This lock could be crossed by a road bridge, and a footbridge, leading to another more precarious footbridge, then Catherine Wheel Road and the Brewery Tap pub. Thames Lock itself, still in effect the gateway to the British canal system, actually comprised of a pair of locks separated by a narrow strip of land upon which sat the lock-keeper’s hut.
And it was in the lock nearest to the Brewery Tap side of the canal that the body had been discovered by part-time volunteer lock-keeper Bill Cox.
Knott and Faraday parked in Catherine Wheel Road and walked over the footbridge to where they could see Cox, wearing his distinctive yellow high-vis jacket, standing at the lock-side amongst a small group of people. A narrow boat was moored just outside the lower gates which stood half open.
Brentford still retained a lot of the characteristics of a small town, in spite of having been swallowed up in recent years by extensive redevelopment causing it to be labelled West London’s latest property hotspot, and Leon Knott was a local man, who himself owned a pleasure boat which he kept in Brentford Dock marina, as did Bill Cox. So Leon knew Bill, and was fully aware of the operating procedure of Thames Lock. Being tidal, access was restricted to just under two hours either side of high tide, and no vessel could pass through without the presence of a lock-keeper, which in October, and throughout the winter and early spring, was by appointment only.
Bill Cox hurried towards the two police officers.
‘We got a body in the lock,’ he said unnecessarily, and continued with a kind of nervous verbal diarrhoea. ‘Am I glad to see you two. I got hold of it with me boat hook. And a nasty turn it gave me too, I can tell you. Almost an occasion to have a vessel come through nowadays, at this time of year. They either stay up in the canals or stay out in the Thames, the pleasure boaters anyway, get the odd work boat, of course, we still have the one working yard, but I’ll tell you one thing, Leon, you know me and canals and boats, what I wouldn’t have given to have been here in Brentford in the days when the big ships was unloading their cargoes into the barges, the traffic, can you imagine what it must have been like—’
‘Bill,’ interrupted Leon Knott loudly.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Bill Cox at once.
Leon noticed that the lock-keeper’s voice was high-pitched and shaky. ‘I’ve had a bit of a shock. You know what, all my years on the river, and doing this job, never come across a body before...’
He stopped himself this time. ‘Sorry,’ he said again.
‘That’s fine, Bill,’ said Sergeant Knott. ‘Perfectly understandable.’
‘It’s upset me a bit, to tell the truth,’ continued Bill. ‘I mean, it’s just an ordinary day and you just don’t expect, I mean do you...?’
‘No, of course not,’ said Leon Knott. Then he continued in an encouraging fashion, ‘Just tell me exactly what happened, Bill. How did you find the body?’
‘Well, like I said, we had this narrow boat come through, heading out onto the river. The Hilda May. Going upstream to Maidenhead. The tide was right, gotta catch the tide right with a narrow boat, as you know, Leon, they’ve not the power or the steerage to cope with the Thames, unless you’ve got the tide behind you...’
‘I know, Bill,’ interrupted Leon Knott, a note of warning in his voice again.
‘Oh yes. Well, she came into the lock all right. No trouble at all. Then when I tried to open the lower gates to let her out the other side, I had the devil of a job, I can tell you. There was obviously something stuck. I got my long boat hook and poked about a bit, and eventually the gate opened enough to let her through. Of course, this lock was built to accommodate vessels wider than a narrow boat, if it had been a standard canal lock she’d have been stuck there, for certain.’
Bill paused, as if realising he was digressing again. ‘Well, as soon as she was through I got the boat hook again and it snagged onto something pretty quickly, so I just pulled. And up it floated. I let go, straight away, and down it went again. I shouted out, couldn’t help myself, so the skipper of the Hilda May moored up and came back to see if I needed help. But I just dialled 999. Didn’t want to mess with it without the police here. There’s not much more I can tell you, Leon.’
‘All right, Bill, so you didn’t see this body very clearly then?’
‘No, not really. I was that shocked, you see,’ he added again.
Leon had one last question.
‘You’re sure it was a dead body, aren’t you, Bill?’ he asked. ‘I mean, it could have been a bundle of rubbish or old clothes, or even a guy or something. We’re coming up to Guy Fawkes night, after all, aren’t we?’
‘It’s a body, Leon,’ said Bill, a trifle indignantly. ‘A man, and he didn’t look as if he’d been in the water for long. Couldn’t have been that long, anyway, or we’d have found ’im floating on the surface. As it was, he sank right down again when I let go of...’
‘Now, you didn’t touch anything, did you, Bill?’ interrupted Knott.
‘Touch anything? The poor bastard sunk down to the bottom again. What do you think I did? Jump in along with him?’
‘OK, Bill, take it easy,’ responded Leon Knott. ‘Let’s have a closer look, shall we?’
He approached the lock side, at the same time asking the small group of people standing around to vacate the immediate area.
Knott and Faraday both lent over the lock and peered into the murky water. Knott knew that the lock was about twelve feet deep, and the water level was probably halfway up the sides. He couldn’t see anything below the surface.
‘Right then,’ he said. ‘Let’s get your body out of there, shall we, Bill? How many boat hooks have you got?’
Bill produced three long boat hooks and agreed to help the two policemen locate and remove the body from the lock. Bill was well built and fit for a man in his early sixties, but Neil Faraday was a rugby-playing thirty-something, an exceptionally big strong lad, and he took the brunt of the dead weight when it came to hauling the body out, and laying it, face up, on the ground.
Sergeant Knott looked down at the dead man with some reluctance. In spite of Bill’s almost certainly correct assertion that he had not been in the water for long, one of his open eyes appeared to have been eaten by something already. It was not a pretty sight.
Knott also immediately noticed the state of the man’s upper left leg, which appeared to have suffered several wounds that had clearly been stitched up by medical professionals. His trousers, blue jeans, had fallen down, revealing the extent of his injuries, and were rolled around his lower legs, something which could presumably have been caused either when he entered the water or during the operation to recover his body. In spite of the time of year the man was not wearing a jacket, although this also could have been removed in a similar fashion.
There appeared to be bloodstains on his shirt, around the area of his right shoulder and on his jeans, another indication that he could not have been in the water very long. In cool British waters a dead body might remain below the surface for a week or even two, Sergeant Knott reckoned, but, as Bill had so long-windedly pointed out, vessels did pass through Thames Lock at all times of year, albeit not as frequently as they once did. It was possible that the body may have lain at the very bottom of the lock for a couple of days, perhaps, without discovery, but certainly unlikely that it had been there much longer than that.