Gay Longworth - Dead Alone

‘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 …’

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.

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.’