Strange Tide

by Christopher Fowler

  The boat ahead showed no signs of slowing down, which was bad for both of them. Too many deaths on the Thames were caused by private craft colliding with commercial vessels.

  They were approaching one of the trickiest sections of the river. Three crossings clustered next to each other. The misted struts of Hungerford Bridge and the two Golden Jubilee Bridges rose through the rain, then Embankment Pier on the left, Festival Pier on the right, plus various slow-moving river buses, cruise boats and barges, some crossing from one shore to the other, all in the lowered visibility of the downpour. Fraternity had been raised in a West Indian Christian community, and although he was no longer a believer he felt like touching the gold crucifix he still wore beneath his shirt.

  The other launch swung hard to port and he only just managed to avoid punching into its wake. Thames regulations were the opposite of those for road driving, and required users to stay right on the river. Now he was being forced over, out into the central channel and the lane of the opposing river traffic. Worse, the dark columns of the pier were dead ahead. His opponent was pushing closer, seizing the advantage.

  Fraternity was forced to throttle back as the first launch powered forward. There had to be another way around.

  A river bus was turning, churning the water into a greenish plume around its stern, blocking access. The next pier was connected to the shore by a walkway held aloft on thin iron stanchions. There was space enough to get the launch through to the other side, but he would not be able to see the struts until he was almost upon them.

  If I make it through this, thought Fraternity, I’ll stay on dry land for the rest of my life. He accelerated, preparing to cut under the walkway. He knew the metal pillars were hard to spot because they had recently been painted deep green. He stood up, leaning forward, trying to see them. He thought about closing his eyes and hoping for the best. The pier was approaching at tremendous speed. A handful of startled tourists began clearing the walkway as he came near.

  The pylons loomed out of the rain just as he was almost upon them. They appeared a lot closer together than he remembered. One was dead ahead. Fighting to correct his path, he oversteered and caught it on his port side. The grinding of iron pillar and fibreglass hull sounded bad, but a moment later he was through the pier and out, drawing parallel with the other launch. He tried to see the pilot’s face, but rain and speed denied him a clear view.

  Between the golden eagle of the RAF memorial on the north bank to the London Eye on the south, the Thames was suddenly filled with small craft and tourist boats. They were hitting the city’s single most crowded marine crossing-point. Everywhere he looked there were river vessels of every size, shape, power and colour. Half a dozen skiffs were filled with schoolchildren, for God’s sake.

  The launch beside him took the only option possible, fan-tailing into the tightest U-turn it could manage. Enveloped in a blast of horns it looped to starboard against river rules, still making the turn too wide. Its pilot had not allowed for the incoming powerful current, which broadsided his launch and slowed it down.

  Fraternity could see what would happen; the boat would be forced between the barges and the great wall of the embankment. He swung to port, powered up and came in from the other end, blocking its path. There was a rasp of steel and stone from the pursued boat as it hit a buttress protruding from the embankment wall.

  Fraternity was only just able to come to a stop before meeting the same fate. The other vessel rocked heavily as the man he had been chasing leaned out to reach the river wall. As the boat moved away beneath him he lost his balance and was dropped into the water.

  The DC knew that if he dived in as well he would lose his only advantage. He came alongside the panicking man and signalled to him. The launch was still turning and grinding against the wall. The suspect thrashed in the water as it backed on to him, its spinning propeller now a lethal weapon. As it bore down on him he disappeared from view. Fraternity brought the launch around and grabbed the lifebuoy attached to the boat’s hull.

  He thought he had the situation under control until he saw the blossom of crimson in the brown water; the object of his pursuit had been sliced by the roaring blades.

  24

  TOSHERS & MUDLARKS

  On Wednesday afternoon, King’s Cross was scabbed with clouds the colour of dried blood. As a rainstorm of apocalyptic proportions broke, the two Daves went running for buckets, knowing that the downpour would expose a number of flaws in their window repairs.

  ‘Well, if it isn’t James Bond,’ said Janice Longbright as Fraternity dripped all over her desk. ‘Do you want me to give you a rough estimate of the damage bill?’

