A Dark and Twisted Tide (20 page)

Bad things happen to women in this house.

Without a sound, Badrai crosses to the window and looks out. The boat is just feet below her. The sky is thick with clouds and there is no light in the creek. The boat is no more substantial than a dark shadow on the surface of the water. Only the pale face of the driver is visible.

No urgent commands. No gestures. No signs of impatience. No attempts to convince. It has all been said already.

Bad things happen to women in this house.

Does she believe it? She didn’t want to. The room is so clean and comfortable, the food so good. The people taking care of her so kind.

But the crying she hears when the house has fallen quiet for the night? The shouting of women whose requests are denied. The locks that are always turned? The pain in her stomach and back, which never seems to go away?

The boat is waiting. It won’t for long.

Badrai picks up the cork ball. Two keys. One of which she already knows will fit the door to her room, the other the back door of the house. She lifts the key and slips it into the lock. She listens for as long as she dares. All is still.

Five minutes later she is stepping down into the boat. The driver smiles.

FRIDAY, 27 JUNE

45

Lacey and Dana

‘
GOOD AFTERNOON. I’M
afraid there’s an operation in progress ahead. We’re going to have to ask you to take a detour. What do you draw?’

The master of the tugboat gave Lacey the dimensions of his boat.

‘You should be fine,’ she told him. ‘Can you make for that line of red buoys and steer between them and the shore? At St George’s Stairs you’re clear again.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘Just routine, Sir. Thank you for your cooperation.’

The tugboat moved off up-river and Sergeant Buckle, up on the fly bridge, steered them towards the next boat heading their way. In spite of emails sent out to all craft that regularly used the Thames, in spite of frequent messages on the Thames shipping channels, a lot of vessels didn’t seem aware that half the river was closed for much of the day.

‘Any time you want to get involved, just say,’ she muttered to Turner, who was reading the
Daily Mirror
in the cockpit.

He didn’t bother looking up. ‘We both know they’ll be a lot more lippy if I try and boss ’em about. Cute girlie in uniform and they bend over backwards.’

‘I’ll assume you didn’t intend that to sound as obscene as it did. How do you think they’re getting on?’

Turner handed over the binoculars he’d forcibly removed from her twenty minutes earlier, when she hadn’t been able to take her eyes away from the operation half a mile up-stream. She adjusted the focus and fixed them on Sergeant Wilson’s Targa, the lead boat in the operation. It was directly in the middle of the channel, feet away from the lead dive boat. Tulloch and Chief Inspector Cook were in the cockpit, Wilson on the fly bridge.

On the dive boat she could see the skipper, the sergeant in charge of the dive and other team members milling around. One officer, wearing the customary black diving suit, was getting ready to go down, his orange, spaceman-like helmet on the deck close by. He was being hooked up to the multicoloured air-supply tube and to the harness that would keep him anchored to the boat all the time he was below.

Turner spoke, making her jump. ‘So where do we think these women are coming from? Middle East covers a big area.’

Lacey bit back her irritation. She didn’t want to talk. She wanted to watch and worry. ‘Could be bigger than that. According to the staff at the hostel I went to, some of the people we see trafficked could have come here legally. We could be talking about any of the poorer countries in the European Union. Other parts of Eastern Europe. They also talked about a big influx of people from the Stans. You know, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan.’

‘And they’re being brought here for what? The sex trade?’

Lacey put the binoculars back to her eyes. ‘Probably. Although the Border Agency said we shouldn’t rule out organ-trafficking. It’s very rare in the UK, but not unheard of.’

‘Jeez, what sort of organs?’ Turner was actually looking down at his genitals.

‘Nearly always the kidneys. People can manage with only one, so no messy dead bodies to deal with.’

‘Yeah, but we do have messy dead bodies, floating about all over the place, so it can’t be about kidneys.’ Turner was looking smug.

‘Unless they took both.’ Lacey looked at her watch. The oper ation was planned to last for six hours. Given that rainfall had been
unusually low throughout the Thames catchment for three weeks now, water levels in the river were as low as they were ever likely to get. ‘If there ever were a good time for such a foolhardy operation, it would be today,’ David Cook had told them during the briefing earlier. He hadn’t tried to hide that he was glaring at her specifically.

