Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation (12 page)

On the other side of the sea wall was an algae-covered concrete lip, some four feet wide. It was accessible via gaps in the wall every hundred yards or so that could be closed off with thick metal gates if there was a particularly high tide. Sloped down into the water beyond was the sea wall, built from massive blocks of stone that had been coated in thick black bitumen. Decades of hot summers had caused the bitumen to soften and run like ancient wrinkled skin.

Looking down onto the concrete lip, Emma could see three men in parkas and woollen hats clustered around a telescope mounted on a tripod. The other two had binoculars slung around their necks. The telescope was pointed sideways, along the wall, and following its line Emma could see in the distance a marshy
area where banks of mud emerged from the rippling water like the backs of wallowing animals. Small wading birds scurried across the mud with splayed feet, probing for worms. The men ignored them, spending their time instead chatting and sipping tea from thermos flasks held in gloved fingers. They were obviously waiting for rarer prey.

‘Morning!’

Emma turned, surprised, to find a woman in a green Barbour jacket and a headscarf wandering past. She had a chocolate Labrador at heel.

‘Good morning,’ Emma replied.

The woman smiled and walked on. The dog sniffed at Emma’s trousers, waited for a moment to see whether it might be stroked, then wandered off.

Turning back to the estuary, Emma noticed that the birdwatchers’ attention had been gripped by something out on the mudbanks. The man with the telescope was bending over with his face pressed up against the eyepiece, while his two friends had their binoculars clamped to their eyes with an eagerness that Emma would have considered suspicious if she had seen it displayed in a park near a children’s playground. Following their rapt gaze she couldn’t see anything different about the mud banks. The birds looked exactly the same to her. People were strange.

She looked back out across the water. The mist was beginning to clear now, pushed off by the stiffening breeze. A weak sun was now visible as a white circle the size of a penny held at arm’s length in the sky. Beneath the rippling, wind-blown water Emma could see the dark shadows of sunken mud banks. The ripples seemed to change shape as they crossed the shadows. Further out, where the angle of the light on the water meant that the mud banks were invisible beneath its surface, Emma
found that she could still tell where they were from the patterns of ripples. The estuary had a geography all its own, if you knew what you were looking for.

She was avoiding having to get the body identified. She knew that, but her willpower appeared to have evaporated. All she wanted to do, for the moment, was stand there and look out across the water, like the birdwatchers, waiting for something meaningful to happen. She didn’t know what it might be, but she would recognise it if she saw it.

Emma wandered along the wall towards where the mud banks lay, heading in the same direction as the lady with the Labrador. She tried to work out which of the birds had got the birdwatchers all of a twitter, but they still all looked the same to her: dun-coloured little bundles with thin beaks and wide feet. Surely, if you were going to go to all the trouble of spending hours standing in the cold and the rain you would do it for something bright and tropical, or at the very least something bigger than the average, but to Emma it seemed that all the men were getting excited about was a bird the same size and shape as the rest of them but with a black edge to its wing feathers, or an extra toe, or something.

Past the mud banks, Emma saw a forest of slender wooden poles pointed towards the sky. For a few moments she couldn’t work out what they were, then she realised. Masts. As she got closer she saw that they were all attached to boats that were drawn up on a concrete causeway that sloped down towards the water. And not just any boats. These were all small one- or two-person catamarans – two narrow hulls like canoes linked by narrow struts with a mast projecting right from the centre. A sign on a building nearby said: ‘Canvey Island Boat Club’. Obviously there was more going on here than just birdwatching.

Her way forward was blocked by a fence that marked the
boundary of the Boat Club. The Labrador woman had headed down the slope to where she had parked her car. Emma turned around and headed back along the wall.

The mist had rolled back now, revealing more of the water. Faintly, in the far distance, Emma thought she could make out a mass of land: sketchy suggestions of hills and dips across on the Kent side of the estuary. Gravesend, perhaps? Years ago, centuries before the Dartford Tunnel had been dug, and before the Queen Elizabeth Bridge had been built, both of them ten miles or so upstream, the only way from one bank to the other would be by boat. To make the trip by cart or by foot would require you to go all the way up to – where? Walton-on-Thames, perhaps? Or further?

