Isvik (7 page)

I shook my head. I hadn't noticed any ring.

‘A bad business.' His hands were locked together on the desk. ‘It's not nice seeing somebody, anybody, in that condition. But somebody you've met, a strong, characterful young woman – very striking, didn't you think her?'

‘Yes, very striking,' I agreed. ‘Great vitality.'

‘Vitality, yes. It hit you straight away, a sort of sexual energy.' There was a sudden gleam in his eyes, his small mouth slightly pursed so that I wondered whether he was married and if so what his wife was like. ‘She wasn't raped, you know,' he added. ‘It wasn't that sort of killing.'

‘You asked?'

‘Yes, of course. It's the first thing that comes to mind.'

‘And you're convinced she was killed.'

‘That's the Inspector's view. What else? It was either that or suicide, and she wasn't the sort of person to kill herself, not when she'd just got the backing she needed. And it would be odd if she fell into the dock by accident. Sky clear and a nearly full moon. Now if she'd had the dog with her … But she hadn't.' He got to his feet. ‘Her brother was one of the Disappeareds. That may explain it.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘The Disappeareds. Don't you remember?' This over his shoulder as he walked across the room to a bank of filing cabinets. ‘All those silent women holding a weekly vigil in that square in Buenos Aires. There was a lot about it in the press two or three years back. A mute accusation for the loss of their loved ones. About thirty thousand of them. Just disappeared. Surely you remember?' He pulled open one of the drawers. ‘Connor-Gómez. That was the family name, her name before she married, and her brother was Eduardo. She talked about him briefly when she first came to see me. He was a scientist. Biology I think she said.' He found the file he wanted and lifted out a sheet of notepaper. ‘Here we are. Just an ordinary thank you letter for arranging that meeting on board the
Cutty Sark
, and then at the bottom a PS.' He handed me the letter. ‘I gave a copy of it to the police, of course.'

It was a typed letter, short and to the point, with a wild flourish of a signature sprawled across her name typed at the bottom, and below that the postscript, hand-written and difficult to read:
Other people are after the ship. Don't let them discourage Ward please
. The
please
was heavily underlined.

‘Have you been in touch with him?' I asked.

‘Ward? No. What's the point? Nothing I could do about it and he'll know she's dead. The media gave it full coverage, all the gory details.' He held out his hand for the letter. ‘So ironic, just at the moment when she'd found a backer, and an interesting one, too. He came and saw me here the day after our meeting, wanted to know a little more about her.' His glasses caught the light as he turned back to the filing cabinet. ‘I couldn't tell him much, but I learnt a little bit more about him, enough anyway to realise he could contribute quite a lot to the expedition. He's not just a truck driver, you see. Not any more. He has his own business now and runs a small fleet of those transcontinental monsters they use on the Middle Eastern run down through Turkey. That's the modern equivalent of the old silk road.' He paused, searching for the folder he had taken the letter from. Then, when he had found it, he said, ‘I asked him about the cargoes he was running, but he wouldn't say much about that, or their destination. I don't imagine it was drugs. He didn't seem that sort of man. But it was cértainly profitable. Arms most likely, and the destination probably Iran or the Gulf States.'

He pushed the drawer to and returned to his desk. ‘A pity,' he said again. ‘She had been trying unsuccessfully for over six months to raise the necessary funds in South America and the States. Finally she came to England and got herself a room in Mellish Street, where she'd be close to the Museum here and at the same time handy for the City where she hoped to fund the expedition. Then, when the institutions turned her down, she began advertising in a few selected magazines. That was how she landed Ward. Rather similar, the two of them – wouldn't you say? Both of them with a lot of energy, a lot of drive.'

Wellington had resumed his seat and he leaned across the desk, staring at me as he said abruptly, ‘How do you drown a woman?' He didn't wait for an answer. ‘I asked the Inspector that. You hold her head under water, of course. But to do that in the South Docks you'd have to be in the water yourself. How do you get out? And when you have found the ladder, or whatever it is, you're sopping wet as well as scared. Somebody surely would have seen the man. I mean, you don't forget a sight like that, do you? At least, that's what the Inspector is banking on.'

