Strange Tide

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Not a clue.’

  ‘She was booked for six sessions, two a week, and was less than halfway through. She had one arranged for last Sunday night. The night she died.’ The young PC checked the Life Options website and found no mention of it. ‘There’s nothing here.’

  Longbright winced at the thought. ‘It seems a bit unlikely that a holistic health centre would be mixed up in this, don’t you think?’

  ‘Mr Bryant never seems to worry about whether it’s unlikely,’ Fraternity replied. ‘He’d see that phrase “sacred river” and run off with it.’

  ‘Then we’d better think like him,’ said Longbright.

  30

  SINKING & DROWNING

  Bryant was restless. The room was overheated. Alma’s steak and kidney pudding lay heavily in his stomach. Feeling miserable and sorry for himself, he had gone to bed early and had now awoken at the wrong time. The duvet kept sliding to the floor with spiteful deliberation. He had somehow managed to turn himself around inside his pyjamas. Exasperated, he sat up and checked the time: 10.47 p.m. There was no point lying there staring at the ceiling, his brain racing. He decided to get up and work.

  Locating a pad of foolscap and a fountain pen, he began making notes. Outside the secret rain was making the dullest surfaces glisten. In weather like this even the most trampled patches of Central London were capable of sprouting moss. Walls darkened, pavements turned green and drains blocked. It was as if the pervasive damp sought to breed more adaptive life forms. Restless, he turned the radio on. An announcer was warning that the Thames barrier had been lowered. The tide was unusually high tonight and low-lying parts of the city were at risk of flooding. A cyclist had come off his bike in a deserted part of Canary Wharf and had drowned in the shallow lake that had formed by the side of the road. The spirits of the river were abroad, Bryant decided. It was a bad night to be out.

  He forced himself to think about the logistics of the case. They had assumed from the start that Dalladay had been chained in the Thames because it was an unmonitored spot. Along the sixty miles of north-side pathway following the river through the city, starting by the Prospect of Whitby, the oldest river tavern still standing, were alleyways hemmed with tall, spiked fences, coils of razor wire and security cameras. Corporations were required to allow public access but had made it almost impossible for anyone to gain entry. In place of the promised pathway lay a patchwork maze of obstructions cloaked in municipal ambiguity. The riverside developers acted as if they owned London’s best views, hiring security guards to intimidate anyone who tried to exercise their legal rights. Therefore choosing the spot for its secluded inaccessibility showed premeditation and planning.

  If Dalladay was despondent about being pregnant, why did she not choose to terminate? The doctor’s report suggested she was not unhappy at all. So why would she have killed herself in such a bizarre fashion? She had a predilection for self-mythologizing and was in a confused state, so she might have attempted a rebirth ritual, casting her old spirit into the waters in order to return anew. Either that or she wanted to hurt someone, to say: You made me do this. Given what he knew about her, neither solution seemed likely, but who could fully appreciate her state of mind?

  Stay at home and go through your books, John had kept telling him, but how could they help? There was no more room for books in Bryant’s office. His bedroom and the lounge he shared with Alma had shelves bellying with the weight of obscure tracts, catalogues, indices, files, novels, magazines, paperbacks, reference works and manuals. He looked at the bifurcated, sundered, foxed and otherwise buggered-about-with volumes and his heart sank. Could this sad little archive really be of any use in uncovering the reason for a young woman’s death? He knew he had to keep his mind occupied or he would sink in its churning currents.

  ‘Keep at it, you stupid old fool,’ he said aloud. ‘What else can you do?’

  Approaching the first of the shelves, he cracked his knuckles and set to work.

  Longbright rubbed her eyes and checked her watch: 10.47 p.m. She fantasized about a microwaved toad-in-the-hole. It was either that or macaroni cheese, which she hated. There was nothing else in the PCU kitchen cupboard except cat food and a litre bottle of slivovitz with ‘Toxicity test – Don’t Drink!’ written across the label in Bryant’s hand.