  ‘I was trying to save someone’s life,’ said Fraternity, struggling to get his soaked boots off.

  ‘Your suspect came in DOA. It wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Fraternity quietly.

  ‘Do you want to know who he was? Bill Crooms, fifty-six, an engineer from Manchester down on his luck, staying at a Travelodge on the Euston Road, paying his bills in cash.’ She checked her screen. ‘Chalk another one up to Old Father Thames. We’ve got an ID for the body under the bridge, too. Dimitri Gilyov, forty-seven, engineer, born in Fryazino, which is supposedly to the north-east of Moscow, although I couldn’t find it. While I’m waiting for further information, read and sign please.’ She handed him several pages.

  ‘What’s this?’ Fraternity asked.

  ‘Your insurance waiver. Don’t worry, there’ll be lots more paperwork after your interview with Barbara Biddle.’

  ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘New internal investigations. It shouldn’t be too adversarial. Charing Cross Hospital’s Emergency Medical Team say Crooms suffered a massive myocardial infarction. Not his first one. This time he died instantly, thanks to a combination of factors: the stress of a high-speed pursuit and a plunge into freezing water. The head wound probably came just after and finished the job. He had a stratospheric alcohol level in his bloodstream.’

  ‘So I’m off the hook?’

  ‘Not quite. We have to argue that his death wasn’t the direct result of police intervention but a consequence of him fleeing the scene after assaulting an officer, which means it’ll be treated as misadventure pending further investigation.’

  ‘Surely if he died in the river the matter should go to the Wapping Marine Policing Unit,’ said Bryant, appearing in the doorway. He gave his Lorenzo Spitfire a thump and dug for his tobacco pouch. ‘They get the corpse but not the case.’

  ‘Can you not knock your pipe out on my lintel?’ asked Longbright. ‘I’m about to copy them in on Fraternity’s statement.’

  ‘Give them more information than they know what to do with.’ Bryant made a horrible draining noise on his pipe and squinted through the barrel. ‘They pull a hundred bodies out of the water every year so they’ll be thrilled to receive tons of extra paperwork. Their job’s tough enough as it is. Ask Fraternity here.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Fraternity confirmed, ‘I saw some stuff dragged out of the mud that I’d rather forget. And it was always cold out on the water, even on sunny days. They’re a hard bunch.’

  The Marine Police Force had been founded in 1798, and was the oldest in the world. At that time the Pool of London was so congested that ships waited up to two months to leave, so two hundred men armed with muskets, pistols and swords fought the night plunderers and river pirates who pilfered cargo. They wore nickel anchors on their reefer jackets and eventually became the Thames Division of the Metropolitan Police. DC DuCaine had trained with them for six exhausting, freezing weeks.

  ‘They’re not happy about you commandeering one of their launches,’ said Longbright. ‘Where did you get the ignition code?’

  ‘The old boats just have a key,’ DuCaine explained. ‘We were issued with them during training. I never returned mine.’

  ‘What, and you just happened to have it on you?’

  ‘It’s got a really cool anchor on it. I use it as
my key ring.’

  ‘I imagine they might want it back now. What about his?’

  Fraternity blew his nose noisily. ‘No idea. He certainly didn’t know the river, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Did you know it’s where we get the term “police station” from?’ said Bryant out of the blue. ‘From the Marine Police Force. If a craft is “on station” it’s anchored. And “on the beat” – that comes from the beating of oars in river police boats.’

  Longbright looked at the man she had known all of her working life in puzzlement. Today he was back to his usual infuriatingly random, lateral-thinking self. Yet he had failed to attend his appointment for a new MRI scan and was flagrantly disobeying orders to stay put.

  ‘Connections,’ Bryant continued, ‘where are they? Crooms and Gilyov were both engineers. Did they know each other? Were they friends, did they work together, live in the same area?’

  ‘Until two months ago Crooms was doing contract work as an automotive mechanic based out of Dubai,’ said Longbright. ‘We’ve got nothing on Gilyov except that he was born in Russia and was carrying out electrical work here in London for corporate clients. His last employer says he failed to turn up for work three weeks ago.’

