Isvik by Hammond; Innes Page B

up, and across the river the pinnacles of Greenwich and the masts and yards of the Cutty Sark .
    I had tried to get a glimpse of Mellish Street between the newer buildings, but there were very few of the old houses still standing and it was difficult in the midst of all the construction to picture what it must have been like for her living down there, walking the dog at night, her mind all the time on the Weddell Sea and the abandoned expedition boat waiting for her at Punta Arenas.
    From the Garden Islands terminal it was only a few minutes’ walk to the park entrance and the glass-domed rotunda that houses the lift to the Greenwich Foot Tunnel. The sky was beginning to lighten over Blackheath, the beauty of Wren’s architecture on the far side of the river standing in perfect harmony above the darker grey of the water. I stopped at one point because a shaft of sunlight had suddenly pierced the gloom. It picked out the Royal Naval College and a ferry angling across the river. There was a Thames barge, too, motoring up Blackwall Reach, the whole scene suddenly Turneresque. How many times had she come down here to the southernmost tip of the Isle of Dogs? A pointless question since I didn’t even know how long she had been in England. I should have asked. So many questions I should have asked her, remembering that sense of awareness I had felt at first sight of her.
    The lift was for up to sixty passengers and there was a TV monitor by the gates showing the northern half of the tunnel with tourists moving up and down it. A notice said it had been opened in 1902 at a cost of £127,000, that it was over twelve hundred feet long and between thirty and fifty feet below the water according to the state of the tide. There were quite a few kids in the tunnel when I entered it, the high-pitched scream of their voices resounding in the long lavatorial tube-train-sized passage – two hundred thousand white tiles, the notice had said.
    I think Victor Wellington was as glad to see me as I was to see him, for when I asked for him at the Museum I was shown straight into his office. ‘Bad business,’ he said after he had greeted me. He must have said that three or four times during the quarter of an hour or so I was with him. ‘No, I’ve no doubt at all.’ This in reply to my question asking him whether he was certain the body was that of Iris Sunderby. It was the ring, he said, and he went on to describe it, an eternity ring of unusual thickness and banded with what he took to be thin rectangles of ruby and emerald. ‘On the left hand,’ he said. ‘Very striking.’
    I shook my head. I hadn’t noticed any ring.
    â€˜A bad business.’ His hands were locked together on the desk. ‘It’s not nice seeing somebody, anybody, in that condition. But somebody you’ve met, a strong, characterful young woman – very striking, didn’t you think her?’
    â€˜Yes, very striking,’ I agreed. ‘Great vitality.’
    â€˜Vitality, yes. It hit you straight away, a sort of sexual energy.’ There was a sudden gleam in his eyes, his small mouth slightly pursed so that I wondered whether he was married and if so what his wife was like. ‘She wasn’t raped, you know,’ he added. ‘It wasn’t that sort of killing.’
    â€˜You asked?’
    â€˜Yes, of course. It’s the first thing that comes to mind.’
    â€˜And you’re convinced she was killed.’
    â€˜That’s the Inspector’s view. What else? It was either that or suicide, and she wasn’t the sort of person to kill herself, not when she’d just got the backing she needed. And it would be odd if she fell into the dock by accident. Sky clear and a nearly full moon. Now if she’d had the dog with her … But she hadn’t.’ He got to his feet. ‘Her brother was one of the Disappeareds. That may explain it.’
    â€˜How do you