Read Online Isvik by Hammond; Innes - Free Book Online Page B

murdered?’ She was a real East Ender.
    â€˜How do you know she was murdered?’
    â€˜Well, I don’t, do I? But that’s what I ’eard. The papers, they don’t say it were murder, but that’s wot they bin ’inting at. An’ all chopped up like that, makes shivers run down yer spine just ter think aba’t it. Wot yer want then?’
    I started asking her about Iris Sunderby, what time she normally took the dog out at night, whether she had had any visitors, and I described the student I had seen at the Cutty Sark that day. I didn’t say he had followed us and I didn’t mention the name Carlos, but I did tell her he had had a red open sports car and as soon as I said that she nodded. ‘’E parked it up beyond the tree there. I was a’t the front talkin’ ter Effie Billing an’ this little red car turns a’t of Mill’arbour an’ stops right there.’ Her description of the driver fitted. He hadn’t got out. He had just sat there as though waiting for somebody.
    â€˜When was this?’ I asked.
    She couldn’t give me the date, but it was a Wednesday, she said, about a fortnight ago. And it had been in the late afternoon, about tea time, which meant he had picked up her trail again after she had dropped me off at South Quay station. Or maybe he had managed to keep us in sight all the time. ‘Did he talk to her?’ I asked. ‘Did he call at the house?’
    She shook her head. ‘Not that I saw, an’ I was watching on an’ orf for more’n an hour I’d say. Then she came out an’ drove orf in ’er little car. An’ as soon as she’s inter Mill’arbour ’e whips that little red beast of ’is round an’ roars off after ’er.’
    â€˜Did you tell the police?’
    She shook her head. ‘Didn’t ask, did they?’ To her the police were clearly something to be avoided.
    I thanked her and walked away, past the house Iris Sunderby had lived in for what must have been at least a fortnight, past the tree, turning left up the main Millharbour road towards Marsh Wall and the Telegraph building and the dock where her body had been found. Away to the left was the slender, box-shaped indicator of the Guardian newspaper. I was in an area now of brash new construction and for the first time I became conscious of the Development Corporation’s obsession with flattened gables that seemed to me remarkably ugly. A feeling of depression came over me, this frantic development I had walked through, and all for what? A few years of London air and diesel fallout and it would be completely in tune with the tattiness of the rest of the Borough of Tower Hamlets. The image of the body lying in that dock with the head and upper torso chopped to bits seemed a sad vignette that matched the mood of the strange dockland tongue hanging out in a great loop of the river.
    Why? Why? Why? Why had she been killed? All that effort to prove her husband right, to prove he’d really seen the ship and hadn’t hallucinated. I was thinking about the irony of it, the waste, as I walked towards the overhead railway and South Quay station.
    To the west of the Telegraph building a narrow walkway led to the dockside and the gangway leading to Le Boat, a restaurant occupying the upper deck of a vessel called the Celtic Surveyor and incongruously roofed in a sort of plastic reproduction of a big top. A journalist going on board at the stern told me the ship belonged to his newspaper and had been moored there to act as the staff canteen. He was critical of the management for letting off the upper part to a commercial outfit and said they had had quite a fight to get the restaurant to repaint the original name on bows and stern. ‘It’s bad luck to change the name of a ship, isn’t it? Le Boat!’ There was a lot of expression in the way he said it.
    The drizzle had started again, a fine,