Dead Alone

She looked back at the small flat square of stone under which her father’s bones lay. ‘Good news, Dad,’ she said quietly to herself. ‘The police are finally taking us seriously. I’m going to find Frank.’ Her mother was in Woolwich burial ground. Another almighty disaster in a life coloured by other people’s mistakes. Even in death, they couldn’t be together. Clare always felt bad that she visited her father more often than her mother. She felt guilty whenever she walked into Woolwich and saw the fresh yellow roses that Irene had dutifully brought. Irene had been her Mum’s best friend. It was Irene’s family who took Veronica in when her mother had run off. In a way, Irene was Clare’s only real friend too, if she thought about it. Irene never said she left the flowers. Clare knew that it still hurt her to talk about it. Irene missed her friend as much as Clare missed her mother, they were united by that common denominator. It was their foundation. Irene had been with her all through the search for Frank. Given her valuable clues and held her when, again, they came to nothing.

A man stood by the bench behind her. She glanced at her watch. Trawling time again. She was due at work. She blew a silent kiss to the ground and turned away. Two men were emerging from behind an ivy-clad tree. One was rolling up a rug, the other was struggling with his flies. It made her sick what went on in the graveyard, but she’d never seen anyone do anything near her father’s grave. No grip on a small flat stone. The tombs were the worst off. Illicit sex: another of life’s levellers. Judges or bricklayers, they all looked the same with their trousers down.

Clare took the bus to work, changed into overalls for the morning shift and began to sweep. She liked autumn. Red leaves made a welcome change from fag butts and beer cans.

CHAPTER 7 (#ulink_eaa85510-d10f-571b-93cf-1959ccc38b88)

In the police station’s yard Jessie rinsed the mud off her boots, watching the dirty water mingle with the soapsuds that bubbled in the drain. Above her was the shower-room window, where the washing men’s words billowed out into the yard, enveloped with steam and the smell of expensive soap. Jessie wished she smoked; she needed more time to think about how she would handle Mark. The men were talking football. Something about transfer rules. Then she heard something that made her concentrate.

‘That was gross, wasn’t it?’

‘This fucking job is bad enough without rotting jellyfish pouring out all over us.’

‘Insides is one thing, jellyfish have always given me the willies.’

Jessie catapulted herself into a run.

‘Do you think it was part of the joke?’

‘What, some metaphor about a stinking fish?’

They laughed.

‘Fucking hell, ma’am!’

‘What jellyfish?’ demanded Jessie.

The scene of crime boys slipped around on the wet tiles, frantically trying to protect their modesty.

‘Jesus Christ –’

‘Do you mind –’

‘This is the men’s locker room.’

‘What fucking jellyfish?’

A ballsy lad put his hand on his hips. Jessie’s eyes did not leave his.

‘The one that fell out of the skeleton’s torso.’ He gave her a challenging half-smile.

‘Did you bring it in?’

‘No way.’

Jessie turned to leave. They could tell she was pissed off.

‘It was just a rotting piece of fish. It was nothing.’

‘One jellyfish maybe, but not two, not in the Thames.’ She hurried to the evidence room, where the booty from the morning’s crime scene was being examined and labelled by DC Fry. ‘Where’s the jellyfish?’

‘What?’ he said, looking up.

‘I asked you to bag everything around the body. There was a jellyfish. Where is it?’

‘I didn’t think you meant that. It was dead, slimy, it wasn’t anywhere near the thing.’

‘When I said everything, I meant everything.’

‘Sorry.’

‘What about the one that fell out of the body?’ He looked at her blankly. ‘You did stay until the others had finished, like I asked you?’

He looked around the room nervously.

‘Fuck!’ She glanced at her watch. ‘The tide will be back up by now. We didn’t have a second chance.’

‘Sorry.’

She ignored the tone in the guy’s voice. If he didn’t like taking criticism from someone his own age, he shouldn’t get things wrong in the first place.

Jessie put on a pair of waders and some long rubber gloves. The tide had turned and was lapping at the area where the body had been found. Smaller bits of the river’s cargo moved in rhythm with the tide: a condom, a small plastic bottle, a recently devoured packet of cheese-and-onion crisps. A pole had been sunk into the mud to mark the crime scene. She couldn’t risk taking the steps and wading a hundred yards back through water. It had been bad enough when the tide was fully out. She was scared that if she attempted it now she might step into a run-off channel, lose her footing and be dragged out by the current.

As she removed the rope from her backpack, Jessie was glad of the hours she’d spent being dragged up mountains by her brothers. She wrapped the rope around a tree trunk and tied a slipknot. She pulled against it and, when satisfied, threw the length of rope over the side of the river wall. Waders did not make good rock-climbing boots. Her arms had to take all the weight as she slid down the wall on the base of her boots and landed in a few inches of water that disappeared as quickly as it reappeared. She’d had no idea the Thames was so mighty. Every time she looked back, the water seemed to be reaching higher up the wall.

