over.
‘Come on, Mrs Esthart, love. What happened?’ she said to Stella.
Stella told her side of the story.
‘Come on, love,’ said Florrie to her mistress. ‘What’s behind it? I knew something was up, keeping it to yourself, weren’t you? Tell old Florrie.’
For answer Rachel produced a card. It was a plain white correspondence card with a gold deckled edge, a slight pink shadow, hardly a stain, marked one edge. It said:
I am sending a present to my mother. It will arrive on May 1st from my mother’s son.
‘Yesterday was May 1st,’ said Rachel. ‘It’s late.’
She was like a child whose birthday had been overlooked, but at least she was talking.
Florrie said defensively, ‘I blame the drugs they give her. She’ll be herself when they wear off.’
‘I am myself.’
‘I think that card is wicked. A cruel joke.’
With the bleakness of returning sanity, Rachel said: ‘Either the card is honest, and my son is around. Or somebody hates me.’
Next day the first body arrived, afloat in the river, but late for its appointment. It had got caught in the chains attached to a string of barges. This had delayed its transit up river. Otherwise the tide would have deposited it sooner.
Attached to the body in a pocket, soaked but legible, was a white correspondence card. It said:
A present for my mother.
The first body, that of a young woman, was found soon after dawn by a lighterman going to work his barges. The tidal river has its own pattern and sets its own working hours, so he was early to work. The tide rose about five o’clock, but it was full summer and a fine day so he had light enough to see what was there at the wharf on Fidder’s Reach.
When he had taken it in, Will Summers, lighterman and waterman of the river for thirty-odd years, not without experience of dead bodies, was sorry that he had seen so clearly. I’m never going to forget that sight, he told himself, I shall never forget that girl, poor kid. She’s going to come back every so often and be like a member of the family.
He knew it was a girl from the clothes, otherwise he might have been confused, for the face had been terribly beaten by the chains in which she had become entangled, and a piece of rope had lashed her legs, tearing at them. There were no fish much in the river, but there were eels and some of them must have found her. Or perhaps a river rat, venturing out at night to eat. The pathologists would identify the likely causes of the marks.
She was wearing a pretty flowered cotton dress. Or at least, it had been pretty once, brightly coloured in red and blue, but it was stained and dirty now. Her shoes had gone, but a necklace of white beads remained around her throat. Will Summers took that fact in because of all the things about her only the white, china beads remained unspoilt. They gleamed in the water. They were what he had first seen and reached out a hand to touch.
The water moved darkly around the body, unpleasantly thick and brown. The barges had been towed along late yesterday and lined up in a string to be unloaded on Ellers Wharf. At some point they had found the body (or it had found them) and brought it along with them.
‘I never saw that happen before,’ said Will Summers to himself. ‘First time I ever saw that. But anything’s possible in the river.’ The river was a living entity to him, a character fully alive and operational in his working life. He respected it and feared it. Never more so than now. Then he saw how it happened with the girl. It was her hair, her lovely long and beautiful fair hair, that had become entangled in the chains. She would have to be cut free.
He made for the telephone to call the police. On the wharf was a wooden shed which served as an office, the telephone was in there. His foreman was sitting down going through some papers and drinking a mug of tea. He looked up in query.
‘I’ve got a deader.’ He dialled 999. ‘And I don’t like it, Ted, I don’t like it.’
‘They’re none of them good.’
‘You haven’t seen this one …’ His hand was trembling so much that the telephone shook. ‘I can’t get this bloody number.’
Ted took the telephone from him. ‘Here, let me.’ He put his mouth to the instrument and shouted. ‘Police.’
After he had got his message across he went outside to take a look for himself. Soon he came back and went across to a cupboard on the wall which he unlocked, taking out a bottle of colourless liquid to pour good helpings into two mugs. ‘Here’s yours, Will. Drink up.’ It was rum, transparent before the burnt sugar was put in to colour it, and immensely strong. Never ask where it came from. ‘It’s my silver wedding anniversary today. Nice way to bring it in … Not that it’s not better in some respects than the day itself. I was out of a job and on casuals. No way to start a married life. At least this war’s put us to rights there, Will. Never be out of a job now.’
‘No.’ Will drank up. Both men had seen the river in the Depression when men crowded at the dock gates to be picked out one by one for casual work, favoured men first. The war, in a way, had been a godsend. ‘Not in the docks, any road.’
‘Not anywhere. It’s different now. Got a welfare state now, you know. This lot know what they’re doing.’
‘They better.’ He took a deep drink. ‘You always were an optimist.’
The two men finished their drinks. ‘So what about the one outside?’ asked Ted.
‘Murder. She’s been murdered, that one.’
The news about the body was spread about the area with speed, reaching several centres where gossip was received and disseminated almost before the police knew themselves what had turned up there on the riverside. They were slow to react at first, thinking it just another suicide. There had been two already that year. The ending of the war had not brought peace to everyone. The last floater had been a young girl who had gone in with her lover, a coloured serviceman. He had survived, she had not. They were all the same, but all different, with the little eccentricities of dying that make each death unique. The hand grasping a piece of wood that it had clutched at as it went down, the body making its own bid for life, defying the mind; the body unclothed because death comes easier that way; the body in the top coat because the water is cold; they got them all. The murdered do not have so much choice, they are thrust willy-nilly into their departure with all the apparatus of their living about them. They cannot choose whether they die with their return train ticket to Waterloo in their pocket or a ham sandwich still stuck in their teeth. This too the police team had met recently. Connie Shepherd had been eating ham and the threads were still in her molars.
All those dead by drowning show the same set of postmortem signs, this is where they are the same. But this is only true when the bodies are recovered from the water soon after death, for when putrefaction comes on then these signs are obliterated. Most
