A Dark and Twisted Tide (41 page)

THESSA WAS GIVING
the two women in her charge medical attention. She had insisted on doing so, in spite of the surroundings. She’d given them both fresh water and wrapped a scarf around Lacey’s neck wound. She was helping Pari to escape, she explained. They had to go further into the sewer, to find a ladder that would take them safely to the street. She and Pari had been on their way when they’d heard Lacey screaming.

According to Thessa, who was well and truly in charge at the moment, there wasn’t room for three of them in the boat, so Lacey would have to swim holding on to the side, and to do that she’d need to be feeling a whole lot fitter than she was. Thessa had produced a flask of something that tasted a little like brandy, only thicker and sweeter, and made them both drink some of it.

Lacey drank and tried to get her head back together again. The water and the brandy helped. She wasn’t going to drown, not just yet. Her head hurt and her throat felt as though it had been ripped open, but she was going to be OK. The rats had gone. The water was rising, but they were safely out of it – she crouched on the ledge, the other two still in Thessa’s pretty, silly boat.

A boat that somehow seemed to cast a pale, silvery light around
itself. Or maybe that was just the light from the strange, old-fashioned lantern that Thessa had switched on.

The boat rocked and Lacey’s eyes went to the young woman in the bow. Since her very vocal attack on the rats, Pari hadn’t spoken. She was curled up on the narrow seat and looked as if she was in pain, as well as exhausted. In the dim light, Lacey took a proper look at her. Young, slim, long dark hair, pale eyes.

Lacey gave one more look around to make sure there were no rats. Then, ‘Thessa,’ she said, ‘was Pari in that building on East Street? What happens in there?’

‘We need to go.’ Thessa was reaching for the mooring line, untying it. ‘The water will get too high soon to take the boat any further. Lacey, can you get back into the water, do you think?’

‘You said you were helping her escape. How did you know she needed to?’

‘She sings to us,’ interrupted Pari. ‘She sings songs from home, so that we know we can trust her, and then she helps us get out. I’ve seen her.’

Someone else had talked about a woman singing. Nadia. Good God, how could she have forgotten Nadia?

‘Lacey, are you OK? Look at me. Focus.’

Lacey forced herself to look Thessa in the eyes. Nadia was dead. She’d heard her drown. First the cries of terror, then the screaming, the choking and finally the silence.

‘Lacey!’

She couldn’t help Nadia. It might not even be possible to retrieve her body until the tide went out again. In the meantime, Thessa was right. The water was getting very high.

‘What’s happening to these women?’ she asked.

Suddenly Thessa looked terribly tired. Tired and sad. ‘Lacey, I don’t know. All Alex will tell me is that the girls are trying to escape from a terrible life. He helps them.’

Alex? This was about Alex?

‘I hear them crying as I go past in my boat. I hear how sad they are, how frightened. I hear them in pain, like this little one here.’ She turned and smiled at Pari.

‘Some of them aren’t just in pain,’ said Lacey. ‘Some of them are dying.’

Thessa nodded. A big, fat tear wobbled at the corner of her eye and began to roll down her cheek.

‘Thessa, who’s doing it?’

And finally, Thessa’s face collapsed into grief. ‘My brother. I’m so sorry, Lacey, but Alex is killing them.’

‘It was about a year ago when the first woman vanished from the clinic,’ said Christakos, as Anderson pulled out on to Lewisham High Street and stepped hard on the accelerator. As they picked up speed, he switched on the blue light. Dana was in the passenger seat. In the back, Mark was cuffed to Christakos.

Minutes earlier, they’d discovered that Christakos’s sister was no longer at her house in Deptford. Upon hearing the news, Christakos had been able to think of only one place she might be. They were heading for the river. She owned an old Victorian pumping station, he’d explained, which she’d tried to keep secret from him. Whilst impossible for her to access from land, he believed she might be able to use her boat to navigate the sewer system.

‘Jamilla Kakar was her name,’ Christakos went on. ‘We were baffled. We said goodnight to her, locked the door of her room, as is customary, and then the next morning she just wasn’t in it. There was no trace of her at all. The bars on the window made climbing out impossible. Her room was still locked. It was like – magic.’

Dana twisted round in the seat. ‘Did you report her disappearance?’

Christakos might have taken a blow but he wasn’t all out of arrogance.

