A Dark and Twisted Tide (3 page)

‘Are you OK?’ Ray asked, as the police launch approached.

‘I’m fine,’ she said.

The master of the vessel was a young sergeant called Scott Buckle. He looked over at Lacey and waved.

‘Part of the job,’ Ray told her in an undertone. ‘Won’t be the last you pull out.’

‘I know.’

‘It’s a greedy river. People get distracted, a bit careless. It won’t give them a second chance.’

Almost a year ago, the river had given
her
a second chance. It had let her go, which was possibly why she didn’t fear it now. ‘This wasn’t the river.’ She watched her colleagues prod the corpse with boathooks. ‘And they’ll not get it with those. It’s fastened tight around the pile.’

‘You don’t know that,’ Ray told her. ‘No way would you know that unless you’d stuck your head under. Please tell me you didn’t do that.’

‘She didn’t go in accidentally,’ Lacey said. ‘She’s wrapped up tight like a mummy.’

Ray sighed. ‘Jeez, Lacey. How do you do it?’

3

The Swimmer

IN THE SHADOWS
, the other swimmer kept perfectly still. Sunlight couldn’t reach all the way in here, but the glinting boats with their head-splitting engines sometimes came dangerously close. And they had lights, those men who believed the river was their own. Powerful, searching beams that could find anyone, even in the darkest corner. So keep still, low in the water, eyes down, that was the way. They’d think your head was weed on wood, your arm a broken branch stripped raw by the water and bleached pale by the sun.

Anya had been found. The swimmer could see her now, shroud trailing out into the water, searching for an escape that was a lost hope. Soon more boats would come. They would lift her from the river, expose her poor, ravaged body to the sunlight, prod her, poke her with their fingers and their tools and their eyes.

The woman who swam as though she’d been born in the water was being helped on to one of the bigger boats. They lifted her easily. She looked tiny and slender, despite how strong and fast she was in the river. The breeze caught her hair, already drying in the sun, and it flew out behind her like a bright flag. The men would take her away, too. They thought she was one of them, after all. They had no idea how many secrets she kept from them.

The woman with the bright hair turned and, for a moment, seemed to look directly at the swimmer. It had been close just now. For a moment, only chance had prevented the two of them from coming face to face.

It was all a matter of chance, really. Sometimes it worked in your favour, sometimes it didn’t. Given more time – days, even hours – the water would have undressed Anya, the tide and the current left their mark and she would have become just another victim of the river. If the bright-haired woman hadn’t swum this morning, Anya probably wouldn’t have been found while her story could still be told.

It all came down to chance. And chance would take it forward. Because if Anya spoke to them, they’d find the others too.

4

Dana

‘
TELL ME SOMETHING
. The fifteen-year-old who thinks getting pregnant might inject some meaning into the grubby, state-subsidized existence that passes for a life. Whose permission does she need to reproduce? Or the crack addict, taking it up the arse to fund the stuff that gets more riddled with poison every time? Who signs the form that says
she
can have a baby?’

Dana closed her eyes, as if by doing so she could drown out the sound of her partner’s voice. It was over then. No baby, after all. Helen had always had a problem with authority (ironic really, given that she’d made her career in a field that demanded it) and medical authority was the hardest for her to stomach. One of her favourite rants was about the arrogance of the medical profession. She just didn’t usually do it in front of them.

Dana opened her eyes and looked at her watch. She’d make the ten o’clock briefing after all. She should have known it would end like this. Well, being thrown out of a fertility clinic would be a new experience.

‘We have no powers to determine who out of the general population can or cannot reproduce,’ said the consultant, who was also the medical director of the clinic. Trust Helen. If you were
going to piss someone off, you might as well start at the top. He was a tall, thin man in his sixties, with large, dark-blue eyes and heavy, black eyebrows. His hair, still thick and slightly too long, was black speckled with grey. The name on his office door read Alexander Christakos.

Christakos’s office was directly on the river and the window behind him looked out at the honey and ivory stone, the arched river frontage and the gulls’-egg-blue roof of Old Billingsgate Fish Market. It was a conference centre now, a venue for huge and glitzy events, but in the old days, from this room, you’d have been able to smell the fish.

