Dead Alone

Jones nodded. ‘Dead or alive.’

The timer on the video switched itself on to record. Clare stared wide-eyed at the empty television screen. ‘I’m not normally here in the daytime,’ she said, sounding far away again. ‘There are certain programmes I can’t miss.’

Jessie wondered which daytime host held Clare’s attention. Kilroy. Oprah. Trisha. Vanessa. Ricki. Springer. Pick a card. Any card. ‘I’m surprised you ever get time to watch television,’ she said.

Clare bit at her forefinger. ‘I don’t sleep much.’

CHAPTER 3

‘Pull. Pull. Pull. Three, straighten up.’ The tip of the boat cut through the deep cold water, parting the mist. ‘Three, are you listening?’ Oars collided. A whistle blew long and loud. The boat started to drift out of line, carried along by the rush of the tide. The muddy brown water slapped heavily against the fibreglass hull. Cold spray covered the girls’ bare pink thighs, mottled with exertion. ‘What on earth is going on?’

‘I thought I saw something on the shoreline. I’m sorry, it looked like …’ the girl paused, her fellow rowers peered to where she was pointing, ‘… bones.’

‘Oh God,’ said the cox. ‘Any excuse for a break! It’s pathetic – get rowing.’

‘No, I swear. I think we should turn around.’

They rowed the boat round and backed towards the muddy stretch of bank. The tide was rushing out, they had to fight it to stay still. The five girls stared over the water. Patches of mist clung to the river, reluctant to leave.

‘There!’ shouted the girl.

There was something lying on the thick, black, slimy surface. Strange outstretched fingers, poking out of the mud like the relic of a wooden hull.

‘It’s just wood,’ said the cox.

‘White wood?’

‘Yes. Let’s go.’

The girl at the back of the boat was closest. ‘I think I can make out a pelvis and legs.’

The girls began to row away from the bank. They didn’t want to get closer. They didn’t want to get a better look.

‘What do we do?’ asked a shaky voice from the back of the boat.

‘Row. We’ll call the police from the boathouse. Get a marking so that we can tell them where it is.’

‘It’s right below the nature reserve. We’d better hurry, it’ll be open soon.’

‘Oh shit. Okay, okay … um, pull, pull – fuck it, you know what to do …’

CHAPTER 4

A fully decomposed skeleton had been found in the mud on the bank of the Thames. No skull. No extremities. Probably a forgotten suicide. A local PC was on site. It warranted nothing more from CID than a detective constable. It was perfect. Jessie was early to work, as usual, and when she asked what was in, as usual, all he had to do was obey.

‘Headless body on a towpath,’ said the duty officer, crossing his fingers. Her leather-coated arse didn’t even touch the seat.

CHAPTER 5

Jessie parked her motorbike on Ferry Road in south-west London. Here, secreted between a man-made nature reserve and a primary school, was a little-known cut-through to the Thames. As pavement gave way to mud and puddles, and buildings became trees and brambles, Jessie had the distinct impression of being drawn back in time, to Dickensian London. She feared the worst. A young woman, sexually assaulted on this heavily wooded, unlit, desolate path, strangled and then dumped. Decapitated.

She marched on through the puddles, the swirling Thames far below her. She saw DC Fry up ahead, sipping coffee from a Starbucks cup. He was chatting to five women all wearing matching tracksuits. Jessie assumed he had his back to the body. His eye on the girls.

‘Good morning,’ she said loudly.

Fry turned and looked at Jessie.

‘Morning, ma’am. What are you doing here?’

Another police constable she didn’t know hovered nearby. Jessie beckoned Fry over. ‘Where is the body on the towpath?’

‘There’s another body?’ he asked, excited. Bones in the Thames were too run of the mill to be inspiring.

‘What do you mean, another one? Where’s the first?’

He pointed over the edge of the wall. ‘Careful, it’s slippery,’ said Fry. Jessie left the path, crossed the few yards of brambles and low-growing branches, and stepped on to the stone wall. It was covered in a film of algae, as frictionless as ice. She felt the soles of her boots slip. Jessie grabbed a branch and looked over the edge. It was a twenty-foot drop to the mud. Down a steeply angled slope of greenish stone. Leading away from the base of the wall was a beach. A fool’s beach. The tide had gone out, leaving a wide expanse of deep, dangerous mud. Gulls criss-crossed it with their weight-bearing webbed feet, searching for titbits, leeches, worms, tiny spineless organisms on which to dine. By the look of the algae-coated wall, Jessie guessed the tide often reached as high as where she now stood. She looked back at the glistening mud. A semi-submerged ribcage jutted out of it. Was this her headless body on the towpath?

