A Dark and Twisted Tide (28 page)

The two lab technicians began the process of removing the linen wrappings. They found the knots at the neck, midriff and feet and snipped them away first. When everything was loose, Kaytes got involved, lifting the head, shoulders, waist and legs as the technicians unwound the bandages and bagged them carefully. The shroud beneath was a large, square piece of fabric, large patches of which were still white. At a nod from Kaytes, Max found the loose edge beneath the corpse’s left side and raised it. The woman beneath was revealed.

‘She looks like Sahar,’ said Mizon, referring to the woman Lacey had found in the river just over a week earlier.

‘She looks like Nadia,’ said Lacey.

She looked like both, thought Dana. The dead woman’s features were strong and regular. A high forehead, strong nose. Her eyes were open, large and pale in colour. About twenty years old, was Dana’s best guess. Her breasts were high and small, her hips narrow and angular, her waist tiny. Her legs were long and a little on the thin side. The dark triangle of pubic hair had been neither trimmed nor shaved. There was fine, dark hair on the lower part of her legs and lower arms. The hair on her head was black and very long.

‘She wasn’t stabbed, or shot,’ said Stenning. ‘There’s barely a mark on her.’

‘We still need to turn her,’ said Kaytes, ‘but I’m inclined to think you’re right. Jac, can I get a light up here, please?’

As the powerful light illuminated the woman’s head, everyone moved a step or two closer to the top of the gurney. Kaytes took out a surgical comb. He began moving it through the woman’s hair, gently parting it at inch-wide intervals across her head. ‘No obvious major head injury. OK, let’s turn her.’

He and his two assistants, with the skill of long practice, slid their hands beneath the woman’s body and turned her on to her front.

‘Pete’s right,’ said Anderson. ‘No sign of blunt-force trauma at all.’

‘She couldn’t have drowned,’ said Lacey. ‘She was practically gift-wrapped. She must have been dead, or at least immobile, before they did that to her.’

Kaytes had found a magnifying glass and was looking through it at something on the woman’s neck. Then he walked back down the body until he was directly above her left hand. The skin around her hand looked like a thin glove about to slip off. Kaytes frowned and leaned over to check the other hand.

‘Was she strangled?’ asked Dana. ‘Or suffocated in some way?’

Kaytes gave her a small smile. ‘Possibly. Turn her back, please, girls.’

‘Look,’ he said, a few seconds later, when the woman was once again staring up at them. ‘See these marks just above her collar bone?’

‘Looks like something was wrapped round her neck,’ said Anderson. ‘Strangulation then?’

‘Could be,’ said Kaytes. ‘The mark goes all round to the back of her neck and it doesn’t look like a post-mortem wound to me. And there are marks on both hands that could be defence wounds. We need to be very careful with the hands, girls. We could very well find our perp’s DNA tucked away under the fingernails.’

‘They’re Pashtuns.’ Lacey had both hands wrapped round a coffee mug, as though she needed the warmth within it. ‘There’s no way of knowing now, but I’ll bet Sahar had pale eyes. Nadia has. So has this one. Young, beautiful women from Afghanistan or somewhere very close.’

The team, together with David Cook and Lacey, were back at
Lewisham police station. The post-mortem would continue for several hours. They’d left Kaytes and his team to it.

‘We do need to talk to this Nadia Safi,’ said Dana. ‘Whether she’s involved or not, she’s all we’ve got for the moment. Which is why you’re joining the team again, Lacey. You’re our only link with her.’

Lacey looked sharply at Cook, who nodded his head. ‘I’ve said it’s OK,’ he said. ‘We can cover your shifts until it’s over. Which I hope it will be soon, by the way. We’ve got a busy few months ahead.’

As Dana watched, a gleam lit up Lacey’s eyes. For all that she had insisted upon her need to go back into uniform, Lacey wanted to be involved with this case. She wanted to solve it. She was still a detective, however much she might try to pretend otherwise.

At that moment, the door swung open and Mizon walked in. ‘Report back from fingerprints,’ she announced. ‘Three different sets of prints on those toy boats, including yours on the yellow one, Ma’am, and Lacey’s on all three. More significantly, though, another very distinctive print that we also found around the winch on Lacey’s boat, one that matches, exactly, the third set.’

