2009 - Ordinary Thunderstorms (12 page)

She still felt something of the new girl at school—the MSU was small and close-knit, there was hardly any turnover of personnel (once you arrived at MSU you were there until retirement, more often than not)—and there were very few women police constables. So far in her few days at Wapping Rita had only met two other WPCs.

She stood at the end of the new jetty, pausing before she headed back along it to the Phoenix Stairs passage, and looked down river to the clustered towers of Canary Wharf, watching a jet soaring up from City Airport, and then turned her gaze across the river—it was high tide—to the vast modern blocks of St Botolph’s Hospital. It was like a small, complete city, she thought, everything you needed—heating, food, transport, sewage, life-support systems, morgue, funeral home—was there: no need ever to leave…

Morbid thoughts, Rita thought—ban them. She wasn’t in the best of moods, she knew. Her father had been aggressive over the breakfast cornflakes this morning and she’d snapped back at him. Then he had counter-accused her of sulking…They were beginning to argue like an old married couple, she thought, and she realised she wasn’t happy being on her own—she’d always had boyfriends and lovers and being single didn’t suit her. She hadn’t enjoyed her party either, her mood had soured when—retouching her make–up in the ladies’ lavatory—she had heard two men in the corridor outside talking about her. She had recognised Gary’s voice but couldn’t place the other’s—the music from the public bar was warming up, half obscuring it.

She heard Gary say: “—No, no. We, you know, broke up.”

Then the other man: “Shame, yeah…(something inaudible) lovely girl, Rita. Just my type.”

“Yeah? What type would that be?” Gary said.

Rita was now at the door, ear to the jamb.

“Full breasts, thin frame,” the man said. “You can’t beat it. What a fool you are, Boland.”

They laughed and she heard them wander off. Rita came straight out of the ladies and went into the bar to see that Gary was standing on his own. She looked around: the place was full. Had it been Duke? She just couldn’t be sure. But it aggrieved her and it cast a cloud over her farewell. Every man she greeted, chatted to, let buy her drinks, said goodbye to, swore to stay in touch with and kissed on the cheek might have been Gary’s interlocutor. It made her wary and awkwardly self-conscious of the tightness of the T–shirt she’d chosen to wear. She’d drunk too much to little effect and woken up crapulous with a mighty day-long hangover.

Get a grip, she said to herself, disgusted with her self-pity, it’s hardly the end of the world, girl. For god’s sake—just blokes talking, nothing new there. Still, it was never nice to eavesdrop on conversations about yourself. Just as well she hadn’t been able to see their faces or any gestures they had made…

Routinely, she checked that the mooring ropes were made fast on her boat, a brand new Targa 50, re-tightened one, and turned her back on the river and went briskly along the jetty through the passage, across the narrow cobbled roadway that was Wapping High Street and into the operations Portakabin. Joey Raymouth was already there, still diligently writing up his notes from that morning’s intelligence briefing, and they greeted each other, perfunctorily but warmly—she liked Joey. He was assigned to her, seeing her through her first month on the river, ‘mentoring’ her. His father was a fisherman in Fowey, in Cornwall, and he had a West Country burr to his voice.

“You all right, Rita? Look a bit under the weather.”

She forced her face into a wide smile. “No, no probs at all.”

He rose to his feet and together they went to receive their instructions from Sergeant Denton Rollins—ex-Royal Navy, as he constantly reminded his charges—with the heavy implication that he still could not understand how he had come down so low in the world.

Their duties for this shift were all very straightforward—checking mooring permits at Westminster and Battersea, investigating a fire on a boat at Chiswick and some thefts from pleasure cruisers in Chelsea marina.

Raymouth took more notes as Rollins read out the details. Rita looked round as more colleagues came in and the swell of banter grew.

“Oh, yeah,” Rollins said. “One for you, Nashe. Reports of a man killing a swan at low tide by Chelsea Bridge yesterday morning. Your neck of the woods.”

“A swan?”

“It’s illegal. Don’t die of excitement.”

“I’m in it for the glamour, Sarge.”

She and Joey went back out to their boat and put on their buoyancy vests. Joey went through the checklist and started the engines while Rita undid the moorings, cast off and then stepped aboard as the Targa pulled away from the jetty into mid-stream.

