A Dark and Twisted Tide (32 page)

Hardly daring to move, but knowing she had to, Lacey reached into her shoulder pack and tapped out a message on her phone:

Urgent assistance needed. Where are you?

Her usual crew would be on duty on the river right now. Finn
Turner always kept his phone close, in case one of his numerous girlfriends tried to get in touch.

Then a reply came in:

Not far from your place. What’s up?

The small boat was moving.

Possible illegal immigrants in Deptford Creek. Two males, one female. Small motor boat, heading out to Thames now. Can you intercept?

That would have to do. Lacey cast off and began to follow. The boat, about ten yards in front, turned the bend and went out of sight. Lacey paddled hard and in another second had turned the same bend. The boat had vanished.

No sign of her colleagues. Nothing on her phone.

Lacey sped towards the mouth of the creek, keeping close to the left bank. She hit the Thames and, in spite of all her experience on the water, had to fight hard not to give way to panic.

The full force of the tide swept her up, pushing her on towards the city, and the river seemed so much wider in the dark, she could barely see the north bank. But there was the boat, about fifteen yards in front. Sometimes, it was just all about muscle. Head down and paddle.

They were using their engine again, but slowly, hugging the shoreline, slinking in and out of the shadows. They probably weren’t going much faster than she, but she’d tire soon. Where the hell were Fred and Finn?

Then, almost from nowhere, came the sound of engines so loud she thought she was about to be run over. A large boat was heading straight for her, lights shining out like beacons. Lacey grabbed her own light and switched it on, then began paddling hard out of the way.

‘This is the Metropolitan Police. Stay exactly where you are.’

The sergeant’s voice. The Targa was almost level, she could see him at the fly bridge, the lanky form of Turner on the port side.
Another officer in the cockpit. As the boat drew level, Turner’s eyes caught hers for a second, then they’d gone past, were gaining on the small motor boat.

‘Cut your engines and wait for us to reach you. Do not attempt to get away.’

The wash from the Targa’s engines reached her, picking her canoe up and spinning it round. She paddled hard to correct it, but the second wave hit her and she almost went over. Her phone fell into the bottom of the canoe. Ahead, the Targa was lighting up the river. They’d picked out the small boat, were gaining on it easily. They’d look for her just as soon as they could but she wouldn’t be their priority.

OK, what were her options? She was more or less opposite the entrance to South Dock Marina. Conscious of getting tired, knowing it would be a safer place to wait, Lacey paddled over and tucked herself in the lee of the nearest yacht, a forty-foot Moody. Then she found her radio.

‘Constable Flint requesting urgent assistance,’ she managed, a split second before the world turned upside-down.

This was it, the swimmer knew. This was the moment. Such a chance would not come again. Lacey was below the surface. She had to be found quickly, before she had a chance to get her bearings. Speed and courage were needed now. Lacey was strong and fast. The swimmer had to be stronger.

Lacey was beneath the surface, trapped inside the canoe. She forced her mouth shut and swung her body to one side.

The canoe wasn’t moving. She was stuck upside-down in the water. What the hell had happened? Again, she swung herself to one side. She had to get out. She was still holding the paddle. Keeping it in her right hand, she pushed herself free with her left.

For a second, after breaking the surface, she could do nothing but gulp in air and spit out water. The canoe was just out of reach, still upside-down. Lacey looked round quickly. No one in sight.

Still clutching the paddle, she began swimming towards the
canoe, but as she reached out the smooth fibreglass hull bounced away.

Then something was dragging her down. Lacey went below the surface in an instant, with no breath in her lungs. She kicked down and broke free, but immediately was grabbed around her shoulders.

Survival instinct kicked in. Lacey twisted, struck out with the paddle and her free fist. Her buoyancy aid was pulling her towards the surface, the weight clinging to her legs trying to get her down. There was light in the water. The torch had fallen from the canoe, was sinking to the bottom, illuminating the river bed, which seemed alive with mitten crabs.

And the linen-wrapped corpses on the marina floor.

She broke the surface again, bracing herself for the next attack. Nothing. No face bearing down on her. No wiry arms reaching out. She was, or appeared to be, completely alone.

