Strange Tide

by Christopher Fowler

  Bryant replaced the book on his shelf, between WWII Carrier Pigeons and Farming Smocks of Somerset. ‘I don’t want to feel like a hospital patient confined to a ward.’

  ‘Then don’t think of it like that,’ said May. ‘Make the most of it, Arthur. Do a Mycroft Holmes, run things from here without leaving the comfort of that ratty old armchair. Get us to do all the running about.’ He had a sudden thought. ‘Suppose Tower Beach has been used before? It’s one of the few really secluded parts of the Thames Path. What if Dalladay wasn’t the first? You can get access to every cold case going back over the last decade, you might turn up something.’

  ‘Could you be any more condescending?’ asked Bryant with a grimace. ‘Perhaps you’d be happier if I sat here doing a nice jigsaw or taking the clock to bits.’

  ‘Well, the case is sort of like a jigsaw if you prefer to think of it—’

  Bryant threw a shoe at him. ‘Go on, hop it,’ he shouted. ‘I will not be treated like a mental defective.’

  ‘I think perhaps you’re in denial about your situation,’ said May.

  ‘I’m not in denial, I’m in an extremely aggravated state of furious despondency,’ Bryant barked back. And I’ll go where I damn well please, he thought, waiting until the coast was clear before picking up his overcoat and hat once more.

  18

  BIRTH & DEATH

  Arthur Bryant made two clandestine trips on Tuesday evening, and got an unwelcome surprise. First he went to visit Marion North in Chelsea, having been put in touch with her by his old friend Maggie Armitage. ‘If you really want to talk to an expert on the sacred river,’ she said, ‘you need to talk to Marion.’

  ‘Is she an academic?’ Bryant asked.

  ‘No,’ Maggie replied, ‘she’s a rather glamorous New Age evangelist and property developer.’

  ‘That’s an unusual hyphenate.’

  ‘She’s also a crook, but she’s very well connected and knows a lot about spiritual matters,’ said Maggie. ‘Let me give you her address.’

  Cheyne Walk had long been the most fashionable street in Chelsea, thanks to its extraordinary roster of residents, which had included Whistler, Turner and Ralph Vaughan Williams, Henry James, Laurence Olivier and Mick Jagger. Big names still lived there, but they were no longer drawn by the nature of the light dancing on the water. They were there to say I’ve arrived, I’m important, see what I can afford. But in truth it was hard to know if there were any residents at all, so rarely did Marion see anyone coming and going. They had to exist, of that she was sure, but perhaps they were mere names in company registers held overseas, investors in prime real estate they had only ever seen on a website.

  Marion North lived just beyond the walk in an ex-council flat on Cremorne Road, which veered away from the river and therefore became a less desirable location. She could see the back gardens and catch tantalizing glimpses of the river sparkling between the trees, but she might as well have been on Mars for all the good the proximity did her. Mrs North was a social climber, eaten up by the idea of getting on, and to be so close to so many rich and powerful people was a torture in which she luxuriated.

  ‘So lovely to have a visitor,’ said Mrs North, beaming her sunniest smile as she opened the door. She was small, neat and attractive, with gimlet eyes that missed nothing. She actually craned her head forward as she studied the elderly detective, noting the frayed lining of his oversized tweed coat, the hand-knitted scarf which appeared to have been knotted underneath his shirt and the darned hatband on his trilby from which protruded a ticket stub for a 1959 production of Ruddigore. As her eyes swept up and down, her smile lost a little of its effervescence. And those trousers – were there really pyjama bottoms sticking out from beneath them? She quickly invited him inside before anyone passing could see.

  ‘Thank you for meeting me at such short notice,’ said Bryant. ‘Do you have a bin?’ He pulled what appeared to be a sardine from his pocket. ‘It fell out of my sandwich,’ he explained cheerfully, handing her the fish.

  Marion managed to conceal her revulsion beneath a determined smile, and offered tea. ‘I have camomile, mint or elderflower.’

  ‘Builder’s will be fine,’ said Bryant, looking around like a burglar casing the joint. ‘And a biscuit.’

  Mrs North looked flustered. ‘I don’t think we have—’

  ‘Nothing fancy, just a custard cream will do to settle me. Gyppy tummy. Ta.’

