TWO

I had only met her that once and the appalling mess they uncovered for me in the hospital mortuary was quite unrecognisable. The body was about the same build. That was all I could tell them. Concentrate on the clothes, they said, and that ring on her finger. But I didn’t know what clothes Iris Sunderby possessed and she might have had any number of rings. I certainly had not noticed one when I sat almost opposite her in the after cabin of the Cutty Sark, or when her hands were on the steering wheel as she drove me through the Blackwall Tunnel and on to the Isle of Dogs.

I asked them why they thought I could help and they said that divers had dredged up a handbag from the bottom of the dock. In it they had found the remains of several letters, one from Victor Wellington, another from me, the others from addresses in the Argentine. ‘Have you any reason to think she would commit suicide?’ The Inspector threw the question at me almost casually as we walked out into the damp atmosphere of a day that was hovering between drizzle and rain.

‘Quite the reverse,’ I said. ‘She was full of plans for the future.’ And I told him briefly about the ship in the ice and the vessel waiting for us in Tierra del Fuego. But he already knew about that. ‘Mr Wellington said the same thing and I’ve spoken to a man named Ward up in Glasgow. I gather he was willing to finance the expedition.’ He nodded, leaning his body into the wind. ‘So it’s murder.’ He turned his head, a quick, searching glance. ‘Have you got any views on that, sir?’

‘No, why should I?’ And I told him again that my visit to the Cutty Sark was the first and only time I had met her. But then I remembered the student, a cousin she had said, and I explained how I had seen him watching her park her car by the Gypsy Moth pub, how he had looked down at us through the Cutty Sark’s skylight and had then followed us in his bright red sports car.

‘Did she give you his name?’

‘Carlos,’ I said.

‘His surname?’

But I couldn’t tell him that and in the end he thanked me for my co-operation. ‘If you hear anything else …’ He hesitated. ‘I think I should tell you the state of the body is not indicative of the cause of death. The pathologist is quite satisfied she died by drowning.’ And he added, ‘The wounds to the head and neck were probably caused by her body being sucked into the swirl of a ship’s propellor. We checked with the Maritime Trust vessels and one of them regularly runs up the engines, usually at slow ahead to lubricate the prop shaft. The watchman did that the night before the body was reported to us.’

‘It could have been an accident then?’

‘It could.’ He nodded. ‘Seems she’d formed a habit, ever since she’d rented the room in Mellish Street, of taking a walk in the evening, usually with her landlady’s dog. Quite late sometimes. She liked to walk round the docks. So yes, it could have been an accident, particularly as the night she disappeared she had already taken the dog out.’ But I could see he didn’t think it likely. ‘She was last seen down by the river at the end of Cuba Street by the South Dock Pier. Perhaps I should say that two men saw a young woman of her description on her own and without a dog. They had been having a drink together at The North Pole and though they couldn’t give the exact time, they both said they had stayed in the pub until it closed.’ We had reached the police car and he paused, the keys in his hand. ‘Originally she was going to drop you off at Liverpool Street station, you said. It was on her way. Do you know where she was going, her original destination before she changed her mind?’

‘I think she said Cadogan Gardens, something to do with the Argentine Embassy.’

‘And then, when she found she was being followed, she swung off the main road and headed back towards her lodgings on the Isle of Dogs. Was she scared?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe. But it didn’t show in her face. More annoyed than scared.’

‘Did you get the number of his car?’

I shook my head. ‘He was three vehicles back.’

‘A Porsche, that right?’

‘It looked like a Porsche, but I can’t be certain. All I am sure about is the colour and that it was an open sports car.’ Once again I went over the description I had given him, the boy’s face dark and tense behind the wheel, the black hair streaming in the wind as we came out of the Blackwall Tunnel still vivid in my mind. ‘We’ll have a Photofit picture circulated, but it’s not much to go on. The car is a better bet. Not too many open top Porsches around in this country.’

He offered me a lift to the nearest tube station, but I said I would rather walk. I was feeling slightly sick. I had never seen a dead body before and I needed to come to terms with the memory of that battered, half-decapitated corpse, the pale marble of her skin and the open wound along her thigh.

He nodded. I think he understood. ‘I’ll be in touch,’ he said as he got into his car, adding, ‘We’re not revealing the cause of death, not just yet. Understand?’ And he drove off eastwards, while I turned and headed towards Limehouse and the Docklands Light Railway. I wanted time to think, and a sight of the environment in which she had lived during the time she had been in England might help. The line ended, I knew, at Island Gardens at the southern tip of the Isle of Dogs. From there I could walk through the foot tunnel under the Thames to Greenwich. If I was lucky I might be able to have a word with Victor Wellington. We had both seen the body and between us we might remember something that would make identification more positive.

But it was the motive that was nagging at my mind. If that young relative of hers had done it, then there had to be a motive, something personal, and remembering the violence of her reaction when she realised he was following her, I wondered whether I ought to have passed on to the Inspector the exact words she had used.

The Docklands Light Railway was still relatively new, the blue-painted, glass-domed station glistening in the wet. There was a train already in, two box-like glass coaches painted blue and a warning to say that their operation was automatic. It left almost immediately, and sitting up front with a gaggle of tourists and no driver, it was like travelling on a toy railway. As it swung away from the Fenchurch Street line and headed south on an elevated track parallel to the West Ferry Road, the whole of the Isle of Dogs opened up ahead of us. The drizzle had turned to rain, the water in a succession of docks we crossed dark and mottled, and in between them construction areas that were glistening islands of yellow earth criss-crossed with the tracks of heavy vehicles out of which rose a forest of gantry cranes.