‘Of course I didn’t, Detective Inspector. Let’s not waste time with point-scoring. My first thought was that it was someone on the staff, but they denied any knowledge and it seemed unlikely somehow. They’ve been with me for many years. We put it down to carelessness. Someone had accidentally left keys around, Jamilla had taken advantage and left. I don’t know whether you will believe this or not, but I hoped that she was all right.’

Anderson overtook a stationary car, putting them directly in line with an oncoming bus.

‘But that wasn’t the end of it?’ Mark wasn’t wearing his seat belt. Neither was Christakos. None of them were. Had she been reckless, agreeing to this high-speed dash to an abandoned building on the riverbank?

‘Sadly, it was just the beginning.’ Christakos was speaking directly to Mark now. ‘Not long afterwards, another woman vanished in exactly the same manner, even though we’d changed the locks. I couldn’t put it down to carelessness a second time. Someone had let her out. All the staff pleaded ignorance. I could hardly threaten them with the authorities. Besides, something told me they were telling the truth. I know my sister very well.’

Traffic, for the most part, was letting them through. They were in Deptford already, not far from the river.

‘Excuse me pointing out the obvious,’ said Mark, ‘but from what I understand, your sister is in a wheelchair. How did she manage to make her way round that three-storey house, helping young women escape and smuggling them safely away?’

‘You’d be surprised by what Thessa can achieve.’ Christakos looked oddly proud. ‘She never let her disability stand in her way. She was always the strong one. I realized she’d been accessing confidential documents on the computer. I’ve never managed to devise a password that she hasn’t guessed. But she left a trail, of course. I could see that documents had been accessed when I’d been out of the office. Only she could have done that. And she started going out in that boat of hers at all hours. She smuggles keys to them somehow and then takes them away by water.’

‘Did you challenge her?’

Christakos shook his head. ‘She wasn’t comfortable with the clinic, I knew that. If it made her happy to help one or two women leave sooner than they might otherwise have done, I was willing to live with that. I wasn’t sure how much longer I was going to keep going anyway.’

‘You were willing to let her take these women and drown them?’

Christakos twisted round to face Mark directly. ‘I had no idea they were coming to harm. It was only just over a week ago, when
you found Anya in the Thames, that I realized what was happening.’

‘You realized she wasn’t helping them escape at all?’ said Dana gently.

Christakos shook his head. ‘No. She was killing them.’

93

Lacey and Dana

‘
ALEX IS IN
custody.’ Thessa steered the boat through the channel of the sewer. She and Pari were still on board, Lacey was clinging to the stern. They couldn’t risk the engine, with Lacey being so close to the propeller, so Thessa and Pari were using the oars as paddles. Lacey was pushing against the wall to keep them moving, hating every moment of being in the water.

‘He was arrested this morning,’ Thessa went on. ‘The staff of the clinic are all at Lewisham police station too, but there are other men involved. The ones who bring the girls here in the first place. He’ll have given them instructions to go back for Pari once it was dark. Alex doesn’t know I own the pumping station, but they could easily decide to look in the sewer.’

They were back at the fork in the tunnel, but other than a faint gleam in the darkness, Lacey could see nothing of the opening on to the Thames. Thessa turned the boat to follow the right-hand fork. ‘Not much further. On the right-hand side. Nearly there, girls.’

Lacey looked up at her. In the darkness of the tunnel, Thessa’s eyes looked huge. ‘How long have you known? About Alex?’

Thessa didn’t break the slow, steady rhythm of paddling. ‘I’ve known about the clinic for a long time. I wasn’t comfortable but I’ve always trusted Alex. He was always the strong one.’

‘You didn’t say anything to him?’

Thessa seemed not to have heard, was telling the story in her own way. ‘I started singing to them as I went past in the evenings. I thought it would help, to hear a song from home, so I sang something I remember my mother singing to Alex and me when we were tiny. And then, one night, one of the women called out to me. Begging me to help her escape. I ignored her, just went motoring past, but all night I couldn’t get it out of my head. I kept thinking, I could, I could help her escape. I could easily find keys, attach them to a ball of cork so they wouldn’t sink, and throw them into an open window. After that it was easy. They’d creep down the stairs, let themselves out at the back, get into my boat and I’d bring them here. I gave them money and the details of some people I know who help them get settled.’