Because the tide was high the Thames looked like a proper city river—like the Seine or the Danube—the river broad and full, perfectly apt and proportional to the embankment walls and the buildings on either side and the bridges that traversed it. At low tide everything changed, the river fell between twelve and twenty feet, walls were exposed, weed draped the now visible piles of the bridges, beaches and mud flats appeared and the river looked like the Zambezi or Limpopo in times of drought. Correspondingly, the city suffered aesthetically, but this morning the river brimmed and Rita felt her moodiness begin to disappear and her heart quicken with pleasure. This was why she had transferred to MSU, she realised, hauling the fat rubber fenders on board as Joey accelerated off, the two big Volvo diesels firing up with a bass roar, heading up river, Bermondsey to the port side, Tower Bridge up ahead, the clear morning light making the windows of the City’s office blocks flash brazenly, the breeze whipping her hair. HMS
Belfast
coming up, then London Bridge, Tate Modern, the Globe Theatre. What a way to earn a living, she said to herself, widening her stance on the deck, gripping the guard-rail with both hands as Joey speeded up, the spume of their bow wave almost indecently white, drops of river water bouncing off her uplifted face. She held herself like this for a second or two, breathing deeply, feeling her head spin before she went down below to the forward galley to brew up two mugs of strong tea.

The Chiswick fire had been intriguing. A barbecue on deck of a Bayliner cruiser had been left untended, sparks from which had set small fires going on the boats moored alongside. Lawsuits for damages were pending. Joey and Rita interviewed angry boat owners and took down details—but there was no sign of the careless cook. His Bayliner was now semi-burnt-out, sunk to the gunwales from the weight of the water from the fire brigade’s hoses. Piecing together the various accounts witnesses supplied, it seemed he had lit the barbecue, had a violent row with his girlfriend, she had run off and he followed, forgetting about their soon-to-be-chargrilled Sunday lunch. Joey was pretty sure it was illegal to have a barbecue on a moored boat anyway—no naked flames. Anyway, they had the man’s details—the Chiswick police could track him down while they would serve notice to remove his burnt-out boat within seven days or face further penalties.

On the way upstream to Chiswick they had passed the
Bellerophon
and she had given the klaxon a toot but there was no sign of life on deck. In fact in the dozen or so times she’d passed her home since she’d begun at MSU she’d never seen her father. He was sulking below, she knew: somehow her new job with the river police irritated him more than when she’d been on the beat in Chelsea and elsewhere. She didn’t care—she was happy, she was enjoying her new job too much—he’d come round to it one day, or not. Up to him.

As they motored under Albert Bridge, almost coasting downstream on the ebb tide, Rita remembered what Rollins had told her about a man killing a swan. She told Joey and he steered them over to the Grosvenor College stairs on the Chelsea shore.

“You check it out, Rita,” Joey said. “I’ll write up the great Chiswick barbecue fire.”

She strode along the Embankment, back on familiar ground, past the Royal Hospital (where the Flower Show marquees were now all but dismantled) and stopped at the gate of a small triangle of waste ground on the west side of Chelsea Bridge. How many times had she come past here, she thought, and never noticed this place? The man who had phoned in the complaint had come through under Chelsea Bridge before he had seen the man with the swan, so the beach, as such, had to be on this side. The gate was locked so Rita climbed over the railings and went down some steps that led towards the river. At the base of the bridge she found the usual graffiti, and a fritter of condoms, needles, beer cans and bottles. Peering over the edge of the Embankment wall she could see the small mud beach exposed by the ebbing tide. She looked downstream—if she went down to the beach she would almost be able to see the
Bellerophon
from here. Why would anyone kill a swan? Some junkie out of his skull? Some drunk waking up, showing off for his drunken mates? She moved away from the bridge, pushing through bushes and low branches towards the apex of the triangle. She noted how dense the undergrowth was, a little sliver of rampant wasteland in douce Chelsea. She ducked under the branches of a sycamore, eased carefully by a holly bush, shimmied through a gap between two rhododendrons—and stopped.