At South Quay station we were right alongside the Telegraph building, swinging east, then south through an area of new construction, the buildings brash and for the most part architecturally appalling. Crossharbour, Mudchute, a view west beyond Millwall Dock, almost every building knocked flat and the streets boarded up, and across the river the pinnacles of Greenwich and the masts and yards of the Cutty Sark.

I had tried to get a glimpse of Mellish Street between the newer buildings, but there were very few of the old houses still standing and it was difficult in the midst of all the construction to picture what it must have been like for her living down there, walking the dog at night, her mind all the time on the Weddell Sea and the abandoned expedition boat waiting for her at Punta Arenas.

From the Garden Islands terminal it was only a few minutes’ walk to the park entrance and the glass-domed rotunda that houses the lift to the Greenwich Foot Tunnel. The sky was beginning to lighten over Blackheath, the beauty of Wren’s architecture on the far side of the river standing in perfect harmony above the darker grey of the water. I stopped at one point because a shaft of sunlight had suddenly pierced the gloom. It picked out the Royal Naval College and a ferry angling across the river. There was a Thames barge, too, motoring up Blackwall Reach, the whole scene suddenly Turneresque. How many times had she come down here to the southernmost tip of the Isle of Dogs? A pointless question since I didn’t even know how long she had been in England. I should have asked. So many questions I should have asked her, remembering that sense of awareness I had felt at first sight of her.

The lift was for up to sixty passengers and there was a TV monitor by the gates showing the northern half of the tunnel with tourists moving up and down it. A notice said it had been opened in 1902 at a cost of £127,000, that it was over twelve hundred feet long and between thirty and fifty feet below the water according to the state of the tide. There were quite a few kids in the tunnel when I entered it, the high-pitched scream of their voices resounding in the long lavatorial tube-train-sized passage – two hundred thousand white tiles, the notice had said.

I think Victor Wellington was as glad to see me as I was to see him, for when I asked for him at the Museum I was shown straight into his office. ‘Bad business,’ he said after he had greeted me. He must have said that three or four times during the quarter of an hour or so I was with him. ‘No, I’ve no doubt at all.’ This in reply to my question asking him whether he was certain the body was that of Iris Sunderby. It was the ring, he said, and he went on to describe it, an eternity ring of unusual thickness and banded with what he took to be thin rectangles of ruby and emerald. ‘On the left hand,’ he said. ‘Very striking.’

I shook my head. I hadn’t noticed any ring.

‘A bad business.’ His hands were locked together on the desk. ‘It’s not nice seeing somebody, anybody, in that condition. But somebody you’ve met, a strong, characterful young woman – very striking, didn’t you think her?’

‘Yes, very striking,’ I agreed. ‘Great vitality.’

‘Vitality, yes. It hit you straight away, a sort of sexual energy.’ There was a sudden gleam in his eyes, his small mouth slightly pursed so that I wondered whether he was married and if so what his wife was like. ‘She wasn’t raped, you know,’ he added. ‘It wasn’t that sort of killing.’

‘You asked?’

‘Yes, of course. It’s the first thing that comes to mind.’

‘And you’re convinced she was killed.’

‘That’s the Inspector’s view. What else? It was either that or suicide, and she wasn’t the sort of person to kill herself, not when she’d just got the backing she needed. And it would be odd if she fell into the dock by accident. Sky clear and a nearly full moon. Now if she’d had the dog with her … But she hadn’t.’ He got to his feet. ‘Her brother was one of the Disappeareds. That may explain it.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘The Disappeareds. Don’t you remember?’ This over his shoulder as he walked across the room to a bank of filing cabinets. ‘All those silent women holding a weekly vigil in that square in Buenos Aires. There was a lot about it in the press two or three years back. A mute accusation for the loss of their loved ones. About thirty thousand of them. Just disappeared. Surely you remember?’ He pulled open one of the drawers. ‘Connor-Gómez. That was the family name, her name before she married, and her brother was Eduardo. She talked about him briefly when she first came to see me. He was a scientist. Biology I think she said.’ He found the file he wanted and lifted out a sheet of notepaper. ‘Here we are. Just an ordinary thank you letter for arranging that meeting on board the Cutty Sark, and then at the bottom a PS.’ He handed me the letter. ‘I gave a copy of it to the police, of course.’

It was a typed letter, short and to the point, with a wild flourish of a signature sprawled across her name typed at the bottom, and below that the postscript, hand-written and difficult to read: Other people are after the ship. Don’t let them discourage Ward please. The please was heavily underlined.

‘Have you been in touch with him?’ I asked.

‘Ward? No. What’s the point? Nothing I could do about it and he’ll know she’s dead. The media gave it full coverage, all the gory details.’ He held out his hand for the letter. ‘So ironic, just at the moment when she’d found a backer, and an interesting one, too. He came and saw me here the day after our meeting, wanted to know a little more about her.’ His glasses caught the light as he turned back to the filing cabinet. ‘I couldn’t tell him much, but I learnt a little bit more about him, enough anyway to realise he could contribute quite a lot to the expedition. He’s not just a truck driver, you see. Not any more. He has his own business now and runs a small fleet of those transcontinental monsters they use on the Middle Eastern run down through Turkey. That’s the modern equivalent of the old silk road.’ He paused, searching for the folder he had taken the letter from. Then, when he had found it, he said, ‘I asked him about the cargoes he was running, but he wouldn’t say much about that, or their destination. I don’t imagine it was drugs. He didn’t seem that sort of man. But it was cértainly profitable. Arms most likely, and the destination probably Iran or the Gulf States.’

