Strange Tide (5 page)

She wondered what they would say if they could see her now.

She tried to raise herself a little, but her head hurt too much. She felt the wet sand against her knees, her forearms.

Feeling strangely disconnected, she turned to face the night sky and was surprised to find it was cleared of clouds. Diamond stars sparkled down, but the rippling black water cast aside their reflections. Over on the Queen's Walk, the tumorous stump of City Hall was colonnaded by piercing shafts of light and surrounded by glass towers angled as sharply as knives, as if to warn Londoners that they would be cut if they came too close. From this distance the penthouses looked more like part of a penitentiary. She viewed everything with a distant disregard. The night and the river and the strange burning pain in her head had drained away all sensation. Clear thought was impossible. What could she remember?

Lowering her head to the cold stones, she wondered if it would take her a long time to die. The back of her head stung when she rested it. Her left wrist was sore, and the cold wet sand made her skin bristle. Now that this little life was over, she could distance herself from futile human emotions and accept what had happened.
When Death comes to the door
, her father had once told her in his typically fatalistic way,
it's important to have your bags packed and ready. Nobody should be caught unawares at such a time.

Instead of thinking about what lay beyond, she tried to focus her blurred thoughts. She concentrated on her senses.

Touch: the rough edge of the concrete, the chill grit of the sand, something by her right foot, a stick of driftwood perhaps, some tide-smoothed pebbles.

Sight: the ancient embanked wall with its worn green steps, the dank stanchions of the pier, a few saturnine trees, the glimmering river and the pale mother moon, controlling everything.

Smell: brackish, stale and damp but not unpleasant, like mildew, moss or mud, or dead wet foliage.

Sound: the gentle flopping of the tide,
ker-lep, ker-lep
, rhythmic and calming, the clock of the river ticking away her life.

Taste: the water, brackish but too cold to be completely unpleasant, a touch of brine from the distant sea, a strangely lifeless flavour which was yet alive. Wasn't it always moving?

A sudden flood surged about her head, sending a fresh bolt of fire through it, and now she came fully awake and began to panic. Her hair was caught on something in the sand and she could not turn her face. The next little wave was enough to wash into her mouth and make her choke.

She tried to lift her left wrist but the chain tore a strip of pain around her flesh. The more she struggled the worse everything became. The moon pulled at the night, bringing another little wave just as she was breathing in, and this time she swallowed and retched.

It was the fault of the moon. The sun was male because he was larger and angrier, worshipped by all men. He gave violent life to everything he touched. The moon was female because she was smaller and calmer, and moved in cycles that shifted the oceans of the world, something even the sun could not do. At night she was accompanied by her children, the stars.

She much preferred to die at night, in the reflected light of the Earth's only natural satellite.
The moon is so strong and kind that it won't kill me
, she thought,
I will become a part of the tide, and I'll flow back in, renewed.
She opened her mouth to accept the rising waters, the cold blackness, the flowing eternal dark.

Just past Sugar Quay on the north bank of the Thames there were, until very recently, some overhanging plane trees and, on one corner, a flight of stone steps leading down to the ragged shoreline.

This access to the river is still known as the Queen's Stairs, and stands in front of the Tower of London. Carved into the nearby wall are dates and initials: ‘ST D. E. AD 1819', a boundary marker representing St Dunstan-in-the-East. The church had been destroyed in the Blitz, and its overgrown ruins had lain undisturbed for years.

Once the Thames had been slow and wide, and many of the buildings had water gates that gave direct access to the river. Now, the remnants of St Dunstan's were cut off from the river by a thunderous arterial road, and beyond was only a windswept plaza of grey stone, the rear of another corpse-grey office block, a steel-ribbed castle of finance guarded by impassive wardens in headsets. Near the gleaming brushed-chrome embankment railing stood a sign that summed up the city's new attitude, a pictogram of a pedestrian with a diagonal red bar passing through it. Humans were not wanted here, just drones for the hive who would climb over the bodies of their fallen predecessors to continue making money.

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?'

‘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.'