‘Four nights ago.’ Pari had twisted round to face the others. ‘I heard you singing and I saw you throw keys. I saw someone leave.’

Thessa frowned and put her head to one side. ‘No, dear,’ she said, after a second. ‘I think you’re getting mixed up.’

‘How many did you help get away?’ said Lacey, as Pari began counting on her fingers. Thessa’s arms seemed frozen in the act of paddling.

The question brought Thessa’s attention back. She started paddling again. ‘Only four. I’d have done more, but I could only leave the house when I knew Alex was out and not at the clinic. He doesn’t leave me alone very much.’

Pari gave a little shrug and picked up her own paddle. Lacey paused a moment before asking the difficult question. ‘Why are some of them dying?’

Thessa shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t know they were until a couple of weeks ago. When I found Anya.’

‘Who’s Anya?’

‘The body you found in the river, dear. When you were out swimming a week last Thursday. I found her in South Dock Marina just days earlier. She’d broken loose of her weights, somehow.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Pari. ‘Which of you found Anya?’

‘Thessa did,’ said Lacey. ‘And then she left her somewhere she knew I’d find her. What about the woman on my boat? Were you responsible for her, too?’

‘I’m sorry about that, dear, it must have been a dreadful shock. But you weren’t getting the message. I thought the crabs might do it, or the boats – that you’d make the connection with the marina – but I guess I was hoping for too much.’

‘How much further?’ Pari was looking ahead again. ‘I can’t see any ladder. I have good eyes. I can’t see anything.’

Pari had good eyes. Four nights ago, she’d seen Thessa rescuing one of the other women from the building on East Street. Two nights ago, someone, whom Lacey now knew to be Thessa, had strung the body of a freshly drowned young woman up on Lacey’s boat. But Thessa had denied rescuing the woman.
No dear, I think you’re getting mixed up
.

Suddenly Lacey was very conscious of being within striking reach of Thessa’s paddle.

‘I couldn’t let it carry on, dear,’ Thessa was saying. ‘Not when I knew the girls were being harmed. But it was beyond me, I’m afraid, to call the police about my own brother. I thought, if the bodies were found, if he knew the police were investigating, he might stop.’

‘Why pick me?’

‘I’d seen you swimming and in your canoe. And on your big, fast police boat. I knew you were the one.’

So it had been Thessa, in her little boat, who’d been visiting Lacey’s yacht at night, Thessa who’d left hearts and crabs and, eventually, a corpse. In some ways, it made much more sense if the stalker had been trying to warn Lacey, rather than frighten her. Except—

‘But the women are being brought here to die. Nadia told me. She told me they’re tied by the neck to mooring rings and left to drown, just like I was. How can Alex be killing them, if he doesn’t know about this place?’

‘Nadia?’ Thessa looked genuinely surprised.

‘Nadia Safi. She was here with me today. She was at East Street, too.’

Thessa’s big eyes opened even wider in astonishment. ‘Nadia was here?’ She turned back, to look along the long stretch of water.

‘Yes, she brought me. I didn’t want to say anything before because I didn’t want to frighten you. She was attacked. Someone pulled her out of the boat. I think she’s dead.’

‘Nadia was attacked today? I’m not sure that’s poss—’ began Thessa.

There was a sudden sound, which none of them had made. The sound of something falling, or slithering, into the water.

Lacey drew her legs up beneath her, wondering if rats could swim. Thessa had stopped paddling, was sitting bolt upright, her eyes flicking from Lacey to Pari and back again. ‘Put the oar down for a moment, Pari dear,’ she said.

‘We have to keep going,’ Lacey countered.

Thessa ignored her, her attention still fixed on the noise they’d just heard. In the pale light of the lantern, she seemed to be changing. Her shoulders had drawn back, her head was up, her eyes shining again. She looked taller, younger, stronger. Then, too quick for Lacey to stop her, she reached to one side and caught hold of a mooring ring. In a flash, she’d pushed the boat’s rope through it and pulled it tight. They stopped dead.

‘Thessa,’ said Lacey, as cold realization sank in. ‘How could Alex have killed Nadia if he’s been in custody all day?’

Fred and his crew were waiting at the jetty, the same one from which Dana had climbed aboard the traffickers’ boat not twenty-four hours earlier. As they ran down the riverside steps to meet him, Anderson got a call on his radio. He held up a hand, indicating that they should all wait.