A Dark and Twisted Tide (12 page)

21

Dana

‘
THE PRACTICE OF
shrouding a body before burial is common to just about every religion and culture,’ said Mizon from her place at the front of the room. ‘There’s even evidence of native North American tribes weaving shrouds out of vegetable material.’

Dana reached up and pulled the window blind shut. A little past noon, the sun had moved round to their side of the building and the temperature was climbing high. In the meeting room were Neil Anderson, Pete Stenning, Tom Barrett and Gayle Mizon. Her inner circle.

Thorough as always, Mizon had projected several images of bodies shrouded for death on to the white screen behind her: grief-stricken nuns carrying a long, thin parcel; the wan face of a child before his head was finally covered; row upon row of white bundles laid out on a tiled floor.

‘However people choose to dispose of their dead,’ she was saying, ‘there will be some ritualistic element to the preparation of the body and that will nearly always include a symbolic washing and then a shrouding.’

‘My dad was buried in his best suit,’ said Barrett.

‘That’s become quite common in Western cultures,’ Mizon
agreed. ‘But only recently. Shrouding goes back to the days when clothes were expensive. By putting the deceased into a shroud, the family were freeing up a suit of clothes for another family member.’

Stenning was holding a Coke can against the back of his neck. ‘So, does the way she was shrouded give us any clue about her background?’

Two faint, parallel lines had appeared between Mizon’s brows. ‘That’s where it gets a bit trickier. From what I can gather, what we saw really isn’t typical of any recognized funeral etiquette.’

‘How do you mean?’ asked Dana.

Mizon glanced at her notes. ‘Jewish burial clothes are called Tachrichim. A tunic, trousers, belt, and a hood and scarf to cover the head. Then the whole body gets wrapped in another large piece of cloth that is effectively the shroud. The Jewish tradition dictates that everyone is equal in death. So Jewish burial clothes wouldn’t have zips, buttons, fasteners, or any ornamentation. No pockets, either, because personal possessions have no place in the afterlife.’

‘Not Jewish then,’ said Anderson.

‘Not typically Muslim either,’ said Mizon. ‘Muslim burial cloths are known as Kafan. Three pieces of cloth for a man, five for a woman. They’re not clothes as such, just large pieces of very simple cloth that wrap set parts of the body in a prescribed order. Again, modesty in death is important.’

‘Hindus use clothes too,’ said Dana, ‘with one large sheet to cover the whole body. My mother was cremated in her wedding dress. Which was red, by the way. Of course, all this doesn’t mean the victim wasn’t Muslim or Jewish or Hindu, just that her body wasn’t disposed of in a religiously orthodox manner.’

‘People were saying the body was mummified,’ said Barrett.

‘No,’ said Dana. ‘Though the way it was trussed up did give that impression. Can you find those first photographs, Gayle?’

They waited while Mizon found the photographs of the corpse taken by the Marine Unit, and then Dana stood and walked closer to the screen.

‘You can see that whilst the fabric has largely come away from the upper part of the body, the lower body is still mainly wrapped.’ Dana used a pencil to point to the image. ‘And if you look around
the feet and calves, and then the waist, it does look a little like a mummy, but the way this woman’s been wrapped is actually quite different to the Egyptian process.’

‘How exactly?’ asked Anderson.

Dana nodded at Mizon to explain. ‘An Egyptian mummy would be completely wrapped in bandages,’ Mizon said. ‘Each individual limb, even each finger and toe, would be wrapped separately. You’d be talking hundreds of yards of fabric. On this woman, the bandages were just at certain points – ankles, waist, neck.’

‘So, if there’s no real link with customs in Islam, Hinduism or Judaism, what about Christianity?’ asked Anderson.

‘Similar, but not quite,’ said Mizon. ‘If you’ve seen images of the shroud of Turin, you’ll know it was a piece of fabric just wide enough to cover a body but at least twice the body’s length. It would have been fastened in place by some means, quite possibly long thin strips of the same fabric. What we have is one very wide strip of fabric and several much thinner ones that were used to tie the main shroud in place.’

‘So, however she died, her body was prepared for burial by someone from a Christian tradition,’ said Dana.