‘She could have been drowned in her lodgings, in the bath, something like that,' I said. ‘Then driven to the dockside and dumped there.'

We were still discussing the various possibilities when his secretary came in to say the Admiral was waiting for him and all the members of the ship model group were assembled. He nodded and got to his feet. ‘Bad business,' he said again as we went to the door. ‘And bad luck on you. Could have made your name on a project like that. But perhaps you're best out of it.'

‘How do you mean?' I asked. And when he didn't immediately reply I added, ‘Because of that postscript to her letter?'

We had paused in the corridor outside. ‘No, because of Ward.' He seemed to hesitate. Then he said, ‘There was no pools win, you see. He came by his money some other way.' And when I asked him how he knew, he gave a little deprecating laugh and said, ‘Simple. I just phoned a couple of the main operators.'

‘You mean he hasn't got a million?'

He shrugged. ‘Can't answer that. All I know is, if he's got that sort of money, it didn't come to him through a pools win.' The words hung in the air as he stood there smiling at me. ‘Too bad it turned out this way.'

He had nothing else to offer me, of course, but before he went off to discuss ship models he was kind enough to say he'd continue to bear me in mind if he heard of anything that required a wood preservative consultant.

I had a sandwich and a cup of coffee in the Museum cafeteria, then walked back through the foot tunnel to the Isle of Dogs. I didn't take the train. Instead, I decided to walk along West Ferry Road until I reached Mellish Street. There were houses at first and a few trees, but at the Lord Nelson, on the corner of what the developers had left of East Ferry Road, the hoardings began. From then on it was all hoardings, dust and heavy machinery, and all that was left of old Millwall were the pubs. They stood, solitary and splendid, waiting for the coming of the yuppies – the Ship, the Robert Burns, the Vulcan, the Telegraph, the Kingsbridge Arms. By Cyclops Wharf and Quay West a long stretch of hoardings advertised Greenwich views, gymnasium, restaurant, swimming pool, running track, squash, water sports, leafy squares, cobbled streets, bakery, the Island Club, the river bus – a you-name-it, we've-got-it development.

And then I came to Tiller Road and the vestige remains of Tower Hamlets' cheap-looking post-war housing. Mellish Street began like that, too, breeze-block two-storey tenements with rusty metal windows and concrete slab porches, and behind the tenements several tower blocks climbing the sky. But halfway up the street, from Number 26 on, it was the old original terraced houses with front parlour windows that jutted out into front garden patches.

The house in which she had lodged was one of these, right at the end of the street by a solitary tree.

I don't know what I expected to learn from this visit, but though I rang the bell several times, there was no answer. A black kid was trying out a skateboard down by the tenements, otherwise the street was deserted, a few parked cars, that's all. I hammered on the door. There was no sound, not even from the dog, but a curtain twitched in the house next door and I had a glimpse of a cotton dress and a sharp, lined face with eyes full of curiosity.

She must have been waiting for me there behind the door, for she opened it as soon as I rang the bell. ‘Good morning.' I hadn't thought what I was going to say and we stood there for a moment facing each other awkwardly in silence, her eyes grey and slightly watery. ‘I was wondering about the dog,' I said hesitantly.

‘Mudface? She took it with 'er, ter Poplar ter stay with 'er brother. You the perlice? She got fed up wiv the perlice.'

‘No,' I said. ‘I know Mrs Sunderby.'

Her eyes brightened. ‘'Er as was murdered?' She was a real East Ender.

‘How do you know she was murdered?'

‘Well, I don't, do I? But that's what I 'eard. The papers, they don't
say
it were murder, but that's wot they bin 'inting at. An' all chopped up like that, makes shivers run down yer spine just ter think aba't it. Wot yer want then?'

I started asking her about Iris Sunderby, what time she normally took the dog out at night, whether she had had any visitors, and I described the student I had seen at the
Cutty Sark
that day. I didn't say he had followed us and I didn't mention the name Carlos, but I did tell her he had had a red open sports car and as soon as I said that she nodded. ‘'E parked it up beyond the tree there. I was a't the front talkin' ter Effie Billing an' this little red car turns a't of Mill'arbour an' stops right there.' Her description of the driver fitted. He hadn't got out. He had just sat there as though waiting for somebody.