  She couldn’t leave Fraternity collating reports by himself. Raymond Land had cited a migraine and beetled off home, Dan was going over data with Giles, Meera and Colin had been sent back to Lambeth Bridge by John. Speaking of which, where was John? She’d tried calling him, but his phone went straight to voicemail.

  She and Fraternity had finished filing statements from Dimitri Gilyov’s most recent workmates, and they repeated the same mantra: he was a good worker who kept to himself, he wasn’t a man you crossed, and there wasn’t anything more to say about him. Gilyov had sometimes worked in tandem with another engineer, Andrei, who said that Gilyov had a vile temper but didn’t drink any more – that last word had been stressed with a certain ominousness – and tried to keep his nose clean these days. There were hints of past tragedies, but Andrei didn’t seem too sure of his facts because Gilyov never confided in anyone. He kept his male friends at arm’s length and if he wanted female companionship he hired it.

  Longbright wandered into the common room and took another look at the whiteboard. The St Alphege Centre had come up clean too. There was nothing in the Life Options accounts that smelled bad. They weren’t in financial trouble. Far from it; judging by their press coverage in the past few weeks investors were likely to be beating down their doors. North’s mother was a bit of a character, a New Age therapist with a midnight cable TV show and a line of crappy-looking jewellery. Her daughter was more of a mystery, a finishing-school dropout who had somehow hooked up with Thornberry and set about turning him into a brand.

  Unsurprisingly, there was no Alistair Thornberry on the electoral register. Ali looked to be of Arabic descent, in which case his name made more sense. His web presence had been so carefully controlled that she wondered if he’d used a company to eradicate past misdemeanours and have his autocomplete searches deleted. Maybe someone like Reputation.com had cleaned his cache and eliminated all earlier photographs. The right to be forgotten was now legally enshrined, so the practice made good business sense.

  She thought about Ali. Given his Middle Eastern features, there was a chance that ‘Thornberry’ might have fled from conflict at some point in the past. She ran a check through London GCHQ and Interpol but nothing was immediately apparent. She also talked to Cheltenham and Scarborough, but drew blanks in both security outposts, which meant that either he was an illegal immigrant operating under a new identity, or he had changed his name and they simply had no records on him because he had never done anything to warrant their attention. Without a valid reason to connect him to the case, a deep search would require higher approval and take several days.

  Not that she ever trusted GCHQ to tell her the truth. On the few times she had visited their red, white and purple offices, which reminded her of a mall in a motorway service station, their officers had treated her as if she was on a school trip to learn about democracy.

  Back at her screen, she uploaded the headshots she had surreptitiously taken at the centre. They showed a man in his late twenties with aquiline features and slightly imperfect teeth, his musculature accentuated by a tailored midnight-blue suit. Dan had facial recognition software so advanced that no one else knew how to operate it. If he couldn’t find out who Ali Thornberry was, nobody could.

  Beneath Lambeth Bridge, Colin Bimsley stumped along the shoreline with a polystyrene tray of cod and chips in one hand. ‘If someone jumps out of the shadows and clouts me with a spade again I’m going to be well manked off,’ he said, through a mouthful of batter.

  ‘That’s not very likely, is it?’ said Meera, chucking a pebble into the shallows, ‘seeing as he’s in the salad crisper, thinking about what he wants on his headstone.’

&nbs
p; ‘It has to be someone who knows the river,’ said Colin, peering up into the dark. ‘You can’t see that girder from the road above. You can barely see it from down here. Everything looks different from the water. But who’d spot that?’

  ‘River police,’ said Meera.

  ‘What, you think it’s one of ours?’

  ‘That’s just it, though.’ She threw another stone. ‘They’re not, are they? They’re a law unto themselves. Have you ever had a drink with one?’

  ‘Nope, but that’s because nobody wants to drink with anyone from the PCU, not even Community Support. The river boys won’t. They threatened to duff Fraternity up over his little boating expedition. And they took their key back.’ He bit the end off a pickled wally. ‘They told him to stay away from the water in case he suddenly discovered he couldn’t swim, which was thoughtful of them. I think he lost them their no-claims bonus.’

