Strange Tide

by Christopher Fowler

  Banbury didn’t like suggesting the idea, but he felt somebody had to say it. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, John, but have you thought about finding a replacement for Mr Bryant?’

  ‘There’s no one who could take his place,’ said May flatly.

  ‘What about promoting Fraternity DuCaine? He’s young, he’s smart, he’s got a lot of energy.’

  ‘He doesn’t have enough experience, and he certainly doesn’t have Arthur’s weird way of looking at things.’

  ‘You’re right, but you’re never going to find someone who has that. Maybe what’s needed now is a fresh approach.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be any good. Fraternity’s mainly a tech-head. Can we not talk about this right now?’

  ‘It’s just that . . . there’s a woman I worked with a few months ago,’ said Banbury, shifting the last of his equipment. ‘She’s a forensic specialist with a lot of unusual ideas, clever, geeky, a bit on the autism spectrum. She came to the CoL from Munich and is looking for a change. Her name’s Steffi Vesta. Maybe you could trial her.’

  ‘It’s out of the question,’ said May. ‘Can you imagine what it would do to Arthur, knowing he’d been replaced? It would destroy him. This unit is all he has left to live for.’

  Dan glanced back at the steps and lowered his voice. ‘You don’t have to tell him, John. You always said the case has to come first. This girl was chained to a rock and left to drown. We’re going to need more help. What are you going to do, tell Raymond to turn it over to the CoL? It’s our case; nobody else will be able to do a better job, even without Mr Bryant.’

  ‘This German woman,’ said May. ‘What’s her specialization?’

  ‘She’s a lab rat but prefers being out on the street. Not a lateral thinker but very determined. Hell, she’s so keen to get into an outsource unit that she’s prepared to intern with us. What harm could it do?’

  ‘No, maybe later,’ said May stubbornly. ‘I’ll see Arthur’s doctor first. I owe it to him to exhaust every possibility.’

  The Emergency Medical Team had followed Banbury’s path and were standing by, awaiting a briefing session. ‘What if Dr Gillespie says there’s absolutely no hope?’ Banbury insisted.

  ‘Then we’ll have to consider taking someone else on board,’ May replied. ‘But not before. I’m not giving up yet.’

  5

  CAUTION & TRUST

  Ali Bensaud kept on the move and constantly changed the way he looked. This week he was in Victoria, the next in Hampstead. He worked out in the public parks. He knew he was handsome. When he smiled, even the most suspicious people were drawn to him.

  He had tried to find Zakaria Rahman in London, without any luck. He missed Ismael, his brother in all but blood. He missed his family. He sent a message to his father to say that he was fine, but heard nothing back. He would send money when he could, even if he heard nothing. This was a different world, where all about you people shed cash unthinkingly. You could almost see it falling from them like goat hairs. In small amounts: pounds for ice creams and soft drinks; ten-pound notes for beers. In large amounts: credit cards for designer clothes and theatre tickets and restaurant bills, cards placed unthinkingly into the hands of total strangers. If they were told that something would cost more they just shrugged and paid. No one ever apologized to them or offered a better service, they just took more money, and more money. The British were trusting and lacking in caution because these amounts meant nothing to them. They didn’t seem to know what anything was worth. Would this amount buy a loaf of bread, a packet of cigarettes, a phone? Half of them had no idea. There was water in every tap but they bought it in bottles. There were meals you could make but they paid fortunes to have them cooked. He stood in the station watching people buying railway tickets, being charged different amounts for the same ticket again and again, and hardly anyone complained. He saw a sea of opening wallets.

  Londoners were the worst; they were far too worried about time to care about money. There was a sign outside the Armenian barber shop in Victoria that promised to cut hair in five minutes or your money back. If a haircut took a minute more, would the world end? The Queen lived in Victoria. Did Prince Philip go there to get his hair cut? No, because he did not care about time. But everyone else who was rich did. People would hand over their phones because they could not be bothered to learn how to take a photograph. They left food, binned clothes and threw away computers because a new one had come out. Why shouldn’t you take from them that which they wouldn’t miss?

