The Memory of Blood(47)

He leaned out from the edge of the gangplank and followed the rope down, over the cloudy green water of the incoming tide.

The body of a short middle-aged white man was slowly twisting on the end of it.

He reached for his mobile and called his foreman.



‘You have to wear a safety harness,’ insisted Mick Leach, the burly Cannon Street foreman. ‘If you slip and fall in out there, you won’t surface. The river flows faster than you can swim, and the current will draw you out from the reach. Sometimes the bodies don’t come back up until they beach at Teddington Lock. I don’t want another death on my hands. I’ve already had trouble with the ambulance crew. They wanted to take the body and leave you guys a PRF.’

‘Suspicious death, we take precedence,’ said Colin Bimsley. ‘Turn your back for a minute.’ He zipped up his PCU jacket. ‘Dan, I can haul him in before you even know we’re out there.’

Banbury didn’t look so thrilled with the idea. He peered out into the dark nest of cables and scaffold tubes with apprehension. ‘It’s not a good idea with your spatial awareness problems, Colin. Let me have a go.’

‘It’s fine,’ Colin assured him. ‘I’ve done this loads of times. It’s only a problem when I’m on the move.’ He led the way along the planks to the end of the scaffolding. Bimsley had immense upper body strength. Planting his legs astride, he was able to grab the creaking cord and slowly haul it up.

‘Try not to let it touch the sides,’ warned Dan. ‘Site contamination.’

‘You want to give me a hand, then?’

The pair pulled, and lowered the body onto the wet planks. The corpse was dressed in designer jeans with muddy knees and an expensively tailored navy Bond Street jacket. But the rope was the thing; it was secured around his neck in a traditional hangman’s noose.

Banbury got in closer. The face was a reddish grey. It was a common belief that beards and nails continued to grow after death, but they merely became more prominent as the soft tissues round them lost their turgidity, so the skin round a hair follicle would retract. The effect was to make it look as though the nails and beard had suddenly grown. Kershaw could use the retraction to help him gauge the time of death.

The victim’s open mouth revealed a swollen blue-grey tongue. The skin of the dead man’s neck had been abraded under either ear by the roughness of the tightening rope. He had lost a shoe, and was still wearing an expensive watch.

‘Tricky things to do up, those,’ said Banbury, snapping on a pair of transparent gloves. ‘The rope, a bit of a specialist skill, I would have thought. Otherwise you’d say suicide. I don’t think his neck’s broken. Looks like he hung there until he choked to death. Either that or suspension trauma.’

‘What’s that?’

‘If you get strung up and can’t get down for a lengthy period of time, the blood pools in your legs and keeps the oxygen from reaching your brain. You lose consciousness, then your body slowly shuts down and you die. Takes about an hour. Faster if it’s cold, and it must have been cold down here last night. My missus had the heating on, ridiculous in June. Suspension trauma, definitely. Supposedly it’s what happened to Christ on the cross. Let’s see what he’s got on him.’

Banbury knelt and carefully opened the jacket. Fishing around in the pockets, he pulled out a wallet. ‘What have we here? Nearly two hundred quid in tenners. Killer obviously not interested in dosh. Driver’s licence—Gregory Simon Baine.’

‘Blimey, he’s the producer of Kramer’s play.’

‘Leave him here for the distress crew. Let’s go back.’

They made their way down through the construction grid and found Mick Leach waiting for them. ‘If you’d had an accident I’d have had my site shut down,’ he complained.

‘Well, we didn’t, did we? Who found him?’

‘My lad over there.’ Leach pointed to a shivering Arabic boy in a yellow safety jacket. ‘He won’t be able to tell you much more than I have. He’s not exactly Stephen Fry when it comes to the English language.’

‘How did you know who to call?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Why did you call the PCU and not City of London?’

‘We had your phone number.’

‘Where did you get it from?’

‘Here,’ said Leach, holding up a clear plastic bag with what appeared to be a child’s doll inside it. ‘One of our men found it on the planks this morning, just where the rope was tied.’

Banbury glanced at Bimsley as he accepted the plastic bag and examined it. One of the PCU’s cards had been folded into the top opening. He removed it and carefully tipped out the contents.