  Mrs North led him through to a front room that had enough dried flowers in it to choke an asthmatic. Bryant found himself in a hell of pastel shades, beige, soft olive and mauve. Locating a gigantic, dusty-pink armchair, he disappeared into it.

  His hostess returned with a rough approximation of regular tea, acknowledging her visitor’s social status by providing him with a mug, keeping a Spode floral teacup for herself. Of biscuits she found none. ‘Before my husband and I divorced we travelled the world,’ she said. ‘We lived in Geneva – for our daughter’s schooling, you understand – and were going to live in Cheyne Walk when we returned.’ She was unable to resist a peep out of the faux lead-light window. ‘But it transpired that he had debts and, well, one was forced into more straitened circumstances.’

  ‘I wouldn’t complain,’ said Bryant. ‘It’s a nice gaff, this. Mind you, these old drums near the river get wicked damp.’ Bryant did not enjoy the company of the upwardly mobile, and tended to exaggerate his use of the vernacular when he was in their presence. He could get quite jellied eels-ish if the wrong person wound him up, and there was something about Mrs North that wasn’t quite right. ‘As I explained on the phone, you know a friend of mine—’ He moved a china Buddha back from his elbow, just in case.

  ‘I wouldn’t say “friend”, exactly,’ Mrs North replied, anxious to distance herself from Maggie Armitage. ‘More of an acquaintance.’

  ‘I understand she met you at a spiritualist’s meeting.’

  Mrs North shifted uncomfortably on her too-small chair. ‘It was all terribly Victorian. I thought she was quite wrong about the medium, who was quite marvellous – but surely this isn’t why you’re here.’

  ‘Maggie tells me you’re a bit of an expert on certain elemental subjects, specifically the Thames.’

  Mrs North set her teacup aside. ‘If one is interested in matters spiritual it’s only natural to study the elements. After all, water is their mother. It has the ability to purify itself, which is one of the requirements of motherhood, since life must begin in purity. Do you wish to take notes?’

  ‘No, ta,’ said Bryant, ‘I’ve got a brain.’ He flicked the side of his head.

  ‘Right, well, er, water – moving water is spiritually pure. It calms and harmonizes. It is clear, yet contains all. It changes constantly, and can never be stilled. It is consciousness personified. No wonder we revere it.’

  ‘You can freeze it,’ said Bryant.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You said it can never be stilled, but it can turn to ice.’

  ‘Yes, but only to thaw and start flowing once more.’ Mrs North’s smile slipped a little. She was not one to be beaten by a common little policeman dressed like a rag-and-bone man. ‘Please feel free to ask me anything. If I can’t answer I’m bound to know someone who can – I know simply everyone. For example just the other day—’

  ‘Why are rivers considered sacred?’

  ‘They bring life. They are life. But as a rule they are not Christian. They contain deities, promote fertility and bring about destruction, so in that respect they behave like pagan gods and demons. There was a spot in the Thames known as “Black John’s Pit” from which imps leaped forth to push the heads of children underwater. I’ve always thought that the indentations along Blackfriars Bridge look like pulpits, with a backdrop of pedestrians forming a moving congregation.’

  Bryant tried the tea. It was awful. He didn’t bother to suppress a grimace. ‘If rivers are gods, do people make sacrifices to them?’

  ‘But of course! All kinds
of sacrifices were made to the Mother Thames, from sheaves of corn and loaves to money and animals, and thus the future was divined. The Thames possesses the power of hydromancy. Its roots are sacred. Even the tree that grows at its source has been worshipped for centuries.’

  Bryant set the tea down and pushed it away. It was so weak that he could see through it even with milk in. ‘I read somewhere that the Thames has its own saint.’

  ‘Indeed, Mr Bryant, St Birinus, who converted the Saxons to Christianity by baptizing them in the river during the seventh century. And later, in the eleventh century, St Alphege, who was said to have parted the Thames and was beaten to death with ox-bones.’

  ‘Well, nobody likes a smartarse.’

  ‘There are many, many other saints, both male and female. Some of the men had their left hands cut off and cast into the river.’

