‘Young lady nicked your watch in that last clinch, did she, sir?’
Joe laughed. ‘No. Not my watch.’ As though to double-check, he ostentatiously consulted his wristwatch. Well after eleven. What the hell did he think he could achieve at this late hour, boiling his brains over a stillborn case? He thought there might be waiting on his desk a delivery of notes from Cottingham who’d been sent off with a day’s steady police work under his belt before the axe had fallen. Joe was feeling too agitated to go straight home and he didn’t have the effrontery to face Maisie’s sharp tongue and knowing comments in his evening dress with lipstick on his left cheek and reeking of champagne and cigars. An hour’s clandestine work would steady his jumping thoughts. Scotland Yard never slept. Lights were on from top to bottom of the building when he left the taxi. The uniformed man at the entrance saluted him and waved him through. As he passed the reception desk on his way to the stairs, he was hailed urgently by the duty sergeant.
‘Sir! Commander Sandilands! This is a piece of luck! We’ve been trying to get hold of you. Something’s come up. All too literally, sir! There’s a couple of river police here won’t go away until they’ve seen you.’
Joe approached the desk in puzzlement and the sergeant opened the office door behind him calling, ‘Alf! George! Got him! He’s all yours.’
Alf and George slammed down mugs of cocoa, bustled out of the office and stood, giving him a slow police stare. They were wearing their river slickers and naval-style peaked caps and very purposeful they looked. The leader glanced uncertainly from Joe back to the duty officer, who swallowed a grin and said, ‘Yes. This is who you’ve been waiting to interview. Commander Sandilands.’
‘Off duty,’ Joe muttered, aware that he looked as though he’d just strolled off-stage from his bit-part in a society farce at the Lyric. ‘Sandilands it is. Tell me what I can do for you.’
‘What you can do for us is identify a corpse, sir. It’s down at the sub-station by Waterloo Bridge. It’s a fresh one – only been in the water an hour at the most. A suicide.’
‘I’d like to help, of course,’ said Joe, stifling his irritation. ‘But suicides are not my department. Can’t you just go through your usual channels?’
The last thing he wanted was to be lured away to that stinking hole down by the bridge. The river police, the only arm of the service the people of London had ever really taken to their hearts, were a force Joe could admire too but he wanted nothing to do with them this evening. As well as coming down hard on theft, piracy and smuggling in the docks they managed also to patrol the sinister reaches of the Thames which were favoured as the last resting place of unfortunates driven to take their own lives. Sometimes the three-man crews were so quickly on the spot in their swift river launches that bodies were netted and fished out before they’d breathed their last, and in that cold, stone, carbolic-scented little room by the arches they would squeeze and pummel the victim laid out on the canvas truckle bed until, willing or not, the dank river water spewed out of the lungs to be replaced with the breath of life.
‘Regular channels no use, sir. It’s you we have to see. Just to take a look at the body before it goes off to the morgue. Won’t take you a minute and it will save us hours.’
‘Why me?’ Joe shivered. The evening’s euphoria had evaporated, leaving him full of cold foreboding.
‘No identification to be found, sir. No documents, no labels on clothing, nothing at all. Except for one item in her pocket.’
‘Her pocket?’
‘Deceased is a young female, sir.’
He fumbled under his cape and held up a small white object.
‘We were lucky we got there before the printer’s ink ran. You can just make it out.’ He read from the card: ‘“Commander Joseph Sandilands, New Scotland Yard, London. Whitehall 1212.”
‘It’s your calling card, sir.’
Chapter Sixteen
For a moment, Joe’s face and limbs froze. When finally he found his voice it rapped out with military precision: ‘Waterloo Bridge. We’ll never get a taxi at this time of night. Half a mile from here? We can run it in five minutes.’
He was sprinting out of the door before the river police had pulled themselves together. They pounded after him, boots thumping, capes flying.
As the door swung to behind them, the duty sergeant caught the eye of a passing constable who’d loitered to witness the strange scene. ‘’Struth! That got him moving! D’you see his face when the penny dropped? Wonder how many girls the old fart’s given his card to lately?’