to this part any more. Look at what we had to go through. Public thoroughfare, my arse. The only other way you can access the old beach is by passing through one of the corporate reception areas and subjecting yourself to a grilling by a headset-chimp.’

  ‘High and low tides must vary a lot at this time of the year,’ said May, squinting up. A few rags of mist were still clinging to the pier stanchions. ‘They should give you a rough time of death. What was holding her in place?’

  ‘Well, this is weird,’ said Banbury, digging the sand away. ‘Come a bit closer.’ May found himself looking at the stone stump, about a foot in diameter, into which a rusty iron ring was embedded. ‘It’s the top of an old stanchion, probably used to tie up boats, late 1940s, early 1950s.’

  ‘How can you tell the period?’ May asked.

  ‘Post-war concrete.’ The CSM held up a fragment of wet cement and rubbed it in his fingers, watching it dissolve. ‘The good stuff was in short supply so they bulked it up with pebbles and shale. You don’t think she was chained here alive, do you?’

  ‘God, I hope not. I wouldn’t want to die by ingesting this stuff.’

  ‘Our noble Mayor says the Thames is clean now.’

  ‘I think it’s safe to say that drowning in it would still be a fairly unpleasant experience. What a lonely, miserable death.’ May frowned. The ghost of an idea had formed.

  Banbury fought the breeze and erected the tent. ‘If I get this logged in the next half-hour you can whip her straight over to Giles and he can run tests on her lungs.’

  ‘Punishment.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Isn’t that what it feels like to you?’ May pointed at the position of the body. ‘Chaining someone to a post in a public place and letting them die? It’s almost a tradition in this part of the city. Smithfield is just behind us. Thousands died there. Like putting someone in the stocks.’

  ‘You’re talking about centuries ago,’ said Banbury. ‘Don’t start sounding like Mr Bryant.’

  ‘Somebody has to, now that he’s not around.’ May rose unsteadily to his feet and stretched his tight spine. The November air was damp and cruel to older bones. ‘If she was still alive when she was chained up, why didn’t she cry out? You’d think somebody might have heard her.’

  ‘Why would they?’ Banbury wrestled with a telescopic leg. ‘It’s deserted around here after midnight, and if you go back a bit there’s the noise of all-night traffic on the A3211. Maybe she did scream and there was nobody to hear her.’ As if on cue, a shriek of laughter came from somewhere on the walkway – the sound of children was rare in this part of the city.

  ‘A good spot for a murder, if you can reach it.’ May studied the few boats that traversed the greenish-brown expanse ahead of him. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any CCTV on the river itself, or the foreshores. But there must be on Lower Thames Street and at the entrances to the underpasses. Know what I’d do if I wanted to kill someone here? Strangle them in the middle of the subway, out of the sight of cameras, lift the body over that steel gate – causing the contusion on the back of the head – then drag them down to the beach.’

  ‘Then you wouldn’t make a very good murderer,’ said Banbury. ‘Why not leave her in the subway? And you’re going to toss a dead weight over an eight-foot gate? Why go out of your way to make things complicated?’

  May shrugged. ‘You’re right, we’re missing something. After I’ve got her off to St Pancras, see what you can turn up in the way of video footage. Can you make—’ He stopped and turned. ‘Wait, that’s no good.’

  ‘What?’ Banbury rose and followed May’s eyeline.

  ‘I was going to say can you make casts, but there shouldn’t be anything to make a cast from.’ The sand had dried a little while the tide was out, but the high water table and the deep green shadows would ensure that it remained permanently damp, even in the height of summer. The same ancient mix of sand and clay had preserved the most unlikely items all along this part of the Thames, from the phallic silver brothel-brooches of Southwark’s whores to a single banana found in 1999, which had been discovered lying whole under the waterlogged beach and dated back to 1560, a full century before the fruit was ever known to be exported to Britain.

  Banbury heard nothing more and looked up. ‘Sorry, John, not with you.’

