Strange Tide

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘I hate it when things get over-complicated,’ Land complained. ‘What am I going to tell Darren Link?’

  ‘Don’t tell him anything,’ May advised. ‘As far as he’s concerned we’re still following leads and making progress.’

  ‘Couldn’t you do it? He’s on his way here right now.’

  ‘I’m afraid this one’s yours,’ said May, checking his tie in the hallway mirror. ‘I’m off out.’

  Land was aghast. He pointed back at the door to the detectives’ office. ‘You can’t leave me with Link and your partner. Is he even safe in there?’

  ‘Just so long as you keep the doors and windows shut.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To see Freddie Cooper. He called to say he’s remembered something that might be of use.’

  ‘Couldn’t you do it later?’ Land pleaded.

  ‘His office isn’t far away. I’ll only be a few minutes.’ May raised a firm fist. ‘Put your foot down, Raymond. Be resolute. Don’t let Link bully you.’

  ‘He always did when we were at school together,’ muttered Land. ‘He used to hit me around the head with a sock full of conkers. I joined the force to get away from people like him.’

  But the hallway was empty; May had gone. Land stepped around the fresh hole in the floorboards created by the two Daves and found Crippen looking up at him with wise eyes.

  ‘And you’re no bloody help either,’ he said, returning to his office to prepare for the worst.

  Freddie Cooper had a floor of an unrestored building on Shaftesbury Avenue just past Cambridge Circus, where fully grown plane trees shielded the windows of the upper levels and dappled the pavements in summer. Even in November they sheltered the route and helped pedestrians to forget the vast new development that stood there.

  The ward of St Giles was one of London’s peculiarities: opaque, forgotten and remarkably unchanged for most of its life. Its High Street had seen the Roman army march down it to the City of London. In the Middle Ages its best-known public house, the Angel Inn, which stood beside the equally venerable St Giles-in-the-Fields church, had served as the last watering hole for those to be hanged a mile west at Tyburn Tree. The church, the pub and the street survived, but now they had been rendered even more invisible opposite the 134,000 green, orange, red and yellow glazed terracotta tiles that covered Central St Giles, the towering development newly wedged into this unphotogenic corner of the West End.

  John May turned up his collar and hurried across its rainswept plaza, locating Cooper’s address in the surviving terrace over the road. The entrepreneur met him in a dank grey lobby and guided him to the lift. On the top floor a staircase extended to the separate part of the roof.

  ‘I didn’t want to touch anything,’ Cooper said, leading the way. ‘My folks owned this building back when the street was really run down. I held on to the flat after they sold the rest. Lynsey didn’t like the house in De Beauvoir. She spent her life shuttling between properties, unable to settle. She didn’t really have a base.’

  They had reached the end of a bland pastel office corridor. Cooper pushed open the pale oak door to reveal an unchanged part of the original structure. A hall of bare boards and stripped brick opened out into a gaudily decorated living room with windows overlooking the tops of the plane trees.

  ‘She kept some of her stuff here,’ he explained.

  May looked around. ‘Why didn’t you tell us this earlier?’

  Cooper looked amazed. ‘Why would I want to tell you everything? It didn’t seem important. Anyway, I assumed she’d been at her own flat, but I think she must have come here to get some clothes ’cause one of her bags is missing. She left bags everywhere.’

  ‘So what made you change your mind about contacting me?’

  ‘I was down by the river earlier, thinking about what she said – something about wishing the river could take her out to sea. She talked so much, I didn’t listen most of the time.’

  He led the way to a small bedroom with built-in wardrobes, opened one and pointed down. In the back was an expensive black leather travelling bag. May looked about, found a shoehorn and lifted the bag out by its handles. ‘May I?’

  ‘There was a canvas holdall too. I have no idea what she stored in any of them.’

  May removed a neatly folded handkerchief and used it to pull open the top zip. Inside was a jumble of unironed clothes, shoes, make-up bottles, cigarettes and a smaller case stuffed with paperwork, which he took back to the lounge table and carefully laid out. His show of keeping his prints away from the collection was performed mainly for Cooper’s benefit.