  ‘We’re wasting our time here. Nobody’s going to come back now that the body has been removed.’ Meera looked for a good skipping stone. ‘What about the other bloke?’

  ‘What, Bill Crooms? Janice thinks he might have known Gilyov from one of the river pubs like the Cutty Sark Tavern or the Yacht. They still get a lot of river people. I mean, it could be anything, couldn’t it? Maybe they were both in a Scrabble tournament as children or poked each other on Facebook. D’you want some of this wally?’

  ‘I’d rather drink my own sick, thank you.’ Another stone cracked off a bridge stanchion and slapped into the water. ‘If the Dalladay and Gilyov deaths are part of the same case, how are they connected? You know the problem with this whole investigation?’

  ‘You’re about to tell me, aren’t you?’

  ‘It’s a serpent with its head cut off.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The old man! He’s gone off to Storybookland and we’ve got no one in charge. John only works well when he’s half of a team. You must have seen the change in him this week, it’s horrible to watch. He’s never had to handle the whole thing alone before. I’m getting my CV sorted.’

  Colin looked up, startled, half a chip hanging from his mouth. ‘You wouldn’t jump ship, would you?’

  Meera wiped mud from her hands. ‘What choice have we got? Bryant’s not going to get better and now that he’s been told to stay out of the unit he’ll go downhill fast, like teachers do when they retire. You should be looking around because there’s not going to be much of a redundancy package. We’ll be offered LOTs in the Met.’

  ‘Lots of what?’

  ‘Lowest On Totem. We didn’t take promotion, did we? We’re back to square one, you and me.’

  ‘At least we still have each other,’ said Colin, removing a fishbone from his teeth and flicking it into the water.

  ‘Oh yes, thank goodness I have that to cling on to.’

  ‘You’re being sarcastic, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Colin, I am being sarcastic.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what, I’ll do a deal with you.’

  ‘What, not another one of your special offers? If the PCU comes through you’ll take me to Chopsticks of Fury on Kingsland High Road for a mystery-meat chow mein?’

  ‘I thought you liked it there.’ Colin looked crestfallen. He shoved his fish tray into a paper bag and carefully placed it, rather disgustingly, Meera thought, in his jacket pocket.

  John May alighted at Temple Station, walking out on to the Thames side of Victoria Embankment, one of the last dark, green, quiet spots in Central London. He knew he must be crazy to have agreed to the meeting, but it was too late to turn back.

  There were no pedestrians to be seen in either direction. May was reminded of old post-war films about London, where the roads were devoid of traffic and the number of pedestrians in any shot could be counted on the fingers of one hand. He checked his Timex: 11.10 p.m. She was already ten minutes late.

  The Thames was higher than he had ever seen it. Its waters slapped the wall just below the railings. Leaning over, he could see one of the conduits from the underground River Fleet emptying itself as earth-darkened run-off poured down from the hills to the north. The lions were partially submerged.

  He glanced at the ropes of lights on the opposite bank, thinking about leaving, but when he looked back a taxi was drawing away and there she was, running across the road towards him. I really can’t believe I’m doing this, he thought, preparing to hold her in his arms.

  At midnight, under a railway arch at Finsbury Park Station, one of the few that had been too angular and ugly to be sold off to developers and stuffed with minuscule luxury apartments, a strange turnip-shaped woman, ragged and filthy, uncoiled herself from an upturned blue Nissan and lowered her boots into a puddle in order to note its increased depth. Delighted by the result she dabbled her feet in the water like a duck, then hammered them up and down, splashing and thrashing with laughter.

  ‘It’s coming, Arthur,’ she roared into the rain. ‘I warned you about the powers of death and rebirth before, but you wouldn’t listen. Last time it was fire, this time it’s water. London is at the mercy of the four elementables. The sea levels are rising. The lions are drowning! The river must give up its dead. You proved yourself once – it won’t be so easy to do it again. You should never have married me and got me stagnant with your child. We’ll be together again soon, just you wait and see!’

