A Dark and Twisted Tide (26 page)

Was she telling the truth? Impossible to know. Nadia turned her head, cursing the tiny grille that made her vision so limited. She saw Fazil, who would withdraw his protection completely if he knew she was talking to the police.

‘You were on the river,’ she said. ‘That night last year when the boat overturned.’

Lacey nodded.

‘You came in for me,’ said Nadia. ‘You, not any of the men.’

‘They were at the other side of the boat. They didn’t see you.’

‘You think they would have jumped in the water for someone like me?’

‘Actually, you’d be surprised. And I was fastened to the boat. I was never in any danger.’

‘You were when I tried to stand on your head to get out.’

The policewoman smiled, showing teeth that were small and the colour of fresh cream. ‘I’d really like to ask you some questions,’ she was saying now. ‘Can we sit down for a while?’

Nadia’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘They are watching us.’

The policewoman didn’t look round, didn’t react in any way. ‘Who? Who is watching us?’

‘I have to go. They cannot know you are police.’

Lacey was looking directly into Nadia’s eyes, as though the grille wasn’t there. ‘Come with me now. I can keep you safe. Come and testify. We’ll look after you.’

Did she really think it was that easy?

‘Will you look after my family, too? Thousands of miles away. Can you keep them safe?’

Lacey was clearly too honest to make promises she knew she couldn’t keep. She stepped back and shook her head, exaggerating the gesture. ‘Tell them you’re not who I’m looking for. Tell them I’m a private investigator, they’ll know what that means, and that I made a mistake. Tell them I won’t be bothering you again. Then call me. We’ll talk when you’re alone.’

Slowly, Nadia raised her veil. She kept the edges close to her head, so that only Lacey could see her. The policewoman had dyed her hair since the night last October. Even soaking wet, Nadia knew it hadn’t been this dark. Her skin was darker too, as though she’d spent months in the sun. Only her eyes were the same.

‘You would have asked to see me,’ she said. ‘To be sure I’m not who you’re looking for. Thank you for saving my life.’

She dropped the veil again and set off. She didn’t look back.

59

Dana

‘
MA’AM, WE LOST
her.’

‘You are kidding me!’ A woman had come to them of her own volition, had met with one of them, and now they’d lost her? Dana turned on the spot, looked up and down the Bayswater Road. No burka-clad woman had come out of the shopping centre this way. Up the road, at the entrance to the park, she spotted Lacey, who’d followed Nadia at a distance, trusting in her colleagues to keep her in sight. ‘Are you sure?’ Dana said into her radio.

Stenning sounded out of breath. ‘Do you have any idea how many burkas there are in Whiteleys shopping centre at this time of year?’

‘Keep looking.’ With less than an hour’s notice, the only members of her team Dana had been able to get across London were Stenning and Mizon. They couldn’t even cover all the exits. ‘We can’t lose her. She’s all we’ve got.’

As the words came out of Dana’s mouth, she knew it was hopeless. Nadia had gone.

60

Lacey

‘
PENNY FOR ’EM?
’

Lacey jumped. Ray was in the cockpit of his boat, smoking, an open can of beer at his side. From somewhere below, she could hear Eileen humming quietly and tunelessly to herself. The two of them hadn’t gone out for the evening, after all. She wondered if Eileen were still in her sea-blue dress, and what on earth had possessed the woman to get herself all dressed up with nowhere to go.

‘Didn’t see you there, skulking in the shadows,’ said Lacey as she made her way around the port deck of his boat.

He blew smoke up into the air. ‘Too hot to go below.’ There was practically no breeze on the creek tonight, and the smoke hung above Ray’s head, almost as though he were in an enclosed space. She could see Eileen’s comb and mirror beside the beer can.

‘You been working?’ he asked her.

‘Wild-goose chase,’ Lacey admitted. A big, black, billowing wild goose, who’d got clean away. And some time tomorrow she’d have to explain to Tulloch about her unofficial undercover activities along the Old Kent Road.

Exhaustion getting the better of her, she wished Ray a good evening, opened the hatch and went below. The cabin was hot, as
she’d expected. It was going to be a long, sticky night. She slipped off her shoes and went into her bedroom. The cabin was small enough for her to take in everything from the doorway, and neat enough for her to be able to spot anything out of place.

