‘No, not at all.’ I set down my beer, thoughts of food forgotten.
‘Sorry to disturb your weekend, but I was given your name by DCI Andy Mackenzie. You worked with him on a murder inquiry a while back?’
His tone made it a question, but I remembered Mackenzie well enough. It had been the first case I’d been involved in after I lost my family, and hearing his name so soon after I’d been thinking back to that time was strangely apt. He’d been a DI back then, and it hadn’t always been an easy relationship. My fault more than his, so I appreciated his putting a word in for me.
‘That’s right,’ I said, trying not to raise my hopes. ‘How can I help?’
‘We’ve got a reported sighting of a body in the Saltmere estuary, a few miles up the coast from Mersea Island. We can’t do much tonight but there’s a low tide just after dawn. We’ve got a pretty good idea where it might have grounded, so we’ll be carrying out a search and recovery as soon as light permits. I know it’s short notice, but can you meet us out there first thing tomorrow morning?’
Jason and Anja’s party flashed across my mind, but only for a second. They’d understand. ‘You want me there for the recovery?’
I’d worked on water deaths before, but normally I was called in once the body had been retrieved. A forensic anthropologist was generally only needed if there were skeletal remains or if a body was badly decomposed. If this was a recent drowning, and the body was still in reasonably good condition, there’d be nothing for me to do. And this wouldn’t be the first false alarm sparked by a floating bin-liner or bundle of clothes.
‘If you can make it, yes,’ Lundy said. ‘A couple of weekend yachtsmen spotted the body late this afternoon. They were planning to drag it aboard until they got close enough to smell it and changed their minds.’
That was just as well. If the body had begun to smell that suggested decomposition had set in. Manhandling it on to a boat would likely have caused more damage, and although it was possible to distinguish post-mortem injuries from those caused before death, it was better to avoid them.
‘Any idea who it might be?’ I asked, hunting around for a pen and paper.
‘A local man went missing about six weeks ago,’ Lundy told me, and if I hadn’t been so distracted I might have made more of his hesitation. ‘We think there’s a good chance this is him.’
‘Six weeks is a long time for a body to be drifting in an estuary without being found,’ I said.
No wonder the yachtsmen had noticed the smell. It wasn’t unheard of for human remains to stay afloat for weeks or even months, but that was usually in deeper water or out at sea. In an estuary, where the body would be left stranded and exposed at low tide twice a day, I’d have expected it to have been noticed before now.
‘Not this one,’ Lundy said. ‘You don’t get many boats on it these days, and there’s a rat’s nest of creeks and saltmarshes feeding into it. The body could have been drifting in there for weeks.’
I scribbled on the notepad, trying to make the pen work. ‘And the missing man, anything suspicious about his disappearance?’
There was another hesitation. ‘We’ve no reason to think anyone else was involved.’
I lowered the pen, picking up on the DI’s caution. If no one else was involved that left either natural causes, accident or suicide, and Lundy’s manner suggested this wasn’t either of the first two. Still, that didn’t explain why he was being so cagey.
‘Is there something sensitive about this?’ I asked.
‘I wouldn’t call it sensitive, exactly.’ Lundy spoke with the air of someone choosing his words. ‘Let’s just say we’re under pressure to find out if it’s who we think. I’ll tell you more tomorrow. We’re mustering from an old oyster fishery but it can be tricky to find. I’ll email the directions, but you’ll need to allow plenty of time to get there. Satnavs aren’t much use in that neck of the woods.’
After he’d ended the call I sat staring into space. There was obviously more to this than the DI wanted to go into over the phone, although I couldn’t think what. A suicide might require tactful handling, especially when dealing with the family. But police officers weren’t usually so coy.
Well, I’d find out soon enough. Including why they wanted me present for the recovery. Even if they were right and the body had been in the estuary for weeks, the police didn’t usually need a forensic anthropologist’s help to remove it from the water. I wouldn’t normally expect to be involved until the remains were back at the mortuary.
But I wasn’t about to argue. This was the first consultancy work I’d been offered in an age, and hopefully a sign official attitudes towards me had thawed. Please God. Suddenly even the thought of Jason and Anja’s dinner party didn’t seem so bad. I’d have a longer drive to the Cotswolds, but the recovery shouldn’t take all day. They’d understand if I was a little late.
Feeling brighter than I had in months, I went to get my things together.
2
It was still dark next morning when I set off. There was traffic even at that time, the headlights of lorries and early commuters snaking along the roads. But they grew sparser as I drove out of London and headed east. Soon the roads were unlit, and the stars brightened as the crowded suburbs were left behind. The muted glow of the satnav gave the illusion of warmth, but that early in the morning I still needed to turn on the heater. It had been a long, cold winter, and despite the calendar the promised spring was still no more than a technicality.
I’d woken feeling sluggish and aching. I’d have put it down to a low-grade hangover if I’d had more than a single beer the night before. But I felt better after a hot shower and a quick breakfast, too preoccupied with the day ahead to worry about anything else.
It was peaceful on the early morning roads. The Essex coastal marshes weren’t too far from London; flat, low-lying towns and countryside that fought a perpetual, and often losing, battle with the sea. I wasn’t familiar with that stretch of the south-east coast, though, and in his emailed directions Lundy had again warned to allow plenty of time. I thought he was being over-cautious until I’d looked up maps of the Saltmere estuary online. The ‘rat’s nest’ of creeks and saltmarshes the DI had mentioned was an area called the Backwaters, a tidal labyrinth of waterways and ditches that bordered one of the estuary’s flanks. On satellite photographs it resembled capillaries feeding into an artery, most of it only accessible by boat. And not even then at low tide, when it drained to become a barren plain of mudflats. The route I’d be taking only skirted its edges, but even so the roads looked small and tortuous.
The glow from the satnav dimmed as the sky directly ahead continued to lighten. Off to one side, the refineries of Canvey Island were silhouetted against it, fractal black shapes sparkling with lights. There were more cars on the road now, but then I turned off on to a side road and the traffic thinned down. Soon I was on my own again, heading into an overcast dawn.
I switched off the satnav not long afterwards, relying solely on Lundy’s directions. All around, the landscape was flat as a stretched sheet, scribbled over by thickets of hawthorn with only the occasional house or barn. The DI’s directions took me through a small, dismal-looking town called Cruckhaven that lay close to the neck of the estuary. I drove past pebble-dashed bungalows and stone cottages to a harbour front, where a few dirty-hulled trawlers and fishing boats slumped at angles on the mud, waiting for the returning tide to give them grace and reason.
It looked an unprepossessing place, and I wasn’t sorry to leave it behind. The road continued alongside the estuary, the tarmac eroded in places where the tide had overflowed the banks. Recently, by the look of things. It had been another bad winter for flooding, but wrapped up in my own problems in London I hadn’t paid much attention to news reports of coastal storms. Judging by the sea-wrack stranded on the road and surrounding fields, they would be harder to ignore here. Global warming was more than an academic debate when you were this exposed to the results of it.