From out on the main river came the sound of an engine. If one of the Marine Unit boats was looking for her, they wouldn’t think to come in here and she no longer had a phone or radio. The sound was fading again.

Without stopping to think, Lacey abandoned her paddle and set off in a fast crawl towards the Thames. Her canoe had disappeared, she just had her buoyancy aid to keep her afloat, but spending another moment near whatever had attacked her was impossible. She would have to take her chances in the river.

How long had she been in the water? Five minutes? An hour? She’d cheated the river once, which meant she couldn’t ever drown. Claptrap, Thessa had said, of course you can drown, don’t take silly risks.

She was getting colder, and slowing down. She was no longer sure she could feel her feet and the tips of her fingers were going numb. The buoyancy aid was keeping her head above water, but the waves were bouncing into her face and every few seconds she dipped below the surface again.

The massive circular edge of the landing stage that marked the entrance to the creek was in sight, gleaming like a beacon in
the moonlight. It had the look of a prehistoric temple, of a wooden henge rising out of the water. Why was it suddenly so much harder to concentrate? Why were her thoughts drifting off in random directions?

The Targa was coming back. Impossible to mistake that high-pitched drone. And this time it was looking for her, no doubt about it. Travelling slowly, but relentlessly, the flashlight in the bow sweeping left and right in the water.

The beam settled on her face, blinding her, but getting out of the water was all she could think of right now. The boat drew closer. The buoyancy aid tightened around her chest and she felt herself being lifted. The water was falling away, she could see it swirling beneath her. A second later she was on the hard, cold deck of the boat, conscious only that it felt good to breathe freely, and that the man who held her was warm.

‘Look, Sarge!’ Finn Turner’s voice was gleeful. ‘I caught a mermaid.’

72

Dana

‘
THE DIVERS ARE
back up,’ Chief Inspector Cook told Dana, as he put the phone down. ‘They’re pretty certain there are two bodies. Wrapped like the other two we found and weighted down at the neck, waist and ankles.’

Three hours after the arrest of the two suspected people-traffickers and their human cargo of one, two and a half hours after the frantic search to find the body (alive or dead, and frankly either would do) of Constable Bloody Flint, Dana had assembled her team at the station. SC07, the specialist division that dealt with people-trafficking, had been informed and had agreed to her retaining operational control for now.

Two more corpses. Together with the two Lacey had found, and the one pulled out of the river weeks ago, she had five dead women.

It would be getting light soon. The search of the marina bed had been conducted in darkness. Which might now prove to be no bad thing. ‘How secure are they?’ she asked.

‘What?’ Cook’s heavily lidded eyes seemed sleepier than usual.

‘Are they going anywhere in a hurry?’

‘I really don’t think I want to know what’s on your mind,’ Cook said. ‘And far be it from me to tell you your job, but shouldn’t you
be cordoning off that marina and getting started on the boat-to-boat search?’

Yes, she probably should. That would be doing it by the book, and if in doubt, one always did it by the book. Except—

Dana turned to where Lacey was sitting quietly in the corner of the room. She wore borrowed clothes and her hair had dried in long, stringy tendrils. She’d managed to get hold of a laptop and her attention was fixed on the screen. Dana raised her voice.

‘OK, thanks to PC Flint and her unfailing disregard for procedures, we appear to have found the body stash. What we can’t necessarily assume is that we’ve also found the centre of the operation.’

‘I’m not following,’ said Cook. ‘And I hope you realize there’s a limit to how long I can leave a couple of corpses bobbing around in South Dock Marina.’

Dana glanced at the clock again. Time seemed to have speeded up. ‘Dave, the suspects your officers arrested tonight – thanks to PC Flint and her unauthorized stake-out – may not have been heading for the marina. Who hides bodies within yards of where they’re being killed?’

‘Fred and Rosemary West,’ said Barrett.

‘Yeah, thanks, Tom. But if you have a yacht, how likely is it that you’d dump a body over the side in the marina? You wouldn’t. You’d take it out into the middle of the channel, or closer to the estuary. I’m not sure our gang have any real connections with the marina other than using it to store bodies.’