  There were receipts from the Cossack Club, torn-up bank statements, a couple of sketchbooks filled with unfinished spidery drawings, as if she had suddenly lost interest in them, and a plastic folder of what appeared to be coursework.

  Unclipping it, May read for a minute and held the top page by its edges. ‘Life Options – what’s that?’

  Cooper squinted at the heading. ‘It’s a new company, like a spa, holistic stuff, not my sort of thing but it’s already making good money. I’m funding their expansion. We’re planning to roll it out as a national chain next summer.’

  ‘And she went there, did she?’

  ‘I don’t know. I guess so.’

  ‘What, you really don’t know or you don’t want to tell me?’

  Cooper gave him a dry look. ‘I think she was planning to enrol there.’

  ‘So you told her about the place? She didn’t just happen to pick up a brochure for a company you’re investing in?’

  ‘I guess I must have said something. I’m not good with details.’

  ‘It looks like she was thinking of taking an awful lot of courses,’ said May, flipping through the pages. ‘“Energy Attunement for Spiritual Development”, “Emotional Healing”, “The Healing Power of Crystals”, “Enneagrams & Metaphysical Communication”, “Chakras & Auras”, “Inner Child Rehabilitation”. It’s starting to make sense now.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Cooper, looking over his shoulder.

  ‘These are expensive sessions. Maybe hostessing at the Cossack Club paid for them. Did you give her money?’

  ‘I tried but she wouldn’t take it. She didn’t tell me she was planning to take all this stuff.’

  ‘You never talked about what she did, where she went?’

  ‘I’m not one of those blokes who talks to birds, OK?’ said Cooper. ‘She never told me much about anything.’

  ‘She talked, but you didn’t listen.’

  ‘Yeah well, she didn’t make a lot of sense. Of course I feel bad about what happened.’

  ‘Mr Cooper, I’ve done some checking on you,’ said May. ‘You weren’t exactly sitting at home pining while she was disappearing for days at a time.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Cooper. ‘I move in a lot of circles, attend a lot of social events.’

  ‘We’re not talking about black-tie stuff.’

  ‘No, more like bars and clubs, hanging out with the right people.’

  ‘Why?’

  Cooper looked puzzled. ‘What do you mean, why? What kind of question is that? To raise money, to move it around, to find investment opportunities—’ He was at a loss for words.

  ‘And that makes you happy.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re getting at.’

  ‘I mean here was a beautiful girl you say you were in love with. She goes off the rails and you don’t prioritize her welfare.’

  Cooper smirked. He looked like a schoolboy sharing internet porn. ‘She was hot but she wasn’t going to be around for ever, if you know what I mean. There are plenty of others ready to take her place.’

  May tried not to judge, but he really did not like Cooper. London was full of shapeshifting wolves who never dreamt of taking regular work when there was easy prey around. He held up the wad of papers. ‘You honestly think there’s money in this company? Selling fantasies?’

  Cooper ran a hand throug
h his hair. ‘I see the bottom line. Their business plan makes sense and the time is right. There’s a Middle Eastern guy who conducts the courses. He could sell anything to anyone. He has a business partner, a woman with a head for making money. I like her; she thinks like a bloke. They have a very franchisable brand. Word’s getting around, so they need to roll it out fast.’

  ‘How much are you in for?’

  Cooper shook his head. ‘Everything, man.’

  ‘You know I have to check them out.’

  ‘Hey, I showed you her stuff because you said you wanted to know where she’d been, that’s all. Don’t drag me any further into this.’

  ‘Let me make it simple for you,’ said May, stepping closer. ‘You have no way of explaining why a woman with whom you were intimate died. Her family and friends have no explanations either, but everyone seems to think it was inevitable that something bad would happen to her. Perhaps we should just leave it there . . . What do you think?’

  Cooper shrugged. ‘I don’t know what to say to that.’