  ‘Oh?’ Bryant perked up. ‘Why?’

  ‘To transubstantiate, to unite them with the water. This was the line where penitence crossed into punishment. The church was always a political body, and wherever there is water there is worship. That’s why so many churches and abbeys line the Thames Valley.’

  ‘What about this area?’ Bryant dug into his coat and produced a crude map he had scribbled out on the back of a takeaway falafel menu. ‘Tower Beach?’

  ‘That’s an area associated with St Mary the Virgin,’ Mrs North replied without a moment’s hesitation. ‘Masses were held at Greenwich for the souls of mariners. Some of her churches are the sites of prehistoric settlements. One arch of London Bridge was actually known as Mary Lock. There were a great many monasteries built on the banks, and there are still more than fifty riverside churches dedicated to St Mary over the course of the Thames. Virgins bathed in its waters to become fertile.’

  ‘So it’s possible that a female might also be sacrificed to the river?’

  Mrs North pursed her lips. ‘Unlikely,’ she said. ‘The river is a giver of life.’

  ‘But you said it also destroys.’

  ‘It does, indeed. But it would have to be a male sacrifice. The waters can only move in conjunction with the moon, which is of course the greatest female goddess.’

  Bryant had the distinct sense that he would get nowhere further here. Mrs North was selecting facts that suited her own particular world view. He knew that the Reformation had all but destroyed the spiritual significance of the Thames, because of the dissolution of so many monasteries along its banks. The saints were replaced by the pageantry of monarchs, and then the commerce of maritime trade.

  He mentally crossed out the line of inquiry. If anyone recalled the sacred origins of the Thames today, it was hardly likely they considered the Square Mile to be best suited for conducting such a ceremony.

  ‘Take a look at this,’ said Ray Kirkpatrick, the ursine head-banger who happened to be an English literature academic. They were standing in the conservation department of the British Library on Euston Road, a long white hall filled with wide, antiseptically clean tables and plans chests. Kirkpatrick raised the battered brown leather volume in his great paws, which were barely covered by a pair of white cotton gloves. ‘Back in 1623 it went for about a quid. Seven hundred and fifty copies were printed. There are two hundred and twenty-eight left, one recently found in a Calais library. Most of the remaining copies are owned by bloody dot.com millionaires. Be careful with it.’

  ‘May I?’ Bryant goggled at the pages, as brittle as dried rose petals. ‘A Shakespeare first folio. I’ve never seen one before.’

  ‘Check out the dedications,’ said Kirkpatrick, ‘especially from John Heminge and Henry Condell, the actors who edited it.’ He raised the volume and read aloud.

  ‘To the great Variety of Readers. From the most able, to him that can but spell: there you are number’d. We had rather you were weighed; especially, when the fate of all bookes depends upon your capacities and not of your heads alone, but of your purses. Well! It is now publique, & you wil stand for your priviledges wee know: to read, and censure. Do so, but buy it first.

  ‘They’re making jokes and saying don’t just stand there reading it, buy the bloody thing! Nearly four hundred years later and people are making exactly the same joke on their book jackets.’

  ‘The Thames,’ Bryant prompted his old friend once more. Kirkpatrick spent too much time working alone in the library stacks and was apt to drift off into its byways.

  ‘I can’t recall any direct Shakespeare quotes about the river, but there must be some. Most London books have something about the Thames in them. Are you sure this is the right way to be tackling a murder investigation?’

  ‘Why have you got this out anyway?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘Running repairs, innit? We had the Magna Carta in here for treatment against mites last week,’ said Kirkpatrick, sounding like a cabbie mentioning a celebrity fare. He scratched about in his voluminous beard and dislodged heaven-knows-what in the way of breakfasty residue. ‘Now that’s a Thames document, signed on the river itself, at Runnymede. The Thames is central to all London history. What about Dickens? There’s a whole book on the subject: Dickens’s Dictionary of the Thames, 1887.’

  ‘Which Charles Dickens didn’t write,’ said Bryant dismissively. ‘His son banged it out. Unfortunately he wrote like a tea merchant, which is what he was. He died with just seventeen quid to his name. Dad had cut him out of the will for marrying a barmaid. Don’t try and test me.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Kirkpatrick laughed and shook his great head, which reminded Bryant of the stone bust of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery. ‘I heard that you were losing your marbles, but you seem pretty much all there to me.’