‘Is this it?’ she called back to Fry. He nodded. The DOA had been exaggerated. Grossly exaggerated. ‘Who are the girls?’

‘Rowers. They spotted the bones and called it in.’

‘And the PC?’

‘First bobby on the scene, local boy.’

‘His name?’ asked Jessie, getting impatient.

Fry shrugged. ‘So, is there another body?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I have been –’ son-of-a-bitch ‘– misinformed.’ She turned back to face the river, then looked down. ‘So what have we got here, Fry?’

DC Fry walked over to join her on the river wall. ‘I’m surprised fewer people fall in. This stuff is lethal,’ he said, sliding his foot over the slime.

‘Would you mind taking this a little more seriously?’

‘Aren’t we just waiting for the undertaker to arrive and scoop this thing up?’

‘You been down there?’

‘Are you joking? Have you seen that mud?’ Fry yawned.

‘You haven’t even been down there?’

He handed her a small pair of binoculars. ‘I can see from here that it’s a fully decomposed skeleton, no doubt been there for years. Search the records and we’ll probably find it was some drunken fool who fell off a boat New Year’s Eve ten years ago and lost his head to a propeller.’

Jessie looked at the perfectly formed skeleton, its grey-white bones the same colour as the grey-white sky. ‘Possibly,’ she said. She scanned the bank through the binoculars, across the water and over to the opposite side. A cyclist had stopped among eight tall larches. There was a depot of some kind. No visible signs of activity. To her right was the beginning of the small island known as the Richmond Eyot. The curve in the river restricted any long view of the beach below her feet. She’d have to get down there. She returned her sights to the opposite bank; the cyclist was already moving away. She lowered the binoculars and turned to Fry.

‘Then again, possibly not.’

‘There’s nothing here for you, ma’am. You can return to the station, I’ll deal with this.’

‘No. I will.’ If Mark was going to send her out on false pretences, she was going to call everyone else out on false pretences. ‘Right, got any wellies?’

‘No.’

She looked down at DC Fry’s nice-boy leather lace-ups. ‘Shame.’

‘Oh, come on …’

She took the coffee from Fry’s hand. ‘Cordon off an area around the body. Get that PC to keep an eye on it. I want all entries and exits to the site logged. Get the scenes of crime officers down here now and a pathologist, if you can lay your hands on one. I want them to see the body in situ. After that, you can follow me round and take notes. And tell forensics to bring a video. The tide will be coming back in, we don’t have long.’

Fry’s frown deepened between his eyebrows. ‘You’re calling in the cavalry for that?’

‘This is a suspicious death, it will be treated like a suspicious death.’ He looked as if he thought she might be joking. She glared at him. ‘What are you doing still standing here?’

‘How the hell do I get down there? That’s a thirty-foot drop.’

‘Men and their inches,’ said Jessie. ‘Always exaggerating.’

Fry was furious, but Jessie was his superior. No doubt he’d vent his spleen in the pub later, telling everyone what a bitch she was.

‘There are some steps in the wall about a hundred yards back.’

Fry peered over. In some places the water reached the wall. ‘But …’

‘Be careful of the run-off channels. We wouldn’t want to lose you to a sudden gush of effluent.’

‘You can’t be serious, guv?’

Jessie narrowed her eyes against the sun’s low-lying sharp reflection. ‘Deadly.’

Fry flounced off. Mark Ward, that bastard. Well, he picked the wrong girl to start a war with. She’d make him sorry he hadn’t simply put a bucket of water over an open door and been done with it. Jessie got on the phone to the riverboat police, the underwater team and the helicopter unit, then she went over to the first officer on the scene. ‘Hi, I’m Detective Inspector Driver, West End Central CID.’

‘PC Niaz Ahmet.’ He was lanky, with heavy hands that flapped like paddles at his sides. His narrow head was perched on a long neck, but his eyes were bright and alert.

‘Were there any markings when you got here? Tyre tracks, footprints?’

‘Indeterminate number of markings on the path. But the mud was flat as it is now. Except for where the water runs off the bank. Rivulets, I think they’re called.’ Jessie immediately warmed to the man. ‘Definitely no footprints, or tyre tracks down there.’

‘Anything resembling a skull?’ asked Jessie.

‘Not that I could see. But, like Detective Constable Fry, I haven’t been down there. Didn’t want to disturb the scene.’

