Strange Tide

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘The physician who brought back Lord Byron’s body from Greece.’

  ‘How do you even know about something like that?’

  There was a crackle as Ali fiddled with the earpiece. ‘I read a lot about the English. You should try it sometime.’

  ‘OK, which section do you want me to start with?’

  ‘How about something easy near the front centre aisle, then we can skip further back and go for more detail.’

  ‘All right, C-12, overweight female, red jacket, lives in Streatham, bad lower back. She’s scared of having an operation on her spine. D-17, elderly female, grey sweater and scarf, Lewisham. She has trouble walking, left leg, probably related to a car accident she had a few years ago. E-8, middle-aged male, black leather coat, Deptford, thinks his grandson is on drugs – how many do you want to do in one go?’

  ‘Let me try for six or seven. You can give me a prompt.’ They had a signal for that: if he got stuck, Ali took two half-steps across the stage instead of a single full stride.

  ‘OK,’ said Cassie, ‘let’s take it up a notch. L-20, overweight male, pale blue shirt, started drinking heavily after his wife died and had to have his left leg amputated.’

  ‘I can’t promise his leg will grow back.’

  Cassie laughed. ‘No, but you could tell him to lay off the booze. Say that the Lord says—’

  ‘I’m not bringing religion into it, Cassie. We had an agreement.’

  ‘If you did, we could get a wider range of venues. I’m just saying, that’s all. N-6, little boy—’

  ‘I told you no kids. Keep the ages above forty.’

  ‘All right, P-22, older female, fluffy pink sweater, worried that her mother’s cancer has come back.’

  ‘Give me a couple more.’

  ‘A-9, middle-aged black female in orchid-print dress and big glasses, depressed because her husband Ronald died of a respiratory illness last month. Want to try a tougher one?’

  ‘Bring it on.’

  ‘Back row, end seat, I don’t have the number. Young male, checked shirt, defensive, arms folded. His wife made him come along. He’s been tweeting a lot about dental problems, either the bills or the work he’s had done. Do you want that?’

  ‘Do I have to look inside his mouth?’

  ‘See if you can make him smile for me.’

  ‘I’m on it.’

  Ali took a deep breath, stepped on to the stage and raised his hands. The rounds of applause had been steadily growing over the past month. Their tour around the North Circular halls and concert venues was starting to attract regular followers. Cassie made a note to renegotiate their performance fee.

  London has a unique quality that is hardly ever spoken of. If you look in the crowds and find someone who appears to be the most complete Londoner you can imagine, an almost parodic image of someone born within the sound of Bow bells or the clubs of Westminster, listen until you hear them speak and you’ll often find they’ve been assimilated from a far-off place. The city attracts those who aspire to it. But listening to Ali gave away no clues to his origin. He was remaking himself so completely that no remnant of his past survived.

  ‘I’m feeling a wave of pain here from somewhere in the third row,’ said Ali, hovering his hand over the seats like a metal detector. ‘The lady in the red jacket, you’ve come here from quite nearby today – Streatham, I’m guessing, because it’s just a short bus-ride away? You can’t go far, can you? You feel every jolt and bump in the base of your spine, right here.’ As soon as he saw her nodding, anticipating his words, he pressed the same spot on his own back, sympathizing with her pain.

  ‘This may not work but let’s try,’ he said, suddenly vaulting down from the stage with his legs together, landing so nimbly that the crowd gasped. ‘Violet, is that your name? Don’t be alarmed, it’s not mind-reading. I overheard your friend sitting next to you – I wouldn’t want you to think that I was cheating or making things up.’ The crowd relaxed in approval. Nice touch, Cassie thought. He always tells me to remember they’re not stupid.

  ‘But she didn’t tell me about your pain, that’s something I can feel in the air sparkling around you like a magnetic force. It’s OK, I’m not a psychic and this is not mumbo-jumbo, I just deal in basic science. Neuroscientists from the Universities of Colorado and Michigan have been using functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify pain for years. Pain radiates out from the body and gives off heat, and some sensitive people can feel this heat. That’s all, there’s no mystery to it. But it’s not the sort of thing doctors are interested in. You don’t want the doctors to operate because you’re frightened, aren’t you? Tell me, why are you scared?’

