Dead Tide

 1

London, April 2008

When would it stop? They’d said nothing about lingering pain, but these cramps forced her to hold her breath and count through them when they came; they were like something too big trying to squeeze through a small hole. Agonising while they lasted . . . and they were lasting increasingly longer, becoming more frequent.

Had they left something behind? Had they torn something?

The cramps were invisible. But the bloating . . . Amelia hoped she could somehow wing an excuse for wearing her raincoat indoors. She pretended to fuss inside her satchel, feigning distrac­tion with files and notebooks so Mads wouldn’t ask what was wrong, but she knew it was futile. Mads missed nothing and the bright toothpaste white of her spanking new A-line waterproof rain jacket was like a beacon, demanding the question be asked.

The lecturer cast a glance out across his small class, who were studying crime and its definitions this semester. ‘Ah, Miss Peters. I see you’ve decided to rejoin us.’ From any of the other lecturers, the words may have cut deep enough to wound. But coming from Detective Superintendent Jack Hawksworth, with his warm tone and ghosting smile, it felt like a welcome. He followed it up – ‘Feeling better?’ – confirming to Amelia why he was her favourite tutor . . . probably everyone’s favourite this semester. Pity he wasn’t here permanently.

She blushed. ‘Bit of a sniffle,’ she lied. ‘I didn’t want to pass it around.’

‘For which we’re all grateful to you,’ Jack Hawksworth said, pulling files from a briefcase and placing them on the desk in a short stack. His grin widened. ‘You’re back just in time for the gruesome stuff. So I promised you all a summary of what a day in the life of a detective attending a post-mortem feels like.’

This won some murmured cheers of approval.

Her friend Madeleine – Mads – slid her an approving look, murmuring, ‘I like your raincoat.’

‘Not too clinical?’ Amelia replied quickly, hoping to joke her way through the oddity of still being dressed for outdoors.

Mads grinned. ‘No. It’s rather spectacular, actually. I’d like one in every colour.’

‘You can afford to,’ Amelia quipped.

‘Aren’t you warm?’

Amelia feigned a shiver as she felt the low but reaching tendrils of another cramp warning her of its impending arrival. ‘No. I think I’ve caught something.’

‘I thought you’d call,’ Mads whispered as Hawksworth turned his back to write something on the whiteboard.

‘I only got back yesterday morning,’ Amelia said under her breath, looking away from the handsome lecturer’s back.

‘And?’

‘Fine,’ she murmured, lying again. ‘Well, I am feeling a bit yuck, but that’s to be expected, apparently. I didn’t dare take any more time away from lectures, especially not his,’ she said, returning her gaze to the very senior detective, who had taken a sabbatical to teach this short course for university students.

‘In the UK we call this forensic pathology a post-mortem, while in America it’s known as an autopsy. It’s an identical process. The pathologist is establishing what exactly killed the person who is lying on their table, but out of that study will come a host of other valuable information that can add enormous assist­ance to the investigating team if the death is suspicious.’

Hawksworth wrote some bullet points on the whiteboard, his felt marker squeaking on the plastic surface.

‘Let me give you a good example of how a death that appeared rather straightforward turned out to be a lot more complicated and resulted in a conviction of murder . . .’

Mads persisted. ‘So when are you going to tell me how it all went down? Or is it still a big secret?’

‘No.’ Amelia frowned. ‘After class we can—’

‘Er, Miss Rundle?’

Both their gazes snapped to Hawksworth as he turned from the board to look directly at Mads. ‘Call me a narcissist, but I hate competing for attention. Both you and Miss Peters might benefit from tuning in to this if you plan to pass this semester.’

They murmured apologies in unified embarrassment.

Something about his amused expression told Amelia that in another setting, Hawksworth might have winked. He didn’t. Instead, he returned to his anecdote about a day when he was still a young detective constable and had attended his first ‘PM’, as he called it, and passed out in the city mortuary, banging his chin on one of the tables and requiring stitches. That soon had the whole class, including the two girls, smiling.

‘It’s true, and the least auspicious start I could have made, being sneered at by Dr Blood, as we knew him – one of the most senior and least empathetic pathologists that Scotland Yard had dealings with. The first day we all filed in, he slid a drawer from the mortuary fridge, removed a partially eaten sandwich, took a bite and put it back.’

The class gasped, some chuckling, and Hawksworth continued, with everyone now seemingly hanging on his words.

‘Then he slid out another drawer, this time with a corpse inside to reinforce the need for the tag on the toe, et cetera. He explained in great detail why we had to count the bodies in when we arrived and out when we left, and enter that figure into the book. And then he, casual as you please, began making an incision into a body from neck to navel. “Get that out of the way,” I think his words were, referring to me, pale and leaning against his fridge,’ Hawksworth said, bringing more laughter.

Amelia and Madeleine forgot their private conversation and focused on the lecture. Hawksworth went on to describe what initially appeared to be a clear-cut case of rape and murder but became far more complex as the pathologist discovered a sinister illness within the victim that was likely the cause of death, even though she’d been physically abused during a break-in.