  ‘Nobody reported it?’ asked Fraternity.

  ‘What, electrician fails to turn up for job?’ said Longbright. ‘Are you having a laugh?’ She checked her screen. ‘Gilyov has no family here. Like Crooms he was broke and living in a cheap hotel. Dan is covering both sites.’

  ‘Then maybe they’ve got nothing to do with Dalladay,’ said Bryant, ‘and Gilyov’s left hand just happened to wash up near her body.’ From a man who spent most of his time trying to join together disparate events, this was an atypical remark.

  ‘So we go back to concentrating on Dalladay?’

  ‘I didn’t say that they weren’t associates, Janice,’ Bryant warned. ‘Just that they weren’t directly involved with the drowned girl.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m confused,’ said Longbright. ‘If they had nothing to do with Dalladay, what connects them?’

  ‘Why, the river, of course,’ said Bryant, waving his pipe. ‘And it’s going to help us find out what’s going on.’

  ‘I wish I had your faith,’ said Longbright, ‘but it’s a bit like expecting the pavement to tell you why a bloke was stabbed on the street.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Bryant agreed, lighting his pipe.

  Out in the corridor, one of the Daves was rehanging a grim sepia painting of a scowling, top-hatted Sir Edward Henry, the police commissioner who had introduced fingerprinting and police dogs. ‘The old man’s back on form, then,’ he told Meera. ‘He’s in there arguing with everyone. I don’t know why he wants this ugly old git put up on the wall. Is it valuable?’

  ‘It’s crooked, like you, and it’s history, which is what you’ll be in a minute if you don’t watch it,’ said Meera.

  John May opened his office window and coughed out of it. Bryant’s pipeful of Ancient Mariner Mentholated Rolling Tobacco was filling the room with pale green smoke. Some months earlier, May had been forced to take the batteries out of the alarm to stop it from constantly blaring out through the building. I’m a victim of passive smoking, he thought, and passive lunacy. He poisons me with his tobacco and fills my head with miscellaneous rubbish.

  ‘What snakes through the heart of this investigation?’ Bryant continued, unconcerned about whether anyone was listening to him. ‘The Thames. The Silent Highway. Liquid history. Think about the crimes that have been committed on it, in it or beside it, the livelihoods that depended on it, all the dock complexes, London and St Katharine’s, Surrey Commercial, India and Millwall, the Royals and Tilbury. Between them they took up an area of three thousand acres. Thirty miles of quays and dry docks. Think about the toshers, the mudlarks, the scuffle-hunters, the lumpers—’

  ‘Nope,’ said May, ‘it’s gone.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The signal.’ He rotated an index finger at his forehead. ‘The decoding apparatus that translates your transmissions from gobbledegook into something my dullard brain can process. Who are these people you’re on about, and of what possible use are they to us?’

  ‘It’s simple,’ said Bryant, warming to his subject. ‘Toshers were sewer-hunters. They worked the outlets at the edge of the Thames, trudging through the glutinous mud with eight-foot poles that they used to extricate themselves. They were after copper mostly, but iron, rope, bones, anything they could use or sell. They had names like One-Eyed George and Short-Arse Jack, and sometimes they found gold sovereigns, silver cutlery, jewels and necklaces that had belonged to the brothel-ladies of Southwark.’

  ‘OK,’ said May slowly. ‘And mudlarks?’

  ‘They were lower down the scale. They lived in tunnels or on the foreshore itself. Wretched old women clad in rags, fighting off rats to hunt for dropped copper nails and tools. Scuffle-hunters pretended to look for work in the overcrowded docks, causing fights so that they could steal imported items and hide them in their long aprons. And lumpers—’

  ‘All right, I get it, but listen to me, Arthur, you do understand that it was all a long time ago, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ his partner replied irritably. ‘I’m not an idiot.’

  ‘There’s no Pool of London any more. These people don’t exist now. The Thames merely provided Dalladay with the manner of her death, so all of these potty facts you trot out are of no use. They’re just local colour. If you put them in your memoirs an editor would write “irrelevant” beside them in red ink and make you cut them out.’

