‘This way.’ The slight, upright figure crunched away from us to where a wooden post stuck out of the shingle, frayed with age and the action of the water. ‘They used to tie up barges here.’ She pointed at the sandy edge of the river. ‘This is where it was.’
It.
‘And it was just lying there?’ I checked.
She looked baffled. ‘What else would it be doing?’
‘No, I meant – it wasn’t buried, or wrapped in anything?’
‘No, no. It was lying there on the shingle. I thought it was a tree root at first – you do get them washed down the river from upstream where the banks are overgrown. I was going to take a picture of it to put on my Facebook page, because it looked like a hand. But then, when I got a bit closer, I thought it looked a bit too much like a hand. And then, of course …’ She shrugged. ‘It was a hand.’
‘Did you touch it?’ Derwent asked.
‘Before I knew what it was. I turned it over. It was palm down, with the fingers curled under it, you see.’ She held up her own hand to demonstrate, a loose fist with knuckles to the sky. ‘Then when I felt it, I knew it couldn’t be a root. Too soft. Too much give in it. But it wasn’t until I saw the fingernails that I was sure. It was such a strange thing to find that I couldn’t quite admit to myself what it was. I took some pictures of it and where I found it and then I picked it up. I was afraid it would be washed away before anyone came to recover it.’
‘You must have had a shock,’ I said.
‘Well, you expect to find bones here – this was London’s rubbish dump for thousands of years, and this area in particular was full of markets. But the bones tend to belong to sheep or pigs or cows. Sometimes you find a bit of a fox. I’ve never found a hand before.’ She faced into the breeze and smiled. ‘But then you never do know what the river will give you.’
At the top of the stairs, the Marine Unit were packing up to head back to their base at Wapping.
‘Finished for the day, lads?’ Derwent demanded as they went past us.
The sergeant stopped. He was mid-fifties and serious. ‘Tide’s coming in. We’re not going to find anything else here today.’
They had found three other pieces of tattered bone and flesh that had all been carefully preserved in coolers for transportation to the mortuary along with the hand. Thinking of what Kim Weldon had said about animal remains, I asked, ‘Are you sure that what you found is human?’
‘No idea.’ He heaved a bag onto his back. ‘But the pathologist will tell you if it’s not.’
‘Where’s the rest of the body?’ Derwent asked. ‘In the sea?’
‘Could be. Could be we’ll find some more bits in the next few days. We’ll be looking. Where we find things has a lot to do with the tide and the shape of the river. The way the water moves through it depends on whether the banks are concave or convex. You get lots of stuff washing up around Greenwich, for instance, and at Wapping, and at Tower Bridge. You won’t find as much on the opposite banks. So we have a few places to look.’
‘I never really thought about the tide coming up the river,’ I said. ‘I thought it flowed out to the sea and that was it.’
He shook his head, not even trying to hide his scorn. ‘Why do you think the flood barrier exists? There’s a clue in the name, love.’
‘I’m not saying I couldn’t have worked it out,’ I protested. ‘I’ve never thought about it before.’
He grunted. Clearly I was worth even less of his time now, which was a shame because I needed his expert knowledge.
I tucked a stray curl of hair behind my ear, widening my eyes to play up the helpless look. ‘As you can tell, I don’t know much about this. The river flows in both directions, so does that mean we can’t tell where the body parts might have gone in? Could they have been moved up here by the action of the tide?’
He wrinkled his forehead, considering it. ‘The tide moves things up but then it moves them back again on the way out, if you see what I mean. That makes it hard to pinpoint where items enter the water. They sometimes wash around the same area for a while.’
‘Could they have been dumped off a boat?’ Derwent asked.
‘Yeah. But why draw attention to yourself by hopping in a boat to dump body parts when you could slip them into the river from the shore? No one would have noticed if it was small parts, which is what we’ve found. People don’t realise but the river is a busy place. You wouldn’t want to be out there midstream and not know what you’re doing.’
He was right. I’d never realised how busy the Thames was with constant boat traffic: commuter boats, tours, barges loaded with building materials, small speedboats and larger vessels crewed by competent-looking people in high-vis overalls.
‘If the body parts turned up in this area, does this mean they were all thrown in the river here?’
‘I wouldn’t want to try to guess, love. But we only found four pieces. Better hope there’s more to come.’ He nodded briskly and strode away.
‘Thanks for the help,’ I called after him.
‘I don’t know much about this,’ Derwent cooed in my ear. ‘Please explain it to me, Mr Police Diver.’
‘And did he explain it to me?’
‘Sort of.’
‘So it worked.’ I put my notebook away. ‘But don’t get used to it.’
‘Hello, you two.’ The pathologist Dr Early barely looked up as we walked in; at the best of times she was a fast-moving blur in scrubs, humming with nervous energy, and she didn’t waste precious seconds on elaborate greetings. ‘I was wondering who was going to be lucky enough to get this one.’
‘Nothing like a nice easy case to start the week,’ I said.
‘And this is nothing like an easy case.’ Dr Early gathered an armful of files and headed for the door.
‘I was going to say that.’ Derwent was actually sulking as we followed the pathologist through the security doors that led to the morgue.
One of her assistants was photographing a collection of objects that lay on a metal table under the glare of a bright light. He was heavily built but he moved with precision and focus as he skirted the table.
‘Here we are.’ Dr Early slipped a pair of gloves on and pulled her mask up over her mouth and nose. ‘You need protective kit too. Then it’s jigsaw puzzle time.’
‘I’m not a doctor, but it looks as if you’re missing a few pieces,’ Derwent said before he tied his mask on.
‘And I’m not a detective but it looks as if it’s your job to find them.’ Dr Early raised her eyebrows at him meaningfully and I smirked to myself under the cover of my own mask: victory to the pathologist.
None of us had forgotten where we were or what lay on the table beside us, but banter was one of the only ways to feel normal when your job involved looking closely at fragments of a human being. Not that I would have known what I was looking at, if I hadn’t been told. No piece was bigger than a shoebox. The skin was yellowed, bleached by the river, and the flesh underneath it was pale and ragged, bloodless. White bone gleamed under the bright lights that shone on the table.
‘So. What we’ve got are four pieces of what seems to be an adult female. She was probably IC1, probably light-haired and probably