Isvik by Hammond; Innes

Docklands Light Railway blue that led up to the little station poised overhead. ‘I have your address and telephone number. I’ll be in touch. Hopefully in about two or three weeks’ time.’
    I thanked her for the lift and got out. She drove off then, and that was the last I saw of her till the police brought me down from Norfolk to identify the body of a woman they had fished out of the South Docks. When they slid her body out and pulled the plastic sheet away it looked at though she had been battered to death with an axe.

TWO
    I had only met her that once and the appalling mess they uncovered for me in the hospital mortuary was quite unrecognisable. The body was about the same build. That was all I could tell them. Concentrate on the clothes, they said, and that ring on her finger. But I didn’t know what clothes Iris Sunderby possessed and she might have had any number of rings. I certainly had not noticed one when I sat almost opposite her in the after cabin of the Cutty Sark , or when her hands were on the steering wheel as she drove me through the Blackwall Tunnel and on to the Isle of Dogs.
    I asked them why they thought I could help and they said that divers had dredged up a handbag from the bottom of the dock. In it they had found the remains of several letters, one from Victor Wellington, another from me, the others from addresses in the Argentine. ‘Have you any reason to think she would commit suicide?’ The Inspector threw the question at me almost casually as we walked out into the damp atmosphere of a day that was hovering between drizzle and rain.
    â€˜Quite the reverse,’ I said. ‘She was full of plans for the future.’ And I told him briefly about the ship in the ice and the vessel waiting for us in Tierra del Fuego. But he already knew about that. ‘Mr Wellington said the same thing and I’ve spoken to a man named Ward up in Glasgow. I gather he was willing to finance the expedition.’ He nodded, leaning his body into the wind. ‘So it’s murder.’ He turned his head, a quick, searching glance. ‘Have you got any views on that, sir?’
    â€˜No, why should I?’ And I told him again that my visit to the Cutty Sark was the first and only time I had met her. But then I remembered the student, a cousin she had said, and I explained how I had seen him watching her park her car by the Gypsy Moth pub, how he had looked down at us through the Cutty Sark ’s skylight and had then followed us in his bright red sports car.
    â€˜Did she give you his name?’
    â€˜Carlos,’ I said.
    â€˜His surname?’
    But I couldn’t tell him that and in the end he thanked me for my co-operation. ‘If you hear anything else …’ He hesitated. ‘I think I should tell you the state of the body is not indicative of the cause of death. The pathologist is quite satisfied she died by drowning.’ And he added, ‘The wounds to the head and neck were probably caused by her body being sucked into the swirl of a ship’s propellor. We checked with the Maritime Trust vessels and one of them regularly runs up the engines, usually at slow ahead to lubricate the prop shaft. The watchman did that the night before the body was reported to us.’
    â€˜It could have been an accident then?’
    â€˜It could.’ He nodded. ‘Seems she’d formed a habit, ever since she’d rented the room in Mellish Street, of taking a walk in the evening, usually with her landlady’s dog. Quite late sometimes. She liked to walk round the docks. So yes, it could have been an accident, particularly as the night she disappeared she had already taken the dog out.’ But I could see he didn’t think it likely. ‘She was last seen down by the river at the end of Cuba Street by the South Dock Pier. Perhaps I should say that two men saw a young woman of her description on her own and without a dog. They had been