Crabs.

Three of them, on her bed. All alive, two still and glossy brown against the plain white duvet cover, the other moving slowly and gracelessly along her pillow. For a second, Lacey watched them, not quite believing her eyes. There was something almost surreal about the long spindly legs and oversized claws on her spotless bed linen. Then she left the cabin, found a high-sided dish and tongs in the galley and went back.

‘Crabs,’ she said to Ray, a second later, when she was back in the cockpit.

‘I can see that,’ he said.

‘On my bed,’ she added.

He flicked cigarette ash over the side. ‘Not something you see every day.’

Lacey leaned out over the stern, upturned the dish and watched them disappear.

‘How did they get there?’ asked Ray, when she’d straightened up again.

‘I have no idea. I left the cabin hatches open but crabs can’t climb a smooth hull, can they?’

‘Not to my knowledge. Mitten crabs, were they?’

Lacey nodded. They were, to her knowledge, the only crab resident in the Thames.

‘Lot of them about,’ said Ray.

‘Ray, have you been here all evening?’

He nodded. ‘Nobody came past me. Any more down below?’

‘Not that I could see. Maybe I’ve got a hole somewhere and they found their way in.’

‘If you’ve got a hole somewhere, you’ll find out at high tide.’

‘You’re right. I’ll give you a yell if I need a bail-out. Goodnight.’

Lacey went below again, unwilling to admit, even to herself, how jumpy she felt. On the scale of one to ten, mitten crabs were hardly disturbing intruders. But it really wasn’t that likely they’d found
their own way in here. So, could she call Tulloch and report three intruders of the crustacean variety? Did she want to be the subject of crab jokes down at Wapping for the next six months? Better to sit tight. Ray and Eileen were within shouting distance.

The boat rocked and rolled, with its bumpy, irregular, oddly soothing rhythm. Around the creek, the air was full of sound. Tidal London had remembered that some wind was the norm and the masts and high buildings were a mass of sighs and whistles. The A2 hummed with the occasional passing car, and a nocturnal bird screeched at the loss of a catch. Inside the cabin, all was quiet.

Lacey stirred, not quite asleep, conscious of being overly hot. There was sweat between her breasts and at the nape of her neck. She grabbed the pillow and turned it, then pushed the duvet further down the bed. It was far too hot to sleep with the hatches shut, but after the little surprise of earlier she hadn’t wanted to be open to the elements. She turned again, and the darkness in her head grew deeper.

She was riding her bike down a long, dark tunnel, which was part creek, part Greenwich foot tunnel, and part something that belonged entirely to dreams. Crowds of veiled women lined her path.

Her head was itching. She reached up, scratched, turned over again.

Joesbury was staring down at her. He lowered his head and her eyes closed. She waited for the moment when his lips touched hers. His eyes again, outside the boat, staring in at her through the cabin window.

Lacey’s own eyes opened, saw the hatch black and empty, and closed again.

She was in the water, swimming fast and going nowhere, in the usual way of dreams. Veiled women were behind her, drawing closer with every stroke, their long scarves floating out across the water, reaching, wrapping, dragging. Those veils, so long and light, so very deadly, running the length of her body, stroking, tickling.

Tickling her foot.

With a sudden, sharp awareness, Lacey sat up, crying out in
confusion. She kicked hard and the creature that had been making its way along her foot fell to the floor of the cabin. She could hear it – clatter, clatter, clatter – along the polished wooden boards.

She found the bedside light, then sprang into a ball on the bed, convinced the things were everywhere.

They weren’t. She ran her hands over her head, her shoulders; knelt on the bed and twisted this way and that. She bundled the duvet into a heap and pushed it against the cabin wall. Only then did she lean over the side of the bed to find the crab she’d knocked to the floor.

It was huge, its body a good three inches across and its legs stretching to eight or nine inches. There was weed attached to its right, rear leg, and one of its claws was much bigger than the other. It had been crawling all over her while she slept.

She had to stop shuddering. It was only a crab. Apart from a nasty nip, it couldn’t hurt her. Lacey looked round. The hatches, one on each side of the cabin, were closed, as was the larger one above her head. The crab must have arrived with the others earlier, hiding out until it could emerge safely under the cover of darkness.