  He won’t get anything out of her, Cassie thought. She’s shrinking in her seat.

  ‘It’s because you’re frightened of being left paralysed, aren’t you? Was there someone else in your family who suffered? There was, wasn’t there?’

  Violet nodded shyly. Of course someone suffered, thought Cassie, everyone knows someone who’s suffered.

  ‘But let me tell you, the chances of that happening in such an operation are relatively small, and you compare that to the grinding pain you suffer all day, every day – and it’s worse at night, isn’t it?’

  Another nod, more emphatic.

  ‘It won’t get better by itself, it will only keep getting worse – so which is worse, the fear of what probably won’t happen, or the pain of what you know will?’

  He’s making it too complicated for her, she thought, making her afraid of him. ‘Do something, Ali,’ she said, ‘you’re losing her.’

  Ali was one step ahead. Taking his left hand from the small of his own back he now reached forward, grabbed her arm with his right and pulled her forward, pressing his warmed palm over her spine. ‘Can you feel that heat, Violet? I’ll push down the pain for now. With my help you can take it away for a while but it will return, and when it does you must be brave and tell your doctor you’ll have the operation. Will you do that for me?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said in a tiny voice, urged on by her friend.

  ‘Louder, Violet, say you will do it.’ Ali raised his own voice. ‘Once it’s out in the open you have to keep your promise.’

  ‘Yes,’ Violet cried out, and her friend applauded and Ali applauded and everyone else around her put their hands together, feeling the waves of positivity in the room.

  He really is a fast learner, Cassie thought, pulling down the mouthpiece. ‘OK, now head over to D-17, bad leg.’

  Back in the present day, Max Wright came wading out of the Thames with a black plastic bag in his right fist. ‘Sodding mask,’ he complained, pulling the rubber seals free from his face. ‘It’s freezing cold down there and I’ve still got sweat dripping into my eyes.’

  Dan Banbury hovered at the shoreline, anxious to help. He admired the Thames police divers intensely. ‘You were down for nearly an hour,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how you do it.’

  ‘That’s the longest I can go without losing the plot, mate. Nil visibility. Very disorienting. It’s like wading through the contents of my littlest one’s nappy.’

  ‘You can’t see anything at all?’

  ‘Not surprising, is it? On days with a bright sun overhead you can see a bit, but not much.’ Wright stamped some life back into his feet. His co-diver surfaced a few metres away and strode to the beach. ‘The ground suddenly drops away as you approach the centre channel, and the flow increases sharply so you have to keep your wits about you. It’s bloody hard work, concentrating on the floor while you’re pulling in air.’

  ‘But you got something?’ said Banbury, eyeing the bag.

  ‘Yeah. Let’s get these things off first.’ The divers began helping each other remove their harnesses.

  ‘So what’s actually down there?’ Banbury wanted to know. ‘I suppose everyone asks you that.’

  ‘Oh, man, barbed wire, shards of wood, all kinds of sharp obstructions. Shopping trolleys, stacks of ’em. We pull one body a wee
k from the river. You can bet there are plenty more tangled up in the centre of the channel that nobody ever finds. I never seem to get a Gucci Dive.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  The other diver laughed knowingly. ‘A body on the first sweep,’ said Wright. ‘It’s just luck. I don’t only do the Thames, you know. I did a job for your bosses, old Bryant and May, years ago. We were looking for someone in the Regent Canal. I did the King’s Cross 7/7 bombings—’

  ‘There was no water involved there, was there?’ Banbury asked.

  ‘No, but breathing apparatus was needed. It was like being underwater in the tube tunnels.’ Wright and his partner had pulled off their suits now and were changing into the overalls they kept in their backpacks. ‘I don’t know what you were expecting us to find, but I don’t think this is it.’ He indicated the black plastic bag he had set down on the sand. ‘Take a look.’

  Dan Banbury pushed back his gloves and opened the bag. Sitting in the silt at the bottom was a male human hand like a fleshy crustacean, palm up, its fingers outstretched, pale and crablike. Banbury picked it up and examined the wrist. ‘Neatly severed,’ he said. ‘The skin’s very loose. The fish have had a good go at it. What do you reckon, two to three weeks’ immersion?’

