Most of the people on the canal bank at that hour of the day were runners and joggers, with the occasional dog walker, paying no attention to the canal’s waters. There were few fishermen around.
‘Can I put the maggot on, Granddad?’ asked the boy.
‘’Course you can, son. I’ll just get this on for you.’ Ron slid the fine nylon line through the eye of the float and let Jared, his grandson, carefully bait the small hook with one of the maggots. He cast the line into the water for the boy and then he noticed the small bundle floating down by some rushes that grew near the lock gates and had escaped the last canal clean-up in the previous year.
‘Jared,’ he said quietly.
‘Yes, Granddad?’
‘Do you see that man sitting back there, the one with the really long rod?’
‘Yes.’
‘Could you go and ask him if he’s had any luck so far today? See if the fish are biting.’
‘Sure, Granddad.’ The small, self-confident boy walked happily back the way they’d come.
Ron had never seen a dead body before outside of a hospital, but he realized immediately what he was looking at. It was far too realistic to be a toy. He had hoped it might be a large doll but he knew, almost instinctively, it wasn’t the case. This year there had been a lot of algal bloom on the canal, but here by the lock it was comparatively clear. The child’s hair floated gently around the back of his head in the dark, still waters. He wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t been scanning the surface of the water for possible obstructions to his line.
He waited for Jared to move a little distance down the towpath to ask the fisherman how he was doing so the child wouldn’t overhear his conversation, then he took his phone out. Ten minutes later the first couple of police arrived.
Baby Ali had been found.
The lock gate, a few metres away from where the body was snagged on the reeds, had been recently repainted black. White numerals denoting its number on the canal were stencilled on to the top lintel of one of the two powerfully thick mitre gates that controlled the flow of water in the lock. Ron noticed — the numbers didn’t signify anything to him — that it was Gate 18.
9
Enver watched the two police divers from the marine policing unit as they gently and carefully moved the body of the child into the webbing of the cradle, so it could be pulled free of the water and up on to the bank of the canal. The water of the Regent’s Canal was mournful, dark and still. It was now 11 a.m. on Tuesday morning and the towpath and canal banks had been cordoned off on both sides. On the other divide of the police tape, a group of TV reporters had assembled. They eyed each other disdainfully. By contrast, most of the technical crew with them — cameramen, sound engineers and other outside broadcast personnel — knew each other from similar, past occasions and there was a sense of, if not quite a party atmosphere, then a definite feeling of good cheer, of camaraderie, as they caught up with news and gossip. This was not shared on the other side of the police line. Grim efficiency was the pervasive atmosphere. There was very little talking beyond what was necessary.
Enver had worked on two previous child deaths, liaising with CEOP, the child protection people. He knew the statistics, themselves a subject of controversy. NSPCC figures put the number of deaths of under-sixteens at one child killed on average every week and one baby killed every twenty days in England and Wales. However, alternative sources put the figures much higher, at one to two hundred per year. The figures weren’t huge but they all knew that the investigation would be depressing enough. Whichever way you looked at it, it would be depressing. It could hardly be anything but. The chances were statistically high that the parents were involved and there would be a tearful litany of denial and attempt to shift the blame elsewhere if they were the killers. The alternative, that there was a child killer on the loose, an Ian Huntley or an Ian Brady or maybe even children involved in killing children, like the Bulger case, was perhaps even worse. Social services would be involved, newspapers, external agencies; it would be a messy and unpleasant investigation. And to make the investigation even more problematic, it would be conducted under an intense media scrutiny and an atmosphere of public semi-hysteria.
He watched as the small corpse, now on the bank, was carefully and gently zipped into a child’s body bag. Enver found the sight of the small container with its pathetic contents deeply distressing. He thought of Mehmet, his anguished, tear-stained face. He thought of Ali’s toy, Grey Rabbit. He couldn’t tell if he felt angry or depressed. Above all, he felt numb and slightly sick. The MPU men climbed out of the water, this part of their job done. Soon they would be joined by the Underwater and Confined Spaces Search Team to check that there were no more bodies down there. Enver guessed visibility would be dreadful in the canal. He’d often wondered why anyone would want to work for UCSST. He could understand people liking diving, not a passion he himself shared, but moving around, groping about in zero visibility in polluted canals, rivers and flooded buildings in search of bodies or evidence was hideous. Even when the search area wasn’t aquatic, UCSST would be crawling around unpleasant places. He’d seen them once having to extract a body from a ventilation flue in a pub in White City. A burglar over Christmas had tried to break into the premises like a criminally minded Santa, by crawling into the hood of the extractor fans from the kitchen, which rose funnel-like from the roof behind the building. He’d become trapped inside and because the pub kitchens were closed for three days, no one had heard his cries for help. He’d been in there for ten days while the kitchen staff had tried to work out where the terrible smell was coming from.
Enver knew the body they’d found had to be Mehmet’s son, Ali. Today was the day after he had spoken to Mehmet and his uncle. So far, all he had been able to do was confirm that the supermarket had no CCTV record of the incident. The shop system was an old XDH one, connected to twenty-eight cameras internally and half a dozen externally. It was a good system: colour and high-resolution. There were so few external cameras because the shop car park was relatively small. The security manager, an ex-soldier, had been very helpful, but they only stored images for three days, seventy-two hours.
And, of course, they had no member of staff either called Aisha or answering to Mehmet’s sketchy description. And that was as far as he’d got in his unofficial capacity. At least now they’d be able to do things properly, although Enver suspected it would all be too late. If only Mehmet had come forward earlier.
He knew too that he would be in for an uncomfortable time explaining to his boss, Detective Chief Superintendent Ludgate, why he was able to identify the body. It wasn’t that he had done anything particularly wrong, he hadn’t had time, but he knew Ludgate would be in a bad mood and he’d be in the firing line.
He could see Jim Ludgate now, stocky and balding, wearing a suit that looked slept in, talking to a slim, dark-haired woman he didn’t recognize. Ludgate looked irritated; the woman, expressionless. Enver was a believer in doing unpalatable things quickly. Oh well, he thought, may as well get things over with. Hopefully, Ludgate won’t be too interested to know how one of his officers had managed to become personally involved with the illegal immigrant parents of a murdered child.
He walked over to the DCS. Movement made him aware of the weight he was carrying. He was suddenly and ridiculously conscious of the tightness of his shirt against his growing belly. Enver was an ex-athlete. He’d been a boxer before becoming a policeman and now, freed from the constraints of having to train and diet to make a weight, his stomach had relished its freedom with predictable results. A section of unwearable shirts in his wardrobe was steadily growing. They were simply too small. Some he could no longer even button around his stomach. It wasn’t just his belly. He felt he could live with that. Even worse were the rolls of surplus flesh on his sides, above his hips. I’ve got love handles, he’d think to himself gloomily. Quite often he would grasp the fatty flesh in each hand and jiggle it up and down angrily in a fit of self-loathing. It really wasn’t the time to be thinking about dieting, he thought, as he approached Ludgate.