Kissed a Sad Goodbye

upset the children. “Shit!” she added as she stood and the tights laddered. Last pair; they’d have to do. It was ' her day for the hairdresser’s, so it meant going at least another week without a cut or color. And it was too hot for her wool suit. She’d have to wear it anyway, no matter if she stank like a stevedore at the end of the day—it was the most professional-looking thing she had, and if this was going to be her big day she was bloody well going to look like it.
    “Will you be home before the center closes?” Christine ignored her swearing, though the boys would have jumped on her because she was always on at them about it. “The boys won’t want to go to Granny’s.”
    “Tough on them, then,” Janice replied impatiently, and sighed. She slid her feet into her new navy shoes and put on her jacket. Already she could feel the wool scratching through the thin fabric of her blouse. “Chris, you know I’ll be home as soon as I can. I’ll ring the center, okay? When I see how it’s going.”
    Christine nodded, her eyes solemn behind the spectacle lenses.
    “You collect the boys from next door and take them along to the center—tell them I said to mind or else.” She grabbed keys and handbag from the chest of drawers on the way out of the room. Glancing back, she saw the unmade bed, the pile of dirty laundry she hadn’t found the time to wash; thought of the dishes waiting in the kitchen sink and the littered sitting room. You wanted this, she reminded herself. You wanted out of uniform; you pushed and stepped on toes to get here.
    Outside the door of the flat, she gave Christine a quick hug, then stood watching her as she ran next door. Across the street her neighbor washed his car, his bulging gut stretching his thin cotton vest. His trousers rode so low that when he bent over half his arse was exposed. Janice turned away, feeling slightly nauseated, knowing he’d smile and whistle if he saw her looking. The bastards; they thought you wanted them no matter how they looked.
    She hesitated, debating whether to walk across Glengall Bridge. It was the most direct route—taking the car meant driving right round the dock, but on the other hand arriving at a crime scene on foot wouldn’t do much to establish her authority.
    A few moments later she pulled her Vauxhall up beside the assembled pandas in the car park of the ASDA Superstore. DC Miller came to meet her, his spotty face pale—on closer inspection, he looked decidedly green about the gills.
    “Tell me this is a joke,” she instructed him. “Manufactured by that old fart George Brent just to ruin my Saturday morning.”
    Miller blanched a bit further. “No, ma’am. There’s a body.” He pointed at the slope leading to the park. “Just up there.”
    A derelict, thought Janice, just found himself a nice peaceful place to pass away. Inconvenient but not messy. Not on this weekend when her guv was off drinking himself into a stupor at his son’s wedding.
    “It’s a woman,” said Miller. “Young. Crime scene team is on its way.”
    Janice felt the prickle of sweat in her armpits. It was her show, then, ready or not.
     

CHAPTER 3
     
The Mudchute is an area of land which originally belonged to the dock authorities. Covering about 30 acres, roughly square in shape, it has high clinker banks (on which grass and wildfiowers now flourish). These banks were built to contain a lake of silt dredged up from Millwall Dock in the 1880s and 1890s.
Eve Hostettler, from Memories of
Childhood on the Isle of Dogs, 1870-1970
     
     
    Kincaid had to stop and consult his London A to Z twice, much to his chagrin, but it had been some time since he’d worked a case in the East End, and he’d seldom had reason to venture further east than Wapping or Limehouse. It was all called “Docklands” east of the Tower now, but not even the massive rebuilding scheme of the last decade had managed to completely erase the character of the individual neighborhoods.
    A glance at his map as he passed Canary Wharf told him that he was entering the Isle of Dogs peninsula. He drove south on Westferry Road, following the line of new housing developments and unfinished building sites sprouting like mushrooms between the road and the shore. Many of the hoardings displayed the legend Finch, Ltd. in a bold graphic.
    Occasionally he caught a glimpse of the river between the buildings, and once a flash of an enormous passenger liner, white and clumsy as an iceberg.