He pushed the drawer to and returned to his desk. ‘A pity,’ he said again. ‘She had been trying unsuccessfully for over six months to raise the necessary funds in South America and the States. Finally she came to England and got herself a room in Mellish Street, where she’d be close to the Museum here and at the same time handy for the City where she hoped to fund the expedition. Then, when the institutions turned her down, she began advertising in a few selected magazines. That was how she landed Ward. Rather similar, the two of them – wouldn’t you say? Both of them with a lot of energy, a lot of drive.’

Wellington had resumed his seat and he leaned across the desk, staring at me as he said abruptly, ‘How do you drown a woman?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I asked the Inspector that. You hold her head under water, of course. But to do that in the South Docks you’d have to be in the water yourself. How do you get out? And when you have found the ladder, or whatever it is, you’re sopping wet as well as scared. Somebody surely would have seen the man. I mean, you don’t forget a sight like that, do you? At least, that’s what the Inspector is banking on.’

‘She could have been drowned in her lodgings, in the bath, something like that,’ I said. ‘Then driven to the dockside and dumped there.’

We were still discussing the various possibilities when his secretary came in to say the Admiral was waiting for him and all the members of the ship model group were assembled. He nodded and got to his feet. ‘Bad business,’ he said again as we went to the door. ‘And bad luck on you. Could have made your name on a project like that. But perhaps you’re best out of it.’

‘How do you mean?’ I asked. And when he didn’t immediately reply I added, ‘Because of that postscript to her letter?’

We had paused in the corridor outside. ‘No, because of Ward.’ He seemed to hesitate. Then he said, ‘There was no pools win, you see. He came by his money some other way.’ And when I asked him how he knew, he gave a little deprecating laugh and said, ‘Simple. I just phoned a couple of the main operators.’

‘You mean he hasn’t got a million?’

He shrugged. ‘Can’t answer that. All I know is, if he’s got that sort of money, it didn’t come to him through a pools win.’ The words hung in the air as he stood there smiling at me. ‘Too bad it turned out this way.’

He had nothing else to offer me, of course, but before he went off to discuss ship models he was kind enough to say he’d continue to bear me in mind if he heard of anything that required a wood preservative consultant.

I had a sandwich and a cup of coffee in the Museum cafeteria, then walked back through the foot tunnel to the Isle of Dogs. I didn’t take the train. Instead, I decided to walk along West Ferry Road until I reached Mellish Street. There were houses at first and a few trees, but at the Lord Nelson, on the corner of what the developers had left of East Ferry Road, the hoardings began. From then on it was all hoardings, dust and heavy machinery, and all that was left of old Millwall were the pubs. They stood, solitary and splendid, waiting for the coming of the yuppies – the Ship, the Robert Burns, the Vulcan, the Telegraph, the Kingsbridge Arms. By Cyclops Wharf and Quay West a long stretch of hoardings advertised Greenwich views, gymnasium, restaurant, swimming pool, running track, squash, water sports, leafy squares, cobbled streets, bakery, the Island Club, the river bus – a you-name-it, we’ve-got-it development.

And then I came to Tiller Road and the vestige remains of Tower Hamlets’ cheap-looking post-war housing. Mellish Street began like that, too, breeze-block two-storey tenements with rusty metal windows and concrete slab porches, and behind the tenements several tower blocks climbing the sky. But halfway up the street, from Number 26 on, it was the old original terraced houses with front parlour windows that jutted out into front garden patches.

The house in which she had lodged was one of these, right at the end of the street by a solitary tree.

I don’t know what I expected to learn from this visit, but though I rang the bell several times, there was no answer. A black kid was trying out a skateboard down by the tenements, otherwise the street was deserted, a few parked cars, that’s all. I hammered on the door. There was no sound, not even from the dog, but a curtain twitched in the house next door and I had a glimpse of a cotton dress and a sharp, lined face with eyes full of curiosity.

She must have been waiting for me there behind the door, for she opened it as soon as I rang the bell. ‘Good morning.’ I hadn’t thought what I was going to say and we stood there for a moment facing each other awkwardly in silence, her eyes grey and slightly watery. ‘I was wondering about the dog,’ I said hesitantly.

‘Mudface? She took it with ’er, ter Poplar ter stay with ’er brother. You the perlice? She got fed up wiv the perlice.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I know Mrs Sunderby.’

Her eyes brightened. ‘’Er as was murdered?’ She was a real East Ender.

‘How do you know she was murdered?’

‘Well, I don’t, do I? But that’s what I ’eard. The papers, they don’t say it were murder, but that’s wot they bin ’inting at. An’ all chopped up like that, makes shivers run down yer spine just ter think aba’t it. Wot yer want then?’

I started asking her about Iris Sunderby, what time she normally took the dog out at night, whether she had had any visitors, and I described the student I had seen at the Cutty Sark that day. I didn’t say he had followed us and I didn’t mention the name Carlos, but I did tell her he had had a red open sports car and as soon as I said that she nodded. ‘’E parked it up beyond the tree there. I was a’t the front talkin’ ter Effie Billing an’ this little red car turns a’t of Mill’arbour an’ stops right there.’ Her description of the driver fitted. He hadn’t got out. He had just sat there as though waiting for somebody.

‘When was this?’ I asked.

She couldn’t give me the date, but it was a Wednesday, she said, about a fortnight ago. And it had been in the late afternoon, about tea time, which meant he had picked up her trail again after she had dropped me off at South Quay station. Or maybe he had managed to keep us in sight all the time. ‘Did he talk to her?’ I asked. ‘Did he call at the house?’