  ‘Exactly, which is why they’re so important,’ said Bryant. ‘It’s the irrelevancies that lend us an understanding of the world.’ He raised his forefinger. ‘Here’s an interesting fact.’

  May groaned.

  ‘When the BBC needed to re-use videotape in the 1960s they had to decide which programmes to wipe. They kept the Shakespeare productions and taped over the “irrelevant” modern dramas. Guess which would have been more useful to us today? Here.’ From beneath his desk he dragged a length of chain and dumped it on to his blotter.

  ‘Is that what I think it is?’ asked May. ‘The reason why we have evidence bags is to stop you sticking your fat fingers all over things.’

  ‘The connection between Dalladay’s wrist and an iron ring set in a slab of concrete,’ said Bryant. ‘Dan couldn’t find out anything else, but then he was looking for relevant facts, where and when it was purchased and so on.’

  ‘What’s your point?’

  He held the chain high and twirled it. ‘What do you think of it?’

  ‘What do you mean? It’s a spivvy silver chain with a silver moon on one end.’

  ‘But it’s not hers. It’s an Arabic man’s neck-chain, John. You just don’t see it as one because it’s not an English style of male jewellery. The links are old but the one that opens is modern. Maybe the original was broken so someone repurposed it. If the killer didn’t want her to escape, why not use a proper chain and padlock with a key, then throw the key away?’

  May found himself growing exasperated. ‘I don’t know, Arthur. Maybe he was improvising.’

  ‘Try again. Who would wear something like this now?’

  ‘I don’t know – someone who likes old jewellery—’

  ‘But not a collector. Look at the scratches and dents on it. So it has sentimental meaning rather than monetary value. Someone changed the lock – why? So he could give it to a girl? Or did it belong to a she? Dalladay was pregnant but by whom was she loved?’

  ‘I don’t see where you’re going with this,’ said May, waving away smoke.

  ‘What did I tell you about the river? The Tamesas, the Dark Water. It attracts suicides. I think she killed herself.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ May exploded. ‘No one in their right mind—’

  ‘She wasn’t in her right mind, was she? That’s why there was only one set of footprints going towards the tideline, and why no
one saw her – because if they did, all they saw was a girl walking along the shore. What if she acted on the spur of the moment and used the chain from around her own neck? It bothered me right from the start that only her left wrist was tied. Try locking this with your hands held together; it’s almost impossible.’ He hefted it in his palm. ‘What do we know about Dalladay, really? That she was an easily influenced young woman who failed to find her place in the world. She was frightened she was going to change her mind about committing suicide, so she chose a method of death that took away the option of escape.’

  ‘Wait – if it really was a suicide that means there was no murderer, and that means this other thing, the drowning of Dimitri Gilyov, isn’t related.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t say there wasn’t a murderer,’ said Bryant with a mysterious smile.

  25

  MOTHER & DAUGHTER

  It seemed like a lifetime ago since the crazy witch-woman in the Rainbow Theatre had foiled Ali’s communication system with the aid of a pair of scissors. Much had happened since then. Cassie had always known that the faith-healing racket would turn out to be a waste of time and resources. The problem, she knew, was that they’d had no way of tapping into the ministry’s congregations. Most of those who’d attended Ali’s events came because they were lonely and credulous, and they were usually so short of cash that the Ministry of Compassion had struggled to sell so much as a T-shirt after each show. Finsbury Park wasn’t America, where the tradition of evangelism had deep roots within communities and the congregations had deeper pockets.

  Cassie was worried. She rarely turned to her mother for advice, and doing so made her feel uncomfortable. She checked her watch and knew that Marion would be entering the restaurant right now. Her mother was always on time. Today she was dressed entirely in purple, which was unfortunate because she clashed horribly with the orange leather banquettes.

  ‘I don’t know why you had to pick this place, darling,’ Marion said with distaste, settling herself gingerly. ‘No one would be seen dead in here.’ She had missed the point; Cassie had chosen it precisely because it was unfashionable. The only diners were a group of dough-faced Russian men hammering vodkas beneath a vast golden chandelier.