His voice had just the trace of an accent, but not one that Dana could place. ‘You and I could debate the merits of that for some time,’ he was saying to Helen, as though it were just the two of them in the room. ‘What I do know is that children conceived using donor gametes, and especially those brought up in single-sex households, will have specific issues to deal with as they grow up. It would be irresponsible for us, and for you, to ignore this.’

Out on the river, a Marine Unit launch was passing in front of the Billingsgate building. In the room, Christakos still had the floor.

‘A number of issues concern us,’ he was saying – and fair play to him for keeping Helen quiet for as long as he had. ‘First, the extent to which you’ve thought through the impact that an unusual conception and upbringing will have on a child. And then of course . . .’

This was their first appointment. Helen had flown down from Dundee, where she worked and lived most of the time, so that they could present a united front. They’d sat in the waiting room with several heterosexual couples, the women flicking eagerly through the clinic’s literature as though the secret to fertility might be found on a glossy sheet of paper, the men fidgety and embarrassed, looking everywhere but into the eyes of another person.

‘Our philosophy here is that parenting is about love, not biology.’ Christakos was determined not to be outdone by a gobby lesbian before suggesting they try elsewhere. Dana could almost have admired him if he weren’t about to break her heart. Another police launch heading downstream at speed. She was going to kill Helen.

‘Time, commitment, patience, generosity, even humour are
important, but love is at the top of the list. Also, a healthy degree of selfishness helps. The patients we accept here very much want to be parents. Now, there is no doubt in my mind that Miss Tulloch wants to be a mother. The question is, do you?’

She didn’t, thought Dana, that was the problem. Helen could live her life childless and never feel there was anything missing. She’d only been going along with this for Dana’s sake. She’d walk out of here, shrug philosophically and say that at least they’d tried. She’d move on, expect Dana to do the same, and Dana really wasn’t sure she could. She wondered how long their relationship would survive, now that Helen had denied her this.

‘The truth is I never thought about children,’ Helen was admitting now, because Helen didn’t know how to lie. Outside, Dana watched a plane move slowly across the sky.

‘This is something Dana wants.’ As Dana’s thoughts drifted, the sound of Helen’s voice was fading. ‘But I want Dana on any terms. And to pick up on your point about love, if this baby is Dana in miniature, how can I do anything other than adore it?’

Dana’s mobile vibrated in her pocket. No reason not to look at it really. Well, that certainly explained the excitement she’d just witnessed on the river. But how . . .? Never mind, she’d deal with it at the station.

The other two had finished spatting. Christakos was on his feet, offering to shake hands. It would be rude not to, and it wasn’t as if she could blame him. It had been Helen’s fault.

Dana left the room first, walking ahead along the corridor, wondering how she was going to talk to Helen without screaming at her.
You couldn’t do it, could you? You just couldn’t keep your mouth shut?

‘We hadn’t really thought about the ethnic thing, had we?’ Helen paused to let Dana step out of the lift first.

‘What?’

‘Well, you remember him saying that Indian donors are very rare? We’ll almost certainly not find one. Perhaps we can just look for dark hair, dark skin tones. I’d like it to look like you if possible.’

‘The Marine Unit have pulled a body out of the river,’ said Dana.
‘Doesn’t appear to be an accidental death. They’re taking it to Wapping. Oh, and guess who found it?’

Helen was looking at her watch now. ‘I’ll be home about six. Look, I may not be able to make the big appointment. Are you OK with that? Me not being there for the conception? I feel as though I should be, it’s just . . .’

They passed reception and went out through the heavy glass door. As they left the air conditioning behind, the heat hit them.

‘What are you talking about?’ said Dana. Helen was looking smart this morning, even by her standards. She was tall and athletic, and always looked good in well-cut trouser suits. Her long blonde hair was swept into a bun at the nape of her neck. She was wearing jewellery, even make-up. The meeting she was rushing off to was obviously important. Much more so than the one she’d just been in.