She shook her head. ‘Not that I saw, an’ I was watching on an’ orf for more’n an hour I’d say. Then she came out an’ drove orf in ’er little car. An’ as soon as she’s inter Mill’arbour ’e whips that little red beast of ’is round an’ roars off after ’er.’

‘Did you tell the police?’

She shook her head. ‘Didn’t ask, did they?’ To her the police were clearly something to be avoided.

I thanked her and walked away, past the house Iris Sunderby had lived in for what must have been at least a fortnight, past the tree, turning left up the main Millharbour road towards Marsh Wall and the Telegraph building and the dock where her body had been found. Away to the left was the slender, box-shaped indicator of the Guardian newspaper. I was in an area now of brash new construction and for the first time I became conscious of the Development Corporation’s obsession with flattened gables that seemed to me remarkably ugly. A feeling of depression came over me, this frantic development I had walked through, and all for what? A few years of London air and diesel fallout and it would be completely in tune with the tattiness of the rest of the Borough of Tower Hamlets. The image of the body lying in that dock with the head and upper torso chopped to bits seemed a sad vignette that matched the mood of the strange dockland tongue hanging out in a great loop of the river.

Why? Why? Why? Why had she been killed? All that effort to prove her husband right, to prove he’d really seen the ship and hadn’t hallucinated. I was thinking about the irony of it, the waste, as I walked towards the overhead railway and South Quay station.

To the west of the Telegraph building a narrow walkway led to the dockside and the gangway leading to Le Boat, a restaurant occupying the upper deck of a vessel called the Celtic Surveyor and incongruously roofed in a sort of plastic reproduction of a big top. A journalist going on board at the stern told me the ship belonged to his newspaper and had been moored there to act as the staff canteen. He was critical of the management for letting off the upper part to a commercial outfit and said they had had quite a fight to get the restaurant to repaint the original name on bows and stern. ‘It’s bad luck to change the name of a ship, isn’t it? Le Boat!’ There was a lot of expression in the way he said it.

The drizzle had started again, a fine, wet mist. The sun had gone and the water of the dock was very still and very black. The Telegraph’s patch was fenced off from the next development, but by clinging to the barbed wire wrapped round a stanchion I was able to swing my body out over the dock and on to the other side. An open gravel expanse led to a neat brick array of office and residential accommodation facing a dockside walk along the line of Maritime Trust vessels, which included the tug Portwey, and beyond that the coaster Robin with the Lydia Eva moored outside.

The water between these vessels was foul with accumulated filth, the surface of it some six to eight feet below me. Vertical iron ladders, rusted and overgrown with weeds, were set at intervals in the dockside. This was where her body had been fished out of the water, right under the tug’s bows where a scum of plastic cartons, old rags and pieces of wood lay congealed in a viscid layer of oil. I should have asked that woman in Mellish Street whether anybody had visited her the night she had been killed, whether she had seen a car parked outside, for now that I had seen the dock for myself I was even more convinced her body must have been dumped there.

I walked back through the new development to Marsh Wall. A construction worker in a hard hat was pile-driving steel rods that protruded from around the base of one of the round columns supporting the overhead railway, the machine he was using kicking up dust and making a noise like a compressed-air drill. I tried to picture this place at night, no construction workers, everything quiet. There were street lights and the development had some exterior lighting of its own. There would be shadows, deep shadows, and nobody about, the alleyways between the buildings like black shafts. He could have knocked her unconscious, then pushed her in, the place deserted and nobody to hear her cry out or the splash of her body as it hit the water. A train ground at the rails overhead and I wondered how late they ran. Could somebody in one of the carriages have seen her standing there with Carlos?

A sign almost opposite me indicated the top of Lemanton Steps. I crossed the road and found myself looking down two flights of new brick that led off the high green bank built to retain the water of the dock. The steps led down into Manilla Street, past a timber importers, ‘Lemanton & Son, Established 1837’, and right opposite was a pub with the improbable name of The North Pole. By then I was tired and hungry. Inside, I found it full of construction workers and for a moment I thought it was just a grog shop, but as my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, I saw one of the girls come out from behind the bar with a plate of sandwiches. She was a big, dark girl with skin-tight black pants and a seductive swagger to her bottom that matched the big-toothed smile and the come-hither black eyes.

I got myself a lager, and when she brought me my thick wad of a ham sandwich, I asked her if she’d ever served the young woman whose body had been found in the dock. ‘Did she ever come in here?’ I asked. ‘Did you know her?’

She checked, the plate still in her hand, her eyes gone dead and the smile wiped from her face, all the flounce gone out of her so that she suddenly looked old and worn. She half shook her head, banging the plate on the table and turning quickly away. I hadn’t expected such a positive reaction from what had been no more than a random enquiry and I was left with the certainty that my question had scared her.

I watched her while I ate my sandwich and she never smiled once after that, and she didn’t come near me again. It was the other girl who collected my money, but as I left the pub I was conscious that she was watching me furtively.

It worried me all the way back to the City and Liverpool Street station, the certainty that she knew something. But what? In the end I pushed it to the back of my mind. She would deny it, of course, so no point in telling anybody. But when the police finally caught up with Carlos and began to build up their case …

That girl, and his carelessness in letting her bag fall into the water, nagged at my mind again that night. It was in the small hours, lying awake and thinking of her stretched out naked in that refrigerated tin box, that I remembered how she had suddenly referred to what I now knew to be the Disappeareds. It was just after we had come out of the Blackwall Tunnel and she could see young Carlos following us. ‘So many killed,’ she had murmured, staring into the rear-view mirror.