‘How will they do it?’ asked Dana.

‘Basically, in circles,’ Cook told her. ‘You see that yellow buoy?’

Dana turned to the buoy close to the adjacent dive boat.

‘And the other two. Both next to dive boats?’

Dana looked and nodded.

‘Keep watching – any second now you’ll see a diver go down below each of them,’ said Cook. ‘The buoys are weighted to the bottom with a straight line coming up to the surface. The weight marks the starting point. The divers will swim around the weight at a two-metre distance. When they complete the circle, they’ll move away and swim around it again at a four-metre distance, gradually widening out until the three of them are practically touching each other. That way, we’ll cover the whole area before we’re done.’

‘Is it dangerous?’

Cook shook his head. ‘They need to know what they’re doing, but I’m not unduly worried about safety, not on a day like this.’

Dana looked up at the sky. The day seemed fractionally cooler than they’d all grown used to. ‘What sort of depth are we talking about?’

‘About seven metres in the middle. Depth’s not the problem here so much as the fast movement of the water and the visibility.’

‘Visibility being?’

‘With the naked eye, zero. With strong searchlights they’ll be able to see a few inches. Largely they’re working on feel. I don’t envy them. You never know what you’re going to touch next.’

Dana looked over the side. Seven metres wasn’t much deeper than an Olympic diving pool, and yet for well over a thousand years people had lived and worked on this river. There could be anything beneath them.

‘Ma’am, we’ve got the visual link up and running. Do you want to come and see?’

At the chart table in the cabin, a young constable sat in front of a computer monitor. Dana stepped closer, conscious of Cook directly behind her. The screen showed swirling shapes of a green so deep it was almost black, occasionally interspersed with pinpoints of razor-sharp light.

‘Does one of the divers have a camera?’ she asked.

Cook leaned closer. ‘These pictures are coming from the RV. Remote-controlled vessel. Bit like a mini submarine. Darren here is controlling it.’

The young constable’s gaze never left the screen.

‘On the surface those torch beams will stretch a hundred metres,’ said Cook. ‘Down there, less than one.’

Dana watched the dull glow of the torch beam. Particles of sand and grit floated across the screen, giving the impression that the RV was moving through soup. It was very close to the river bed. Shapes emerged from the gloom, vague and indistinct. Intermittently, a diver’s gloved hands came into view, creeping hesitantly along the bottom like a slow-moving river creature. Every time he touched something, a fine spray of silt sprang upwards, almost destroying what little visibility there’d been.

‘What’s down there?’ Dana muttered, not really intending that anyone would answer.

‘Nobody knows for sure,’ Cook told her. ‘Lot of building material – bricks, stones, stuff that’s fallen off bridges or riverside buildings over the years. Anything heavy that’s fallen off a boat. Any amount of stuff people have deliberately tried to get rid of. Unless it runs dry, we’ll never know. Even if we invent lights powerful enough to be able to see, most stuff will be covered in silt.’

‘So even if there are more bodies down there, the divers could swim straight over them and never know.’

‘Well, I like to think they won’t be that easily fooled. But it always was a long shot, you know that.’

‘I do.’ Dana looked down-river towards Lacey’s boat. A couple of times during the last half-hour she’d seen the glint of binoculars. It seemed safe to conclude that Lacey was as nervous as she was. Lacey, though, wouldn’t be the one to carry the can when it all went wrong.

‘What are you hoping to see down there?’ asked Turner, coming up beside Lacey on deck. She’d been leaning against the guardrail, staring down into the depths. River traffic had eased and the crew had taken a short break. Lacey took the coffee Turner was holding out to her.

‘You look like one of the legendary mariners of old,’ he told her.

‘Under the spell of a mermaid? Being lured to a watery grave by the siren sound of her song?’

He caught her mood and went along with it. ‘I think women were largely immune to the magic of the mermaid.’

‘Let’s hope so.’ Lacey straightened up and followed Turner back to the cockpit just as Buckle was wiping ketchup from his mouth.

‘Another coffee, Sarge?’ offered Turner.

‘Aye, go on. You two realize we’re going to take a whole load of grief if that lot don’t find anything today, don’t you?’

