was just a rotting piece of fish. It was nothing.’
‘One jellyfish maybe, but not two, not in the Thames.’ She hurried to the evidence room, where the booty from the morning’s crime scene was being examined and labelled by DC Fry. ‘Where’s the jellyfish?’
‘What?’ he said, looking up.
‘I asked you to bag everything around the body. There was a jellyfish. Where is it?’
‘I didn’t think you meant that. It was dead, slimy, it wasn’t anywhere near the thing.’
‘When I said everything, I meant everything.’
‘Sorry.’
‘What about the one that fell out of the body?’ He looked at her blankly. ‘You did stay until the others had finished, like I asked you?’
He looked around the room nervously.
‘Fuck!’ She glanced at her watch. ‘The tide will be back up by now. We didn’t have a second chance.’
‘Sorry.’
She ignored the tone in the guy’s voice. If he didn’t like taking criticism from someone his own age, he shouldn’t get things wrong in the first place.
Jessie put on a pair of waders and some long rubber gloves. The tide had turned and was lapping at the area where the body had been found. Smaller bits of the river’s cargo moved in rhythm with the tide: a condom, a small plastic bottle, a recently devoured packet of cheese-and-onion crisps. A pole had been sunk into the mud to mark the crime scene. She couldn’t risk taking the steps and wading a hundred yards back through water. It had been bad enough when the tide was fully out. She was scared that if she attempted it now she might step into a run-off channel, lose her footing and be dragged out by the current.
As she removed the rope from her backpack, Jessie was glad of the hours she’d spent being dragged up mountains by her brothers. She wrapped the rope around a tree trunk and tied a slipknot. She pulled against it and, when satisfied, threw the length of rope over the side of the river wall. Waders did not make good rock-climbing boots. Her arms had to take all the weight as she slid down the wall on the base of her boots and landed in a few inches of water that disappeared as quickly as it reappeared. She’d had no idea the Thames was so mighty. Every time she looked back, the water seemed to be reaching higher up the wall.
Sinking deeper with each step, Jessie waded through the mud until she got to the pole. As each wave receded, she put her hands flat and felt around the area where she thought the chest cavity would have been. It was no use. Everything felt the same through the thick rubber. Reluctantly, she peeled off one glove and bent forward again. The glistening top layer of mud felt like thick, viral mucus. She withdrew her hand and waited for the water to be sucked back by the weight of the Thames. Then she dug her nails and fingers in deeper and found purchase on the more compact riverbed below. It was no use with one hand, the water was coming in too fast. She took off the other glove and began to dig. She stepped into the hole left behind by the search for the skull, but still nothing.
Jessie stood up and looked around her. More condoms, more crisp packets and Coke cans. Further down the bank, she thought she saw something move in the water. She trudged towards it as quickly as she could, knowing she was getting dangerously deep. Many anglers drowned in shallow stretches of water, held down by water-filled boots. She felt the cold water push against the rubber. She saw it again. A semi-suspended jellyfish. She watched it ebb and flow with the rest of the flotsam. Her hands reached out for the slippery lump. Resisting the urge to pull away, she made a cage with her fingers and held on to it as an incoming wave rushed between her forearms. The water was now above her knees and the mud had sucked her into a vacuum. One boot was stuck. Jessie looked up to the bank. Even if someone had been on the path, they wouldn’t have been able to see her unless they were standing on the wall. This was not a spectator sport. If she got sucked under, no one would know until she rose to the surface two weeks later, bloated with river water and methane.
She tried to pull her leg out of the mud again, but it was only making the other foot sink deeper. Jessie took a deep breath, exhaled, fixed her vision on the post and, once she’d found her balance, slowly lifted one leg fully out of the boot. The tide nearly toppled her, but she threw the bare foot out behind her and her arms in front, with the jellyfish oozing between her fingers, and somehow she managed to stay upright. The mud squelched between her toes as she retraced her steps.
The area PC Ahmet had shown her earlier was under two foot of water, the saturated mud was even more dangerous. If she fell, she would be dragged under and carried downstream within seconds. She had one jellyfish. It had to be enough. Water was rushing in and out of the tunnel. It was too dangerous to stay down there any longer. With stinking, itchy, cold arms and a filthy, numb foot, Jessie carried the jellyfish back to the wall. She shrugged off her rucksack and placed the jellyfish in the container she had brought. Then, flinging the bag back over her shoulder, she grabbed the rope. It had got wet lying against the sodden brickwork. The first few times her hand simply slipped straight off it. She was getting very cold. Jessie rubbed her hands together, kicked the other boot off, peeled off her wet socks, wrung them out and wrapped one round each palm. The looped cotton absorbed the damp and gave her something to hold on with. She lifted herself out of the mud and, with burning biceps and frozen feet, worked her way back up the slimy wall. At the lip she dug her knee into a small ridge and hauled herself over the top. Lying face down on the wall, breathing heavily, she looked back to where she’d found the jellyfish. The wader had already been claimed as the river’s own.
Jessie placed her helmet on the wooden boards by the door and prayed her bleeper wouldn’t go off. The flat housed two women too busy to buy anything. There was nothing on the walls except the previous inhabitants’ choice of paint; the floors were bare and the rooms blessedly uncluttered. Maggie’s only possessions were clothes and make-up, most of which she had purloined from the make-up rooms and wardrobes of television centres around the country. This, she assured Jessie, was normal.
The lights were on, but the flat was silent. Jessie knew the signs. Maggie had had bad news. She pushed the door to the sitting room open and saw Maggie sitting cross-legged on the floor. She did not look up. Instead she held out a piece of newspaper.
‘Bastard,’ she whispered.
Jessie took the newspaper and began to read.
Dear Lord. Give me strength. Is it too much to ask for – an intelligent female presenter of an intelligent show? Clearly it is. Bar the rare exception, TV has become the vessel of the inane, mundane and vain. The saturation of the saccharine blonde was distressing enough, but now they come at us with banal brunettes who I presume by their hair colour are supposed to at least look intelligent. Don’t be fooled. These women are in fact lower down the evolutionary scale than their pitiful predecessors. These are the new blondes. Faux blondes. Blondeabees. And they are springing up like weeds. Chickweed, to be precise. An abundant plant which is known to be particularly troublesome on rich soil. I write this as a warning to all those impressionable producers, pop stars and players. They, like the blondes before them, will suck your AmEx dry.
I could name them all but fear the heavy hand of the ever-watchful lawyers. There is, however, one I feel I must pick on. I couldn’t live with myself if I let this pass without comment. Shown last week, ‘The Olive Oil Revolution’ was a programme about the changing eating habits of the British population. A reasonably interesting subject matter, you would have thought. Wrongly, as it turns out. It was utterly and spectacularly unchallenging. The presenter, I admit, was working with some pretty dire material, but even so she managed to lower the tone. Maggie Hall shook her equine mane, beating all the L’Oreal girls in an instant, and declared that we eat Italian food because it is ‘yummy’. Come back, Anthea – all is forgiven.
Jessie