Isvik by Hammond; Innes Page A

having a drink together at The North Pole and though they couldn’t give the exact time, they both said they had stayed in the pub until it closed.’ We had reached the police car and he paused, the keys in his hand. ‘Originally she was going to drop you off at Liverpool Street station, you said. It was on her way. Do you know where she was going, her original destination before she changed her mind?’
    â€˜I think she said Cadogan Gardens, something to do with the Argentine Embassy.’
    â€˜And then, when she found she was being followed, she swung off the main road and headed back towards her lodgings on the Isle of Dogs. Was she scared?’
    â€˜I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe. But it didn’t show in her face. More annoyed than scared.’
    â€˜Did you get the number of his car?’
    I shook my head. ‘He was three vehicles back.’
    â€˜A Porsche, that right?’
    â€˜It looked like a Porsche, but I can’t be certain. All I am sure about is the colour and that it was an open sports car.’ Once again I went over the description I had given him, the boy’s face dark and tense behind the wheel, the black hair streaming in the wind as we came out of the Blackwall Tunnel still vivid in my mind. ‘We’ll have a Photofit picture circulated, but it’s not much to go on. The car is a better bet. Not too many open top Porsches around in this country.’
    He offered me a lift to the nearest tube station, but I said I would rather walk. I was feeling slightly sick. I had never seen a dead body before and I needed to come to terms with the memory of that battered, half-decapitated corpse, the pale marble of her skin and the open wound along her thigh.
    He nodded. I think he understood. ‘I’ll be in touch,’ he said as he got into his car, adding, ‘We’re not revealing the cause of death, not just yet. Understand?’ And he drove off eastwards, while I turned and headed towards Limehouse and the Docklands Light Railway. I wanted time to think, and a sight of the environment in which she had lived during the time she had been in England might help. The line ended, I knew, at Island Gardens at the southern tip of the Isle of Dogs. From there I could walk through the foot tunnel under the Thames to Greenwich. If I was lucky I might be able to have a word with Victor Wellington. We had both seen the body and between us we might remember something that would make identification more positive.
    But it was the motive that was nagging at my mind. If that young relative of hers had done it, then there had to be a motive, something personal, and remembering the violence of her reaction when she realised he was following her, I wondered whether I ought to have passed on to the Inspector the exact words she had used.
    The Docklands Light Railway was still relatively new, the blue-painted, glass-domed station glistening in the wet. There was a train already in, two box-like glass coaches painted blue and a warning to say that their operation was automatic. It left almost immediately, and sitting up front with a gaggle of tourists and no driver, it was like travelling on a toy railway. As it swung away from the Fenchurch Street line and headed south on an elevated track parallel to the West Ferry Road, the whole of the Isle of Dogs opened up ahead of us. The drizzle had turned to rain, the water in a succession of docks we crossed dark and mottled, and in between them construction areas that were glistening islands of yellow earth criss-crossed with the tracks of heavy vehicles out of which rose a forest of gantry cranes.
    At South Quay station we were right alongside the Telegraph building, swinging east, then south through an area of new construction, the buildings brash and for the most part architecturally appalling. Crossharbour, Mudchute, a view west beyond Millwall Dock, almost every building knocked flat and the streets boarded