Kissed a Sad Goodbye

Leveling their burden on the far side of the gate, the stretcher-bearers moved down the path to the car park. As Gemma and Kincaid followed, the attendants slid the stretcher roughly into the van and slammed the doors.

Gemma winced as she thought of how carefully the woman’s body had been placed in its bower of grass. “That wasn’t necessary. There’s no bloody hurry now, is there?”

Kincaid gave her a surprised glance. “You know it doesn’t mean anything to them. She’s not a person anymore.”

Gemma shook her head. “She is to someone, somewhere.”

“She did look remarkably peaceful,” he said, and she heard the understanding in his voice. It was odd, thought Gemma, that the more disfigured the corpse, the easier it seemed to distance oneself from the victim’s humanity. With a light touch on her shoulder, Kincaid added, “I suppose we’d best get on with it. I think we should see the pensioner who discovered the body. And I’d like to have a look at the geography of the park on our way.”

When he’d retrieved his jacket and his A to Z from his car, they climbed back up to the Mudchute plateau. Skirting the crime scene, they continued eastwards along the path. To their left lay a steep bank, and at its bottom the high-fenced back gardens of a new housing estate. The dense growth of brambles and bindweed that covered the slope and spilled over to crowd the edge of the path showed no signs of trampling. Pausing to look down, Gemma felt the palpable weight of the sun beating against her scalp as the air over the high ground of the park shimmered in the midday heat.

Beside her, Kincaid picked a ripe blackberry and popped it in his mouth. “From the map, it seemed possible that she’d been killed in the housing estate, then dragged up into the park.” He shook his head. “But there’s no access, unless you can fly.”

Gemma tentatively considered a blackberry. She’d read about berry-picking in books, but it was something she’d never done—in her childhood, berries had come in punnets at the greengrocer’s, and her family hadn’t had time for holidays in the countryside. As Kincaid moved away she reached out and plucked one. It left sticky purple stains on her fingers, and as she hurried after him, the wild, sweet-tart taste of it on her tongue gave her an unexpected sense of liberation.

Before them both path and bank made a sharp right turn. Gemma thought of the brief glimpse she’d had of the slightly irregular square of park on the map. “I thought it would be an ordinary city park, but it’s more like the rolly bits of Hampstead Heath laid out on a tabletop, isn’t it?”

“A living tablecloth?”

“I suppose so. But it is an odd place, and an odd name.”

“The Mudchute was built from the silt dredged up from the Millwall Dock—I think the mud was quite literally pumped through a chute,” Kincaid said. When Gemma gave him a surprised look, he smiled and added, “I asked Inspector Coppin about it and got the penny lecture from her for my pains. The land belonged to the Dock and, being off-limits, was a huge temptation to the local children for years. It was only made a park about twenty years ago.”

They had reached a bench set back from the path, a sort of natural lookout point. Gemma stopped and gazed round at the rolling, scrubby grassland, dotted with the occasional tree. “But it’s enormous. What was it all for?”

“Dockworkers’ allotments, mostly, and timber storage. Look, there’s someone’s garden.” He pointed down the now-gentle slope at a small vegetable patch fenced off with chicken wire. “Some of the park is still used for allotments, though I wonder if they’ll be kept up when the pensioners are gone. There’s a demonstration farm here now, used mostly for educating schoolchildren.”

“It sounds like you managed to thaw Inspector Coppin.”

He grinned. “Only because she enjoyed knowing more than I did.”

Ahead of them, the path disappeared into a wide, level expanse of dirt, and the breeze brought them a distinct whiff of manure. “Is that a road?” asked Gemma.

Kincaid consulted the map. “We’re coming to the farm now, and it looks as though a track comes up from the farm entrance. We’ll have to see if it’s accessible at the bottom.”

“If you could drive a car this far, you could carry a body to where we found her.”

Looking back along the path, Kincaid mused, “A good walk, carrying such a burden.” He knelt and felt the dry earth with his fingers. “But as hard as the ground is, you might be able to drive partway along the path without leaving a trace.”

They started down the gentle incline and soon reached the main farm buildings. Inside the central courtyard a group of small children ate ice creams bought from the concession kiosk. “A thriving business, that,” said Gemma. The sight of the children made her think of Toby, left in her sister’s care by default. A day spent with Cynthia’s little hellions and her son would be wound up like a top for a week, but what choice had she had?