‘What’s that got to do with it?’ I had asked her and she had turned on me. ‘Eduardo is one of them,’ she had said. ‘Eduardo is my brother. My younger brother. And that little bastard –’ She nodded at the reflection in her rear mirror – ‘Why is he here? Why does Ángel send him?’ And she had gone on about her half-brother, how evil he could be.

Something else she had said came back to me then. ‘He hated Eduardo.’ And when I had asked her why, she had said, ‘Because he is a good man, a Connor-Gómez. Not Sicilian. My father has told him Eduardo –’ Her mouth shut tight on whatever it was she was going to say. ‘That is before they burn down the store.’ She swung across the truck we were passing into the left-hand lane and then made the sharp turn left where it was signposted Isle of Dogs.

That was when we had lost sight of the car behind. Her mood had changed then, the tension gone. I should have mentioned all this to the Inspector, but I hadn’t remembered at the time. I had been too shocked at the sight of her body, everything else blotted out. And then Victor Wellington reminding me of it. Had she meant her half-brother was one of those responsible for what had happened to the Disappeareds? Or was she simply saying he had been a supporter of the Junta, the military regime that had caused the terror, or at least condoned it? I knew very little about it, only what I had read in the papers after the invasion of the Falkland Islands, and anyway it was no concern of mine – except that I had met Iris Sunderby and had been brought down to London to try and identify her body.

To get it out of my mind I took the following day off, borrowed a friend’s boat and sailed it out to Blakeney Point, anchoring under the shingle there. It was one of those cloudless East Coast days, the sun blazing down and a bite in the wind, which was north-east force 3 to 4, the sort of day when even visitors from hot climates suffer from sunburn. I stayed out overnight, caught some fish, and after making a splendid breakfast of them, sailed back in the dawn to find that Iain Ward had phoned in my absence.

The message on my Ansaphone said he had seen the papers that morning and would I phone him urgently. And he gave his telephone number. By ‘that morning’ he obviously meant the previous morning’s papers. I didn’t take any papers myself, but my next-door neighbour let me have a look at his Express and there, under the heading ‘DOCKLAND KILLING’, I found my name referred to as one of those who had been called in to identify the body. Inspector Blaxall was quoted as saying that positive identification would probably depend on dental evidence and as a resident of the Argentine it might be some time before the police in Buenos Aires were able to trace her records. Even then the condition of the body would make it difficult to check the dental information. There followed the names of those who had been called in to identify the body, among them mine: Peter Kettil, a wood preservative consultant, who had also talked to Mrs Sunderby at the conference on board the Cutty Sark last week, seems to have been fairly sure the body in the dock was hers.

The report went on to give something of Iris Sunderby’s background. Her father, Juan Connor-Gómez, had been head of the family department store in Buenos Aires. He had committed suicide just before the Falklands war, his business having failed following a fire that gutted the main building and destroyed something over a million pounds’ worth of stock. Her brother, Eduardo, a bio-chemist, had disappeared at about the same time. According to the police, the possibility that this is a political killing cannot be ruled out. ‘It may be that it goes back to the period when people all over the Argentine, but particularly in cities like Buenos Aires, were disappearing. A report on the family background from the police in Buenos Aires is urgently awaited. Until our people have that report the purpose behind this brutal killing will not be known.’

I phoned Ward at once, but got no answer, and it wasn’t until evening that I finally got through to him.

‘Are ye all set, Peter?’ Those were his opening words. And when I asked him what he was talking about, he said, ‘Are ye all packed an’ ready to go, ’cause Ah’ve booked tae seats fur Sunday on a flight to Madrid. We stay overnight, then fly Iberia direct to Mexico City. Meet ye at the BA check-in desk at 13.00. That all right?’

I couldn’t think what to say for a moment, the abruptness of it taking my breath away. ‘You mean you’re going ahead with the expedition?’

‘Och aye.’ He said it quietly, a matter-of-fact statement. ‘Why not? The boat is there. We can sail as soon as we get to Punta Arenas.’

‘But …’ It was now Wednesday evening. ‘Are you serious? I mean … well, you can’t leave for a sail in the Weddell Sea just like that. We’d need stores, gear, clothes. We’d need to plan ahead, to plan very carefully.’

‘All taken care of.’

‘But …’

‘Ye just listen to me. Ah’m used to organism’ things at short notice. Ah’ve cabled that Norwegian to have the boat stored an’ ready to sail within a week and Ah’ve transferred the necessary funds to a local bank wi’ instructions to settle all accounts. Ye’ve got a passport, have ye?’

‘Yes.’

‘A valid passport. Ye’ve no’ let it run out?’

‘No. It’s fairly new.’ My thoughts were running away with me, my imagination too. It was one thing to sit in on a meeting like that in the Cutty Sark theorising about whether or not there was an old frigate locked in the ice of the Weddell Sea, talking vaguely about an expedition to recover it; quite another to have somebody say we leave in four days’ time, destination Antarctica. ‘Visas,’ I said. ‘I’d need visas. And money – traveller’s cheques. Another thing, what do we wear? For an expedition like that you need special clothing.’

‘All taken care of,’ he said again. ‘Ah provide the money, an’ the special clothing, the very latest in protective gear, that’s being flown out, Ah hope tonight. ’Fraid Ah had to guess yer size. Visas will be dealt with by me travel agent. His office is in London.’ He had me write down the address, which was in Windmill Street. ‘Have yer passport there by 09.00 tomorrow mornin’ and Jonnie Crick promises to hand it back to ye wi’ all the necessary visas in time fur us to catch the plane. Okay?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not okay. This is Norfolk, not London, and it’s already past eight in the evening.’