  Wright pursed his lips, considering. ‘Yeah, something like that.’

  ‘Ever had just a limb before?’

  ‘Oh yeah, loads of times,’ said Wright matter-of-factly. ‘More legs and torsos though. You know – dismemberments.’

  ‘How far was it from the concrete post?’

  ‘I reckon no more than three metres. You touch something and you know it’s worth investigating. It’s almost like a sixth sense. I’ve got very sensitive fingertips. Mostly I’m looking for knives, so I have to go carefully. You don’t want to get nicked with so much crap in the water.’

  ‘It’s bloody hard work to move through because you can’t get a proper grip,’ his mate added.

  ‘There’s a tattoo,’ said Banbury, peering at the severed wrist. ‘What’s left of one, at least. I need to get this back to St Pancras.’

  ‘Be my guest,’ said Wright with a grin. ‘Our bill will be in your inbox before you arrive there, knowing my boss. If you want us back to search for the rest of him, we’ll be very happy to give you an estimate.’

  16

  SIGNS & PORTENTS

  Arthur Bryant packed the last few strands of Ancient Mariner Rough Cut Naval Shag into his pipe bowl and tamped it down. The tobacco caught eventually, and blue smoke drifted to join the rags of mist that rose from the shadowed arches below, dispersing in the diluted sunlight.

  ‘They saw it as the giver of all life, of course,’ he said, puffing contentedly. ‘The centre of organized society and industry. The great abbeys built bridges and supervised the cultivation of arable land here. They reclaimed the marshes and planted crops.’

  Clenching the stem between his peppermint-white false teeth, Bryant placed his gloved hands on the balustrade and leaned over the side of Waterloo Bridge, looking down into the turbulent flow of the Thames.

  ‘The spot where the river rises in Trewsbury Mead has always been regarded as holy,’ he continued. ‘The artist Stanley Spencer believed that immersion in its sunlit waters returned us to the pagan roots of Christianity. The river is continuity, of faith and inspiration and bloodlines. It’s a boundary, a frontier, a defence.’

  He took another leisurely puff. ‘And as the monarchy had a direct line to God the Thames was always held to be a royal river. The palaces were placed on its banks. Henry and Elizabeth both held pageants on the waters. For his “Aqua Triumphalis” Charles II was rowed from Hampton Court to Whitehall while being serenaded by the painted figure of Isis.’ Bryant’s fingers followed the pattern of snakelike ripples below. ‘The Thames wasn’t just used by royalty, of course. During the Great Plague more than ten thousand city folk sheltered on the waters, locked up inside their boats. But of course rats can swim, and it was said that people died at the oars, to be washed up on the tides over there. The rats were blamed for infecting them before they set out to sea as well, but we always seek to blame, don’t we? The river was involved in the Great Fire too – people dived in to face drowning instead of being burned alive. Man-made machinery toppled the ancient gods, and industry polluted the sacred Thames. By 1827 its contents were so lethal that they had been branded “monster soup”. During the Great Stink, when the windows of Parliament were left open everyone on the windward side was asphyxiated. But long after the factories have gone the river’s still here, just as it will always be.’

  ‘I like it when you’re like this,’ said May. ‘On safe ground.’

  Bryant turned around, his cornflower-blue eyes wide and distant. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Inside the history of London. It’s where you belong, standing here looking out. But there are parts you don’t know any more, Arthur. You think all the poisonous factories have gone, but what are those financial powerhouses doing? Belching out cash and rewarding their workers with privileges denied to the likes of you and me. It’s invitation only now, and we aren’t allowed in. The culture of civic-minded philanthropy we once had has been lost in the feeding frenzy of making money.’

  ‘Oh, the frenzy was always there,’ said Bryant dismissively. ‘It’s a cycle of growth and catastrophe. And actually, we can go anywhere we please. The Square Mile’s trained monkeys don’t frighten me. This city is my jungle gym.’

  ‘Is that so?’ asked May. ‘When we last stood here you were saying goodbye to it.’

  ‘I wasn’t feeling well then.’ He ran a hand across his hat. ‘It comes and goes. I’ve been looking up medical precedents that might help me to understand what’s going on in the old brain-box, and I think I’ve found a couple.’

