Strange Tide

by Christopher Fowler

  The money rolled in. The clients adored him. He and Cassie rented adjoining flats in one of the better streets in Chiswick. Suddenly they were leading charmed lives. It seemed as if nothing could go wrong.

  Then came the third week in November, and everything began to fall apart.

  Arthur Bryant looked out of the living-room window at the rain cascading into the centre courtyard of his apartment building. ‘I’m missing something,’ he said.

  ‘You always say that whenever you’re on a case.’ Alma was seated at the table addressing cards to her fellow parishioners. She was forever organizing outings and charity collections for her church. The flat looked more like an Oxfam shop these days, with trays of lurid iced cakes ready for dispatch to fundraising teas and boxes of second-hand clothes awaiting shipment to refugee camps. Alma had always been a large, expansive woman but now as she started to shrink her kindness expanded to fill the rooms. Bryant had managed to keep his quarters sacrosanct, although he noticed she had tried to sneak a crucifix on to his bookshelves. He said nothing, but turned it upside down. She got the message and removed it.

  ‘No, I don’t mean the case – although I’m definitely missing something there, too,’ he said with a sigh. ‘The hallucinations are some new side effect of my deteriorating mental processes. Where am I while they’re happening? Am I just standing in the street with my mouth open, easy prey for muggers? Am I wandering in the middle of the road liable to be crushed beneath juggernauts? Do I just sit down on a bench and go to sleep? What happens when these states of mind come on?’

  ‘God is granting you visions,’ said Alma simply. ‘He’ll protect you until he makes his purpose known.’

  ‘He can’t protect me from the wheels of a number seventy-five bus. I need John for that. I almost wish I had your faith. Wait a minute, what do you mean he’ll protect me until then? What’s he going to do afterwards?’

  ‘That’s for Him to decide. He may choose to fold you into His bosom.’

  ‘Oh, that’s charming. You lot have got all this worked out, haven’t you? If I live it’s because He has a higher purpose, and if I fall off my perch it’s because I’m answering His call. As I’m not planning to assume room temperature just yet He’ll have to get on with something else for a while, cause a few famines and start some new wars until I’m ready. I’ve got work to do.’

  ‘Oh, that poor girl,’ said Alma, setting aside her cards. ‘The one who was drowned. Is that the case you’re working on?’

  ‘You know it is,’ said Bryant irritably, ‘I told you all about it yesterday.’

  ‘Yes, but I only listen to about a quarter of what you say.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps a fifth. Are you getting anywhere?’

  ‘I’m not about to tell you, am I? It’ll be all round your church by this evening.’

  ‘Mr Bryant, I’m shocked you should think that. You know I never talk to my ladies about you. I haven’t dared to mention your name ever since you accepted their offer to deliver the weekly sermon.’

  ‘I don’t see why that should have upset you,’ he huffed. ‘It was about God.’

  ‘Yes, but it wasn’t about our God, was it?’

  ‘I didn’t expect them to be so proprietorial. I thought they’d be interested in hearing about a different belief system.’

  ‘You frightened the life out of them. All that stuff about biting the heads off monkeys and burning people to death.’

  ‘Very well, to answer your question, so far we’ve utterly failed to find out anything useful at all. Why?’

  ‘It’s just that I saw her picture on the news and thought it was funny it should have happened on that spot.’

  Bryant turned, intrigued. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘My mother told me she used to see the vicar of All Hallows conducting services right on the beach there, after the church was damaged.’

  ‘What sort of services?’

  ‘Hymns and readings – and baptisms, she said. It makes sense, doesn’t it? The Black Friars and the White Friars were just a bit further along, and they used to conduct ceremonies beside the Thames, didn’t they? You know – the monasteries. I know most people think it’s dirty and dangerous, but if you have faith the river is life. It can wash away your sins. I was just thinking, she’d sinned, hadn’t she?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘By getting pregnant out of wedlock.’

  ‘Good Lord, it’s not the 1950s. So you think someone was trying to purify her in a sort of perverted baptism ceremony?’