‘Also,’ added Lacey, ‘anyone with half a brain would realize there are CCTV cameras around the marina. And all the berth holders will be known and registered. It’s just too big a risk.’

‘Not everyone’s approach to risk is as cautious as I’d like, Lacey, but I take your point.’

‘I think they’re transporting the bodies around in a small boat,’ said Lacey. ‘Something that can sneak past the cameras at the riverside entrance. A boat that may have no connection to the South Dock Marina.’

‘Well, I suppose that does make some sense,’ Cook grudgingly admitted. ‘If they’re using a small boat, maybe one with a small
engine, they won’t want to risk motoring out to the centre of the channel.’

‘The tide’s too strong and there’s too big a risk of being mown down in the shipping channel.’

‘So,’ said Cook, ‘if they can’t dump the bodies in the middle, which would be the ideal place for them, they need another area of deep water that isn’t affected by tides.’

Lacey sat back. ‘Marinas.’

Cook rubbed his eyes. Being dragged from his bed in the middle of the night didn’t suit him. ‘God help us if we have to search every dock and marina in the city.’

‘I don’t think we will, Sir,’ said Lacey. ‘Small boat, remember? They’re not travelling far. And there’s another thing. Look what I found.’

She turned the laptop round to face the rest of the group. They were looking at the website of one of the natural history publications, a feature on Chinese mitten crabs. ‘This was in
The Ecologist
. It seems they’re a particular nuisance around marinas. Possibly because edible rubbish thrown from boats encourages the little wiggly things that they eat. Anyway, they’re a notorious problem at South Dock Marina. I think the crab business was a bit of a game on the part of my stalker. You know, throwing a clue in our faces and seeing how long it took us to work it out. The toy boats, too. Where do you find a lot of boats together? A marina.’

Around Lacey, heads were nodding.

‘I think South Dock Marina is where the bodies are dumped, and the holding facility, whatever it is, will be somewhere near by,’ she went on. ‘We’re closing in.’

‘Which brings us to the problem,’ said Dana. ‘Once it gets out that we’ve found two more bodies, and arrested the three in the boat tonight, the operation will close down or move on. We’ll never find who’s doing this.’

Cook sat down heavily. ‘I can’t do it, Dana. We’ll have been spotted there tonight. People will start asking questions. We’ll have the press down there before you know it. And that’s before we get on to the fact that Lacey was attacked there and only just escaped with her life.’

‘More by sheer luck than operational competence,’ snapped Dana.

Lacey gave her a weak smile.

‘My point is—’

The door to the meeting room opened and Stenning and Anderson entered. ‘The girl still isn’t talking,’ Anderson said. ‘The interpreter’s tried both main Afghan languages and a couple of dialects and got nothing out of her. We can try other languages in the morning, but frankly she could be from anywhere in the Middle East.’

‘She’s a Pashtun,’ said Lacey, picking up the photograph again. ‘Just like the others.’ Dana found herself nodding. Even the standard police mugshot couldn’t disguise the girl’s appeal. She was striking, with fair, almost European skin, bright blue eyes and dark brown hair.

‘She looks quite a lot like you with your Bollywood makeover.’ Mizon turned the photograph towards her.

‘Neither of the two men are saying anything either yet,’ said Stenning. ‘Although both of them do have some knowledge of English. What’s pretty obvious is that they’re scared.’

‘Will they talk, do you think?’ asked Cook.

‘Probably,’ said Stenning. ‘But I can’t see them being major players. They can probably tell us where they were going to take the girl, but other than that . . .’

‘That’s something in itself, though,’ said Anderson. ‘We get a warrant, a dawn raid should throw up something. In which case, we need to get moving. Once it’s known that these guys have been picked up, they’ll start covering their tracks.’

‘Except, if Nadia was telling the truth, nothing illegal happened to her while she was with these people,’ said Lacey. ‘She was looked after, given a nice room and plenty of food, medical attention when she got ill, and then the job that she’d been promised.’

‘So, if we raid the place, wherever it is, and we come up with nothing, that’s it,’ said Dana. ‘We might get some minor convictions for people-smuggling. The operation will move somewhere else and we’ll never know what was going on.’