The Hireling's Tale Read online

  ‘I see,’ nodded Crowe. ‘Well, I suppose I’ll have to revise my entire diagnosis in the light of that.’ He winked at Shapiro and clambered up the gangway on to the bank.

  The hire boat Guelder Rose was tied up at the first waterside cottage she’d come to after Barry Lacey’s discovery. This was some five miles east of Castlemere, a bit past Chevening. Shapiro had been in his office when the call came in, three minutes later he was on his way. Lacey was too shocked to make perfect sense, but it was hard to see how the body of a naked girl on a boat where she had no right to be could be other than a suspicious death.

  Donovan was actually off duty today. No one had called him, although his expertise would be valuable to the investigation. Shapiro knew he’d appear by a process similar to magnetism when rumour of a corpse on a boat reached up the canal as far as Broad Wharf. In fact, the waterfront version of Jungle Telegraph must have been operating at peak efficiency, because Donovan’s bike gunned to a halt outside the cottage while Shapiro was still talking to the Scenes of Crime Officer.

  ‘Found anything?’ asked Shapiro. He couldn’t be more specific because he didn’t know what Donovan was looking for.

  Donovan hauled himself up on to the short foredeck of the Guelder Rose. It was raining again: he looked as if he’d been in the canal. When he shook his head the water flew off the black rat-tails of his hair. ‘No sign of a boat coming alongside. No scratches, no mud, not even a rub-mark from the fenders. More likely she was boarded from the port side.’

  Shapiro was puzzled. In more than thirty years on the job he’d seen dead bodies in odder places than this. He’d seen naked dead bodies before, too. But he couldn’t construct a sequence of events that put a naked dead body in the hold - sorry, the chain locker – of the Guelder Rose. It wasn’t an excess of party spirit that led this girl to streak through Mere Basin at nine o’clock at night: she’d been beaten up, the last thing she’d have felt like was playing games. She might have been looking for help, she might have been looking for somewhere to hide. Maybe in the end it was a simple mistake - taking the canvas cover for a solid surface - that killed her. But if she was wandering round naked on a dock full of people, why did nobody help her? Or failing that, complain?

  ‘How did she get there?’

  Donovan shrugged. He was a tall man, stick-thin, with bony shoulders made for the job. ‘She fell through the hatch.’

  ‘With no clothes on?’

  ‘I doubt anybody went down to undress her afterwards. For one thing, they couldn’t have got out again without ripping away more of the canvas.’

  ‘All right. So why did no one notice? Not the Laceys, they were in town, but the Basin’s full of people up to midnight and later. If she walked up the wharf with no clothes on around nine o’clock at night, climbed on to a boat and then fell through a hatch, why did nobody see her?’

  ‘Maybe she wasn’t naked then.’

  Shapiro considered that. ‘So she climbed on to the boat, did a strip act and then fell through the hatch. You think that would go unnoticed?’

  ‘Maybe she didn’t walk. Maybe she was helped, or carried. Maybe someone wrapped her in a coat or a blanket, carried her on board and dropped her through the hatch. Then he took his blanket away with him.’

  ‘Why tear the canvas? Why not just lift the hatch? It wasn’t locked, there were only a couple of split pins securing it. Lacey got it open easily enough. If somebody wanted to hide her, that was the thing to do. She could have been down there for days before anybody - er - smelled a rat. I’m right, aren’t I? - a boating party would have no reason to go in there?’

  ‘Wouldn’t think so,’ said Donovan. ‘I don’t use mine much, except as a dog-kennel. Mostly you keep your fenders over the side and your warps coiled on deck, ready for use.’

  ‘So, apart from the torn canvas, it would have been a good way to dispose of a body. By the time she started to smell there’d have been no way to establish when and where she came aboard.’

  ‘But the canvas was torn,’ objected Donovan. ‘Someone was bound to notice, sooner rather than later.’

  ‘Exactly. So he was more concerned with getting her off his hands than with concealing her long-term. He was in a hurry. He was afraid of being seen; or of being missed; or maybe it wasn’t him who killed her, he was just helping out, if he could get her off his hands he didn’t care how quickly she was found.’

