Isvik Page 5

  ‘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 ban
k 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.