Strange Tide

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘So you know who I am?’ Bryant seated himself facing Ali in one of his elegant consultation chairs.

  ‘Certainly. I would rather have an open, honest discussion with you than have any more officers prowling around the place undercover.’

  ‘I was very impressed, watching you in there. You use some form of neurolinguistic programming? You think all behaviour has structure that you can learn?’

  ‘No,’ said Ali, unruffled by the question. ‘I just try to put clients at their ease by adopting their natural speech patterns. We use a variety of different therapies to help them with various problems.’

  ‘What kind of problems?’

  ‘At the moment we’re offering advice on a variety of lifestyle issues, but we’ll soon be able to deal with depression, phobias, habit disorders, allergies, learning issues, psychosomatic conditions and so on.’

  ‘But you’re not doctors.’

  ‘We specialize in the areas that GPs won’t cover.’

  ‘Forgive me, but this is largely pseudoscience, isn’t it?’ said Bryant. ‘The mind-over-matter thing has been discredited again and again.’

  ‘Control trials aren’t the best way of discovering whether a technique works, Mr Bryant. Our clients would not return if they didn’t feel a change in themselves. We receive many unsolicited commendations—’

  Bryant knew a clever mimic when he heard one. Ali was spouting jargon like a paid expert fielded by a TV network, but it didn’t sound as if he entirely understood what he was saying. ‘Where do your therapies cross over into mysticism?’ he asked. ‘Marion North was selling “energy rocks” from here, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Our clients choose from a wide spectrum of therapies, from those with a scientifically quantifiable health basis, like yoga, meditation and stress control, to more psychic energy-based disciplines.’

  ‘Do you diagnose?’

  ‘We offer advice.’

  ‘What was your advice for her?’ Bryant pulled Angela Curtis’s pill-pot from his pocket and rattled it. ‘I understand she was taking them for depression.’

  Ali took the pot and read its label. ‘They were prescribed by her doctor, not by me. She was seeing Marion North.’

  ‘What happens if you don’t think someone has a problem? Do you send them away?’

  ‘We deal with their perception issues.’

  More recited jargon, thought Bryant. ‘So it’s a win-win for you, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘If they arrive complaining that they’re overweight but have a normal BMI, you say let’s deal with how you perceive yourself, and – forgive me for mentioning anything so vulgar as monetary gain here – you cream off the ackers.’

  Ali was smart enough to realize that he had been caught out. ‘I don’t know what that means.’

  ‘Ah, yes, English as a second language, I forgot. You still get your mitts on the moolah, the dosh, the deep-sea divers, the loot.’

  ‘I’m not very familiar with this language,’ Ali replied, ‘but I assume you’re suggesting we’re in it purely to make money.’ His reply was tinged with just the right amount of snobbery and irritation to pass for gentrified English.

  Bryant took out one of the glittery drawings Longbright had filched from the centre. ‘Surely you admit that when it comes to selling “magic” children’s daubs and hand-painted lucky rocks the line has been crossed?’

  ‘People throw coins into wishing wells but it doesn’t mean they believe their dreams will come true. If it makes them feel better it’s a working therapy.’ Ali’s brow furrowed. ‘Forgive me but you are not here to get tips on running a business, surely.’

  ‘Three women have drowned, Mr Bensaud. That is your birth-name, isn’t it? It’s quite hard keeping up with your identity changes. Two of the dead were your clients and one was your therapist. And here you are running courses in sacred rivers, informing vulnerable clients about the cycle of death and rebirth.’

  Bensaud shook his head. ‘You’re very much mistaken if you think they’re vulnerable, Mr Bryant. They’re customers, not patients, and they’re buying what they want to hear. I’m not your enemy, I’d like to help you as much as possible.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear that. Your paternity test for Lynsey Dalladay’s child came back positive, in case you were wondering, which is why we’re having this conversation.’

  ‘Yes, I thought it had.’ Bensaud sat back with his palms on his thighs and studied his opponent coolly.

  ‘Don’t you think your relationship with her was unprofessional?’

  ‘There was nothing wrong with her.’

  ‘But given her background—’

  ‘She was not helpless or at risk in any way, if that’s what you mean. She was healthy and entirely responsible for her actions.’

  ‘She was pregnant, and you are the father.’

  ‘You think I deliberately abused any authority I had? She told me she used contraception.’

  ‘She told you she was pregnant.’

  Bensaud looked pained and sat silent for a moment. ‘Yes. But she did not suggest I was the father.’

  ‘It was lucky she died before she could talk to anyone else,’ said Bryant. ‘I mean, from a business perspective. I imagine it would be difficult to get other women to, if you forgive the phrase, open up to you. For example, Angela Curtis—’

  ‘Mr Bryant, I did not have relations with that woman. She attended one of Mrs North’s courses. I had no dealings with her socially.’