  ‘You reckon it’s murder then.’

  Shapiro scratched his eyebrow with a thumbnail. He was fifty-six, a solidly-built man with a slightly rumpled, lived-in face indistinguishable from a thousand others except by a particularly sharp pair of clear grey eyes. ‘The fall that killed her may have been an accident, but according to Crowe she was beaten before she died. It may or may not be murder, but it’s certainly one for us.’

  ‘So she was hurting, maybe she was concussed. Maybe she wandered on to the boat looking for somewhere to hide and fell through the hatch.’

  ‘Then what became of the blanket? If she came on board alone she was already naked, in which case someone would have seen. If she was wrapped up enough to pass unnoticed, somebody took the blanket away afterwards.’ Shapiro squatted beside the open hatch. SOCO and the FME had been down there with her, they couldn’t do their jobs at arm’s length, but there was nothing Shapiro could learn from such close examination. He’d leave her in peace until the paramedics removed her.

  He found himself trying to estimate her age. Twenty-four, twenty-six? Under the bruises and the blood she was a pretty woman. Her hair was dyed blonde, the bubbly perm a recent investment, and enough of her make-up had survived the assaults on her to show that she’d taken some trouble with it. She’d made an effort to look good for whoever had done this to her.

  He felt a surge of anger under his breastbone. People assumed that policemen became hardened to the aftermath of human tragedy, but Shapiro never had. He’d learned how to deal with it, both practically and emotionally, and that made it easier to see what he had to see and still somehow get on with the job. But every time he took a phonecall that led him here, that left him looking at the lifeless wreckage of a human being who’d begun their last day full of the same hopes, fears, concerns and things to do as everyone else and ended it on a slab, the long experience that stopped him throwing up was no protection against this burgeoning anger. At the waste of a life; at the sheer impertinence of whoever presumed to take it.

  He gritted his teeth to keep his voice low. ‘One way or another, someone’s responsible for this girl’s death. Someone beat her black and blue, then he brought her to this boat and pushed her out of sight to die alone in the darkness. Then he folded up his blanket and went home. I want the bastard, Donovan.

  ‘Ask round in the Basin, see if anyone saw anything. It might not have looked like a man carrying a woman - it could have looked like a couple of drunks leaning on one another, or somebody delivering equipment to the boat. He may have had a van; he may not have been alone. But he must have been there. Find someone who saw him.’

  ‘Where will you be?’

  ‘I’ll be trying to find out why she’s been dead for fifteen hours and still nobody’s reported her missing.’

  Part of the answer came from the autopsy. Shapiro attended in person. It wasn’t strictly necessary - a police officer had to be present but it didn’t have to be him - but he worked on the basis that the cadaver was the only witness to the murder that he presently knew of and the post mortem was her only chance to speak. If he wanted to hear what she had to say first-hand, rather than through the filter of a formal report, he had to be there, ready to ask questions, when the FME was giving his running commentary to the tape.

  When she heard his heavy step pass her door, Detective Inspector Liz Graham put aside what she was doing and followed her chief to his office. He had a spare chair for visitors but Liz took Donovan’s favourite spot, on the windowsill overlooking the canal. ‘So do we know anything more about our Jane Doe now?’
/>   Shapiro nodded and lowered himself behind his desk. He looked glum, his broad lived-in face falling into dejected creases. This stage of an investigation was often depressing. You had a corpse, and no killer, and not enough facts to think you’d ever find one. Over the hours and days ahead they started trickling in, one at a time, building up a picture of the victim and how she spent her last hours that by degrees focused suspicion on a particular individual - usually someone she knew, very often someone you knew. But this first day, unless there were eyewitnesses or real smoking-gun evidence, the task could look impossible.

  ‘Two things,’ he said. ‘How she died, and how she lived.’

  She died, as Crowe had predicted, of falling through the canvas hatch and smashing her head on the steel plates below. But if she hadn’t collided with the bottom of the Guelder Rose she still wouldn’t have been in the peak of health. There was enough cocaine in her system to drop a donkey.

