Kissed a Sad Goodbye

drinking himself into a stupor at his son’s wedding.

“It’s a woman,” said Miller. “Young. Crime scene team is on its way.”

Janice felt the prickle of sweat in her armpits. It was her show, then, ready or not.

CHAPTER 3The Mudchute is an area of land which originally belonged to the dock authorities. Covering about 30 acres, roughly square in shape, it has high clinker banks (on which grass and wildflowers now flourish). These banks were built to contain a lake of silt dredged up from Millwall Dock in the 1880s and 1890s.

      Eve Hostettler, from Memories of

      Childhood on the Isle of Dogs, 1870–1970

Kincaid had to stop and consult his London A to Z twice, much to his chagrin, but it had been some time since he’d worked a case in the East End, and he’d seldom had reason to venture further east than Wapping or Limehouse. It was all called “Docklands” east of the Tower now, but not even the massive rebuilding scheme of the last decade had managed to completely erase the character of the individual neighborhoods.

A glance at his map as he passed Canary Wharf told him that he was entering the Isle of Dogs peninsula. He drove south on Westferry Road, following the line of new housing developments and unfinished building sites sprouting like mushrooms between the road and the shore. Many of the hoardings displayed the legend Finch, Ltd. in a bold graphic.

Occasionally he caught a glimpse of the river between the buildings, and once a flash of an enormous passenger liner, white and clumsy as an iceberg. As he neared the bottom of the horseshoe he turned left on East Ferry Road, heading north again, up the center of the Island.

To his left he saw a row of Victorian terraced houses that formed part of a prewar housing estate; to his right lay a wasteland of construction. This had to be the extension of the Docklands Light Railway he’d read about, which would take the train under the river to Greenwich, and then to Lewisham, but he hadn’t visualized the extent of the chaos the controversial project would generate.

The engineers had managed, however, to keep East Ferry Road passable, and beyond a hoarding on his right the land rose steeply to the plateau of Mudchute Park. Kincaid bypassed the first entrance to the park, a steep, arched tunnel across from the Millwall Dock, and soon came to the entrance of the ASDA supermarket.

As he turned into the car park he saw the pandas, blue lights flashing, clustered in front of the ASDA service station. Gemma’s battered Escort stood a little to one side; a pair of uniformed constables held back a gathering crowd of interested onlookers.

Pulling up between Gemma’s car and a red Vauxhall, Kincaid got out and headed for the knot of people gathered at the rear of the car park. The bodies shifted and he had a glimpse of Gemma’s copper hair and green shirt as she turned to meet him.

“Guv.” Gemma greeted him with a brief nod. “This is DI Janice Coppin. She’s the senior officer here.”

Kincaid held out his hand to the woman in the navy suit, who gripped it as briefly as courtesy allowed. The expression on her blunt face imparted no more welcome than her handshake, and even her stiff blonde hair seemed to radiate displeasure.

“What have we got, Inspector?” Kincaid asked easily, but he remembered his chief’s comment about the newly promoted DI not being considered up to the job, and thought it wouldn’t surprise him if Coppin felt hostile towards Scotland Yard for invading her patch.

“Up there.” DI Coppin stepped aside so that he had a clear view of the entrance to the Mudchute, tucked away in the heavy shrubbery that lined the perimeter of the car park. “A woman’s body, exposed by the side of the path. We were waiting for you,” she continued. “The pathologist’s finished, but we couldn’t move the body until you had viewed it in situ.”

Kincaid had no intention of apologizing to her for his tardiness. He said merely, “Let’s have a look, then,” and started towards the park entrance.

The litter strewn over the car park tarmac spilled onto the ground, clustering thickly along the paved path that climbed towards the plateau and the entrance to the park. The rubbish made a mockery of the pastoral, wooden arbor built over the park’s swinging gate, and would prove a headache, he knew, for the team collecting evidence.

The wooded slope was gentle, but by the time Kincaid had pushed carefully through the gate bars, he’d begun to sweat. The path forked before him, and even after the rains of the past few weeks, its surface was trampled hard enough to resist an impression from his rubber-soled shoes. Ahead and to the right it climbed towards a dividing hedge and beyond that the high open spaces of the park; to his left it wound along the edge of the steep bank, and a dozen yards along it he saw a cluster of white-overalled crime scene technicians.

Kincaid slipped on an overall and started towards them. Out of long habit, he put his hands behind his back as he followed the line of the blue and white crime scene tape. It removed the unconscious temptation to touch.

The technicians parted at the end to let him through, and he saw her then, half in the hedge’s shadow.

“She was a looker, all right,” said Willy Tucker, the photographer, at his elbow.

She lay on her back, between the edge of the path and the hedge that separated this alley of park from the higher ground. His first impression was that her clothes had been straightened.

The short skirt hugged her thighs too neatly. The long, black linen jacket was still held together by its pewter buttons, though one cream satin bra strap showed where the jacket had slipped a little from her shoulder. She wore no blouse.

Glancing at Tucker, Kincaid said, “Her tights—they weren’t disturbed?”

“Not that we could see without moving her.”

The tights were sheer, the merest whisper of black against her pale skin, and both legs had laddered. One foot was bare, the other encased in a black shoe with a high, chunky heel.

Kincaid squatted, still keeping his distance, and at last looked at her face. It was a smooth oval, the skin unlined even in the strong light. The nose was straight, the lips well-defined. As the patch of shade retreated, sunlight sparked from the cloud of her red-gold hair. So alive did it look that if not for the slight congestion of her face and the hovering flies, one might have thought she had simply lain down for a rest.