By midday, the day was as light as it was going to get. Freezing fog shrouded the canal above St Pancras Lock. It wrapped around Detective Inspector Dan Carter’s thick-set frame like a wet blanket. He tucked his stripy cashmere scarf into his overcoat and pulled the collar up around his neck.
From where Carter was standing he could see the naked legs of a young woman’s body. Her swollen white limbs had a blackish hue.
He looked up as Detective Constable Ebony Willis came striding back along the towpath towards him, tucking her notebook back inside her jacket as she did so. He thought how she didn’t seem to notice the cold, didn’t feel it like he did. Today the cold and damp in the air sank into his bones; he just couldn’t get warm. Ebony didn’t even have gloves on. She was wearing her self-imposed uniform of black trousers and a fitted black quilted jacket. Her afro hair was scraped into a ballooning ponytail at the back of her neck.
He waited until she reached him. ‘What’s the score?’ he asked, keeping his voice low and banging his leather-gloved hands together to counteract the cold.
‘Basically – he says she wouldn’t have gone far in this canal.’
Carter looked past her to the man in the dark overcoat walking away.
‘Is he the lock keeper?’
‘No, he’s the man who was here when the boys were messing about and fell onto the ice. But he knows all about the Regent’s Canal – he works in the Canal Museum just down the road. He said that different types of locks allow for different water levels and movement between sections of canal.’
Carter swivelled on his heels to look around him and get his bearings. ‘Plenty of ways to get down here, especially with all the development that’s going on. There’s two acres of Camley Park on the other side of the canal for a start. Did he mention if there was any CCTV?’
‘The nearest is two hundred metres away, Guv.’
Carter stepped closer to the side of the canal and knelt to pick up a piece of the broken ice.
‘Got to be two inches thick.’ He turned it over in his hand. ‘We’ll need to wait for the ice to thaw before we can get the divers in to search.’
‘Yes, Guv – forecast isn’t good. No more snow for a few days but then it’s coming back.’
Carter’s thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of journalists on the bridge that spanned the canal up to their right. He could just about make them out: dark shadows moving through the fog. He heard them clanking their equipment as they hurried down as far as they were allowed onto the towpath. They stopped fifty metres away from where Carter and Ebony stood; just near where their car was parked. Next they heard an officer on the edge of the crime scene talking to them, directing them to where they could stand. Carter scowled.
‘They didn’t take long to find out.’
‘No, Guv. The canal man said the lad who fell on the ice took pictures on his phone; his friends wouldn’t help him out till he put it on Instagram.’
‘Little bastards. Where is he now?’
‘In a cell; he’s given his statement already. Now he’s waiting for someone to be free to tell him he can leave.’
‘Good. Make him sweat for a few hours.’ He shook his head, trying to shake off a headache. He’d spent the evening reminiscing with an old friend and a bottle of JD and now he was beginning to feel the hangover start. He rubbed his face and sighed. ‘What’s the matter with people? Should have respect for another human being. Now we’ve got the frigging newspapers before we’ve even had a chance to assess the situation, let alone inform the family.’
Carter pulled back the entrance to the crime scene tent and stooped as he stepped inside; Willis followed. The smell hit Carter so hard that he was in danger of throwing up. He instinctively drew his scarf up over his nose.
‘Doctor Harding?’
A blonde-haired woman in a white forensic suit was kneeling beside the remains of the woman, which were bloated and blackened by the water. The woman’s head was inside a polythene bag. She had wounds as big as teacups that had eaten into her body.
Doctor Harding looked up and nodded. She didn’t smile. She wasn’t one for automatic gestures of politeness. ‘Willis . . .’ She handed Ebony a pair of gloves. ‘Help me with the body.’ A police photographer moved around and between them in the small tent as he took pictures of the body.
Carter spoke from behind his scarf. ‘How old do you put her, Doc?’
‘Mid-twenties.’
‘Any birthmarks, operation scars? Anything that might help us to identify her?’
