Kissed a sad goodbye - Deborah Crombie [10]
Outside the door of the flat, she gave Christine a quick hug, then stood watching her as she ran next door. Across the street her neighbor washed his car, his bulging gut stretching his thin cotton vest. His trousers rode so low that when he bent over half his arse was exposed. Janice turned away, feeling slightly nauseated, knowing he’d smile and whistle if he saw her looking. The bastards; they thought you wanted them no matter how they looked.
She hesitated, debating whether to walk across Glengall Bridge. It was the most direct route—taking the car meant driving right round the dock, but on the other hand arriving at a crime scene on foot wouldn’t do much to establish her authority.
A few moments later she pulled her Vauxhall up beside the assembled pandas in the car park of the ASDA Superstore. DC Miller came to meet her, his spotty face pale—on closer inspection, he looked decidedly green about the gills.
“Tell me this is a joke,” she instructed him. “Manufactured by that old fart George Brent just to ruin my Saturday morning.”
Miller blanched a bit further. “No, ma’am. There’s a body.” He pointed at the slope leading to the park. “Just up there.”
A derelict, thought Janice, just found himself a nice peaceful place to pass away. Inconvenient but not messy. Not on this weekend when her guv was off 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 3
The 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