Jessie blew on her hands and rubbed them together. ‘Anything else?’

‘No. Few bits of debris, broken bottle, bit of metal pipe, trolley wheel, a dead jellyfish. But no footprints. I noted that especially.’

‘Follow me. I want you to take statements from the girls. And anyone else who turns up.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

She walked along the footpath to where the rowers still stood, huddled over cold coffee, exhaling clouds of expectant breath. Gold letters adorned the navy-blue tracksuits: CLRC. Jessie introduced herself and began her routine questions.

Jessie climbed the frost-covered grass embankment on the other side of the pathway and peered over the iron railings. The so-called nature reserve looked like a filled-in chalkpit or a disused water reservoir. Steep banks surrounded the rectangular expanse of water. It seemed a desolate place, offering none of the comforts the name suggested. She turned away and walked back down the path after Fry to the stone steps. Like the wall, they were covered in algae. The river’s mucus. Fry was f-ing and blinding as he fought through the mud. It was almost worth the humiliation to see him pick his way like a girl in Jimmy Choos. Jessie took a step down on to the slippery tread. The slightest pressure on her heel and she’d lose what little grip she had. There was nothing to hold on to and the stairs were very steep. If these remains had been brought to the river, they hadn’t come this way. Above her was a canopy of branches, stretching low and wide over her head. There was no lighting on the path above, nothing opposite and no residential buildings for a quarter of a mile. For central London, this was an extraordinarily deserted spot. Perfect. Suspiciously perfect.

She rounded the wall and saw a tunnel entrance. No run-off channel emerged from the black mouth of the tunnel, but there was a silt fan. Did that mean the tunnel was active, or was the silt backwash from high tide? Jessie pulled a slim black torch out of her rucksack and pointed it into the darkness. Disturbed pigeons flapped past her. On the right was a raised stone walkway. Jessie mounted the slimy steps, stooped to the arc of the airless tunnel, and began to walk uphill away from the daylight. Below her on the gravel and silt floor were the beached whales of the river’s lifeless catch. A shopping trolley. A rusting bicycle frame. Two heavy-duty plastic sacks. There was something that looked like clothing caught under a plank of wood. Jessie jumped off the four-foot ridge and landed squarely on the solid ground. The cloth was a woman’s coat. She slipped on a plastic glove and took hold of the coat, gently tugging it free. She stared into the never-ending darkness ahead of her. Where would such a steep, dry tunnel lead?

‘Ma’am,’ shouted Fry. She could make out the silhouette of the lower half of his body at the tunnel entrance. He sounded anxious. ‘Ma’am, what are you doing in there?’

She walked back down the tunnel. It got softer underfoot the lower she got. Jessie passed Fry the coat without saying anything, then picked a high ridge and walked down the sloping bank to the skeleton. The ground was still getting softer with every step. She stood over the bones. Slowly sinking. Thinking. What had bothered her about the bones when she’d studied them through the binoculars bothered her even more now. She looked back to the gaping archway of the tunnel, staring at her like a one-eyed monster. Dormant. But dangerous. Her eyes returned to the skeleton. It wasn’t what Jessie expected a river to regurgitate. Bodies pulled from the Thames were the worst kind. Like leaves left in water, the skin formed a translucent film over flooded veins. Bloated with river water, corpses would burst at the touch, emptying their contents like a fisherman’s catch. There was something about the whiteness of this ribcage, rising out of the brown-black mud like a giant clam, that made her think the river had not claimed this body. Human hands had put it there. Nature was never that neat.

The forensic team arrived eventually. With no sense of urgency, they ambled along the sliver of countryside towards her, laughing and joking, in a pack. Shift workers all. Bodies had a habit of turning up at odd times; theirs was not a nine-to-five existence. They looked confused when they saw the bag of bones they’d been called out for.

‘I want everything picked up inside the area. Film it, photograph it, then bag it up. I’ve called the River Police. Low tide is in fifty minutes, then the tide will be racing back in. Take mud samples, water samples and get the temperature of the water and air.’

They looked at her the same way as DC Fry had. What? For this?

She felt unsure in front of these men. They knew more about the nature of death than she ever would. She tried to keep the nerves out of her voice. ‘The head, hands and feet are missing. Keep an eye out,’ she said.

‘They’d have fallen off during decomposition. The head is probably in Calais by now.’

‘Exactly,’ said Jessie. ‘So why isn’t the rest of this poor soul in Calais too? The tide is too strong. This skeleton should be completely broken up, not sitting neatly in the mud like that.’