  ‘I didn’t say that, Mr Bryant. I suppose it was just the idea of babies and water. The unborn and newly birthed are innocent even if the mother isn’t.’ In the kitchen the oven pinged, so she struggled to her feet. ‘Would you like some cabinet pudding?’

  ‘Only if I can get my teeth in first,’ said Bryant. ‘You always leave the stones in the plums.’ He rose and set off in search of his dentures. He kept several sets in order to cope with the inconsistencies in Alma’s cooking. On the way he grabbed a pencil and paper. The innocence of the newborn absolves the sins of the mother, he thought. Then: There’s someone I have to see.

  Looking through his reference books, an idea had begun to form about the uniqueness of his condition, and once it had taken root he knew it would not be shaken off without thorough exploration.

  21

  RUN & SWIM

  James Crawley hated his sedentary job, but since he worked as a risk assessor in a government office on Millbank he was doomed to a life of sitting in meetings, sitting behind his desk, sitting in the canteen at lunchtime and generally – sitting. As he lived in nearby Vauxhall he had recently started running to work, pacing along any path that still ran close to the river to finish at Lambeth Bridge.

  His exercise regime had its good and bad points. The downside was that he frequently found himself running in squalls of rain driven in by the river winds, and on fine, mild days the air pollution from Westminster’s traffic was suffocating.

  On Wednesday morning he discovered another bad point; you might accidentally be confronted by a corpse. At first he thought a workman’s tarpaulin had blown off the bridge and become entangled in the steel rafters underneath. But tarpaulins didn’t have feet, and this one was hanging by them. When he touched the tarpaulin it slid away to reveal a man in a grey boiler suit, his arms dangling down on either side of his head, almost invisible in the shadows.

  As a risk assessor Mr Crawley should have been able to work out the odds of such a bizarre accident occurring – for that’s what he assumed it was, because what else could it possibly be? Down here, beneath the thrum of the traffic and the warbling of pigeons, was one of London’s lonely recesses. It was a spot where the dankness of the Thames could permeate your marrow and any vile deed could pass unnoticed.

  Mr Crawley called an ambulance rather than the police, figuring that the workman might still be alive, in which case he would require urgent medical attention, but the police and the ambulance crew arrived at the same time. The assessor gave his name and address, then headed back to the Economy-Plus 2-Lever Lumbar Support office chair he had lately grown to despise. His strange discovery became just another anecdote to be trotted out in public houses, the gristle upon which Londoners daily fed and thrived.

  It was 7.53 a.m. on Wednesday when John May arrived with Dan Banbury and an ambulance from St Thomas’ Hospital. Banbury had caught the incoming call because he had gone in early and reset his incident parameters to prioritize anything unusual happening on or around the Thames foreshore between Hammersmith Bridge and Tower Bridge.

  Even as the EMTs were cutting the body loose and lowering it on to the stones, May knew it had a connection to the discovery two mornings earlier on Tower Beach; the workman was missing his left hand and the cauterized stump of the wrist showed the frayed upper edge of a tattoo.

  The pair followed the body to the St Pancras Coroner’s Office, then ran through their notes in Rosa’s room while they waited impat
iently for Giles Kershaw to carry out a preliminary examination.

  Giles finally called them in, booting a plastic bucket across the floor until it was positioned under the worst of the leaks. ‘This place is falling apart,’ he complained. ‘We need a new roof.’

  ‘Why don’t you have a word with one of your friends in high places?’ May suggested. ‘I’m assuming you still have the Chancellor’s ear.’

  ‘Not so much these days, since I stopped going out with his niece,’ said Giles gloomily. ‘I think the initial thrill of hanging around a mortuary at night wore off. She said I smelled of death. Not terribly conducive to a relationship.’

  ‘If you really want to prove yourself useful, couldn’t you start dating the Metropolitan Police Commissioner’s granddaughter or something?’

  ‘As surprising as it sounds, John, I’m not seeking career advancement, I’m looking for a soulmate.’

  May sighed. ‘That’s very selfish of you. Right now we could do with all the help we can get. Arthur’s illness has become a lot more serious, Raymond couldn’t organize an egg-and-spoon race and the rest of us are just trying to keep things together.’