‘The linen matched,’ said Lacey. ‘The sample we had in storage from a corpse retrieval two months ago was the same as the fabric wrapping the body we pulled out a week ago. That’s way beyond coincidence.’

Neither man looked convinced.

‘The woman found at South Dock Marina was likely to have been an illegal immigrant,’ she tried again.

The other two exchanged a sceptical look.

‘I don’t flatter myself they’re doing this to keep me happy.’ She nodded towards the three boats at the centre of the operation. ‘How much does an operation like this cost?’

‘I dread to think,’ said Buckle.

‘So Mr Cook and DI Tulloch would never have authorized it if they didn’t think we’d find something.’

‘It’s a massive river, Lacey. We’re searching a fraction of it. There could be a dozen down there and we might never find them. What are the chances, realistically?’

Lacey closed her eyes, feeling her face tighten. The chances were low to non-existent, everyone knew that. She wouldn’t officially be held responsible if the search turned up nothing, but it would be pretty clear what everyone thought of her.

46

Nadia

THE
CUTTY SARK
, one of the last great British sailing ships, always made Nadia think of a tethered goddess, or a magnificent bird with its wings clipped. She liked to close her eyes when she was in its vicinity and imagine it in full sail, cutting through a rising storm, the scantily clad witch at its prow laughing in defiance of the weather. Instead, it was held captive in a dry dock, sails in storage, for tourists to crawl over.

It was also very close to the river. From the tip of Greenwich Reach, the old ship could see all the way to the city in the west, to the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf directly ahead, and to the Millennium Dome in the east. In the sun, the Thames was gleaming blue. It was nothing more than a mirage, Nadia knew, a sleight of hand, the reflection of the sky. The sun had only to slink behind a cloud and the water would revert to its normal state of moving, greedy, liquid mud.

Fazil was sitting on the edge of one of the concrete flower-beds. Nadia pulled her scarf up around her head, hiding the sides of her face. She kept her eyes down until she drew close.

‘Uncle.’

It was a courtesy title. Fazil was a distant relative, hardly family at all, but older than she. He wasted no time, pushing a folded sheet
of paper into her hand. ‘The police are looking for you. What have you done?’

Nadia opened it to see her own picture. She had to stop herself looking round, as though even here, already, there would be people pointing.

‘We printed it off the police website,’ Fazil was saying. ‘Your picture is everywhere. I can’t protect you from the police. Why are they looking for you?’

The police would arrest her. Send her home. Or back to the house on the river.

‘I don’t know. I swear. I’ve done nothing wrong.’

He leaned closer. He smelled of mint and tobacco. ‘You think they care? Just being here is wrong to them.’

He was holding out a plastic carrier bag. ‘Jaamil sent you this,’ he said. ‘It’s not easy for us to help you.’

Nadia took the bag. ‘I’m very grateful.’

‘Did you bring the money?’

Nadia handed over banknotes. Fazil counted them twice. ‘Not as much this week.’

‘I broke a plate. I had to replace it.’

He nudged the carrier bag, causing the plastic to rustle against his hand. ‘Straight away,’ he said, pointing to a door some twenty yards away. ‘Or I won’t be responsible. I’ll be here next week.’

Nadia said goodbye and walked over to the ladies’ lavatory. Five minutes later, a burka-clad woman, her face entirely covered, emerged. She passed briefly through the evening crowds and disappeared.

47

Lacey

IN HER BEDROOM
cabin, Lacey changed into shorts and a T-shirt, then pulled her hair free from its pins. She found sneakers and climbed back up top. Ray was in the yard, chatting to one of the other boat owners. She could hear Eileen clattering about below. Good, she really didn’t want to talk.

‘It’s not over,’ Tulloch had told her, as the search had finally been called off and she and the MIT had said their goodbyes. ‘The pregnancy gives us a whole new lead. If she was treated in this country, she’s traceable.’

The water was high, lapping against the hull of Lacey’s boat, gleaming an uncharacteristic blue beneath the evening sky. A family of swans sailed elegantly around the Theatre Arm. The younger ones had just a trace left of the grey plumage of cygnets. Lacey reached into the sealed box where she kept dried bread and biscuits and threw a handful overboard.