  He listened to them on tube trains and in shops, always talking about the time it took to do this or that. Then there was the thing about houses. Every day, the same conversations about houses, how much they were worth, how near they were to schools and stations, how much they could be sold for. Why would two people choose to live in a building that had ten rooms? An unused room was a sin. Why would they send their parents into care homes when they had room in their houses? He longed for a day when he could take the houses from them too, to make them see that they could be happier with less. To make them rediscover themselves and each other.

  There were other city-dwellers, ones who shopped in the cheapest supermarkets and went to sales and ate in junk-food outlets, and watched every last penny. They got fat from sugar and corn starch, and smoked and drank hard. They had a tough time raising kids and in them he recognized something of his own background, so he left them alone to concentrate on the rich ones.

  Ali did not have to pay to enter the nightclub in Greek Street. The Syrian on the door had come over in a vegetable truck and eye contact was all it took for the red ropes to be parted. Inside, the music was like a magnified heartbeat. He was making good money now, but had to be careful. He stood at the bar with a beer and looked around because in here he could not hear anyone speaking. He understood much from the way people stood, their hand gestures, the closeness of their faces.

  There were three girls grouped together, lambs protecting themselves from wolves. Any two would back up the third. They were of no use to him. There were girls everywhere, some of them beautiful, some dressed like whores. Sullen girls paired with angry, mean-eyed men; clutches of drunk girls quacking like ducks, who had no need of partners tonight. There were hunters looking for prey and invisible people who arrived with prettier, thinner friends. There was hardly anyone alone, except her.

  He guessed – rightly, it later turned out – that she had been abandoned, but her pride would not allow her to leave. Instead she had ordered another white wine and stood tapping her cobalt nails on the counter while a José Padilla track brought the Mediterranean into the basement. Padilla had been popular in Libyan beach bars but you couldn’t tell that to an Englishman; they thought you lived in mud huts. Besides, he never spoke about his roots. He was a Londoner now. Being a Londoner was, he learned, a state of mind that anyone could attain with a little hard work. You learned to say please and thank you and sorry, always sorry. You said sorry in a thousand different intonations and circumstances. You even apologized for being in the way when you weren’t. And you always had to be in a hurry, otherwise you didn’t look important.

  There was a long list of things you needed to do before becoming a Londoner, starting with learning how to use the system with intelligence and reason. And there were small things to learn, like the trick of catching the right part of the Northern line at King’s Cross and knowing how to cross a road diagonally and how to look right through the people you didn’t want to see, and having a favourite pub where the barman would, after two or three weeks, send you the faintest nod of greeting as you approached.

  By now Ali had been a hotel cleaner, an unregistered tour guide, a café busboy, a barman and a car-park attendant. He was living in a council flat with five others, and made sure that he hardly ever saw them. He paid cash because there were only supposed to be two people renting. The flat was sublet by a Greek electrician who had more than a dozen properties scattered across Camden and Dalston in a scheme he’d
arranged without the councils knowing; lots of people ran scams like that.

  There were still little things that gave Ali away. He didn’t have a bank account or a credit card. He couldn’t pronounce ‘Greenwich’ or find a fast route across Covent Garden. He watched a lot of films and read a lot of books, but they couldn’t teach him everything he needed to know. Up until now the only people who had helped him to move up were those who were getting a cut. It was time to find someone who would help him out of loyalty, even love. Which meant that he would have to make himself appealing in a new way.

  This was the hardest part of all. He’d had no practice, which was why he picked the girl standing at the end of the bar tapping her hand to the music. It was important not to look too eager or ingratiating. Better barely to care at all.