‘Dana, were you listening to anything in there?’ Helen sidestepped to let an office worker carrying a tray of coffee get around them.

‘Not really,’ Dana admitted. ‘I tuned out when you went off on one.’

‘Yeah, I thought so. OK, I have to go now, so focus for a second. Your period started last Friday, is that right? That means you have to start using the ovulation kit roughly a week today. They’ll want to book you in for a scan the first cycle, just to make sure everything’s doing what it should.’

Helen had stepped into the road in front of a black cab. She handed Dana a large brown envelope. ‘The forms for GP notification and the confidentiality waivers are in here – you need to get them sent off today. Also, the guidance notes on selecting a donor. I do want to be involved in that, because there is no way I want my son or daughter to be ginger.’

Dana was facing directly into the sun now. She blinked. ‘He signed the forms?’

Helen was in the cab, about to close the door. ‘Of course he signed the bloody forms! We’ll be awesome parents. Love you.’

The door slammed shut and the cab sped back towards the bridge. Dana realized she had no idea where Helen was going. She’d been completely mysterious about the reason for her trip down,
other than the visit to the clinic. And now she was on her own, in the middle of a London street, with some vague idea that there was somewhere she needed to be, when all she could think about was that, in the last few minutes, her life had changed completely.

5

Lacey

‘
YOU SURE ABOUT
this?’ asked Sergeant Buckle.

‘I’m sure.’ Lacey watched three of her colleagues approach with the body, now decently enclosed within a large, zipped black bag. Their movements were slow and respectful, conversation kept low, mindful of the fact that the jetty at the back of Wapping station was open to public gaze.

On the main arm of the jetty was a small, square building, painted deep blue. Within it were worktops, storage, and a large, shallow steel bath. Each body recovered from the tidal Thames was brought here for initial examination and identification if possible. An unpleasant, unpopular part of the job, it was highly unusual for an officer to volunteer, as Lacey had just done.

‘I can easily get someone else,’ Buckle tried again.

‘Got to do this sometime,’ said Lacey. ‘And I’ve seen her already, remember?’

‘
It
,’ corrected Buckle. ‘You’ve seen it. We don’t make assumptions about gender.’

‘Delivery for you, Sarge.’ The others left and Buckle looked at his watch. ‘Right, we’ve got around twenty minutes before CID get here. Let’s see what we can tell them.’

As the sergeant supported the body around the upper part of the
torso, Lacey unzipped the bag. She did so holding her breath, but the smell that came out was no worse than a sort of concentration of river water, with a trace of rotting organic matter. The upper part of the woman’s body – it
was
a woman, she just knew it – was largely skeletonized, but the cloth binding her was tighter around her abdomen and upper thighs and appeared to have protected the soft tissue in that area.

Buckle had a recorder in the upper pocket of his overalls and he spoke into it, giving the date and time of the initial examination of DB 23, the twenty-third Dead Body to be pulled from the Thames that year. Lacey picked up the digital camera.

‘Corpse measures 165 centimetres and weighs just under 70 pounds,’ said Buckle. ‘Allowing for fairly advanced skeletonization, particularly around the head, upper limbs and torso, I’d say we’re looking at the remains of a small adult or teenager.’ From a few paces back, Lacey took full body shots of the corpse.

‘The size of the frame suggests it’s unlikely to be an adult male.’ Buckle glanced up and winked at Lacey. She moved up the side of the bath to take close-ups of the head. The weed coming out of the eye socket was vile, like something from a bad science-fiction movie. She was going to get rid of it as soon as she could. She photographed each hand in turn, then did a series of close-ups, starting at the head and moving down the body.

‘An unusual feature of this particular body is that it appears to have been wrapped,’ Buckle was saying, ‘head to foot, in some sort of fabric. Whatever the solution to the mystery, it seems highly unlikely this was an accidental death or an incident of self-harm. OK, let’s turn it over.’

Lacey put down the camera and helped Buckle turn the corpse. A patch of scalp with long hair streaming from it was still attached to the skull at the back. Decomposition on this side of the body was less advanced and the flesh of the shoulders and lower back shone red and raw in the bright sunlight.