  ‘OK, what are they?’

  ‘Do you know, I can’t remember right at this moment, but I’m sure they’ll come back to me.’

  May sighed. ‘Then I guess we’ll have to get on with the investigation while we’re waiting.’

  ‘It’s almost half ten,’ said Bryant, checking his stopped watch. May had no idea how he could tell the time from it. ‘Does that mean I’m to be imprisoned in the office for the rest of the day?’

  ‘No – Dan is heading over to Dalladay’s old apartment and thought you might like to be in on the search. Just this once.’

  ‘That’s more like it.’ Bryant slapped his gloves together with satisfaction. ‘You can let me take over for a while.’

  May studied his partner objectively. What did civilians make of this rheumy, rumpled, pink and wrinkled figure dressed in clothes three sizes too large for him? A rare species of Senex Londiniensis, discovered somewhere between the stalls of Whitechapel and the sidings of King’s Cross, struggling on between prostate and probate, becalmed and possibly embalmed, with only the crystalline gaze of his blue eyes to suggest the iceberg of his intellect – no wonder he was perpetually underestimated. Now, though, since the onset of his illness, people were already starting to ignore him – something May knew they did at their peril.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, giving in and offering Bryant an arm. ‘Show me how it’s done.’

  The flat was in a graceful cream-coloured terrace on Denbigh Street, Pimlico, just behind the statue of the nineteenth-century master builder Thomas Cubitt. Dan Banbury was agitatedly waiting for them at the door. ‘I started an inventory last night but haven’t done the bedroom or lounge yet,’ he warned, ‘so don’t—’

  ‘Don’t say it,’ said Bryant, waving him inside the house. ‘Where were you earlier?’

  ‘Dredging the murder site,’ Banbury replied, heading upstairs. ‘Max Wright gave me a hand.’

  ‘So he should do,’ said Bryant, ‘he costs enough.’

  ‘No, he gave me an actual hand. Cut off at the wrist. Here.’ He passed back a photocopy of the half-eaten tattoo. ‘Any idea what that is?’

  Bryant dragged out his trifocals and breathed on them. He studied the r
emains of a blue-ink pattern showing what appeared to be a stack of foreshortened bricks. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes, what?’

  ‘Yes, I know what it is.’

  Banbury stopped on the stairs, exasperated. ‘Do you want to tell me?’

  ‘No, I want to check it against an illustration in one of my books back at the office. It’s a bit moth-eaten.’

  ‘Fish-bitten, actually.’

  ‘Then let me do some reconstruction first. Which flat are we heading for?’

  ‘Here. Her parents bought her this place. She kept it on even though she’d moved in with Cooper.’ The CSM led the way into a bare, expensively furnished open-plan lounge, as white, light and impersonal as a letting agent’s photograph. ‘May I?’ asked Bryant politely, pointing at the next room.

  ‘You’ve never bothered to ask before,’ said Banbury. ‘Are you feeling all right?’

  ‘No, I’m not. So?’

  ‘So can you go tromping through my floor grid leaving sticky fingerprints all over everything?’ He sighed. ‘I suppose so. Go on, off you go.’ He turned to May. ‘It’s like dealing with a child.’

  ‘Have you turned up anything?’ May asked.

  Banbury rubbed his face. It was only mid-morning and he was already tired. ‘Not really. She has a lot of very expensive clothes and virtually nothing in her current account. She stayed in the Ham Yard Hotel and the Soho Hotel in the last two weeks – we’ve got all her movements from the hotel room swipe cards. She ran up a few stiff restaurant bills and bar tabs, but it’s hard to say who with. One waiter remembers a young man and a young woman, blonde – that’s all. It’s like trying to lay hands on ghosts. It’ll take a while to get CCTV footage from the hotels because there’s a lot of it to go through. I can see where she’s been but I don’t really get who she is.’ He looked down at the opened layers of his technician’s box and shook his head. ‘All this equipment. It tells you everything and nothing.’

  There was a crash from the bedroom. May and Banbury ran in to find Bryant sprawled on the floor, pieces of a giant china horse everywhere. ‘I slipped,’ he said, taking their proffered arms as he climbed off his knees.