  ‘She’s still dead.’

  Bensaud held his gaze. ‘You’re telling me I’m a suspect.’

  ‘It sounds as if you’re telling me. We’ll be interviewing your colleagues and clients and searching the premises, as well as examining all of your online data.’

  ‘You have a warrant for this?’

  ‘It will be here first thing tomorrow, so I must ask you to leave everything untouched.’

  Ali rose. ‘I’ll expect you then. In the meantime I’d like to get on with my work.’ He waited for the detective to join him, then left the room first.

  As he departed the centre, Bryant rang his partner in Shad Thames.

  ‘About Bensaud’s positive paternity test,’ he said, ‘would you like to hear a theory? Marion North was just starting out at the centre. She got a little over-enthusiastic and failed to follow the centre’s carefully plotted boundary lines about its holistic-homeopathic advice. She told Angela Curtis to throw away her medication and start buying their manuka honey or whatever. As soon as Curtis did so, her depression went untreated and returned.’

  ‘Curtis’s death occurred earlier than the others,’ May pointed out. ‘Could you stand still? You’re fading in and out.’

  ‘I’m trying to get across a road without being knocked down. Listen to me. Perhaps Bensaud failed to follow his own rules. His new power corrupted him; he wouldn’t be the first. As for Gilyov, maybe the engineer had something on him.’

  ‘So Bensaud seduced Dalladay, and when she became a danger to his career he turned to murder. It doesn’t sound—’

  Bryant would not be moved. ‘As for the contusions, they’re either deliberate or accidental. Giles thinks Marion North went over head first and hit the stone wall of the embankment on the way down. Sorry, I’m not exactly sparing your grief.’

  ‘You’re saying that whichever way we go, Bensaud is our man. How do we prove that?’

  ‘He’s not able to acknowledge that he’s capable of killing. At the moment we don’t have anything on him other than the paternity result.’

  ‘That’s enough to bring him in for formal questioning, Arthur.’

  ‘And how do you propose we extract a confession, by breaking out the rubber truncheons? He’s smart enough to have set you up for murder, John. You didn’t see it coming and we won’t see it when he vanishes again. There has to be another way of proving his culpability.’

  ‘So how can you get me off the hook?’ asked May,

  ‘I have a date with Daisy,’ said Bryant. He rang off and
headed for the tube.

  Fraternity DuCaine and Janice Longbright were running out of desk space. Raymond Land’s ‘paperless office’ initiative had spectacularly failed, and half-eaten trays of dhal, aloo ghobi, chicken korma and beef randang teetered on stacks of overstuffed cardboard folders.

  ‘Let’s call it a night,’ said Janice, clearing up the meal. ‘When I look away from the screen all I can see is dots. I can’t believe you’re leaving us for the geek squad. Why did you order minced turnips in dried ginger?’ She sniffed the tray and dropped it in the bin.

  ‘I’ll only be up the road in Holloway. And I’m a vegetarian, remember?’

  ‘Then just order chicken. If I had any sense I’d get out too.’ Longbright sighed. ‘I haven’t had a holiday in seven years. I thought you liked working here.’

  DuCaine sighed. ‘The forensic tech is a game-changer. I can’t advance here. Look what happens when the old boys aren’t around; the unit falls apart because nobody except you knows how they work. The only reason Darren Link hasn’t taken the case away is because it must suit his purpose not to. He was on vice in Dalston, wasn’t he?’

  ‘For a while, yeah. His mates are still there.’

  ‘What if he knew they were on the take and figured we wouldn’t go there? We could have another look at the club.’

  ‘If there was anything on the premises it’d be long gone by now. I’m not pulling up their carpets with these nails.’

  ‘You’re such a girl,’ Fraternity said, grinning. ‘You’ve still got the contact list, yeah? Everyone who knew Dalladay at the club?’

  ‘Sure.’ She pulled a single page from one of the files, cascading brown rice on to the paperwork. For the next hour DuCaine worked in silence. At the end of it, he turned his screen around.

  ‘You wanted some answers,’ he said. ‘You were just searching in the wrong place.’

  ‘I tried to track all the addresses, phones and credit cards of members who were known to hang out with Dalladay but came up short,’ Longbright admitted.

  ‘Because the names you were given by the club were phonetically anglicized from the Cyrillic alphabet. The ones you couldn’t find are Macedonian, Russian and Ukrainian – I haven’t started checking Chinese names yet. I think these three all have criminal records in their native countries, although I can’t get access to the Russian files. I figured if they were specifically requesting Dalladay’s company they were doing it for a reason, and they had to have paid her.’

  ‘I tried that,’ said Longbright. ‘There was nothing in her account.’

  ‘No, but there were several international bank transfers made to her via a private bank in Switzerland that according to these dates bypassed the money-laundering checks that are supposed to be in place for overseas transfers.’