‘Of course. Ah should have told ye. A motorcycle courier from a delivery firm callin’ itself the Norfolk Flyer will pick yer passport up at 06.30 tomorrow mornin’. And see that there’s a full-face picture of yerself with it fur photocopying. And when ye pick yer passport up on Sunday mornin’, pick mine up as well.’ For the moment his voice seemed to have lost almost all trace of an accent. ‘Windmill Street,’ he added, ‘is just to the north of Piccadilly Circus, a turning off Shaftesbury Avenue. Ye’ll find Jonnie’s office on the third floor. Don’t forget, will ye? Ah need to be on the plane to Madrid with everythin’ sorted out and Ah’ve still a lot to dae. Hold on a minute now and Ah’ll give ye the flight number.’

‘Look, this is crazy,’ I said. ‘Nobody planning an expedition leaves it to the last minute like this, certainly not an expedition to the Antarctic. You haven’t even got the boat yet.’

‘Ye’re wrong there, laddie. Ah bought Isvik last week, two days after we met at Greenwich. What shall we call her, the Iain Ward?’ The way he said it, the fact that he was considering changing her name, the whole precipitate business of rushing off to the Antarctic made me suddenly feel I was dealing with a megalomaniac. Yet he had seemed sensible enough. Maybe it was the telephone. The telephone does accentuate inflexions in the voice, nuances of personality that are not perceptible when overlaid by the visual impact of the individual. But I was thinking of Iris Sunderby’s words – an ego a mile high – and her view that his accent was phoney.

‘Are ye there?’

‘Yes, I’m still here.’ What the hell did I say to him?

‘Luke, d’ye want the job or not?’

‘I didn’t know you were offering me a job.’ I said it without thinking, to gain time while I tried to find a few answers to the questions racing through my mind. If his travel agent could produce visas for two or three of the more difficult South American countries at such short notice there must either be something wrong with them or … ‘How much are these visas going to cost you?’ I asked him.

‘That’s none of yer business. But they’ll be the real thin’, not forgeries.’ I could almost hear him smiling at the other end of the line. ‘They’ll cost a bit more, of course, but everythin’ costs more if ye’re in a hurry. Aye, and if it’s money that’s worryin’ ye, Ah’m no’ expectin’ ye to come along just fur the ride. Ye’ll be there to dae a job so Ah’ll pay ye a salary. No’ a very big one, mind ye, but still enough to provide fur yer funeral if we get into trouble and lose our lives. Now, is there anythin’ else, otherwise … Och, the flight number.’ He gave it to me. ‘Terminal One.’

‘I’m not going to be rushed into this,’ I said. ‘I need time to think.’

‘We don’t have time.’

‘Why ever not?’ I demanded. ‘It’s still winter down there. There’s lots of time before the spring –’

‘The time of year doesn’t concern me.’

‘What does then? Why are you in such a hurry?’

‘Ah’ll tell ye when we reach Madrid, no’ before. Now, dae ye want the job or not? Ah need a wood preservative expert, somebody whose technical opinion will be accepted, but it doesn’t have to be ye.’ His voice hardened as he added, ‘Ah’ll be frank with ye. Ye’re not by any means the best qualified expert available. Inside of a week Ah could have somebody with more qualifications flown out to join me. So ye think it over, okay?’ The smile was back in his voice. ‘See ye at the BA check-in desk 13.00 hours Sunday. And don’t forget to pick up the passports from Jonnie.’

There was a click and the line went dead. I was left standing there staring blankly at the saltings, my mind in a turmoil. Slowly I put the receiver back on its rest. The sun was setting, the salt marsh illuminated in a golden glow. Glimmers of light picked out the dark ribbons of water, the hides used by the wardens and the bird-watching members of the NNT standing stiffly like pillboxes, black and white Friesians grazing with their rumps turned to the north-westerly breeze, and far away across the flat expanse of the reclaimed marsh, beyond the pale yellow line of the shingle horizon, the white of a tanker’s bridge was followed by the red funnel of a freighter, their passage so distant they seemed to hang there, immobile.

My mother called from the kitchen. ‘Who was that, dear?’

I didn’t answer for the moment. The sound of her familiar voice seemed to accentuate the appalling choice with which I had been presented. I was in the front room of my family’s semi-detached house on the coast road just east of Cley with its white-painted picture-postcard windmill. Since my father’s death it had become my den. Now I called it my office.

‘Anybody I know?’

‘No.’ I went over to the window. ‘Just a client.’

‘Well, supper will be ready in a moment, so don’t do any more work.’

The tanker and the red funnel had repositioned themselves imperceptibly and I was looking at the view with a sense of hyperawareness. It was a view that I had come to take for granted. But not now, not if I were going to hand my passport, to that Norfolk Flyer chap in the dawn and then go down to London on the Sunday, to Windmill Street and on to Heathrow in time to meet Ward at the flight check-in desk at 13.00. And if I went with him … That view was suddenly very precious to me.

The Warden came out of his house near the end of our row of neat semis. I watched him as he crossed the road and took the well-worn path out to the first hide. Even in winter with the wind blowing straight down from the Arctic and the marshland all frozen solid, the waterways iced over and a dusting of snow on everything, the crystals driven horizontally against the glass of the window with a sound like the rustle of silk, even in those conditions, this Arctic shore of Norfolk had its charm. And now as I stared, I felt it clutching at my heart.

Punta Arenas! That was where he was asking me to go and I hadn’t even looked it up in my school atlas. No point, I had thought. Iris Sunderby was dead. And now this Glaswegian planning to run the expedition himself.