‘What are you thinking?’ said one of them, softening immediately.

‘I don’t know yet. But bones don’t emerge clean and white from years of being buried in the mud, without a billion micro-organisms making them their home. Just because it’s a skeleton, doesn’t mean it’s old news.’

She left them standing in the mud.

‘This is a wind-up,’ said one.

‘Sounds like she knows what she’s talking about,’ said another.

‘Trust me,’ said the first. ‘I heard it from a mate at her AMIT. She’s being taken down a peg or two.’

DC Fry looked up into the sky. ‘Bloody Nora, you got the flying squad out!’

Jessie didn’t look up.

‘They are filming the foreshore and surrounding area. On my orders.’ Was she mad? She should never have risen to the bait. Jones would go ballistic.

‘Ma’am, that isn’t our lot up there, that’s the press.’ PC Ahmet pointed as he walked, his long frame almost reaching the sky.

‘What?’ She looked up. A helicopter hovered above. She could feel the telephoto lens aimed at them.

‘Like sharks, they have a great nose for blood,’ said the sombre PC.

‘Get that skeleton covered,’ she screamed at the scenes of crime officers. ‘Now! Jesus Christ, how do they know so quickly?’ she said. ‘The body was only reported to me an hour ago.’

‘Their technology is more advanced and they are permanently tuned in to police scramblers.’

This young constable continued to surprise her.

‘Right,’ said Jessie, trawling her memory for correct procedure. ‘Fry, get on to Heathrow, get an exclusion order and get that thing out of here.’

‘On what grounds?’

‘On the grounds that its propellers are disturbing a murder scene!’

‘With all due respect, ma’am, you don’t know that it is a murder scene –’

‘And you don’t know that it isn’t.’ She faced Fry full on and lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘Unless there is something you aren’t telling me?’

He shook his head. She smelled a rat, but there was nothing she could do about it now.

Jessie watched the helicopter withdraw to the limits of the exclusion order. The tide was rising, and she’d been denied a Home Office pathologist. News was out about the circus she was whipping up on the banks of the Thames. Mark was probably somewhere watching her hang herself and Jones was nowhere to be found.

‘Ma’am, the pathologist has arrived,’ said DC Fry. Her reluctant shadow.

A smart, auburn-haired woman held out her hand. She looked almost too delicate for the job, but her handshake was firm and her boots were caked in mud from previous grisly expeditions. ‘Sally Grimes,’ said the pathologist.

Jessie turned back to DC Fry. ‘I want those rowers filling out PDFs.’

Fry looked horrified at the amount of paperwork Jessie was accruing, but kept his mouth shut. The two women walked out to the skeleton. The water level was rising. ‘PDFs?’ queried Sally Grimes.

‘Personal description forms,’ Jessie said, ducking under the tarpaulin. ‘They describe themselves on it for the Holmes database back at the station.’

‘I know what they are. I was wondering why you were using them.’

‘Because I haven’t got a clue who this person is, or why they ended up here, and I’ve got to start somewhere.’

‘Bodies from the river are usually just picked up and matched to missing persons.’

Jessie studied the pale-skinned woman. ‘I was told you weren’t an investigative pathologist?’

‘I’m not. Yet. So what do you think you’ve got here?’

‘No idea, to be honest. I suspect I’ve been set up with a dud call by my fellow DI, who thinks I need bringing down several pegs. I thought I’d get him back by going by the book, give them the classroom detective they are waiting for.’

The police helicopter made another pass, its shadow gliding over the milky-white tarpaulin. It was getting hot under the plastic.

‘With bells on,’ said Sally.

Jessie shrugged. She wouldn’t admit she was wrong to call out the police helicopter. Not yet.

‘So they sent me and not a Home Office pathologist, because they don’t think you have anything,’ said Sally.

‘Like I said, I’ve been set up. Thing is, while I’ve been here, something about this skeleton has been bugging me.’

Sally smiled conspiratorially at Jessie. ‘Well, let’s see if we can find something to wipe the smile off your fellow DIs’ faces. What’s been bugging you?’

‘The smell.’

‘It is aromatic, I agree.’

‘I don’t mean the river smell. There’s something else. I only noticed it when the tarpaulin went up. It isn’t organic. In fact, it’s almost like bleach.’

Sally got down on her knees in the mud and smelled the bones. Jessie made a mental note to buy the woman a drink. The pathologist repeated the action at two more locations on the skeleton, nodded quietly to herself, and stood up. From her bag she took a swab and ran it along the exposed clavicle, then another down the fibula.