  ‘How about telling me you’re angry?’ said May. ‘If it was my girl I’d want more than justice – I’d be ready to kill someone. But I’m not you, I’m a public servant. I wait for bad things to happen and try to stop them from happening again. That’s how it works in my world; you can be walking over a bridge when someone coming the other way decides to throw you off. I only get the call after you’ve drowned. Wouldn’t you want me to take someone down for it?’

  ‘Some people bring bad karma on themselves,’ said Cooper. ‘You didn’t know her. It was like she deliberately used up all her options.’

  ‘So there was nothing left to do but die?’ May shook his head. ‘You of all people should understand the difference between victims and predators. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which. Last year I heard about a woman in King’s Cross whose husband beat her up nearly every Saturday night. She wouldn’t leave him or go to a refuge. He thumped her so hard with a saucepan that he broke the handle off, then sat next to her body eating pizza and watching football for the next three days. She nearly died. In his defence he said she’d told him that she didn’t deserve any better. Victim status is learned from family members during childhood. If it isn’t stopped it just gets passed down.’

  ‘You think I don’t know anything about victims?’ asked Cooper hotly. ‘You should have met my folks, man. They’re dead now, and good riddance. And maybe you should talk to Lynsey’s parents. See how caring they were.’ Cooper held his gaze with calm arrogance.

  ‘I will, and then I’ll talk to this wellbeing place. If anyone there is connected to the case in any way you may find yourself with a bad investment on your hands.’ He held up the schedule. ‘I’ll hang on to this.’

  On his way out, he called Longbright. ‘Janice, see what you can dig up on a health spa called Life Options, based in SW1. Dalladay was signing up for courses there.’

  27

  WATERS & VAPOURS

  For a minute Arthur Bryant entertained the notion of knotting sheets together, but the only bed linen available was in the Evidence Room and had belonged to Coatsleeve Charlie, the bogus butler of Belgravia, and the last thing Bryant wanted to do was muddy this story’s flow with an apocryphal and highly libellous tributary. So he just put on his coat, switched his slippers for boots, pocketed his sandwiches, knotted his scarf over his nose and crept out of his office as soon as Longbright was called to a meeting.

  ‘You off out again, Mr B.?’ said one of the Daves, sitting on a camp stool by the hole in the floor brewing coffee.

  ‘You haven’t seen me,’ said Bryant, waving his hands in an ethereal fashion. ‘I’m here in the building somewhere but you’re not sure where.’

  ‘Do you want one of us to come with you?’

  ‘There wouldn’t be much point,’ Bryant replied. ‘What’s the other one going to say if Janice asks where I am?’

  ‘Well,’ said Dave One, pointing to his mate, ‘he always lies but I always tell the truth. So if she asks him where you are, he’ll say that I said you’re in the building. And if she asks me where you are, I’ll say that my mate says you’re in the building. So it’s a win-win.’

  ‘But one of you will be out,’ Bryant reminded him.

  ‘Yes, but it won’t make any difference which of us is out.’

  ‘Yes it will,’ said Dave Two.

  ‘You two are wasted here,’ said Bryant. ‘You should apply for the CID.’

  As he moved through the sifting rain across the grey striped concourse of King’s Cross Station, munching a last triangle of sandwich (fish paste and banana chutney), Bryant considered suicide. Not his own, for he had lately become far too cheerful for such gloomy thoughts. Rather, he was thinking about suicide and water. The Thames was not Lake Windermere, placid and depthless. It was a hazardous, occluded and somewhat repellent maelstrom, not perhaps at its shoreline, where he was now convinced that Lynsey Dalladay had lost her wits and taken her own life, but certainly in its main channel, where for all he knew the engineer Dimitri Gilyov might have chucked himself, although that would hardly have explained how he came to be lodged in the struts of a bridge.

