Free Isvik by Hammond; Innes

wet mist. The sun had gone and the water of the dock was very still and very black. The Telegraph ’s patch was fenced off from the next development, but by clinging to the barbed wire wrapped round a stanchion I was able to swing my body out over the dock and on to the other side. An open gravel expanse led to a neat brick array of office and residential accommodation facing a dockside walk along the line of Maritime Trust vessels, which included the tug Portwey , and beyond that the coaster Robin with the Lydia Eva moored outside.
    The water between these vessels was foul with accumulated filth, the surface of it some six to eight feet below me. Vertical iron ladders, rusted and overgrown with weeds, were set at intervals in the dockside. This was where her body had been fished out of the water, right under the tug’s bows where a scum of plastic cartons, old rags and pieces of wood lay congealed in a viscid layer of oil. I should have asked that woman in Mellish Street whether anybody had visited her the night she had been killed, whether she had seen a car parked outside, for now that I had seen the dock for myself I was even more convinced her body must have been dumped there.
    I walked back through the new development to Marsh Wall. A construction worker in a hard hat was pile-driving steel rods that protruded from around the base of one of the round columns supporting the overhead railway, the machine he was using kicking up dust and making a noise like a compressed-air drill. I tried to picture this place at night, no construction workers, everything quiet. There were street lights and the development had some exterior lighting of its own. There would be shadows, deep shadows, and nobody about, the alleyways between the buildings like black shafts. He could have knocked her unconscious, then pushed her in, the place deserted and nobody to hear her cry out or the splash of her body as it hit the water. A train ground at the rails overhead and I wondered how late they ran. Could somebody in one of the carriages have seen her standing there with Carlos?
    A sign almost opposite me indicated the top of Lemanton Steps. I crossed the road and found myself looking down two flights of new brick that led off the high green bank built to retain the water of the dock. The steps led down into Manilla Street, past a timber importers, ‘Lemanton & Son, Established 1837’, and right opposite was a pub with the improbable name of The North Pole. By then I was tired and hungry. Inside, I found it full of construction workers and for a moment I thought it was just a grog shop, but as my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, I saw one of the girls come out from behind the bar with a plate of sandwiches. She was a big, dark girl with skin-tight black pants and a seductive swagger to her bottom that matched the big-toothed smile and the come-hither black eyes.
    I got myself a lager, and when she brought me my thick wad of a ham sandwich, I asked her if she’d ever served the young woman whose body had been found in the dock. ‘Did she ever come in here?’ I asked. ‘Did you know her?’
    She checked, the plate still in her hand, her eyes gone dead and the smile wiped from her face, all the flounce gone out of her so that she suddenly looked old and worn. She half shook her head, banging the plate on the table and turning quickly away. I hadn’t expected such a positive reaction from what had been no more than a random enquiry and I was left with the certainty that my question had scared her.
    I watched her while I ate my sandwich and she never smiled once after that, and she didn’t come near me again. It was the other girl who collected my money, but as I left the pub I was conscious that she was watching me furtively.
    It worried me all the way back to the City and Liverpool Street station, the certainty that she knew something. But what? In the end I pushed it to the back of my mind. She would