Mizon shook her head. ‘I’m not sure I’d say that either. Certainly not one of the more contemporary branches because, as Tom points out, Christians these days typically dress their dead in normal clothes. On the other hand, Orthodox Christian burial shrouds are quite ornate.’

Several pictures of shrouds appeared on the screen. They showed arches, the sun’s rays, the holy cross, Christian icons, even a resurrection scene.

‘No one wanting to conceal a suspicious death would use one of those though,’ Dana pointed out. ‘They’d be too easy to trace.’

‘True,’ said Mizon. ‘To be honest, Ma’am, I don’t think the means of wrapping this corpse was about religious observation.’

‘What then?’

Mizon switched the screen off, as though rejecting all the in formation she’d just shown them. Or maybe she was just getting too hot. ‘Some killers display their corpses and some conceal them, isn’t that right?’

Stenning’s head lifted. ‘Those who display them are proud of what they’ve done. They want us to find them.’

Mizon nodded. ‘Conversely, those who don’t are ashamed.’

‘This woman was wrapped up like a parcel, weighted down and dropped into one of the biggest, deepest rivers in the world.’ Anderson, too, was looking more alert. ‘I’d say that puts our killer in the ashamed camp.’

‘Deeply ashamed,’ Mizon agreed. ‘I know you don’t like us to jump to conclusions too early, Ma’am, but I’d say the shrouding and the dumping in the Thames are about concealment. In other words, shame. I think the bandages were just to make sure the shroud stayed in place. A burial in the ground wouldn’t need them, but one in fast-moving water would be much less stable. I think the bandages were to maintain the shroud – in other words, the concealment.’

‘So the shrouding gives us no pointers to the killer’s background?’ asked Dana.

‘I didn’t say that,’ said Mizon. ‘He didn’t use a couple of bin-liners, fastened tight with parcel tape. The linen suggests a culture that treats its dead with respect. I think our killer is probably someone from an Eastern background, one more dominated by religious beliefs and practices than the Western world.’

‘I’ll tell you what’s worrying me more.’ Even Barrett was excited now. It took a lot to get him fired up. ‘It wasn’t driven by panic. It was planned. Careful. It was like—’

Dana never normally stole thunder from a team member. This time, though, she couldn’t help herself. ‘Like they’d done it before,’ she said.

22

Nadia

THE SUN WAS
low in the sky and Nadia walked quickly. She’d had to queue for the showers, making her late leaving the pool. She’d promised to be back by six because that was when they were leaving and Gabrielle needed the sunscreen.

‘You wouldn’t mind popping into Boots on the way back, would you?’ Always it was the same. ‘Can you drop by Sainsbury’s? Can you pop into the Body Shop? Can you stop off at Majestic and pick up some wine?’ As though Gabrielle felt a continual need to remind Nadia that time off wasn’t a right, merely borrowed and subject to being reclaimed at any time.

The class had been busy. She was becoming one of the better ones. The one the instructor sometimes turned to when she needed a demonstration.

‘Elbow out of the water first, then stretch the arm out. You use less energy and move faster. Watch Nadia.’

She could swim front crawl now, with her head in the water, coming up intermittently to breathe and moving at speed. Who would have believed it, months ago, when she could barely manage a panic-stricken dog-like stroke?

Muslim women did not swim. Apart from the few who learned
as children, or the very rich with their private swimming pools. It was unthinkable for a Muslim woman to remove her clothes in a public place. But the local authority in Greenwich offered women-only sessions at the local leisure centre, and for two hours a week the pool became a haven for the Islamic or the modest.

It had been one of the hardest things Nadia had ever done, to lower herself into water for the first time. Memories had come raging back: water all around, in her nose, her mouth, her throat. Her chest in agony as burning liquid poured into her lungs. A certainty that she would die, here and now.

It had taken long, long minutes to convince herself that the terror and physical pain were caused by memories, not by anything happening to her at that moment. For most of the first lesson she’d been unable to leave the side, but she’d made herself go back a second and a third time, until getting into water no longer filled her with dread. She’d made herself learn to swim, because she’d known that one day, she and the river would meet again.