  The Dead Diary had made him think of all this. In its pages he had found reports of other strange deaths: drowned bodies pulled from the depths in unusual circumstances. There was the Olympic swimmer who waded into the high tidewater at Rotherhithe and never came out, and the Japanese couple crossing Tower Bridge on a sightseeing tour who somehow managed to fall in together and drown. These were high-profile cases with national attention that yielded rational explanations: the swimmer had discovered he was suffering from motor neurone disease, and the Japanese pair had fallen after climbing out on to one of the parapets to photograph themselves with the tower in the background.

  But there were other, quieter deaths that barely scratched a rune-mark on the stones of the city. In September a well-off middle-aged lady from Chiswick named Angela Curtis had jumped into the waters at Hammersmith for no apparent reason. Bryant’s attention had been drawn by the fact that the profile on her police report bore a remarkable similarity to that of Lynsey Dalladay’s. Mrs Curtis had wedged her foot under a rock, either accidentally or in an effort to prevent herself from changing her mind about suicide. She had recently divorced and moved in with her daughter in Oxford, but the daughter now worked in Great Portland Street, managing a dress company called Coco Bean.

  Bryant took the Victoria line to Oxford Circus and walked back to the company’s wholesale shop. When he entered, stepping carefully between white-lace bridal gowns, two young women so thin that they resembled praying mantises came forward to shoo him out.

  ‘No no no,’ said one briskly, ‘if you’re here about the bins we’ve had them taken off the pavement.’

  Bryant removed his PCU card and held it at arm’s length to ward them off.

  ‘Oh, I’m frightfully sorry,’ she said, reading it. ‘There was a tramp here last week going through our rubbish—’

  ‘And you thought I was a paraffin,’ said Bryant, irritated. ‘Next time I’ll wear my Chanel. Meanwhile, I’d like to speak to Jade Curtis. Is she here?’

  ‘I’ll get her,’ said one of the mantises, beating an awkward retreat.

  They sat together at a tiny white plastic table in the back of the store. Although the room was overheated, Bryant felt an odd chill. Jade Curtis was a pleasant-faced ebony-haired woman in her late twenties who looked as if she hadn’t slept well for six months.

  ‘I blame myself for not taking control of the situation earlier,’ she said. ‘When someone you love dies like that, well, of course you examine the past. If there’s anything you can tell me—’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not here with answers,’ said Bryant. ‘I’m working on a case unconnected with your mother’s death.’

  ‘Then I don’t understand—’

  ‘At least it seems to be unconnected,’ Bryant added hastily. ‘It may be nothing, but if you could hear me
out? I understand that your mother underwent psychological evaluation sometime after she went to live in Thailand?’

  ‘How could you know that?’

  ‘I checked her medical records.’

  ‘I thought doctors couldn’t talk about their patients.’

  ‘Your mother’s death required an inquest. What did she do while she was in the Far East?’

  Jade ran a piece of silk material over her fingers, back and forth, a nervous habit. ‘She was always very driven. She staged fashion events around the world, and the pressure eventually got to her. After my father left she moved to Phuket and lived there for a while. When she returned she suffered a nervous breakdown. She was put on medication to prevent any further episodes, but the regime was difficult because it made her put on weight. She tried every alternative therapy under the sun to replace the pills, but nothing worked. She was very unhappy about that.’

  ‘You think it was enough to make her want to kill herself?’

  ‘I talked to her doctor and he said no. But I know that without her meds she became very depressed.’

  ‘What actually happened on the night she died?’

  ‘She went out with her dog, a Staffordshire bull terrier – she often walked it late. She would drive to the towpath on the south side of the river at Hammersmith. The police thought she might have slipped and fallen in but there were no unusual marks on the bank. And there was a big flat rock on her foot. The police said she’d placed it there. I don’t under-stand. How could this have a bearing on any other case?’

  ‘Would you say your mother was a pragmatic woman?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘Very much so. Why?’

  ‘It’s just that she did some things which were out of character.’ He checked his notes. ‘Joining an anti-capitalist protest group, travelling alone around Greece, becoming a Buddhist. Would you say she felt lost?’

  ‘No.’ Jade shook her head. ‘She just wanted to try all of the things she couldn’t do when she was still with my father. She was a happy woman, full of passions and interests.’