Isvik (6 page)

When I told her he was following us, she didn't say anything, but her face had a set look, her eyes on the rear-view mirror.

‘Who is he?' I asked. ‘What's he want?'

She didn't answer, and when I repeated the question, she shook her head.

‘Is he a student, or just a visitor?'

‘A student, I think.'

We drove in silence, heading down river till we joined the motorway and turned north. Several rimes I looked back, but it wasn't until we were dipping into the entrance of the Blackwall Tunnel that I caught the flash of that red sports car weaving through the traffic behind a big cement truck. She had seen it too and she changed lanes, putting her foot down till we were nose-to-tail with the car ahead.

‘Do you think he's following us?' I had to yell to make myself heard above the noise of engines reverberating against the wall of the tunnel.

She nodded.

‘Why?'

She turned her head. ‘Why do you think?' she yelled. Her mouth was a thin line, her eyes blazing with anger.

I shrugged. It was nothing to do with me. But I had an uneasy feeling it might be if I landed up crewing that boat of hers down into the Antarctic. ‘Who is he?' I asked again as we came out into the relative peace of the above-ground traffic.

‘His name is Carlos.' She banged the wheel again. ‘He send that fucking little sod. One of his boys, but he's some sort of a cousin, too. He even looks like him.'

‘Like who?'

‘Ángel.' She looked at me out of the corner of those extraordinary blue eyes and laughed. ‘Oh, you'll love him.'

‘Who is this Ángel?' I asked.

Still looking at me, she almost ran into the vehicle ahead. ‘You really want to know? He is half my brother, wonderfully handsome, like that boy. And he's a devil,' she added viciously. ‘Fucks any girl he can get hold of and sodoms them too. Nothing he likes better than having them crawl on their hands and knees with their rumps in the air, then he has …' She glanced at me, the flicker of a smile. ‘I see I have shocked you, but that is the sort of man he is.' She swerved suddenly, cutting across the front of a lorry as she changed lanes. ‘
¡Dios mio!
I should know.' She was silent for a moment, then she said, ‘It's the Italian in him, a legacy from a bitch of a woman named Rosalli Gabrielli.' She swung abruptly left on to an intersecting cut-off. Another glance, and a funny little laugh, her eyes alight with a strange excitement. ‘Don't look so worried. The libido don't thrive, I think, down in the ice of the Weddell Sea. You will be safe enough.' Again that little laugh, a soft, throaty chuckle now.

A road sign indicated that we were in the East India Dock Road. She slowed for some lights. ‘I'm sorry. I should have kept quiet about the family. We are not always very nice people.' She shrugged. ‘But perhaps that goes for a lot of the human race.'

The lights changed and she swung left into a side street. ‘You ever travel the Docklands Light Railway? It's rather like riding the El in New York before they build any skyscrapers. I'll drop you off outside the
Telegraph
building. The train will take you to the Tower, and from there it's only a short walk to Liverpool Street station, or you can take the Circle Line.' She turned left again, a mean, shabby little street with a view of water ahead, then right and more water as she doubled back on her tracks. Another glimpse of the river, and then we were crossing the entrance to some docks.

I glanced back. No sign of the car. ‘Where are we?' I asked.

‘Isle of Dogs. West India Docks.'

‘You seem to know your way around.'

‘I live here.'

‘Why?'

‘Because it's cheap. I have a couple of rooms in a house that's due for demolition.' We turned up on to what was the raised quay of the South Docks, two massive buildings of glass and granite-like cladding, and beyond them, seen through the piers supporting the overhead railway, a litter of developers' high gantry cranes. ‘There'll be nothing left of the old Tower Hamlets streets in a few years' time.'

‘There must be other parts of London just as cheap,' I said. ‘What made you pick on this?'

‘You ask too many questions.' She swung under the round pillars of the railway and stopped outside the second of the glass-fronted buildings. ‘I like water and here the river and the docks are all around me.' She nodded to the iron stairway painted in Docklands Light Railway blue that led up to the little station poised overhead. ‘I have your address and telephone number. I'll be in touch. Hopefully in about two or three weeks' time.'

I thanked her for the lift and got out. She drove off then, and that was the last I saw of her till the police brought me down from Norfolk to identify the body of a woman they had fished out of the South Docks. When they slid her body out and pulled the plastic sheet away it looked at though she had been battered to death with an axe.

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.'