‘When was this?' I asked.

She couldn't give me the date, but it was a Wednesday, she said, about a fortnight ago. And it had been in the late afternoon, about tea time, which meant he had picked up her trail again after she had dropped me off at South Quay station. Or maybe he had managed to keep us in sight all the time. ‘Did he talk to her?' I asked. ‘Did he call at the house?'

She shook her head. ‘Not that I saw, an' I was watching on an' orf for more'n an hour I'd say. Then she came out an' drove orf in 'er little car. An' as soon as she's inter Mill'arbour 'e whips that little red beast of 'is round an' roars off after 'er.'

‘Did you tell the police?'

She shook her head. ‘Didn't ask, did they?' To her the police were clearly something to be avoided.

I thanked her and walked away, past the house Iris Sunderby had lived in for what must have been at least a fortnight, past the tree, turning left up the main Millharbour road towards Marsh Wall and the
Telegraph
building and the dock where her body had been found. Away to the left was the slender, box-shaped indicator of the
Guardian
newspaper. I was in an area now of brash new construction and for the first time I became conscious of the Development Corporation's obsession with flattened gables that seemed to me remarkably ugly. A feeling of depression came over me, this frantic development I had walked through, and all for what? A few years of London air and diesel fallout and it would be completely in tune with the tattiness of the rest of the Borough of Tower Hamlets. The image of the body lying in that dock with the head and upper torso chopped to bits seemed a sad vignette that matched the mood of the strange dockland tongue hanging out in a great loop of the river.

Why? Why? Why? Why had she been killed? All that effort to prove her husband right, to prove he'd really seen the ship and hadn't hallucinated. I was thinking about the irony of it, the waste, as I walked towards the overhead railway and South Quay station.

To the west of the
Telegraph
building a narrow walkway led to the dockside and the gangway leading to Le Boat, a restaurant occupying the upper deck of a vessel called the
Celtic Surveyor
and incongruously roofed in a sort of plastic reproduction of a big top. A journalist going on board at the stern told me the ship belonged to his newspaper and had been moored there to act as the staff canteen. He was critical of the management for letting off the upper part to a commercial outfit and said they had had quite a fight to get the restaurant to repaint the original name on bows and stern. ‘It's bad luck to change the name of a ship, isn't it? Le Boat!' There was a lot of expression in the way he said it.

The drizzle had started again, a fine, wet mist. The sun had gone and the water of the dock was very still and very black. The
Telegraph
's patch was fenced off from the next development, but by clinging to the barbed wire wrapped round a stanchion I was able to swing my body out over the dock and on to the other side. An open gravel expanse led to a neat brick array of office and residential accommodation facing a dockside walk along the line of Maritime Trust vessels, which included the tug
Portwey
, and beyond that the coaster
Robin
with the
Lydia Eva
moored outside.

The water between these vessels was foul with accumulated filth, the surface of it some six to eight feet below me. Vertical iron ladders, rusted and overgrown with weeds, were set at intervals in the dockside. This was where her body had been fished out of the water, right under the tug's bows where a scum of plastic cartons, old rags and pieces of wood lay congealed in a viscid layer of oil. I should have asked that woman in Mellish Street whether anybody had visited her the night she had been killed, whether she had seen a car parked outside, for now that I had seen the dock for myself I was even more convinced her body must have been dumped there.

I walked back through the new development to Marsh Wall. A construction worker in a hard hat was pile-driving steel rods that protruded from around the base of one of the round columns supporting the overhead railway, the machine he was using kicking up dust and making a noise like a compressed-air drill. I tried to picture this place at night, no construction workers, everything quiet. There were street lights and the development had some exterior lighting of its own. There would be shadows, deep shadows, and nobody about, the alleyways between the buildings like black shafts. He could have knocked her unconscious, then pushed her in, the place deserted and nobody to hear her cry out or the splash of her body as it hit the water. A train ground at the rails overhead and I wondered how late they ran. Could somebody in one of the carriages have seen her standing there with Carlos?