  May pointed down at a faint wavering line of crescent indentations in the sand, leading from the embankment wall to the concrete stanchion. ‘You don’t think they could still be the remains of footprints?’ He tried to see where they ended.

  ‘Why would there be any prints at all?’ asked Banbury, checking his watch. ‘It’s past noon. The tide’s been in and gone out again.’

  May headed to the edge and bent down, placing his fingers in the water to feel its pressure against them. ‘Maybe there weren’t many waves last night. There’s no river traffic passing near here. The Tower’s restricted and boats can’t get in close because the pier’s in the way.’

  ‘But there’s still the current, John. I would have thought it would wash out most of the markings.’

  ‘The tidal flow must be less pronounced in this stretch. Look at the rise in the shoreline. There’s a hump left by the residue of the old Tower Beach.’ A row of seagulls regarded May insolently. One of them was pulling at something best left unexamined. ‘They didn’t take the sand away when they closed it, they just left it where it was, so the water washes around it. Those marks – OK, there are no details left but they’re definitely prints from a small shoe size.’

  ‘If they’re the remains of hers, where are his?’ asked Banbury. ‘How did he get her down here? I mean, seriously? It would be impossible. If she was already dead he would have had to drag her right across the forecourt to the offices, get her through the building and out of the back. Either that or over that gate beside the stone house. Come to think of it, if she was alive he’d have had the same problem.’ He stood and stretched his back. The cold river air was getting to him as well.

  May felt a chill. ‘The water at the front, the wall at the back, one set of prints, it doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘There’s something else about these prints,’ said Banbury. ‘The heavy indentation is the heel. They’re facing towards the waterline, as if she went down there alone.’

  May traced the route with his raised hand. ‘If she was alive he could have rendered her unconscious on the staircase and carried her out on to the strand.’

  ‘What, you think they had a fight on the embankment and he knocked her out by reaching around to the back of her head with something long and heavy? Without anyone seeing or hearing a thing? Even though it’s empty, this section of the river walk is still pretty exposed. There’s usually a bit of foot traffic nearby.’ Banbury turned and stared back at the green staves supporting the embankment like animal ribs. ‘You might be able to see it from the next reach.’

  ‘But not at night.’

  ‘Even so, you’d think someone would have noticed them.’ He took out a fresh packet of gloves and tore it open. ‘The last time I walked down this new stretch was after a mate’s birthday. I thought I’d take a look at the commemorative poppies in the Tower of London moat. It must have been around midnight. I don’t really remember, I wasn’t exactly sober.’

  ‘Why would you have come down this bit?’ asked May. ‘It doesn’t lead anywhere.’

  ‘Oh, I probably needed a wee. It certainly wasn’t for the view. Apart from the police launches there were only one or
two private vessels moored along the reaches of the river. Maybe she was already on the shore, and he came in by boat and surprised her.’

  ‘God, Dan, I hope there’s a simpler explanation than that.’ May sighed. ‘I wish Arthur was here.’ Working without his partner was like having his hands tied behind his back.

  Above them, an ambulance had arrived. As its crew disembarked, one of the EMTs came to the railing and called out, ‘How do we get down there?’

  ‘You have to go through the office building to your right,’ May shouted back. The pair stood beside the tent waiting for the emergency team. They might have been extras on location, waiting for the director to go for a take.

  ‘John, before they get here, can I ask you something?’ said Banbury, concerned.

  ‘If it’s about—’

  ‘You know who it’s about. Is he coming back?’

  ‘I don’t see how he can.’ May glanced down at the damp sand on his shoes. ‘I’ve been summoned to a meeting with his doctor. I don’t suppose he has any good news for me. I think he’s going to say that Arthur’s reached the end of the line.’

  ‘We won’t survive without him, John. The only reason why our strike rate is so high—’

  ‘You think they don’t know that?’ said May angrily. ‘The performance targets come up in every Home Office assessment we’ve ever had. They stood us in good stead while everything was running smoothly. You know how many officers would be covering a case like this if CoL had to handle it? They save a fortune by using us.’