Later, in the café, huddled in a corner to stay warm on the chilly spring day, Mads winkled the story out of Amelia about what was really going on with her.

‘To tell you the truth, there’s not really much to say. It was like a mini break,’ she explained on the tail end of a mighty cramp that caused her to ball her fists beneath the table as she tried not to show too much in her expression. ‘There were three of us. One was from Birmingham, another from a place called Hassocks . . . and me.’ She found a smile.

‘All from universities?’

‘Two of us were. The girl from Hassocks was a barmaid, a bit older than us but not by that much. We all needed money.’ Amelia shrugged.

‘So, carry on. You went to the airport. Then what?’

‘They drove me to London City Airport and escorted me to the gate and onto a JAT Airways flight to Vilnius.’

‘Oh, posh. Now, where’s that again?’

‘Blimey, Mads, did you do any geography at school?’ The pain had passed again. She could be herself.

Her friend laughed. ‘Hated it.’

‘It’s the capital of Lithuania. The old quarter, as they call it, is lovely in its own way. Some parts of the city are a bit Cold War, but we weren’t in that section. It was very modern where we were taken.’ She sipped her coffee, remembering the excellent hot chocolates she had enjoyed at the old-style chocolate salons in the cobbled streets of Vilnius, while she waited for her body to do what it knew how to do. ‘The hotel was like any hotel,’ she remarked.

‘Oh, like you stay in them all the time, Millie,’ Mads sneered, but with mirth.

‘It was nothing special, but nothing bad about it. A room key, a bed, a bathroom, room service. It was a tiny modern apartment, like that one we stayed in at York when we visited.’

‘Oh, well, that’s disappointing. I was hoping you were going to come back with stories of something more Slavic.’

‘It’s not Slavic, you oaf. It’s a Baltic country.’

‘Russian, whatever.’

‘Old USSR,’ Amelia corrected. ‘The clinic . . .’ Her words trailed off and she gave a grimace, unable to hide it this time. The pain was unbearable again. She held her head against the palm of her hand.

‘What’s wrong?’

Amelia shook her head. ‘I really don’t feel that well.’ She knew she’d been ailing in a shallow way for days. Now it felt like she was sinking much deeper into whatever it was her body was fighting. She could feel her belly swelling, tightening against the elastic of her trackpants.

‘What sort of not well?’

‘I think I’m going to throw up.’

‘Come on, let’s get some air.’

Amelia allowed herself to be helped up from the table. Suddenly, even the sound of the coffee being ground was like a hammer in her mind. She leaned against the wall, trying to look inconspicuous while Mads paid.

Her friend returned. ‘Any better?’

‘No, worse, I think. Something’s wrong, Mads. My head feels like it’s going to explode, but so does my tummy.’

Mads supported her as they left the café, ostensibly cradling her shoulders but in all truth holding her up, Amelia realised.

Mads tried to reassure her. ‘It’s different food, different water. You only got back yesterday, so you’re jetlagged . . . and all those drugs you mentioned – they’ve got to be having some side effects,’ she rationalised. ‘Either that or you’ve got food poison­ing.’ She tipped her friend a sympathetic grin.

Amelia wanted to believe it, but her instincts were saying otherwise. She let Mads lead her to a taxi rank.

‘Don’t make a fuss,’ Mads said. ‘It’s on me. You know how Dad insists on sending money each month.’

‘I’ll pay you back.’

‘Don’t be daft. Make me a chocolate cake or something. You know I can’t bake.’

The taxi ride back to the share house in Putney took an age. When they finally arrived, neither of Amelia’s flatmates were around. She struggled to get her key out of her bag.

‘Bloody hell, you’re useless. Let me,’ Mads said cheerfully. She pushed open the door and sighed. ‘I’m glad it’s the ground floor, Millie, ’cause I doubt I’d be able to carry you any further.’ She was trying to brighten her up; Amelia could hear it. ‘Sofa or bed?’

‘Bed,’ she said, with a groan.

Mads helped her to undress and change into a T-shirt and pyjama bottoms. ‘Do you mind me mentioning that your tummy looks swollen?’

‘I don’t know what’s happening,’ Amelia said, now struggling to speak because it hurt so much. ‘Painkillers.’ She pointed in the direction of her dressing table, the one she’d bought at a boot sale and painted a pistachio colour in the shabby chic style.

‘These are ibuprofen,’ Mads said, looking at the box. ‘I don’t think you should take any more of those until you see a doctor, which I’m going to organise next – and Mum, as she’ll bring a car over. Let me make some tea for you.’ She headed into the kitchen, where Amelia could hear her clanking about with a kettle and teapot.

She let herself sink deeper into her pillow. What was happen­ing? They had warned that the drugs and all the stimulation they produced in her body could make her belly swell. So perhaps she was a textbook case in that regard. But the clinic had said nothing about pain. She needed relief. It was becoming too hard to wince through, as the sharp waves of each cramp crashed to shore. On the rim of her mind, she was aware of Mads calling for an ambu­lance, and then she phoned Amelia’s mum and her own.

All arrived too late. Amelia was dead by midnight.