  ‘Other police units get financial and psychological support,’ said Giles, placing a friendly hand on May’s shoulder. ‘They have systems in place for coping when a senior team member drops out. Why don’t you?’

  ‘Are you kidding? Nobody outside knows that Arthur’s working on the case. They’ve been told he’s on compassionate leave. And we still have nothing.’

  ‘Then maybe I can help,’ said Giles. ‘Dan, perhaps you can assist? Come with me, you two.’ He led the way back to the mortuary and started to pull open one of the body drawers. ‘Do you mind taking a shufti? Or is it a bit early in the day? He’s not in terribly good condition.’

  Giles and Dan eased out the tray. The drawer’s runners squealed appallingly, as if the corpse did not wish to have its dark sleep disturbed. ‘What we have here is a short, stocky male of mixed race,’ said Giles, ‘late thirties, heavy smoker. He appears to have died about three weeks ago, which accounts for his poor state, and as you can see he’s missing his eyes and his left hand.’

  ‘You think it’s the same—’

  ‘Oh yes, we have a perfect fit.’ Giles pulled open a Mylar envelope and carefully lifted out the missing appendage, laying it next to the corpse’s grey wrist-stump. ‘It wasn’t the result of a medical procedure, but nor was it an industrial accident. I’m pretty certain a sharp knife was used to sever the tendons and cut through muscle and tissue, but the bone separation is quite clean. There are no chips or splinters in either section of the wrist. The saw-marks are short, indicating a short blade.’

  ‘So it was done deliberately but not by a surgeon?’

  ‘I suppose it would be consistent with torture or punishment. I can’t think of a normal situation that would result in something like this.’

  ‘That stump – he didn’t bleed to death?’

  ‘No, the severance looks as if it was sealed. It’s likely that it occurred some time before his demise,’ said Giles. ‘He quite clearly drowned. There’s still evidence of mucus in his air passages, distension of the lungs, plenty of burst blood vessels. He tried to breathe. I’d hoped to find ventricular diatoms, bruises on the arms and the neck, but it’s a bit late to find signs of a forced drowning.’

  May turned to Banbury, who was digging around in his backpack. ‘Do you think he was killed at the bridge, Dan?’

  The CSM found his notebook and stepped closer, examining the body with interest. ‘I think someone wedged him up in the rafters of the bridge and hoped he’d just stay there until he’d rotted apart or the seagulls had finished him off. The birds would have taken his eyes first. He was drowned and put up there immediately because his overalls were still wet. They shaped themselves to their drying position, which largely held him in place. Eventually he decomposed sufficiently to fall off his perch, but his boots got caught in some cabling.’

  ‘So someone hacked off his hand, then managed to stow him up there,’ said May, puzzled. ‘The bridge rafters have to be ten or twelve feet above the top of the shoreline.’

  ‘I’ve done your work for you on that one,’ said Giles. ‘A scaffold platform had been left there after the council carried out some rust-proofing. It was removed some time during the third week in October.’

  ‘The tattoo. Could you?’ May pointed to the wrist. Giles carefully added the hand to it. Now the complete design could be seen, but it wasn’t a lighthouse, as Bryant had suggested. It appeared to be a bulbous head with protrusions crushing a stack of bricks, but it still wasn’t clear. ‘Could the hand have been severed earlier to hide the tattoo and delay identification?’ asked May.

  ‘A bit of a melodramatic notion,’ said Giles, who was used to such things from the PCU. ‘More likely he was punished for being a naughty boy, then sent for a swim.’ He covered up the corpse.

  ‘Why was the hand so far away from the body?’

  ‘That might be to do with the tides,’ said Giles. ‘It used to be said that a body thrown from one house in the Thames would be picked up and scavenged by another. There’s a further possibility.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked May.

  ‘Assuming the amputation and the drowning were carried out on different occasions, it might be that the hand was removed and chucked into the Thames at Tower Beach simply because it was expedient to throw it from a spot in that area. It was only because we were searching the Dalladay site that we found it.’

  ‘Maybe getting rid of the hand was a trial run for dumping Dalladay,’ said May. ‘Which would mean that the two events are connected. Arthur would love that.’