‘There’s a tattoo running up the outside of her left ankle.’ Harding turned the victim’s left leg over. ‘I think it’s something written in Norse. I saw something like it once before, on a bald-headed man. That time it turned out to be an ancient proverb meaning: A cleaved head no longer plots.’
‘Yeah,’ said Carter. ‘I remember that guy – had it around his crown, didn’t he? Drug dealer from Croydon, came up to deal with the Turks on Caledonian Road. It proved to be a perfect guideline for someone to cut the top of his head off like a boiled egg. Let’s see if our mermaid shows up anywhere on the system.’
‘Yes, Guv,’ said the photographer.
‘Whoever she was, she’s definitely undernourished,’ said Harding.
‘How long’s she been in the water?’ asked Carter.
‘A few months, at least. She went in when the water was warmer. Decomposition started but then slowed right down.’
Carter hovered nearer and looked directly down over the body at the plastic bag covering her head. ‘Her face looks like something from a waxworks horror museum,’ he observed. He moved closer. ‘It looks like it’s made of cheese.’
The photographer stood where Carter had been to take his shots of the head. Carter pulled back.
Harding nodded. ‘It’s called adipocere – the absence of oxygen and plenty of moisture inside the bag have caused the fats from her face and her brain matter to fuse, turning her face into soap.’
‘Prostitute maybe?’ asked Carter. ‘A client went too far: got carried away with the bag, and killed her by accident then dumped her here?’
‘Pretty risky getting undressed in the middle of King’s Cross,’ Harding answered as she turned the woman’s head towards Ebony and searched for the best place to begin cutting open the bag.
‘People enjoy taking risks,’ Carter disagreed. ‘Might have been a warm summer evening. Maybe this was an experimental sex session gone wrong – he asphyxiates her and then dumps her body straight into the water.’
Harding decided on an entry place for her scalpel and Ebony held the plastic out, away from the woman’s face, whilst the doctor slit down the centre of the bag and peeled it back gently. She finished cutting the bag through. Ebony moved the clumped strands of dark auburn hair away from the woman’s face and neck for Harding to get a better look. She splayed them out, medusa-like.
‘Except . . .’ She turned the head to one side – ‘she wasn’t asphyxiated; she was strangled and the bag was an afterthought. Someone used huge force too; they crushed her windpipe, and broke the vertebrae in her neck, snapping her spinal column – usual injuries we see in someone who’s hanged themselves, but there are no rope lesions. But there’s a necklace, protected by the plastic,’ Harding added as she worked a chain loose that was embedded in the flesh of the neck and eased it free. Turning it till she found the clasp, she pulled two rings around with it, threaded onto the chain. The photographer leant over the body whilst Ebony rested the rings on her open palm so that they could be photographed. Harding undid the chain and handed it to Ebony to bag up. Ebony showed Carter the rings as she did so.
‘Two very different types, aren’t they?’ he said.
‘Of rings, Guv? Yes, I think one is an antique, maybe worth something. Think the other one is cheap.’
‘Anything else on her?’ asked Carter.
‘Not that I can see,’ answered Harding.
‘She look British to you?’ asked Carter. ‘What about the hair? Red hair is very popular with Eastern European women. We have a lot of those living in London.’
‘Yeah, but this wasn’t dyed,’ answered Harding. ‘Celtic, maybe.’
Ebony was still kneeling beside the body, studying the woman’s face. Carter stood back and watched. He was marvelling how Ebony could get that close to the smell and not seem to notice it.
‘What is it, Ebb?’
‘She’s got make-up on.’
Harding rubbed the woman’s cheek with a swab of cotton wool and looked at the resulting red stain on it.
‘You’re right. Must have been industrial-strength to survive this.’
‘There are remnants of blue eye-shadow,’ said Ebony. ‘She’s even got some sort of black eyelashes painted above her eyes. It’s as if she were going to a party.’