A small clearing. Trampled grass, flattened grass. Three rubber tyres set on top of each other to make a seat. She hauled a dirty sleeping bag and groundsheet out from under a bush, and from under another found a wooden orange box with a camping gas stove and a saucepan in it. She put everything back as she had found it. Kneeling, she found feathers and evidence of scorching on some of the longer grass stems. Gull feathers, not a swan’s, she realised: to some people all large white birds looked the same. She stood up: somebody had killed, plucked and no doubt eaten a seagull here in the last few days. She looked around—she was perfectly screened from the Embankment and from anything crossing over Chelsea Bridge. There was a view of the river between two of the bushes but no one looking back from a passing boat would see anything. She searched some more but found nothing except wind-blown litter—nobody ever came to this bit of the triangle, clearly. Whoever had been staying here would be perfectly safe from prying eyes.

She made her way back to the road, thinking: ‘had been staying’? Perhaps, ‘was still staying’? This site didn’t suggest a homeless person dossing down for the night or two—this was more of a hiding place. Somebody was hiding on this triangle of wasteland at Chelsea Bridge, someone desperate enough to catch and eat a seagull at dawn one day. Perhaps it might be worth coming back one night and searching the place—see what or who they turned up. She’d run the idea by Sergeant Rollins. It was their case, after all, killing a ‘swan’ on the river was MSU business.

T
HE LIGHT OVER THE western sector of the Shaftesbury Estate was a milky blue, the early morning sun brightening the brickwork of the topmost storey—the sixth—and beginning its slow creep down the fa£ades of the remaining five, casting sharp geometric shadows as it moved, making the apartment blocks look stark, but at the same time austerely sculptural—exactly the aim and purpose that the architect, Gerald Golupin (1898-1969), had in mind as he had drawn up his visionary design for this complex of social housing units in the 19505, until someone else, to his abiding chagrin, had named it the Shaftesbury Estate (Golupin had proposed something more Bauhausian—MODULAR 9, in reference to its nine apartment blocks and three wide quadrangles—in vain). The Shaft, in certain lights, could still appear severely impressive: hard-edged, volumetrically imposing, a triumphant melding of form and function—as long as you didn’t look too closely.

Mhouse, of course, was thinking none of these thoughts as she plodded up the stairs to her flat—Flat L, on Level 3, Unit 14. She was tired; she had drunk a lot of alcohol and had snorted many lines of cocaine over the last six hours or so as well as performing a variety of sexual acts with two men—what were their names? Still, she had £200 folded flat in the sole of her white PVC boot. It had been one of Margo’s specials. She and Margo showed up at this hotel in Baker Street at midnight where two men were waiting for them in a double bedroom (nice bathroom en suite)—Ramzan and Suleiman, that was it—and so the long night had begun. Ranizan and Suleiman, that was them, yeah, old blokes, but clean—but which one was which?

Luckily, Margo had called her at lunchtime and so she had been able to park Ly-on with her next-door neighbour, Mrs Darling. She was always happy to look after Ly-on (Mhouse gave her a fiver) but it couldn’t be done spontaneously, she needed a few hours notice, at least.

Mhouse rang the bell and, after a two-minute delay, Mrs Darling opened it. She was in her sixties, with a misshapen, lumpy body and a thin head of dyed auburn hair. She had no front teeth.

“Aw, hello, Mhousey, sweet,” she said. “Tired out, eh?”

“Them late shifts is killers, Mrs D.”

“You want to complain—way that factory works you people. Why can’t they pack veg at a proper hour?”

“It’s the early markets, see?”

“Still: it’s a living, I suppose—in these sad times of ours. Here’s the little fella.”

Mhouse crouched and kissed her son’s face—which was still blank and neutral with fatigue, roused from his bed so early.

“Hello, baby,” Mhouse said. “You been a good boy?”

“Not a peep out of him. Slept like a log, little lambkin.”

Mhouse slipped Mrs Darling her fiver.

“Any time, dear,” Mrs Darling said, “such a quiet, well-behaved little chap.” She paused and ruffled Ly-on’s hair, then looked meaningfully at Mhouse. “Haven’t seen you down the Church, recent.”

“I know, I know. I need to go. Maybe tomorrow.”

“God loves you, Mhousey, never forget. He doesn’t loves us all but he loves you and me.”

Mhouse led Ly-on along the walkway to their flat and unlocked the door. Inside she filled the kettle to make a cup of tea, then switched it off. She felt the urge to sleep encroaching on her like onrushing night, a tiredness so acute she could hardly stay on her feet.

Ly-on had turned on the television and was searching the channels looking for a cartoon.