  The coroner had not been able to avoid noticing that there was something odd about Mr Bryant’s reactions lately. They seemed delayed and unfocused. He would start suddenly, as if being reminded of his duties in the present. But as he continued to be spoken of as if he was still a fully functioning member of the unit, Giles decided to keep his counsel. At some point, May would be forced to acknowledge the truth; that his days of working with his old partner were finally over.

  22

  GLOOM & DOOM

  Arthur Bryant was getting better at evading his keepers.

  He slipped out of the PCU by keeping to the edges of the stair treads and using the two Daves to create a distraction, which wasn’t difficult as one of them was under the floorboards hammering on pipes like a tunnelling POW who’d made a wrong turn and the other was on the phone to his girlfriend while trying to light a cigarette with a blowlamp.

  Bryant made his way through the rain to St Giles-without-Cripplegate in the Barbican. A church had stood on the site since 1090. The name referred to one of the gates through the old City wall, which had been built in Roman times to protect the settlement from attackers. The area of Cripplegate had once boasted residents of great importance, but the entire neighbourhood vanished in a single night when in 1897 an ostrich-feather warehouse caught alight.

  St Giles was one of the few remaining medieval churches in the Square Mile and, unusually for London, was still used by a local community. Bryant had gone back on the promise he had made to himself and had arranged to meet Audrey Beardsley, a historian currently working with the British Geographical Society. They had met by accident several years earlier at a conference centre in Berlin. Bryant had gone to the toilet during a talk on the Würzburg Witch Trial of 1626 and had taken the wrong door back, only to find himself attending a Punjabi wedding. It was not the first time he had made such a mistake, and not the worst, which was erroneously projecting a film entitled Autopsies: What Can Go Wrong? to a darkened classroom full of terrified toddlers.

  Beardsley’s spectral figure appeared on the steps of the church. As thin as a cherry tree, as pale as paste, as exsanguinated as Mina Harker, she looked as if she might not make it to the end of the week. ‘I’m glad you wanted to see me today,’ she said, shaking Bryant’s hand with an icy claw. ‘It’s
best not to leave it too long with me. I’m on the way out. The doctors gave me three months.’

  ‘When was that?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘Three months ago. Dying is a pain in the arse. Quite literally, in my case. I’ve had the chemo and the radio but it made no difference. And even if I do go into remission it’ll only come back at some point. There’s no point in starting Bleak House now. Your Janice Longbright brought me a kitten to cheer me up but it got run over. I mean, what’s it all for? What are we here for? My hair’s coming out in clumps. Look.’ She grabbed a dry grey tuft and pulled, unfurling her fist to release a fall of follicles. ‘I tried a wig but it made me look like Shirley Bassey. Look at you, though, the very picture of health. How are you?’

  ‘Oh, I’m losing my marbles,’ said Bryant cheerfully. ‘I’ve gone totally East Ham. One stop short of Barking.’

  ‘I thought you had a very fine brain,’ said Beardsley.

  ‘Yes, and shortly it’ll be in a jar at the Hunterian Museum. My disease is incurable and getting worse by the day. I haven’t quite started taking my plate out in public but it can’t be long.’

  ‘I guess that puts us both in the same boat.’ Beardsley shook her head so violently that Bryant thought he heard her teeth rattling in her skull. ‘It seems such a waste, doesn’t it? We spend the whole of our adulthood accumulating specialist knowledge, forgoing the opportunity to have normal lives, and for what? To die without passing it on.’

  ‘But didn’t you write a book about the Thames?’ Bryant asked. ‘That’s passing it on.’

  ‘Do you really think any one of them cares about such things now?’ Beardsley gestured towards the unwary residents of the Barbican going about their daily lives.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ replied Bryant. ‘Somebody somewhere will share the same passions. They’ll want to use the information you leave behind.’

  Beardsley sniffed. ‘I fear for today’s teens. I look at them sending pictures of their dinners to each other on their phones and wonder what happens if they ever find themselves in a bookshop. They probably think they’ve accidentally gone back in time. I wish I had your positive outlook. I’m more a glass-three-quarters-empty kind of person.’