‘I’m not touching this until I’ve sent these to the lab.’

‘What is it?’

‘This corpse is too clean and too intact to have been here for years, and too decomposed to have died recently, unless someone has taken a cleaning fluid to it. How far would your DI go to make you look a fool?’

Jessie couldn’t answer that. She was too new on the scene to know. ‘He doesn’t like me.’

‘Would he get a freshly preserved lab skeleton, place it here and call you out to get you fired?’

Jessie’s face collapsed in panic. ‘A lab skeleton?’

Sally nodded. ‘I’m pretty sure these bones have been treated.’ They emerged from the tent. Sally arched backwards, stretching her spine. Jessie was too distraught to speak. ‘The undertakers are here. Let them bring the remains to the hospital. We’ll wait for the results on these swabs, see what we’ve got. If your DI has borrowed this from a medical college, we’ve got him. If he didn’t, then we’ll do a PM tomorrow and find out what we are dealing with. Okay?’

No, she was not okay. She had danced right into Mark Ward’s trap.

‘Tell all the undertakers to wear protective clothing,’ said Sally.

Jessie lifted her head. ‘Why protective clothing?’

‘The smell could be a cleaning agent mixed with formaldehyde, but it could be worse. We don’t know and it isn’t worth taking the risk. Plastic gloves will protect them from germs, not acids.’

‘Acid?’

‘It’s possible. Acid is still used as a way to make people disappear. No skull means no dental records. These bones are virtually unidentifiable.’ Sally touched Jessie’s arm. ‘For what it’s worth, I think you did the right thing. Leaving it to the undertakers to pick up without examining it first could have got someone hurt.’

‘You think so?’

‘Yes. Something is not right here. Stick to your guns, Detective. Whoever this dead woman is, she did not end up here by accident.’

‘So it’s a woman?’

‘Yes. But that’s all we know.’

The two women made their way laboriously up the bank. The mud sucked at their boots. Jessie looked back at the staked-out area. Already the furthest two poles were being licked by the rising water.

‘We going?’ said DC Fry hopefully.

‘Once you’ve checked that lot have picked up everything and photographed everything. I’m making you exhibits officer, don’t let me down.’

‘Come on, ma’am. You’re not still going through with this?’

‘Through with what, Fry?’

He did not answer her. Not directly. ‘It’s just … I thought you were doing something special with DCI Jones.’

There was no point in saying anything. Jessie left him smirking. Fry sat so neatly in Mark Ward’s pocket she kept forgetting he was there.

PC Ahmet was still taking the rowers’ statements. ‘Can you stay here, guard the site until it is completely covered in water, then be back here when the tide falls?’ said Jessie.

‘Would overtime commence at the appropriate time?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then I accept your request.’

‘Thanks. Here’s my card – if anything strange happens or anyone comes asking questions, take their details, get a PDF and call me. Only me. Got it?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Thanks, PC Ahmet. You’ve been great.’

CHAPTER 6

Clare Mills stood at her father’s grave and listened to the belching buses trundle by. Cars hooted, mopeds buzzed and boys swore loudly. Not a very peaceful resting place, Whitechapel. She knelt down and swept away dead leaves. Here lies Trevor Mills. Loving husband and father. Born May 13th, 1933. Died April 27th, 1978. RIP. When Clare had first found the plot, she’d been angry that it didn’t say murdered. ‘Died’ implied that her father had something to do with his own death. He’d had a bad heart, weak genes, hadn’t eaten his greens, or had fallen at work. Drowned. Clare watched a drunk urinate against a once majestic headstone. The angel’s head was missing. Vandalism was a great leveller.

She looked back at the small flat square of stone under which her father’s bones lay. ‘Good news, Dad,’ she said quietly to herself. ‘The police are finally taking us seriously. I’m going to find Frank.’ Her mother was in Woolwich burial ground. Another almighty disaster in a life coloured by other people’s mistakes. Even in death, they couldn’t be together. Clare always felt bad that she visited her father more often than her mother. She felt guilty whenever she walked into Woolwich and saw the fresh yellow roses that Irene had dutifully brought. Irene had been her Mum’s best friend. It was Irene’s family who took Veronica in when her mother had run off. In a way, Irene was Clare’s only real friend too, if she thought about it. Irene never said she left the flowers. Clare knew that it still hurt her to talk about it. Irene missed her friend as much as Clare missed her mother, they were united by that common denominator. It was their foundation. Irene had been with her all through the search for Frank. Given her valuable clues and held her when, again, they came to nothing.