Strangers Read Online Free PDF Page A

right?’
    He didn’t reply. He just rolled over towards her, and pressed his face between her breasts. She could feel him shaking. ‘Joe?’ she said again.
    ‘A bad dream,’ he said. ‘Go back to sleep, sweetheart. It was just a bad dream.’
    London, September 2004
    The water gleamed in the moonlight, black and impenetrable where it surged between the standing stones of Tower Bridge, translucent brown where it washed against the banks. The office and apartment blocks were dark and silent.
    The river was old here, close to the end of its journey to the sea. Now it carried the filth and detritus of the city, away from the slow meander through the fields of Wiltshire, past the bridges of Oxford and the gentle lawns of Henley.
    The tide had turned. The river was in ebb, receding from the banks, leaving a waste of mud and shingle behind. Narrow steps led down to the river’s edge where water washed against wooden piles. The moon was setting, and the first light of a grey dawn was gleaming through the clouds. The light caught the water, turning it to opaque steel, reflecting off the frameworks of glass that towered above the old city. The air carried the bite of frost.
    The body of the woman had caught against the mooring and had been left on the bank as the water retreated. She was still wearing the remains of a black dress, sodden and skimpy. Her feet were bare. Her long hair lay in wet, dark lines across a face that the river had battered beyond recognition, the features almost gone.
    She had been young. The men from the Marine Support Unit, the river police, could tell that muchas they lifted the body, already pronounced dead by a doctor called from his bed in the small hours, short-tempered and abrupt. They had been expecting to find this body since the week before, when a witness had reported seeing a young woman jump from the riverside walk into the icy water.
    Suicide, accident, foul play–bodies dragged from the Thames had different stories to tell. Some of them had families–grieving, frantic, knowing their loved ones had been lost. Others had no one, or no one who wanted to claim them. Drunks, the homeless, addicts, asylum seekers, the desperate with nowhere else to run. Some were old, some were, like this girl, young, and some were no more than children.
    A clawed, blackened hand slipped from the body bag and hit the ground with a thud. Through the mud, a gleam of metal was visible from the ring on her finger. One of the men gently tipped some of the river water over it to clean away the dirt. It was etched with a distinctive pattern.
    Maybe this girl would have a name.
    Coroner’s Court, London, September 2004

Post-Mortem Report, Dead Body 13
Body found in river, 7 September, at Stoners Quay

    The coroner’s court of East London is all too familiar with river deaths. The curve in the river around the Isle of Dogs means that bodies are often left aground there as the water retreats with the tide.
    Dead Body 13 was the stark designation of thethirteenth body to be taken from the river in a year that was shaping up to be much as standard. The few people attending the inquest stood as the coroner entered. The court had little to do in this case. No one had been able to establish an identity for the dead woman, or trace the origins of the unusual ring she had been wearing on the middle finger of her right hand. The ring bore an inscription in Arabic, lines from a poem or other literary text:
take what is here now, let go of a promise. The drumbeat is best from far away
.
    Her origins were in the Indian subcontinent. Whether she was a recent arrival, or a runaway from home, it was impossible to tell. No one had claimed her and no one seemed to be looking for her.
    She had drowned. She had been alive when she went into the water–the presence of algae in her liver and kidneys confirmed that, and a witness had seen her fall. He was a man called Joe Massey who had been on the river walk near St Paul’s. He gave