Sinking deeper with each step, Jessie waded through the mud until she got to the pole. As each wave receded, she put her hands flat and felt around the area where she thought the chest cavity would have been. It was no use. Everything felt the same through the thick rubber. Reluctantly, she peeled off one glove and bent forward again. The glistening top layer of mud felt like thick, viral mucus. She withdrew her hand and waited for the water to be sucked back by the weight of the Thames. Then she dug her nails and fingers in deeper and found purchase on the more compact riverbed below. It was no use with one hand, the water was coming in too fast. She took off the other glove and began to dig. She stepped into the hole left behind by the search for the skull, but still nothing.

Jessie stood up and looked around her. More condoms, more crisp packets and Coke cans. Further down the bank, she thought she saw something move in the water. She trudged towards it as quickly as she could, knowing she was getting dangerously deep. Many anglers drowned in shallow stretches of water, held down by water-filled boots. She felt the cold water push against the rubber. She saw it again. A semi-suspended jellyfish. She watched it ebb and flow with the rest of the flotsam. Her hands reached out for the slippery lump. Resisting the urge to pull away, she made a cage with her fingers and held on to it as an incoming wave rushed between her forearms. The water was now above her knees and the mud had sucked her into a vacuum. One boot was stuck. Jessie looked up to the bank. Even if someone had been on the path, they wouldn’t have been able to see her unless they were standing on the wall. This was not a spectator sport. If she got sucked under, no one would know until she rose to the surface two weeks later, bloated with river water and methane.

She tried to pull her leg out of the mud again, but it was only making the other foot sink deeper. Jessie took a deep breath, exhaled, fixed her vision on the post and, once she’d found her balance, slowly lifted one leg fully out of the boot. The tide nearly toppled her, but she threw the bare foot out behind her and her arms in front, with the jellyfish oozing between her fingers, and somehow she managed to stay upright. The mud squelched between her toes as she retraced her steps.

The area PC Ahmet had shown her earlier was under two foot of water, the saturated mud was even more dangerous. If she fell, she would be dragged under and carried downstream within seconds. She had one jellyfish. It had to be enough. Water was rushing in and out of the tunnel. It was too dangerous to stay down there any longer. With stinking, itchy, cold arms and a filthy, numb foot, Jessie carried the jellyfish back to the wall. She shrugged off her rucksack and placed the jellyfish in the container she had brought. Then, flinging the bag back over her shoulder, she grabbed the rope. It had got wet lying against the sodden brickwork. The first few times her hand simply slipped straight off it. She was getting very cold. Jessie rubbed her hands together, kicked the other boot off, peeled off her wet socks, wrung them out and wrapped one round each palm. The looped cotton absorbed the damp and gave her something to hold on with. She lifted herself out of the mud and, with burning biceps and frozen feet, worked her way back up the slimy wall. At the lip she dug her knee into a small ridge and hauled herself over the top. Lying face down on the wall, breathing heavily, she looked back to where she’d found the jellyfish. The wader had already been claimed as the river’s own.

CHAPTER 8 (#ulink_241af141-462d-554e-9d3f-87bdfc21febb)

Jessie placed her helmet on the wooden boards by the door and prayed her bleeper wouldn’t go off. The flat housed two women too busy to buy anything. There was nothing on the walls except the previous inhabitants’ choice of paint; the floors were bare and the rooms blessedly uncluttered. Maggie’s only possessions were clothes and make-up, most of which she had purloined from the make-up rooms and wardrobes of television centres around the country. This, she assured Jessie, was normal.

The lights were on, but the flat was silent. Jessie knew the signs. Maggie had had bad news. She pushed the door to the sitting room open and saw Maggie sitting cross-legged on the floor. She did not look up. Instead she held out a piece of newspaper.

‘Bastard,’ she whispered.

Jessie took the newspaper and began to read.

Dear Lord. Give me strength. Is it too much to ask for – an intelligent female presenter of an intelligent show? Clearly it is. Bar the rare exception, TV has become the vessel of the inane, mundane and vain. The saturation of the saccharine blonde was distressing enough, but now they come at us with banal brunettes who I presume by their hair colour are supposed to at least look intelligent. Don’t be fooled. These women are in fact lower down the evolutionary scale than their pitiful predecessors. These are the new blondes. Faux blondes. Blondeabees. And they are springing up like weeds. Chickweed, to be precise. An abundant plant which is known to be particularly troublesome on rich soil. I write this as a warning to all those impressionable producers, pop stars and players. They, like the blondes before them, will suck your AmEx dry.

I could name them all but fear the heavy hand of the ever-watchful lawyers. There is, however, one I feel I must pick on. I couldn’t live with myself if I let this pass without comment. Shown last week, ‘The Olive Oil Revolution’ was a programme about the changing eating habits of the British population. A reasonably interesting subject matter, you would have thought. Wrongly, as it turns out. It was utterly and spectacularly unchallenging. The presenter, I admit, was working with some pretty dire material, but even so she managed to lower the tone. Maggie Hall shook her equine mane, beating all the L’Oreal girls in an instant, and declared that we eat Italian food because it is ‘yummy’. Come back, Anthea – all is forgiven.

Jessie looked at her flatmate, who shook her head mournfully. There was no point telling her it didn’t matter, that no one read such columns, that the paper it was printed on would be polishing shoes and wrapping up broken glass tomorrow; she’d tried before and words didn’t work.