Why?

I leaned my forehead against the cold of the windowpane. No harm in meeting him. I could always refuse to fly at the last moment. I ticked off in my mind the questions I needed to ask him.

‘Supper’s ready, dear. Bangers and mash, your father’s favourite. Come along. I’m taking it in now.’

‘All right, Mum.’ And I stood there for a moment longer as I thought of my father. He had never been abroad. Incredibly he had never been to London, had barely been outside of Norfolk all his life, and when we had moved to Cley this view had been for him a total fulfilment. And yet, when I said I was going on a Whitbread round-the-worlder, he hadn’t batted an eyelid, hadn’t attempted to dissuade me.

‘It’s on the table, dear.’

Sometimes I felt the world outside of East Anglia wasn’t real to him.

‘A nice sunset. Your father always liked it best at this time of the evening, so long as the sun was setting in a clear sky.’

She was standing in the doorway, taking off her apron. ‘Come along now.’ I took the apron from her and tossed it on to the desk, where it lay like a faded flower piece sprawled across the typewriter. I put my arm round her shoulder. ‘I may be going away for a bit,’ I said.

‘Oh, when?’ She always took my movements in her stride. Thank God, she had become accustomed to my coming and going. ‘Where are you going this time?’

‘Punta Arenas,’ I said.

‘Spanish?’

‘Sort of.’ And I left it at that. I didn’t tell her how long I might be gone. And anyway I didn’t know, or even whether I would go at all.

‘You’re very quiet,’ she said as I slashed my knife through a beautifully crisped sausage. She always was a perfectionist in whatever miserable object she was cooking. ‘Something on your mind?’

‘You know my mind, Mum. Empty as a returned beer keg.’

‘I don’t drink.’ She stared at me uncomprehendingly. She was solid Saxon-and-Dutch East Anglian. Loyal as anybody could possibly be, but completely devoid of humour. My father’s little jokes had just bounced off her like hailstones off a swan’s back. Perhaps that’s what had made them such a good match. Dad’s wit sparked on half a dozen cylinders at least. He was an East Ender, pure Cockney. His father had emigrated from Stepney to Norfolk after the First World War when land was cheap. He’d sold his winkle stall in Aldgato Market and bought a few acres at Cley. I hadn’t known him, only my grandmother, who had been born in Eastcheap and had a cackling laugh. She and my father were very close, and when she was gone, he had turned his attention to me. We had had a lot of fun together for we were on the same wavelength you might say.

And then he’d had that stroke. Odd, the human brain. It’s everything – the personality, the bright intelligence, the humour, everything. And in a flash it’s gone, a blood clot sealing off blood vessels, starving the brain cells. Suddenly they’re dead. And brain cells are the one and only part of the human body that cannot repair themselves. He had never been the same again, all the fun we’d had gone. God, how I had loved that man!

I loved my mother too, of course. But not in the same way. Fred Kettil had had that something, a different sort of It to Marilyn Monroe, but still an It. The times we’d had, the laughter. And then suddenly, nothing. Just a blank stare. Why? Why take a man like that in his prime? What the hell is God up to? ‘You used to laugh at Dad’s jokes, Mum,’ I said. ‘Why not at mine?’

‘You know very well I didn’t understand them. I just laughed because he expected it. But not at the rude ones,’ she added archly. ‘You remember a lot of them were very Clacton Pier. But he was fun. He was always great fun.’ And her eyes glimmered in a very personal way so that I was afraid she was going to burst into tears. She cried very easily.

I suppose it’s a question of imagination, and I sat there silent for a moment thinking about imagination and what exactly it was, as I tried to spear another of her crisp little sausages. Why should one person have it and another not? What goes on inside that skull of ours, what makes it tick? And when we die …?

I was still thinking about that, and what I might be letting myself in for, when I went up to bed. And in the morning the courier arrived almost ten minutes ahead of time, a Polish kid, thin as a lath, on a big BMW motorcycle strapped round with panniers. He glanced at the envelope I handed him. ‘J. Crick Esq.’ And he read off the address. ‘I know where. Soho.’ He stuffed my passport into a pannier already bulging with packages. ‘Good day, I think.’ He had turned his helmeted head to stare at the distant line of shingle, bright yellow in the sunlight.

It was the sun that had woken me, slanting in through the north-east-facing side window of my bedroom and shining full on my face. ‘Yes, it will be another lovely day.’

He nodded, still staring out across the saltings. ‘Same where I come. Too much flat. I like flat.’ He smiled at me, and added, ‘London no good. A12 no good. Better here.’ He pulled his visor down, gunned the big engine and with a wave of his hand roared off in the direction of Cromer and the road to Norwich.

I took a walk then, out as far as the first hide. There were curlews piping, several waders – sandpipers, a godwit, but whether black-tailed or bar-tailed I couldn’t be sure, and I thought I saw a greenshank. These in addition to the ducks and swans and the inevitable gulls, the shapes and the plumage brilliant in that crystal-clear light with the sun climbing up the pale blue, almost greenish early morning sky.

Now that the courier had gone off with my passport, I felt almost light-headed. I had made the first decision. I had taken the first step towards the Antarctic. Nothing I could do now until I collected my passport from the travel agent in Windmill Street. Even then I wouldn’t be able to make a final decision because in fairness I would have to deliver Ward’s passport to him. That would be the moment of final decision, and standing there by that hide, watching the movement of the birds, the incessantly changing flight patterns, I fined it down to just two questions: why the haste, and how had he made his money?