  ‘Let’s not talk about illness, it’s as boring as looking at photos of babies,’ Bryant responded. ‘I’ve got a problem.’

  ‘Of course you have, that’s why you’re here.’

  ‘A drowning.’

  ‘Whereabouts?’

  ‘In the Thames Tideway.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Arthur, the tidal reach stretches all the way from Teddington Lock. Can’t you be a bit more specific?’

  ‘Only if you keep your fat mouth shut this time,’ said Bryant, indignant. ‘Remember when I told you about the Shepherd’s Market black sausage scandal? “In the strictest confidence”, I said. I had half a dozen blokes armed with nail-studded cricket bats threatening to make me the mystery ingredient in their catering packs, all because you talked to someone in a pub.’

  ‘All right,’ sighed Kirkpatrick, holding his thick fingers over his heart. ‘I swear not to tell a living soul. Who’s brown bread?’

  Bryant explained the situation. ‘Normally you look for motive and opportunity among those closest to the deceased, right? So far we’re getting nowhere with that. In this case it’s the location that’s puzzling me. Why the Thames, why Tower Beach? There are some obvious answers – the seclusion and lack of cameras – but I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something else. The location. The river must mean something.’

  ‘Of course, Chuck Dickens wrote a load more about the Thames,’ said Kirkpatrick, rolling his chair over to the nearest monitor and flicking open the digitized works. ‘At the start of Bleak House he speaks of “Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.” But most obviously, he speaks of the Thames throughout Our Mutual Friend. Towards the end of his life Dickens was heading into some pretty dark places. His marriage had fallen apart, his friends were disappearing and none of the things that fired his lifelong anger had changed since he’d begun writing. London’s grinding poverty was still all about him, and the ambitious were climbing on to the backs of those less fortunate to reach the top. Our Mutual Friend is Dickens’s last complete novel, and it’s about shit. Making money from it, to be precise. It’s a book about ambition in London, turning waste into gold, and of course it starts with a corpse being dragged from the Thames between Southwark Bridge and Londo
n Bridge, like something from a horror film. But parts of the book are also a bloody good laugh. And the river courses through it, flowing and swirling and frothing around the characters, befouling everything it touches. Once it had been something pure and fresh, but after the Great Stink of 1858 it became the personification of misery and death. The Thames was a signifier of class, too. Its upper waters, where higher society resided, were far cleaner than the lower reaches. It affected everyone. Even the railway arches that scar South London were put there because the river had turned the land to marshes.’ Kirkpatrick shook his head again. ‘Is it such a surprise to find one more body there?’

  ‘A sacrifice, no,’ said Bryant, ‘but a murder, and in such merciless circumstances . . .’ He searched about for his hat and jammed it on his head. ‘I wish I could say you’ve been a great help, but it feels like every step forward I take involves another step back.’

  ‘Then you’re behaving like the Thames itself,’ said Kirkpatrick, giving a great bellow of a laugh. ‘You’re just another courtier to the tides and the moon.’

  The tides and the moon, Bryant thought as he headed home. It had gone 8.00 p.m., and as his flat was just across Euston Road and the weather was clement, he decided to walk back.

  He had only got as far as Bidborough Street when the bomb went off.

  19

  LADDERS & SNAKES

  ‘Oi, you, don’t just stand there, get to a bloody shelter!’ shouted the man in the green tin helmet. The fat little ARP warden was pointing right at him. Bryant had been planning to cross the road and cut through to the alleyway connecting the two grey halves of Cromer Street, but when he looked up it had gone, blasted away in a great tumbling torrent of tarmac, bricks and plaster. Flames flourished at the mouth of a shattered gas pipe, sending shafts of saffron light through the smoke, painting the street in the colours of hell.

  Bryant looked down at his coat, his trousers, his boots. He was covered in dust but didn’t seem to have been harmed in any way. The siren soared and dipped as the warden ran over to him. ‘Didn’t you ’ear what I just said? You want to get your bloody head knocked off?’