I like to row, even in the rain. I like to feel the pull of the oars tug at my shoulders and I like the way the oar blades cut the water. Something about the rhythm always relaxes me. Even when I’m going to talk to a man about a body.
I had thought of trying to talk to the man I’d seen at the clinic. The one I’d left with a puddle of vomit to clean up. Then I’d realised it was unlikely Daisy would fail to register my presence there and I wanted to postpone telling her that I hadn’t yet agreed to forget her problems. Anyway, the medic might not be able to give me the details I wanted. Whoever had taken the body from the spoil-heap could.
The body. Not Jon. If I was going to do this I would have to avoid thinking of the living person I had known.
There wasn’t much tide running, so it took only a few minutes to cross the river to the waste ground. I could remember when it had been a marsh: now it was filled with dredged mud and before long it would be landscaped. No one seemed to be doing much work. I couldn’t see any active machines except one pump chugging monotonously to itself as it jetted water from the site back into the river.
The ground squelched under my feet. My shoes leaked. I could feel mud, slippery and gritty between my toes as I walked over to where I had seen the body fall from the dredge. Unidentifiable scraps of metal and plasteel garbage jutted out from the sides of the grey-black spoil and water oozed from underneath. I supposed it would all settle eventually; just now it looked unstable and smelled revolting.
“Pretty, eh?”
I had seen him. Sort of. He’d been hanging around on the other side of the site when I beached the dinghy. About fifty or a bit less, grey-haired but looking fit enough and used to rough work. No uniform, but a crudely fastened name-tag told me he was called Pete. Not Company. Not directly, anyway. Casual labour, more like. Someone willing to take on the dirtier jobs which regular staff might balk at. Just the man I was looking for.
“I’ve seen more promising parks,” I acknowledged.
He laughed. “Park! They’ll be replanting every night if they don’t do something about this stuff first.” He scowled at the oozing heaps.
“What do you mean?”
“Couldn’t grow boils on a sailor’s backside with it. It’s solid with salt and God knows what other pollutants. Oil’s the least of them. Would you like to put down roots in it?”
I had to admit I wouldn’t. Even if I didn’t have a congenital aversion to roots.
Pete stared sourly back at me. “You came over in the dinghy?”
No point in denying it. I gestured across the river. “Yes. That’s my boat, over there.”
He looked at the Pig. She didn’t seem to impress him. Then he looked from my boat to where the number seven dredge had been working, just across from where we stood. He had been chewing on something, now he spat sideways, adding to the pollution of the would-be flowerbeds.
“You the one who spotted the body?”
“You know about that?”
“Be hard not to, the fuss there was when the alarm went off. Me and a couple of others do the chores here. I was still on duty when it happened.”
I didn’t ask what the ‘chores’ might be. Round here they’d have to do with tending the spoil heaps and getting rid of the more obvious and unmanageable bits of debris which were dredged up. Their compensation for low pay and a short-term contract would be the right to do what they liked with whatever it was they salvaged. Pete was one of those whose lives were tenuous links between the unbending hierarchy of the Companies and the anarchy of the streets.
“They asked you to deal with it?”
He looked suspicious but decided I had some sort of right to interest. “Yes. Nasty business. I got him free and into the loader they sent as quick as I could. Don’t mind muck but I didn’t sign on for dead bodies.”
None of us did.
“What you reckon happened? Fell in drunk?”
“If he did he took his clothes off first. No. Bastard wasn’t that lucky. Don’t know if he was drunk but if he’d ever woken up he’d have had a hell of a headache.”
I swallowed. I didn’t like to remember what I’d seen of the sheeted figure in the mortuary.
“Where do you reckon he went in? There’s plenty of places upstream I wouldn’t wander round alone.”
I still wanted it to be a possibility. It would mean the Port wasn’t at the centre of whatever was happening. But Pete was shaking his head.
“No chance. He went in the same place the dredge pulled him out.”
“How can you be sure? The tides are fierce enough to shift something heavier than a dead man.”
He smiled. People are always pleased to show they know more than you. “Not this one. Didn’t get a clear view when you saw it dredged up, did you?”
“No. And it wasn’t the kind of thing I stare at for long, either.”
“Can understand that.” He grimaced. “No, whoever pushed him in didn’t want the body found. It was wrapped up in cable heavy enough to hold it till it fell apart.”
Or until a dredge designed to wrench up several tonnes at once bit through it. I had to be sure, though.
“Couldn’t it just have got tangled in the cable when it came downstream? There’s plenty of that sort of junk on the riverbed, especially off the old boatsheds.”
“Tell me about it. I’ve had to sort through most of it and there’s precious little worth any credit. No. You soon learn if something’s been down there years or days. Easy enough with a body, of course, but that cable hadn’t been there any longer. Metal in it was still bright. No corrosion at all. Besides, he wasn’t tangled, girl. He was tied.”
I hoped he enjoyed the effect he was having on me. I didn’t. The conversation had gone about as far as I wanted to take it. Pete seemed to have lost interest too; he was kicking around in the sludge as though he was looking for something. Then he straightened, holding something out.
“Here. I thought there was a chunk or two left – nothing long enough to be worth carting away. Have it as a souvenir.” He was holding out a mud-encrusted piece of what might be cable, bigger than his meaty fist. It was surprisingly heavy.
“Thanks.” I recalled the heaps of stuff waiting for the recycler that Clim had been rummaging through and thought the killer hadn’t had to look far for something to weight the body with. It wasn’t a souvenir I’d treasure.
Something in my face seemed to make him think maybe he’d been a bit too blunt. “You all right, girl?”
“Yes. I’m fine. Thanks for telling me about it. Perhaps the Company peeps will find out who killed him.”
His laugh was for my naivety. “Perhaps the river will run clean and this place will blossom after all. Don’t hold your breath, girl. And don’t go asking Company security about what they’re doing. I didn’t tell them nothing and if you’ve any sense you won’t talk to them neither.”
I opened my mouth to tell him that I hadn’t been a girl for a dozen years now and then heard what he was saying. “Someone else been asking questions?”
“Didn’t I say so? Black guy in fancy shoes.”
“Techno?”
Not that I needed to ask. So Byron wasn’t just pushing buttons. I rather liked the idea of him squelching round here in those shoes; wished I could believe he’d fallen flat.
Pete was grimacing at his own memories. “Course he was techno. Wanted data. Recorded everything.”
“You tell him much?”
“Don’t like being data. Being dumb labour is better.” A snort and a spit illustrated his contempt.
I gave him the coins he’d been expecting, a few more than I’d intended, and went back to the dinghy. On the other side of the river, between the Pig’s mooring and the new marina, was a cluster of figures which included Gus and Daisy but most of whom I’d never seen before.