Get a grip, she said to herself, disgusted with her self-pity, it’s hardly the end of the world, girl. For god’s sake — just blokes talking, nothing new there. Still, it was never nice to eavesdrop on conversations about yourself. Just as well she hadn’t been able to see their faces or any gestures they had made…
Routinely, she checked that the mooring ropes were made fast on her boat, a brand new Targa 50, re-tightened one, and turned her back on the river and went briskly along the jetty through the passage, across the narrow cobbled roadway that was Wapping High Street and into the operations Portakabin. Joey Raymouth was already there, still diligently writing up his notes from that morning’s intelligence briefing, and they greeted each other, perfunctorily but warmly — she liked Joey. He was assigned to her, seeing her through her first month on the river, ‘mentoring’ her. His father was a fisherman in Fowey, in Cornwall, and he had a West Country burr to his voice.
“You all right, Rita? Look a bit under the weather.”
She forced her face into a wide smile. “No, no probs at all.”
He rose to his feet and together they went to receive their instructions from Sergeant Denton Rollins — ex-Royal Navy, as he constantly reminded his charges — with the heavy implication that he still could not understand how he had come down so low in the world.
Their duties for this shift were all very straightforward — checking mooring permits at Westminster and Battersea, investigating a fire on a boat at Chiswick and some thefts from pleasure cruisers in Chelsea marina.
Raymouth took more notes as Rollins read out the details. Rita looked round as more colleagues came in and the swell of banter grew.
“Oh, yeah,” Rollins said. “One for you, Nashe. Reports of a man killing a swan at low tide by Chelsea Bridge yesterday morning. Your neck of the woods.”
“A swan?”
“It’s illegal. Don’t die of excitement.”
“I’m in it for the glamour, Sarge.”
She and Joey went back out to their boat and put on their buoyancy vests. Joey went through the checklist and started the engines while Rita undid the moorings, cast off and then stepped aboard as the Targa pulled away from the jetty into mid-stream.
Because the tide was high the Thames looked like a proper city river — like the Seine or the Danube — the river broad and full, perfectly apt and proportional to the embankment walls and the buildings on either side and the bridges that traversed it. At low tide everything changed, the river fell between twelve and twenty feet, walls were exposed, weed draped the now visible piles of the bridges, beaches and mud flats appeared and the river looked like the Zambezi or Limpopo in times of drought. Correspondingly, the city suffered aesthetically, but this morning the river brimmed and Rita felt her moodiness begin to disappear and her heart quicken with pleasure. This was why she had transferred to MSU, she realised, hauling the fat rubber fenders on board as Joey accelerated off, the two big Volvo diesels firing up with a bass roar, heading up river, Bermondsey to the port side, Tower Bridge up ahead, the clear morning light making the windows of the City’s office blocks flash brazenly, the breeze whipping her hair. HMS Belfast coming up, then London Bridge, Tate Modern, the Globe Theatre. What a way to earn a living, she said to herself, widening her stance on the deck, gripping the guard-rail with both hands as Joey speeded up, the spume of their bow wave almost indecently white, drops of river water bouncing off her uplifted face. She held herself like this for a second or two, breathing deeply, feeling her head spin before she went down below to the forward galley to brew up two mugs of strong tea.
♦
The Chiswick fire had been intriguing. A barbecue on deck of a Bayliner cruiser had been left untended, sparks from which had set small fires going on the boats moored alongside. Lawsuits for damages were pending. Joey and Rita interviewed angry boat owners and took down details — but there was no sign of the careless cook. His Bayliner was now semi-burnt-out, sunk to the gunwales from the weight of the water from the fire brigade’s hoses. Piecing together the various accounts witnesses supplied, it seemed he had lit the barbecue, had a violent row with his girlfriend, she had run off and he followed, forgetting about their soon-to-be-chargrilled Sunday lunch. Joey was pretty sure it was illegal to have a barbecue on a moored boat anyway — no naked flames. Anyway, they had the man’s details — the Chiswick police could track him down while they would serve notice to remove his burnt-out boat within seven days or face further penalties.
On the way upstream to Chiswick they had passed the Bellerophon and she had given the klaxon a toot but there was no sign of life on deck. In fact in the dozen or so times she’d passed her home since she’d begun at MSU she’d never seen her father. He was sulking below, she knew: somehow her new job with the river police irritated him more than when she’d been on the beat in Chelsea and elsewhere. She didn’t care — she was happy, she was enjoying her new job too much — he’d come round to it one day, or not. Up to him.
As they motored under Albert Bridge, almost coasting downstream on the ebb tide, Rita remembered what Rollins had told her about a man killing a swan. She told Joey and he steered them over to the Grosvenor College stairs on the Chelsea shore.
“You check it out, Rita,” Joey said. “I’ll write up the great Chiswick barbecue fire.”
She strode along the Embankment, back on familiar ground, past the Royal Hospital (where the Flower Show marquees were now all but dismantled) and stopped at the gate of a small triangle of waste ground on the west side of Chelsea Bridge. How many times had she come past here, she thought, and never noticed this place? The man who had phoned in the complaint had come through under Chelsea Bridge before he had seen the man with the swan, so the beach, as such, had to be on this side. The gate was locked so Rita climbed over the railings and went down some steps that led towards the river. At the base of the bridge she found the usual graffiti, and a fritter of condoms, needles, beer cans and bottles. Peering over the edge of the Embankment wall she could see the small mud beach exposed by the ebbing tide. She looked downstream — if she went down to the beach she would almost be able to see the Bellerophon from here. Why would anyone kill a swan? Some junkie out of his skull? Some drunk waking up, showing off for his drunken mates? She moved away from the bridge, pushing through bushes and low branches towards the apex of the triangle. She noted how dense the undergrowth was, a little sliver of rampant wasteland in douce Chelsea. She ducked under the branches of a sycamore, eased carefully by a holly bush, shimmied through a gap between two rhododendrons — and stopped.
A small clearing. Trampled grass, flattened grass. Three rubber tyres set on top of each other to make a seat. She hauled a dirty sleeping bag and groundsheet out from under a bush, and from under another found a wooden orange box with a camping gas stove and a saucepan in it. She put everything back as she had found it. Kneeling, she found feathers and evidence of scorching on some of the longer grass stems. Gull feathers, not a swan’s, she realised: to some people all large white birds looked the same. She stood up: somebody had killed, plucked and no doubt eaten a seagull here in the last few days. She looked around — she was perfectly screened from the Embankment and from anything crossing over Chelsea Bridge. There was a view of the river between two of the bushes but no one looking back from a passing boat would see anything. She searched some more but found nothing except wind-blown litter — nobody ever came to this bit of the triangle, clearly. Whoever had been staying here would be perfectly safe from prying eyes.
She made her way back to the road, thinking: ‘had been staying’? Perhaps, ‘was still staying’? This site didn’t suggest a homeless person dossing down for the night or two — this was more of a hiding place. Somebody was hiding on this triangle of wasteland at Chelsea Bridge, someone desperate enough to catch and eat a seagull at dawn one day. Perhaps it might be worth coming back one night and searching the place — see what or who they turned up. She’d run the idea by Sergeant Rollins. It was their case, after all, killing a ‘swan’ on the river was MSU business.