  A pair of passing constables stopped to watch her for a minute, rolled their eyes at each other and kept moving.

  As Esmeralda the tramp released another peal of shrieks the rain suddenly made itself visible, pounding on the chassis of the wrecked car. The sound of laughter and thunder was lost beneath the rumbling of the passing trains.

  31

  VICTIM & CULPRIT

  The boys hadn’t exactly stolen the bright orange dinghy, but nor had they got permission to use it.

  Mitesh’s brother had left it in his shed when he went off to Afghanistan, and when he came back he had lost his old enthusiasms. Once he would race to the coast to take the dinghy out, but now he stayed indoors playing video games and hardly spoke to anyone, so Mitesh and Bhavin had quietly removed it along with the pump and headed for the Thames without telling their mother. They went to the first set of steps beyond Tower Beach because the water was higher than they’d ever seen it, and they thought it would be easier to get into the river from there.

  They hadn’t given much thought to getting out again.

  Bhavin was twelve. Mitesh was eleven.

  Right from the first, Bhavin knew they were in trouble. The current snatched at their oars, the paddles of which were made from thin plastic and bent alarmingly. When they entered the water the tide had been on the turn. Now it started to draw them out. The dinghy had no steering other than its oars, and proved too skittish to control. It now seemed likely that they would be pulled into the main deep-water channel.

  ‘This was a dumb idea,’ Bhavin said. ‘Look at all the rubbish that was floating against the wall – it’s getting sucked out.’

  Mitesh tried to see what was ahead, but away from the lights of the embankment it was much darker than he’d expected. The water smelled of dead plants and something earthier, like graveyard soil and mould. ‘It stinks down here,’ he complained.

  ‘That’s ’cause the other rivers are emptying in – see them pipes along the embankment? Water and dirt, man, ’cause of all the rain. We don’t want to get sucked in under one of those.’

  ‘I wanted to go under Tower Bridge,’ said Mitesh. ‘These oars are crap.’ They weren’t unduly scared because they had no real idea of the danger they were in. The orange dinghy was caught in an eddy and swung around like a fairground car. It lurched so violently that for a moment Bhavin thought they were going to overturn.

  ‘We can’t go to Tower Bridge,’ he said. ‘The river widens after that – we’ll never get back.’ He knew it might already be too late. The ominous tide was now dragging them in that direction, and the great plain of water that lay just ah
ead was starting to look dark and frightening.

  Neither boy was prepared to give in. To do so would be to lose face, so they joked and made light of it while pushing the flimsy oars ever deeper. Bhavin looked past Mitesh’s shoulder and grew afraid; something immense and black was coming towards them, and the little dinghy had no lights.

  The barge was low in the water and approaching at speed. For a moment it seemed as if it would plough right over them. There was no way out of its path. Then it had slid past and the wash propelled them back towards the shore wall. The stairs were suddenly ahead, partly submerged beneath the dinghy. Bhavin tried to grab at a stone outcrop as they passed, but leaning out brought him down so low that he brushed the icy water. The face that surfaced beneath him was white as china, its eyes staring wide, its black mouth open in a silent scream.

  It was not an arrest as such, more of an accompaniment, but it was required by law for any serious crimes suspect. It occurred just after dawn on Thursday morning in the narrow empty street of Shad Thames. The officers were young and from the Met, and were embarrassingly apologetic. After all, the man they had come to collect had far more experience than either of them, but thankfully he had the good grace to allow them to go through the process without interrupting.

  Colin Bimsley, who monitored police calls while he was on the running machine at his gym, was the first to pick it up. He was so surprised that in straining to listen he stood still for a moment and shot off the end of the moving belt.

  Word spread fast and messages flew back and forth. Some offered help, but there was plenty of Schadenfreude mixed in with them. Raymond Land turned up at the PCU without his tie, a sure sign that he had been told the news and had rushed to get there. By the time the rest of the team arrived even the two Daves had somehow discerned what was going on, in the way that electricians, decorators and plumbers always manage to, and were interjecting with helpful ideas as they trailed more cables across the floor.