God, it was huge, easily the biggest of the four. And she had searched every square inch of the boat. There was nowhere a creature like that could hide.

Then she remembered. The large hatch above her head could not be opened from outside, but the smaller side ones could.

Clatter, clatter, clatter. The crab was trying to climb.

Ridiculous to be scared. She swam amongst creatures like this all the time. She’d never minded crabs, quite liked their comic, scuttling ways. And yet this one – she risked peering over the edge of the bed again – there was something almost predatory about the way it was making repeated attempts to scale the smooth wood of the bed frame.

Jesus, where was the man in her life when she needed him?

Before she could change her mind, she swung her legs over the side, picked up the crab and leaned across the bed to open the port hatch.

The creature’s legs thrashed. Its claws reached for her. Lacey
thrust her right hand out of the hatch and dropped the crab on to the deck. She closed the hatch and fastened it tight.

‘Lacey.’

The voice was so soft, so close, that for a second Lacey thought there was someone in the cabin with her.

‘Lay-cee.’

There was someone outside. On the boat, almost certainly – they were too close to be anywhere else. She reached out and switched off the light.

Clatter, clatter. Tap, tap, tap. The crab was scuttling along the deck. A pause, then a splash. It was back in the water where it belonged.

Lacey felt along the shelf that ran around the cabin wall and found her watch. Three forty-seven in the morning. It would be getting light soon. Not soon enough.

Who could be on her boat at nearly four in the morning? She didn’t recognize the voice, couldn’t even tell whether it was male or female. It had been low-pitched, croaking.

A tapping noise. Not the crab this time. The crab was back in the water and that had been heavier, more deliberate, like knocking on a door.

Tap, tap, tap. Someone was tapping on the side of the hull. Lacey picked up her phone. Ray, the reliable insomniac, answered on the second ring.

‘What’s up?’ He kept his voice low, even though he’d told her previously that Eileen and he slept in different cabins, his at the stern, hers at the bow.

‘There’s someone on my boat.’

He didn’t ask her if she was sure, or suggest she might be dreaming. He told her to give him a minute and hung up. Knowing the cabin was in darkness, that anyone watching from outside would see nothing, Lacey got to her feet, found her sneakers and pulled on a light sweater. She made her way into the main cabin and, when she could hear Ray opening the hatch of his boat, did the same with hers.

She stood in the cockpit, looking around, aware of Ray doing exactly the same on his boat. The tapping had been on the port hull, but there was no one on deck. No place to hide either.

‘You been upsetting anyone?’ asked Ray, when she’d filled him in.

Where would she start? ‘No one who knows where I live.’

‘Never a wise assumption,’ said Ray. ‘It always surprises me how many folk know where I live. Your bed is under the port-side hatch, isn’t it?’

Lacey agreed that it was.

‘If the crab was dropped through the other side, you would have heard it banging on the floor.’

‘I guess.’ That meant the intruder had been on the river side.

‘Did you feel the boat rocking? Hear any footsteps?’

‘No. Just the voice. And the tapping.’

Ray was already on her boat. He stepped up on to the port deck and shone his torch in the water.

‘You think they slipped over the side?’ Lacey was having to look behind her every other second.

Ray ran the beam along the length of Lacey’s boat, from the bow to the stern. ‘What say we have a look around?’ he said.

Five minutes later, Lacey crouched in the bow of Ray’s motor boat as they made their way around the community of house boats. Ray hadn’t turned on the engine, was relying instead upon muscle power to propel them along. The dripping of water from the oars as they were raised, a gentle splash as they dipped into the river were the only sounds they made, and these were more than drowned out by the slapping of waves against hulls, the wind keening around the masts and the distant and occasional hum of a passing car.

In spite of the sweatshirt she wore, in spite of the warmth of the night, Lacey couldn’t stop shivering. She’d been on the river at night many times before, but always within the secure environment of one of the Targa launches. This felt very different. So low in the water, so close to the inky blackness that flowed around them, so much a part of the briny, oily smell that rose like steam from a boiling saucepan. And so vulnerable to whatever was out there.