‘Dressed as what? A pantomime dame?’
Harding looked down the length of the woman’s body. ‘She’s had a tough life, whoever she is. The fish have capitalized on the decayed flesh.’ She stopped at the largest of the wounds on the woman’s thigh. ‘But all this tissue destruction wasn’t done in the water.’
‘Could you walk around with that kind of open wound?’ asked Willis.
Harding shook her head in response. ‘Can’t see how.’ She parted the frayed flesh and opened the edges of one of the wounds on the woman’s left thigh; the bone was visible.
‘What can have caused so many different sites of infection, and so deep?’ Carter asked as he took photos of the injuries with his phone. Willis helped Harding to turn the body on its side.
‘I think these wounds started as ulcers.’ Harding turned the victim’s arms at the elbows to take a look. ‘No obvious needle marks but these large open wounds might have started with skin-popping – injecting contaminated heroin under the skin.’
‘If she’s got that kind of drug abuse history we might find her fingerprints on file or she might be known at the needle exchange. We’ll check it out.’ Carter said as he moved back from the body. Ebony continued her fascinated examination of the woman’s face. Harding stood to allow the photographer better access.
‘Can you do the post mortem examination today?’ Carter had seen enough. He felt the need to get out of the confines of the tent. He wanted to breathe in something other than the putrid flesh of a body that had been at the bottom of the canal for months. Carter knew Willis would be happy to stay another hour or two. She came alive around the dead.
‘Yes. This afternoon. I’ll give you a call when we’re ready to start.’
‘Thanks.’ They left Harding in the tent.
‘The tattoo’s got to mean something to someone, Ebb,’ said Carter as he and Willis stepped back over the crime scene tape and walked back towards the detectives’ pool car: a black BMW. ‘We’ll get Harding to take a biopsy. The inks used might help us narrow it down to certain tattooists. Did you ask the canal man if he’d seen anything suspicious? He might have seen someone coming to try it for a location. Did you get a statement from him?’
Ebony nodded. ‘Yes, but nothing suspicious.’
Carter pushed past a journalist who called out ‘Excuse me, mate?’ as he passed.
‘Christ – no – you can’t have a frigging interview.’ Carter squared up to him. ‘If you vultures don’t get out of the way I’ll do you for obstructing a police investigation. And I’m not your frigging mate – got it? MOVE.’
The reporter backed off with two hands in the air in a mock show of compliance.
‘Just doing our job.’
Ebony looked across at Carter as he shook his head, annoyed. They’d worked together for a year. She knew him well. She knew he’d be cross because the reporter was right and, on most days, Carter would have chatted to the journalists, got them on his side. But today Carter was somewhere dark in his own head. He looked across at her and shook his head, exasperated.
‘Sorry.’
‘You all right, Guv?’
‘Yeah. Sorry – got a lot going on at the moment, Ebb.’
‘Guv?’
She raised her eyes towards the car to show where they’d left it and to show Carter that he was going in the opposite direction.
‘I know, I know,’ he snapped irritably.
Carter got into the driver’s seat and waited till Willis shut her passenger door and then reversed at speed, almost hitting the photographer who had just stepped off the kerb to get a photo of them leaving. Willis stayed quiet. She looked across at him. She’d worked with him long enough to know he’d tell her in his own time. She was waiting for him to calm down and get back to what he was good at. Carter was the best ‘people person’ she knew. Today was an ‘off’ day.
‘You want me to attend the post mortem on my own, Guv? It’s no problem.’
‘What, and let you have all the fun?’ He smiled gratefully. ‘No, I’ll be all right, Ebb. Nothing like the smell of a post mortem to get things in perspective.’
After the black BMW had passed him on the bridge, the man turned back to look at the white tent below. The fog was just beginning to thin and he could see it shine bright in the wisps of white. He smiled to himself. He was breathless. Something told him today was the day she would finally rise through the dark water to reveal herself to the world – reborn. And the game would begin again.