The Cutting Place. Jane Casey

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СКАЧАТЬ is long gone and forgotten, but we know they were here. I might be the first person to touch it since they flung it in the water.’

      ‘What sort of things do you find?’ I asked.

      ‘I’ve found Roman glass once or twice, and coins, and bits of pottery. Last year I found a medieval die made out of bone. How did it end up here? Maybe someone flicked it into the river because they’d had a run of bad luck, or maybe they stumbled as they boarded a skiff to cross to the other bank and it fell out of their pocket. There are a hundred possibilities, a hundred stories in one small scrap of history. My favourite was a bone hairpin that was a thousand years old. That’s in the Museum of London, now, with my name recorded as the person who found it. That pin will still be there long after I’m gone too.’

      ‘And people will know you were here,’ I said.

      The fan of wrinkles around her eyes deepened as she grinned. ‘Everybody wants to leave a trace of themselves behind, after all – some evidence they walked the earth. One day someone might be grateful I was in the right place at the right time to find something special. That keeps me coming back.’

      ‘So what was different about this morning?’ I asked.

      ‘Nothing. Everything was the same as usual. At least it was until I found it. Then everything went sideways.’ A low chuckle. Kim Weldon struck me as the kind of person who didn’t allow herself to be unsettled by anything; if what she had found upset her, she had got over it by now.

      But I noticed she said ‘it’, rather than what she had found.

      ‘Where were you when you saw it?’

      She pointed. ‘See the white stripe on the wall? I was halfway between here and there. I always give myself a marker to reach because it’s too easy to get distracted and forget to keep an eye on the tide. You can get caught out – never happens to me but I’ve seen other people get soaked. So I always give myself a limited search area and then I go once I’ve covered it.’

      A Thames Clipper barrelled past, ferrying commuters up the river, and the wake sent a wave that splashed over one of Derwent’s shoes. He stepped back quickly, swearing under his breath, shaking his foot.

      ‘It’s all right, the water is quite clean these days. They’ve even found seahorses down the river, near Greenwich, so it’s fresh. But you really need boots like mine, and you need to be more respectful of the river.’ She looked wistful. ‘I’ve seen grown men tipped over by a wave like that.’

      ‘I’ll bear it in mind.’ From his tone of voice, I strongly suspected that he wouldn’t be returning to the foreshore any time soon if he could help it, boots or no boots.

      ‘This way.’ The slight, upright figure crunched away from us to where a wooden post stuck out of the shingle, frayed with age and the action of the water. ‘They used to tie up barges here.’ She pointed at the sandy edge of the river. ‘This is where it was.’

      It.

      ‘And it was just lying there?’ I checked.

      She looked baffled. ‘What else would it be doing?’

      ‘No, I meant – it wasn’t buried, or wrapped in anything?’

      ‘No, no. It was lying there on the shingle. I thought it was a tree root at first – you do get them washed down the river from upstream where the banks are overgrown. I was going to take a picture of it to put on my Facebook page, because it looked like a hand. But then, when I got a bit closer, I thought it looked a bit too much like a hand. And then, of course …’ She shrugged. ‘It was a hand.’

      ‘Did you touch it?’ Derwent asked.

      ‘Before I knew what it was. I turned it over. It was palm down, with the fingers curled under it, you see.’ She held up her own hand to demonstrate, a loose fist with knuckles to the sky. ‘Then when I felt it, I knew it couldn’t be a root. Too soft. Too much give in it. But it wasn’t until I saw the fingernails that I was sure. It was such a strange thing to find that I couldn’t quite admit to myself what it was. I took some pictures of it and where I found it and then I picked it up. I was afraid it would be washed away before anyone came to recover it.’

      ‘You must have had a shock,’ I said.

      ‘Well, you expect to find bones here – this was London’s rubbish dump for thousands of years, and this area in particular was full of markets. But the bones tend to belong to sheep or pigs or cows. Sometimes you find a bit of a fox. I’ve never found a hand before.’ She faced into the breeze and smiled. ‘But then you never do know what the river will give you.’

      At the top of the stairs, the Marine Unit were packing up to head back to their base at Wapping.

      ‘Finished for the day, lads?’ Derwent demanded as they went past us.

      The sergeant stopped. He was mid-fifties and serious. ‘Tide’s coming in. We’re not going to find anything else here today.’

      They had found three other pieces of tattered bone and flesh that had all been carefully preserved in coolers for transportation to the mortuary along with the hand. Thinking of what Kim Weldon had said about animal remains, I asked, ‘Are you sure that what you found is human?’

      ‘No idea.’ He heaved a bag onto his back. ‘But the pathologist will tell you if it’s not.’

      ‘Where’s the rest of the body?’ Derwent asked. ‘In the sea?’

      ‘Could be. Could be we’ll find some more bits in the next few days. We’ll be looking. Where we find things has a lot to do with the tide and the shape of the river. The way the water moves through it depends on whether the banks are concave or convex. You get lots of stuff washing up around Greenwich, for instance, and at Wapping, and at Tower Bridge. You won’t find as much on the opposite banks. So we have a few places to look.’

      ‘I never really thought about the tide coming up the river,’ I said. ‘I thought it flowed out to the sea and that was it.’

      He shook his head, not even trying to hide his scorn. ‘Why do you think the flood barrier exists? There’s a clue in the name, love.’

      ‘I’m not saying I couldn’t have worked it out,’ I protested. ‘I’ve never thought about it before.’

      He grunted. Clearly I was worth even less of his time now, which was a shame because I needed his expert knowledge.

      I tucked a stray curl of hair behind my ear, widening my eyes to play up the helpless look. ‘As you can tell, I don’t know much about this. The river flows in both directions, so does that mean we can’t tell where the body parts might have gone in? Could they have been moved up here by the action of the tide?’

      He wrinkled his forehead, considering it. ‘The tide moves things up but then it moves them back again on the way out, if you see what I mean. That makes it hard to pinpoint where items enter the water. They sometimes wash around the same area for a while.’

      ‘Could they have been dumped off a boat?’ Derwent asked.

      ‘Yeah. But why draw attention to yourself by hopping in a boat to dump body parts when you could slip them into the river from the shore? No one would have noticed if it was small СКАЧАТЬ