This was stupid. She couldn’t keep putting it off. The body would have been transferred from Jane Catherall’s care to the mortuary nearest to the parents by now. It, and they, were waiting for her.

Reluctantly, she headed down the grassy bank towards her car.

She arrived at the police station just before nine o’clock. Murrell was in his office sifting through a pile of papers. He glanced up as she walked in.

‘Morning. Sleep well?’

‘Not so’s you’d notice.’

He nodded. ‘Wedding party?’

‘You guessed. You weren’t there, were you?’

‘No, but there’s a wedding party on there most nights. Which is odd, considering there aren’t that many weddings occurring on the island. Someone ought to look into that.’

‘You ready to go?’

His eyes narrowed for a second, as if he’d just been told he was being taken to the vet to be neutered. ‘I suppose so.’

‘Problem?’ Emma asked.

‘No.’ He stood up, but hesitated before coming out from behind his desk. ‘Well, yes. In a way.’

‘Go on.’

‘It’s …’ He paused, and swallowed. ‘Look, this is going to sound pathetic.’

‘What?’

‘We’re going off-island, aren’t we?’

Emma sighed. ‘You say that like it’s a bad thing.’

Murrell raised his hands defensively. ‘Not as such, but a lot of us are kind of
tied
to Canvey Island. It’s more than our home; it’s like it’s separate from the rest of Essex and the rest of England. We feel comfortable here, and we’ve got everything we need – shops, pubs, nightclubs, cinemas. And apart from a few weeks in the summer we get the beaches as well.’ He made a vague gesture with his hands. ‘Most of the men who live on Canvey marry women from Canvey. What does that tell you?’

‘That the incidence of people with six fingers is higher than the national average?’

He had the grace to laugh. ‘Well, yeah, in-breeding is certainly possible, judging by some of the people that I see out on the streets – but no, what I mean is, it’s a community in the true sense of the word, with the kind of ties that bind a community together. Off-island, in Essex, over the course of centuries, little villages joined together to form larger villages, and then towns. Here, on Canvey, we didn’t. We’re still separate from the rest. In our minds we’re still that little village, bounded by the sea.’

‘Look,’ she said patiently, ‘I didn’t need a passport to get here. There’s no customs at the border and you’re not going to be cavity-searched when you leave. The people in Essex still talk the same language, and they don’t have nits. Just take a deep breath and force yourself.’

‘Okay.’ He nodded. ‘Right. Yes. Let’s go.’

They took his car, giving Emma a chance to do some more sightseeing as they drove out past the caravan park and the tall metal chimneys of the refinery, past the large supermarket and the several small roundabouts, along the long, curving causeway that carried cars over the marshes and which, Emma noticed, was called Memorial Way, presumably in remembrance of the people who had died in the floods of the 1950s. Murrell was quiet as they drove, and Emma couldn’t help wondering about his reluctance to leave the island. It was almost medieval; but then, she reflected, so much of what she had seen on the island made it feel like a village walled off against the barbarian hordes that roamed the marshes. Some kind of race memory? Who could tell?

Once across the causeway it was about a forty-minute drive to Maldon. The first twenty minutes took them along wide A-roads built up above the Essex countryside as if by architects who were frightened of letting their roads touch the soil; the second half of the journey was along minor B-roads through small villages and past farms and industrial parks. Eventually they got to the outskirts of the town. The mortuary was on the other side, and Murrell had to drive right through the centre of town to get there. Maldon’s town centre seemed to consist of one very long High Street that was a mix of nondescript buildings, old churches and new flat-fronted shops. They passed a particularly impressive hotel named the Blue Boar, and Emma made a mental note to look it up with a view to staying there if work or play ever brought her back to the Maldon area.

The mortuary was part of the new local hospital. Murrell parked in the hospital’s car park, and together they walked through the large sliding doors at the entrance and on through the central spine corridor following the cryptic signage and the
equally cryptic instructions given to them by the woman on the reception desk.

A tastefully furnished waiting room was set to one side of the doorway that led into the main mortuary area. Three people were waiting there: a small man whose tanned skin was almost as leathery as his coat, but not quite as scuffed, a woman who probably massed twice his body weight but who was leaning on him for comfort, and a large man in a tight police uniform whose hair was sandy turning white. He walked over to them. ‘George Rossmore,’ he said, hand outstretched.