  He talked to her. If she had looked any less interested she would have fallen asleep. That was fine; it was just her style. He was careful not to stand too close. People here had a circle of space around them that you could not enter without permission. He had seen a film about a boy who was a vampire, and learned that you had to be invited inside. It was like that with girls. She was wearing a very short dress of white lace with black leggings underneath, the kind of outfit the girls at home wore when they were babies, and she had very high heels because she was worried about being short. She looked away from him and flicked her hair, catching sight of herself in the bar mirror. When she looked back she stole a glance at his face, then looked straight ahead.

  He casually turned to her. ‘Hey, how you doing?’ That was how it was done, as if you could hardly be bothered to open your mouth. He’d watched others and could copy their movements exactly.

  ‘OK.’

  He waited until his own glass was finished before offering. ‘I’m going to the bar – you want . . .?’

  She shook her head. ‘No.’ But this was part of the game. She wanted him to try a little harder.

  ‘Your glass is empty. It’s Saturday night. I’m going anyway.’ He made to move away.

  She shrugged and nodded imperceptibly at her glass. I’m not bothered but if you’re going . . . The thing about Londoners was, you had to interpret everything. No intention was ever made plain. If someone said, ‘Yes, we must do that,’ it usually meant, ‘Piss off.’ Was this a mark of sophistication or merely a sign that they were emotionally backward? He had already learned the hard way that an angry look from a London girl could crack mirrors, blight crops and freeze the Thames solid. There was a point where you became so refined that it made you stupid.

  But this one gave a guarded smile when he returned with the drinks, just a slight turning of the lips. Then she looked ahead again and listened to the music, sipping. They were facing the same direction together. He had read about body language, matching and mirroring. He had cracked part of the code but still had much to learn. It helped that he didn’t drink. Others revealed too much of themselves when they became drunk.

  She finally talked, and after that they moved to a spot where she could actually hear his replies.

  Her name was Cassie, short for Cassandra. She had a husky voice and said she came from Henley, had been there all her life until now. It was a town outside London that pretended it was in the countryside. The man she’d come with tonight had turned out to be a total tosser (he filed the new phrase) and she was better off without him because – and this she said in a single breath – in seven months he’d like bought her a drink one time only because he had this thing about her making more money than him because she worked for like a really high-end Kensington estate agent and was really ambitious and he was in IT and it paid like really badly but he didn’t care because he liked the job but he was all like bent totally out of shape about it plus he didn’t like her smoking?

  He understood the gist of what she was saying, even if he had trouble with some of the words she used. Although he had no knowledge of the English class system, he instinctively knew she came from somewhere in the middle of it. He listened to her and tried to copy the way she spoke. Henley. Foxtons. Unbelievable. Glastonbury. Funny how so many words had the accent on the first syllable.

  Ali had an exceptional memory, and filed away all the strange phrases he heard on the street. Earlier in the month he had met a young Indian man in a club on Brick Lane who seemed to be speaking an alien language. He quickly learned that 110s were expensive trainers. Bait was stupid. Rinsed was something used up. A ginul was a con. Mash was a gun. At first he exhausted himself trying to remember everything, but then he realized that he didn’t need to; many words belonged to different social groups, and he had not yet decided who he wanted to be. Cassie used none of these words but it was still hard to understand her because she never paused for breath, hurling herself at sentences and then lapsing into silence.

  She was still angry with the man who had left her. She wanted to get her own back, and just knowing that she needed something gave him an opening. He was thinking about this when he suddenly realized that she was speaking to him, asking his name. His eyes darted to the bar shelves lined with up-lit bottles behind her head. ‘Gordon,’ he said without missing a beat. ‘Gordon Hendrick.’

  ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  ‘No.’ He laughed. ‘That’s my name. My mother was an alcoholic.’ They both laughed. He was bright, not in the sense of having had a good education, but clever, quick, feral, fast. Because he remembered everything he could not be tricked by anyone.

  He said, ‘You have an accent, just a trace, something Russian.’ She gave him a long, hard look and said her mother had given her a different name, Natalya, but she had changed it. She had been born in Kazakhstan. How was that possible? She looked so English. Suddenly he realized that he still had a lot to learn. Cassie’s parents had brought her to London when she was three years old, so that made her a Londoner. Wasn’t everyone from somewhere else?