  ‘Which perhaps explains why she was naked,’ said Liz. ‘And why she didn’t see the hatch. But if she’d taken that much, how come she was still on her feet and clambering over boats? Shouldn’t she have been curled up somewhere snoring?’

  ‘Donovan thinks she had help - that someone wrapped a coat or a blanket or something round her and took her there. Which sounded reasonable enough until we got the blood-work. You’re right, she shouldn’t have been able to walk, even with help. And a man carrying a woman’s body through Mere Basin would have been as conspicuous as a naked girl.’

  ‘Maybe someone did see them. This is the Basin we’re talking about, the crowd that hangs out down there in the evening wouldn’t rush to call us if they saw something suspicious. Hell, if they saw a naked girl staggering about they’d give her some music and take up a collection.’ Barry Lacey had been right to back away from The Fen Tiger: it wasn’t his sort of pub at all.

  Shapiro rocked his head non-committally. ‘Apparently it was quite a fall. I know, you can break your neck tripping over a kerb-stone; but she didn’t break her neck, she smashed her skull. Crowe thinks she fell further than four feet into the bottom of the boat.’ He was too old to undergo metrication now. ‘Actually, a lot further.’

  Liz frowned. ‘This is a canal boat we’re talking about, not a square-rigger. I mean, she didn’t fall from the yardarm.’

  ‘The highest point on the Guelder Rose is the top of the cabin roof, about four feet above the deck. If she’d fallen from there she could have managed about eight feet. It still isn’t enough. And how did she get there? She was too tripped out to walk; and if someone was trying to kill her, why risk being seen with her in a public place?’

  ‘Could she have fallen off something else? It’s a boat, it passes under bridges - could she have come off a bridge? If Lacey was busy steering he might not have noticed. Even if he felt the bump he might have thought he’d brushed against something: he’s a novice at this, after all, he can’t be too familiar with the boat.’

  It sounded plausible, and there was room in the time envelope. Time of death had been narrowed to between seven and ten p.m.; the Guelder Rose arrived in Mere Basin after eight; if you could accept that a man busy steering a large unfamiliar boat through a narrow bridge could fail to notice someone falling on to his foredeck she might have come aboard up to six miles short of Castlemere. Shapiro could believe that, but other parts of the theory still gave him problems. ‘If you’re trying to commit suicide you don’t wait till there’s a boat underneath you! Besides, we hit the same snag: she had too much cocaine in her to be doing more than crawling round the bedroom floor. Someone must have helped her. And if he helped her off a bridge that’s still murder.’

  ‘You said you’d learned something about how she lived as well,’ Liz reminded him. ‘Do you know who she is?’

  Shapiro shook his head. ‘But I know what she is: a prostitute. Well, probably. Crowe said there was enough wear and tear, inside and out, that if she wasn’t being paid for it she should have been.’

  Liz wasn’t surprised. Violent death takes people on the fringe of society much more often than it ambushes those at its cosy heart. And people who turn up naked anywhere but their own beds tend to be burning the candle at both ends. ‘Working as in, that’s how she made her living? Or working as in, that’s what she was doing when she died?’

  ‘Both, apparently. Read the report if you want the gory details.’

  ‘Then somebody’d better talk to the Toms’ Union.’ Queen’s Street, like most police stations, had an ambivalent relationship with the local prostitutes. The girls were committing an offence, and at intervals there would be prosecutions, fines and short, pointless prison sentences. But between times hookers and coppers were a fact of one anothers’ lives, and there were benefits to be gained by keeping the relationship amicable. Sometimes the girls needed protecting, sometimes the police needed the sort of information picked up by women who made their living on the street. ‘Donovan’s off today, isn’t he? - shall I go?’

  With his chin in his chest Shapiro smiled a secret smile. ‘Yes and no. Donovan was off; Donovan then heard about a body on a boat and all but beat me to the scene of crime; now he’s down at the Basin looking for someone who saw something.’