‘Keith Murrell,’ said Emma’s companion, shaking hands.

Emma did likewise, murmuring ‘Emma Bradbury.’ She looked across to the man and the woman. ‘Mr and Mrs Dooley, I presume?’

‘Indeed,’ Rossmore said.

‘Boyfriend not here?’

‘Apparently not.’

‘Shame,’ Emma said. ‘I wanted to talk to him.’ Something about the voices of the parents caught her attention. After a few moments he realised that the tearful wailing and the muttered reassurances were being said in another language. ‘They’re not British?’ she asked.

‘They’re Travellers,’ Rossmore answered; ‘a people without a land, if you believe them. Even the ones who have settled down, or who have been settled down against their will, and don’t actually move around any more. They have their own traditions, their own ways of doing things and their own language.’

‘Just like the people of Canvey Island,’ Emma murmured, ‘apart from the language bit.’ She thought for a moment. ‘What language do they speak? Romany?’

‘No, you’re thinking of true Gypsies: the Roma. They have a
bit of a downer on the Travellers. They called them “Didicoy”, which is the same word they use for the half-breed children of Roma and ordinary people. That language they’re speaking is Shelti. It comes in two dialects – Gamin and Cant. These two are speaking Gamin, unless I miss my guess.’

‘Wow.’ Emma was impressed. ‘A whole culture that I wasn’t even aware of.’

‘They don’t integrate,’ Rossmore agreed, ‘but they don’t set up an obvious counter-culture of Traveller shops, Traveller churches and Traveller community centres either. They’re the perfect neighbours, as long as you ignore the petty crime and the caravan sites.’

Emma walked across to the two grieving parents. ‘Mr and Mrs Dooley? I’m Detective Sergeant Emma Bradbury. Thank you for being here.’

‘Can we get this over with?’ the husband said gruffly. He wouldn’t look Emma in the eyes.

‘Of course.’ She paused, trying to work out how to phrase the necessary qualification. ‘We don’t know for sure that this is your daughter, but we strongly suspect it is. We need you to confirm it for us. Is that okay?’ She tried to meet their gaze, to gauge whether they understood what she was trying to tell them, but they were both looking away: Mr Dooley towards the window and his wife at the floor. Emma looked towards the door. A hospital worker was standing there. He nodded to her solemnly. ‘Please – come this way.’

He led them through the door into the mortuary itself. The air was chillier there, and it smelled of pine and lavender. Vases of flowers were placed on tables and shelves; anything to disguise the fact that this was a place of death within a place of illness and disease: the final destination for some of the patients who passed through its large sliding doors. He stopped at a doorway.
The room inside was darkened. He gestured inside. ‘Please – whenever you are ready.’

Inside, on a table, a body lay. It couldn’t be anything else. The smell of pine and lavender was almost overpowering. Mr and Mrs Dooley, Emma and Murrell all shuffled in, like actors walking on stage but unsure of their lines or their stage directions. The hospital worker walked over to the body, took hold of a corner of the sheet nearest the head, and folded it back, exposing the face.

It was the woman whose body Emma had seen in Doctor Catherall’s mortuary, but someone had done a lot of good work on her. Emma remembered with a shudder how the woman’s scalp had been peeled forward by the pathologist, exposing her skull and covering her face, but none of that was evident now. Her face was composed, her eyes peacefully closed, her forehead unwrinkled, her hair carefully brushed, A dressing had been applied at the place where Emma remembered that the flesh had been sliced away. It would have been possible to believe that she was just asleep, pale and cold and asleep, if Emma hadn’t seen her with her chest and skull opened up and her organs being removed and weighed with no more ceremony than a load of groceries.

Mrs Dooley let out a shocked wail, then clapped her hand over her mouth. Her eyes were wide and disbelieving. Her husband’s face seemed to age ten years in as many seconds.

‘Yes,’ he said, as flat and as hard as concrete. ‘That’s me daughter.’

Emma led the parents out of the room where their daughter lay and back to the waiting room. It seemed like a different room now. The flowers that had previously been vibrant looked artificial, and the soothing paint scheme pointed up the scuffs and cracks in the walls. Even the neon light strips were buzzing more than they had before.