If Iris Sunderby had been alive I would have found it so much easier to make up my mind. There was something about Ward … But I was thinking of that battered body lying in an unrecognisable mess of flesh and bone in that morgue, the memory of it suddenly so vivid that I no longer saw the geese thrashing across the dawn sky, the growing brilliance of the sun as it cleared the high ground by Sheringham. If only I could have talked it over with her.

What a dreadful way to die. Had she known who it was? I shook myself free of the morbid memory, turned abruptly and headed back home.

Two questions, and on his answers to those questions, and the way in which he answered them, would depend whether I went with him or not. Telling me on the flight wasn’t good enough. I’d have to get the reason for his haste out of him before we moved into the departure lounge. Just those two questions, that would settle it one way or the other. It was out of my hands.

Freed of the need to make up my mind immediately, I went about organising such business as I had, determined that no client should feel let down if I did decide to go with Ward. I had less than thirty-six hours in which to arrange everything and I found the problem of what clothes to take more difficult than dealing with my business. Several times I tried to contact Ward. I wanted to know exactly what he had meant when he said he had arranged for cold weather clothing to be flown out. I needed a list. What about underwear? And gloves? I seemed to remember that layers of gloves were essential, also layers of leg coverings and socks, special boots. But the first three times I tried to get through to him his phone was engaged, and after that there was no reply. I would have liked to have got hold of Lewis’s book. Somebody who had read it said he thought it included a checklist in one of the appendices. Unfortunately it wasn’t available at Cromer and I hadn’t time to drive down to the big Norwich library.

It was a very odd experience packing and organising for an absence that might be longer than the Whitbread, knowing at the same time I might be back home in Norfolk by Sunday evening. A rush of enthusiasm to get the job done resulted in its being more or less finished by midday, so that for a while I was left in a sort of vacuum of suspended animation. But then, as people realised I would be away for some time, the phone began to ring.

Even my mother, to whom time had never meant very much, got the idea that I might be away for longer than usual. ‘You will remember, dear. The Flower Festival. I’m relying on you.’

Ćley’s St Margaret’s, looking over the Glaven valley to something of a mirror image of itself at Wiveton, is a wonderful old fourteenth-century church. It was built by the men who shipped the Norfolk wool out of Cley when it was a real port to the Flemish weavers across the North Sea. The services there were always rather special to me for the parapetted clerestory has great cinquefoil-shaped and cusped circular windows through which the light pours, and when it was massed with the glorious colour of innumerable flower arrangements it really took one’s breath away, it was so beautiful. ‘It’s one of the things I’ll miss,’ I said.

‘Oh, but you can’t. What about me?’

‘I’ll miss you, too,’ I said, putting my arm round her thin shoulders.

‘Oh, don’t be silly.’ She shrugged me off. She was a very independent person. ‘You know I don’t mean that. It’s the flowers. An awful lot of them, and all in buckets of water.’

‘I know,’ I said. I had helped her each year since my father had died.

‘And then there’s the watering and the spraying.’

She said all this again when we were back on the Saturday evening from the Ledwards who ran an antique furniture shop in King’s Lynn. It was his boat I had borrowed. I think she had forgotten that Maity’s wife, Mavis, had arranged it at the last moment as a farewell dinner party for me. But then she saw my gear stacked in the tiny hallway and she began to cry. I told her I hadn’t made up my mind yet whether I was going or not, but that in any case I’d be with her in spirit.

‘Spirit’s no good,’ she said, ‘when it comes to buckets of flowers, and now that Fred’s gone …’ She went on like that all the way up the stairs. Wine always made her a little petulant.

I said goodbye to her outside her bedroom, pushed her in and gently closed the door. What else could I do? And that old cliché jumped into my mind: A man’s gotta do … Shit! I didn’t know what I was going to do. I still hadn’t made up my mind, and I went to sleep wondering whether I ever would, even when Ward had answered those two vital questions.

I was up and watching at the door when Sheila’s little Volvo drew up at the gate. I had already humped my suitcase and the canvas bundle with my sleeping bag, oilskins and cold-weather clothing to the roadside. I closed the door gently and walked down the path. It was not yet six, a dull grey dawn with low cloud and a cold damp wind out of the north. I don’t think she heard me leave. At least there was no sign of her at the windows when we drove off.

‘Julian sends you his love and hopes to God you know what you’re doing.’ She grinned at me. ‘So do I.’ Sheila was Julian Thwaite’s wife, a big, bosomy girl who had once been his secretary and now did the odd bit of typing for me. To keep her hand in, was how she put it, and she had refused to charge for the time she had put in during the last two days. ‘He’s gone fishing, otherwise he’d have driven you himself and I could have had a nice lie in.’ She went through Salthouse at over sixty, nothing on the road, and we were on the A140 and driving south by six-thirty.

I was catching the 07.10 inter-city from Norwich and we arrived at the station with a quarter of an hour to spare. ‘Got your ticket? Money, traveller’s cheques, passport – no, you’re picking that up, of course.’ She swung my suitcase and canvas roll on to the roadway.

‘You’ll make a good secretary yet.’ I grinned at her, and she grinned back.

‘Find that ship, get yourself some more clients and I’ll leave Julian to do for himself and come and secretary for you full time. Okay?’ She suddenly put her arms round me and gave me a hug, kissing me full on the mouth. ‘You look after yourself, my boy.’ She got back in the car, smiling up at me as she added, ‘Just remember, the Weddell Sea isn’t exactly the Norfolk Broads.’ And with that, and a final wave, she was gone.

I was alone then, her words reminding me of the future, the risk and the possible reward, so that when I boarded the train the Antarctic seemed to have moved a step nearer.