Dana sat up a little straighter, saw her movements mirrored by those around her. ‘The winch used to haul the body up the mast?’

‘The very one. Seems little doubt that our perp has a personal interest in Lacey and has been paying her visits for some time. Unfortunately, as his prints aren’t on the system, we’re no closer to knowing who he is.’

‘What about the latest victim?’

Mizon shook her head. ‘Sorry, Boss. Her prints aren’t on record either.’

Around the table were collective sighs of frustration. ‘Couldn’t be that easy, could it?’ said Dana. At that moment, her phone started ringing. It was Kaytes. He wanted them back.

The pathologist steered them towards a small, windowless meeting room that smelled of stale coffee and cleaning fluid. He didn’t sit, just took up a position at the far end of the table. ‘She wasn’t pregnant. I’d be inclined to say she’d never been pregnant. The uterus was small, just what you’d expect to see in a young woman who’s yet to start the whole messy process of sprogging.’

Dana pulled out a chair and leaned on it. Another lead gone.

‘Any major organs missing?’ asked Mizon.

‘All present and correct. I made a point of checking the kidneys.’

And another. Dana sat down.

‘I don’t think she was strangled,’ Kaytes went on. ‘For one thing, the hyoid bone was intact. We’ll have to wait for toxicology reports, but there are no signs of the most common forms of poison.’

‘So how did she die?’

‘We may never know for certain. But the clever money at the moment says she drowned.’

‘That’s impossible,’ said Lacey immediately.

‘Good to see you’re keeping an open mind, River Police,’ said Kaytes.

‘Open mind or not, I can see Lacey’s point,’ said Anderson. ‘Unless she was drugged to immobilize her before they trussed her up.’

‘On the contrary, I think she put up a bit of a fight,’ said Kaytes. ‘There are wounds on her hands and lower arms, some scratch marks and faint bruises. The sort that can develop in minutes, because I think minutes were all she had. There’s also a small wound on the skull, just above the back of her neck. And the mark around her neck that you all saw. They all indicate to me that somehow, possibly with some sort of restraint around her throat, she was held under the water until she drowned.’

‘There’s water in her lungs?’ asked Stenning.

Kaytes nodded. ‘There is. And it’s Thames water. The mixture of fresh and salt water is quite distinctive. Not that that in itself proves anything. If a corpse is underwater for any length of time, water can seep its way into the lungs and stomach.’

Kaytes stretched, put both hands behind his head and arched his back. There was a lecture coming. ‘You know, don’t you, that we can usually only suggest drowning as the cause of death either if someone saw it happen or we’ve managed to rule everything else out. If our toxicology reports come back clean, then my conclusion will be that this young woman most likely died as a result of being forcibly submerged in the River Thames.’

‘After which, she was removed from the river, shrouded, attached
to weights and then dropped back into the Thames somewhere around Deptford Creek,’ said Dana.

‘Seems reasonable to me,’ agreed Kaytes.

‘Seems seriously weird to me,’ said Anderson.

‘But what you really all want to know,’ Kaytes went on, ‘is whether the woman found this morning, the one River Police pulled out of the Thames last week, and the one found at South Dock Marina two months ago have enough in common for them to be the subject of a joint investigation. Basically, do we have three unconnected deaths, or three linked by common circumstances? Is that fair?’

‘Exactly,’ replied Dana. ‘We already know they were found in roughly the same stretch of river. We know there was a good chance that at least two of them were weighted down, given that their condition was consistent with their not moving around too much.’

‘We also know we’re covering a time period of less than a year,’ said Lacey.

Kaytes nodded. ‘Very likely, River Police. Right. All under thirty. I’d go as far as to say all under twenty-five, judging by their teeth and bone development. All three had long, black hair, suggesting Middle Eastern or Asian origin. None of them showed any sign of sophisticated dentistry.’

‘No obvious cause of death, other than what you’ve just told us?’ asked Anderson.

‘No sign that any of them were shot, stabbed, or hit over the head with a blunt instrument,’ said Kaytes. ‘Unlikely they were strangled, because the hyoid bone is intact on all of them. The post-mortem reports on the earliest one shows no sign of her having ingested any poisonous substances. I don’t like to get ahead of myself, but it looks likely all three were forcibly drowned.’