  Liz elevated a surprised eyebrow. She was a good-looking woman rather than a beautiful one, tall and athletic, with strong features and a clear intelligence in her hazel-green eyes. She was forty-one: when she released her curly fair hair from its businesslike pleat and swapped her tailored clothes for a checked shirt and riding breeches she could pass for ten years younger. ‘Was that a good idea? He isn’t exactly Flavour of the Month at The Fen Tiger.’

  Despite its prestigious location The Fen Tiger was a villains’ pub. It had been there since Mere Basin was a stinking sink, nine-tenths derelict, subterranean and all but forgotten between Castle Place and Brick Lane. Ten years earlier a go-ahead council with its eye on a European grant had restored the Basin, turning the warehouses into valuable canal-side properties and opening up the inland waterway to holiday mariners. For years before that the only people using it had been commercial carriers who travelled in convoy with someone riding shotgun on the first boat. It had been a massive undertaking and, but for the occasional excess with the gold paint, a successful one. Castlemere had been built to serve the canal; now the canal served the shopkeepers and restaurateurs of Castlemere. It would never be a tourist magnet in the way that Cambridge and Norwich were, but a fair bit of money came through Mere Basin during the summer months.

  And a fair bit of it got as far as The Fen Tiger and no further. The place was full of thieves, professional and casual, conmen, cloners of phones, hackers of hole-in-the-wall cash machines and dealers in outboard engines which had fallen off the back of a barge. Shapiro would have been glad to shut it down, but naive magistrates kept believing the proprietor’s protestations, that the nefarious activities of some of his clientele were not his responsibility, and renewing his licence.

  Shapiro shrugged. ‘I’m not sure they hate Donovan any more than they do you and me. Anyway, the wharf’s his backyard - at least they’ll be talking the same language. Anyone else’d need an interpreter.’

  ‘So, shall I do the toms? Have we got a photo yet?’

  ‘Should be ready now,’ said Shapiro. He blew out his cheeks. ‘You’d better warn them this may not be an isolated incident. However she got on to the boat, she was beaten black and blue first. A man who hires a prostitute and keeps her quiet with cocaine while he beats the living daylights out of her does it because that’s how he gets his kicks. He doesn’t ever do it just once.’

  Chapter Three

  The fact that a place like The Fen Tiger went quiet when he walked inside concerned Donovan not at all. He was a CID officer, and at any given time about half the Tiger’s clientele were wanted for something. He was quite pleased they considered him enough of a threat to fall silent as he passed: sometimes he felt that the best efforts of all Queen’s Street were as a flea-bite on the hide
of Castlemere’s criminal fraternity.

  What bothered him more was that perfectly respectable people, nice decent law-abiding citizens who were more likely to have a sixth finger than a criminal record, also went quiet as he passed. They’d done this since he was about fifteen. At the time, with the cocky innocence of youth, he’d taken it as a compliment, that they recognized him as an individual not to be trifled with. Later he began to wonder what it was they saw that made them mark him and stand back. He wasn’t a dangerous man. He wasn’t violent, or unhinged, or prone to sudden bursts of embarrassing eccentricity. He thought himself a pretty ordinary man on the whole: a bit of a loner, a bit of an outsider, but still an ordinary decent citizen doing an honourable job. And yet other decent citizens looked at him and moved aside, and he didn’t know why.

  But he didn’t spend much time thinking about it in a place where, on the law of averages, every tenth man would like to put a baling hook in his back.

  Fortunately, with the lunchtime rush yet to start, there were only nine people in the bar. One was the potman Donny Toomes. Donovan didn’t have any friends in The Fen Tiger, but on the long list of his enemies Tbomes would have figured somewhere near the bottom.

  He didn’t order a drink. He had no wish to appear part of this company; besides, mostly what he drank was non-alcoholic and he didn’t particularly want Toomes to know that. ‘Were you on last night?’

  Toomes shrugged: a can’t-remember, don’t-care, wouldn’t-tell-you-if-I-was sort of shrug. Donovan rolled his eyes but hung on to his patience. It was a necessary preamble: Toomes would answer his questions eventually, but it was vital to his own credibility that he shouldn’t make it too easy.

  ‘Simple enough question, Donny: were you working here last night? Say, between eight and closing time - or midnight, whichever came first.’