  She told him about her other jobs. She had worked for Allied Breweries but left because everyone drank too much, then went to the FCO, the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, as a translator writing press releases and sitting in on immigration interviews. She had a Mazda car and her own flat. What she didn’t have, as of an hour ago, was a boyfriend. She seemed as driven and determined as he was.

  It was too good to be true. Ali found himself on his best behaviour. It was suddenly very important that Cassie liked him. He had places to go and worlds to conquer. He needed a partner whose ferocious loyalty would cover his weaknesses and hide them from suspicious eyes. He knew what a power couple was and sensed great reserves of strength in her. She was pretty in an obvious, over-made-up way and her strength would probably become unbearable when she was older. Right now, though, she was just what he needed.

  He turned and smiled slightly and nodded. She was drinking faster than him. ‘Get you another,’ he said, and this time he did not have to wait for a reply because he knew he could walk away to the bar and find her there when he got back. Cassie had instinctively lied about her background upon meeting him. That was good. She knew how to protect herself. She was tough. They weren’t so different from one another.

  While he waited for the barman to pour their drinks, he thought about a possible future for both of them that would be something other than a romantic match. It would be an alliance, and woe betide anyone who was stupid enough to cross them.

  6

  REMEMBERING & FORGETTING

  Dr Gillespie’s third-floor office was situated directly behind the eye-damaging LED Coca-Cola sign in Piccadilly Circus, halfway along a dingy sepia-painted hallway filled with threadbare Indian carpets, African masks and earthenware pots of indeterminate origin. It was extraordinary to think that such places still existed in the heart of the city, but for the moment the building’s byzantine lease protected its few remaining tenants. London had more offices, clubs, bars and bedrooms hidden in tunnels, cellars, basements and chambers than anywhere else in Europe.

  John May stopped before the doctor’s door and knocked. An ex
plosion of coughing subsided and a voice gasped, ‘Come in.’

  The room had no windows and smelled of Vick’s VapoRub and liniment oil. Dr Gillespie had a black eye. He was wearing a flesh-coloured neck brace that forced up his chin and squashed his features into a funhouse-mirror version of his old self. He turned awkwardly and indicated the seat opposite his desk. ‘Impacted vertebrae,’ he said.

  ‘Car accident?’ May asked.

  ‘A difference of opinion with the wife about whose turn it was to bleed the radiators. I dodged a jar of pickled onions and fell over the dog. Your partner.’ He searched around for his notes, but couldn’t see his desktop.

  ‘Here, let me.’ May passed him a fat folder that looked as if it went back at least fifty years.

  ‘I’ve been doing some research. As I told you before, it’s not straightforward Alzheimer’s, at least not as I’ve ever experienced it. Excuse me.’ Gillespie extracted an enormous white linen handkerchief from his sleeve and released a snotty blast into it, wincing when the shock travelled to his spine. ‘Mr Bryant’s bouts of cognitive impairment have distinct phases. I thought at first that his so-called “blank moments” might be due to transient ischaemic episodes triggered by lapses in his brain’s blood supply.’

  ‘You mean mini-strokes.’

  ‘In layman’s terms. Except that there are anomalies. The disease is not taking its traditional path.’ Gillespie winced and gingerly touched his eye. ‘For example, he doesn’t seem to forget words. His memory is relatively undamaged. There are no indicative genetic markers in his background. He’s never had high blood pressure – that’s your problem, not his. You’re both getting on, you know.’

  ‘I’m three and a half years younger,’ said May defensively.

  Gillespie ignored him. ‘He does lose his place occasionally. He’s undergone quite a bit of sensory loss, ears and eyes, but that’s natural at his age. Balancing that, he’s far more physically and mentally active than most people of similar advanced years. And he never seems to get depressed. Why is that?’