As she walked past the box that distributed free newspapers, Nadia automatically scanned the headlines, looking for words she recognized. She’d heard nothing about the body of the woman pulled from the river at dawn yesterday beyond a brief piece on the evening news. The police feared the woman would be difficult to identify and were appealing for help. A young woman, they thought, possibly from the Middle East or the Indian subcontinent, missing for between two and six months. Anyone with any information was encouraged to contact the police.

She didn’t have any information.

In the busy shop on the high street she found the sunscreen. ‘Be sure to get factor 50,’ Gabrielle had said. ‘You have to take into account the effect of the sun bouncing off the water.’

It wasn’t unusual to pull a body from the Thames, Gabrielle had told her. Most didn’t even make it on to the news, just the ones needing identification, or those who’d drowned in suspicious circumstances. Only when the police were appealing for information.

She didn’t have any information. She had to get back.

23

Dana

‘
HELEN, IT’S LIKE
shopping on eBay. Only without pictures.’

‘Hang on, let me find the same site. OK, I’m logging on.’

Dana closed her eyes and pictured Helen in her home office in Dundee. She’d have taken off the suit she’d have been wearing all day, would be in jeans, or maybe jogging clothes.

With a sudden need to see Helen’s face, Dana reached behind her, found the framed photograph that she kept on the bookshelf and placed it just to the left of the monitor. She’d taken it herself – Helen in the garden, not long back from a run. Long blonde hair messy, face red and damp, and a light in her eyes that seemed to say something different every time Dana looked at the picture. Sometimes this picture calmed her when the tightness in her chest was starting to hurt. Not always. ‘How was the flight?’ she asked.

‘Busy,’ replied Helen. ‘Right, London Sperm Bank. Christ, it’s a whole new world, isn’t it?’

The London Sperm Bank was a central bank of donated sperm that supplied most of the fertility clinics in London and the South-East. Since accessing its website, Dana had been getting flashbacks to a brief period in her life, years ago, when after inheriting money she’d almost become a shopping addict. Online sales had been the
worst, with the impression they gave of there being only a limited time to find and grab the best bargains. She’d get hot and jumpy as a caffeine addict, flicking from one screen to the next, spending recklessly and unable to stop. She hadn’t had this feeling in years. ‘Find the page where you select a donor,’ she told Helen.

‘I’m there. Oh my God, you actually have a trolley. It says my trolley is currently empty. Well, I suppose, in a way—’

‘Will you focus for a second?’ Dana waited for Helen to catch up, her eyes tennis-balling from the photograph of her partner to the drop-down list of men who could father her child. Each entry was identified by a simple icon of a male figure and accompanied by the most basic of details: race, sometimes nationality, eye colour, hair colour, height, skin tone, education and, occasionally, religion. The icons were in different colours. So, did she want a fondant-pink, citrus-yellow or lime-green donor? Helen in the picture was amused, not taking it seriously.

‘I cannot choose the father of my child – of our child – on the basis of this information,’ Dana said, when Helen in real life was finally looking at the same screen. ‘These guys could be child molesters, drug-pushers. They might hang around at Waterloo station on Sunday mornings taking down train numbers. God help us, they might play golf.’

‘Just as long as none of them are ginger.’

Silence. And the photograph had that look she always hated, that
So-I’ve-made-a-joke-at-your-expense,-get-over-it
look. Dana wondered if she might be about to cry. ‘We’re supposed to be able to pick the father of our children,’ she said. ‘We choose the man we most love and admire in the whole world and if we’re lucky he feels the same way and we make a family together. Other women’ (
normal women
, said the voice in the back of her head) ‘spend years making this decision. They have a world of data available. I – we – have fewer than a dozen words.’

‘It’s what we signed up for, hon,’ said Helen.

‘Did you know that the starfish is one of the few species in the world that can reproduce asexually?’

Silence. She could picture Helen taking a deeper breath, bracing herself to deal with Dana-being-difficult. Sure enough, Helen in
the picture was doing the
I’ll-keep-my-temper-if-it-kills-me
face.

‘Fascinating,’ real Helen said. ‘But pending the invention of cloning technology, I think we have to be pragmatic. We know these guys are screened for any health issues.’

‘Oh, they’re screened within an inch of their lives,’ said Dana. ‘I’m surprised any of them make it through.’