‘The shroud clinches it though, doesn’t it?’ said Mizon. ‘The fact that two, possibly three, of them were shrouded is beyond coincidence.’

‘I think so,’ said Kaytes. ‘You have a highly unusual serial killer, ladies and gentlemen. One who likes his work wet. Very wet.’

65

Lacey

‘
IT’S STILL BONKERS
,’ argued Anderson, as he’d been doing for most of the afternoon. ‘We’re talking about a major operation. First you’ve got to find these good-looking Afghan girls with blue eyes. Then bribe them to leave their homes and travel thousands of miles with men they don’t know across a major land mass, including the length of Europe. Then you have to smuggle them into Britain somehow.’

‘Not somehow, Sarge.’ Lacey was finding it surprisingly easy to be back at her old desk in Lewisham nick. ‘We know exactly how. They’re coming on a ship to Tilbury, being offloaded there, and then brought up the Thames by small boat.’

Anderson’s complexion had been getting steadily redder as the day went on. He sighed. ‘I stand corrected. We have some idea of the last couple of miles of a several-thousand-mile journey. We’re positively brimming over with information. I’m starting to wonder how we managed without you, Lacey. But to get back to my point, it all smacks of big business. Nobody goes to all that trouble unless there’s money to be made.’

‘Nobody’s disagreeing with you, Sarge,’ said Mizon. ‘But this money-making venture, either by design or accident, is resulting in some of these women dying.’

‘And that’s where we go slipping off into the Twilight Zone,’ snapped Anderson. ‘Because they’re not just being dumped, they’re being wrapped up like Egyptian mummies. That suggests something ritualistic to me, something twisted.’

‘Because smuggling women across the planet and holding them captive isn’t twisted?’ said Mizon.

‘I’m not saying it’s nice, just that there’s a logical point to it. Money. There is no logical point to how these women are being disposed of. And that’s before we get on to the whole business of Lacey’s stalker. It’s all seriously weird.’

Nobody argued.

‘Well, I’m glad we’re clear on that,’ said Stenning. ‘Hush up now, she’s on.’

The others turned to the TV set that had been playing quietly in the background. The early evening news had just begun and the lead story was of the body that had been found on Lacey’s boat earlier that day. A reporter was doing a piece to camera outside New Scotland Yard.

‘The Metropolitan Police have confirmed not only that they are treating the death of the woman found at Deptford Creek this morning as suspicious, but that they believe her death may be linked to two similar cases in London within the last twelve months.’

The scene switched to the press room inside. DI Tulloch, Chief Inspector Cook and Detective Superintendent Weaver sat at the top table facing the reporters.

‘We believe these young women are being recruited somewhere in the Middle East.’ Tulloch had changed for the press conference and was wearing a pearl-grey suit with a deep-pink blouse. ‘We believe they are being tricked into leaving their homes, possibly with the promise of a new and better life in the West. They are being brought into the country illegally, and kept prisoner. Then something terrible is happening to them. We believe three women have died in this way in the last year. There could be many more. There could be more young women at risk even now. If you know anything at all that can help us, please get in touch.’

‘She has a natural authority, doesn’t she?’ said Mizon to Lacey.

‘She does,’ agreed Lacey. ‘How much of it is the clothes?’

‘They help. But I think it’s also about knowing you’re always going to be the brightest person in the room.’

A phone in Lacey’s bag was ringing. Both women looked at each other. Then Mizon’s eyes went to Lacey’s usual mobile, still and silent on the desk between them. They’d hoped the press conference would flush out Nadia Safi, encouraging her to make contact again with Lacey. They just hadn’t expected it to happen so soon.

Conscious of the room around her falling silent, Lacey found her phone.
Number withheld
, said the display screen. Just as it had the last time Nadia had called.

‘Hello?’

‘Do you still want to talk to me?’

‘Of course.’ Lacey nodded at her colleagues. ‘Are you OK?’

Nadia hesitated just for a moment. ‘I’m fine. I saw the news just now. Is it true? That three women have been killed?’

‘At least three. Something terrible is happening to young women just like you. Can you help us?’

‘Yes,’ said Nadia. ‘I think I can.’

66

Lacey

GREENWICH PARK WAS
languid, heavy with the weight of the summer’s heat and over five hundred years of history. Flower stems in the ornamental beds seemed barely able to hold up their blooms.