  ‘Surely there’s no way you can directly access their statements from here.’

  ‘Not directly, but I can get hold of the currency-exchange transactions this end because I’ve got her payments received. You missed them because they went into a separate account.’

  ‘So how much did they pay her?’

  ‘In total? I’ve got six amounts so far totalling one point eight million euros. There could be more.’

  ‘What was she, the most expensive call girl in the country?’ Longbright whistled. ‘Where did it all go?’

  ‘That’s the best part,’ said DuCaine. ‘They briefly entered the second account and went straight back out into a business account owned by Bensaud. It looks like she was helping to finance the expansion of his Life Options franchise.’

  ‘You’re saying that Bensaud had both Cooper and Dalladay giving him money?’

  ‘It seems that way. But looking suspicious isn’t a crime, Janice. Sorry, I’m speaking out of turn—’

  ‘No, go on.’

  ‘Separate the facts from the speculation and all you’ve got is some circumstantial stuff that’s not enough for a conviction. I mean, is Cassandra North implicated in the death of her own mother? Where does the responsibility lie? There are too many interpretations of what might have happened. If you try to prosecute now, the case is dead.’

  ‘It’s the only break we’ve had,’ said Longbright. ‘There’s nothing more we can do tonight. Let’s close this up and go home. Tomorrow’s going to be a big day.’

  39

  PIGS & SHEEP

  Arthur Bryant knocked his pipe out against the embankment balustrade and pocketed it. He looked around. The early morning mist softened the river and its bridges, as if a fine layer of tracing paper had been laid over the scene. The traffic was light, and there were few pedestrians on this stretch of the embankment in front of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. After a few minutes a taxi hove into view and pulled up in front of him.

  ‘You Mr Bryant?’ asked the driver, reaching back to open the rear door.

  ‘Yes, how did you recognize me?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘You’re joking, right? Here you go, mate, some bloke at Smithfields asked me to drop this off. It weighs a bloody ton.’

  ‘Ten stone seven, to be exact,’ said Bryant. ‘Can you get Daisy out for me?’

  The driver came around and dragged the huge red nylon holdall from the rear seat of the cab. ‘You sure you ain’t got a body in here?’ he asked jovially, looking for a way to balance it on the pavement.

  ‘A body, ha ha, very good. Thank you. Clear off.’ Bryant tipped the driver and waved him away, then waited for the coast to clear.

  Unzipping the holdall, he peered inside. A big pink face smiled back. He removed Daisy and attempted to stand her upright. The eponymous flower was stuck behind the pig’s left ear, a joke from the butcher. Her head flopped to one side but she still managed to fix him with a beady black eye.

  Bryant thought he had planned everything carefully, but hit a snag. He couldn’t hoist Daisy up the wall. After five minutes of useless effort he was panting with the exertion and Daisy was diagonal.

  Shortly a group of Spanish students passed, and Bryant was able to enlist their help after convincing them that he was a police officer and not an escaped lunatic. As they hauled the creature upright he wondered if he should have dressed Daisy, but decided that the pull of clothing in water would make little difference to her overall speed. The students took selfies of themselves with the animal. Daisy was now sprawled across the balustrade. After one more push they managed to get all of her to the top, so that her front trotters dangled above the water.

  Setting his mobile’s camera to video (following instructions from Dan Banbury that had only taken three years to master) Bryant pummelled the carcass and gave it a shove into the river below. Peering over the balustrade, he was surprised to find that Daisy did not touch the embankment wall as he’d expected but fell clear, hitting the water cleanly and immediately submerging. A few moments later she surfaced head first.

  The students cheered and went on their way. Bryant rolled up the bag and began walking beside the pig’s drifting body, attempting to keep pace with the outgoing tide, but she was now moving too fast.

  By the time he reached Blackfriars Bridge and waited for the traffic lights to change so that he could cross, he knew that he had lost her. He decided to call his partner.

  ‘John, how are you getting on?’

  ‘I’m going stir-crazy here, Arthur. I can’t clean my apartment again. Are you any closer to getting me out?’

  ‘I’m afraid this might be a bit of a last-minute rescue,’ Bryant replied. ‘I’ll try not to leave it until your neck’s in the noose.’

  ‘You sound out of breath.’

  ‘I’m racing a pig.’

  ‘What’s all that noise?’

  ‘A cyclist just swore at me.’

  ‘What are you doing? You shouldn’t be exerting yourself.’

  ‘Don’t worry, the students helped me push her over the wall.’

  ‘You’re not making any sense.’

  ‘Listen, you know we talked about the river providing an easy way of getting rid
of a body?’

  ‘Did you say a pig?’

  ‘It’s not. An easy way, I mean. Daisy weighed exactly the same as Marion North and I couldn’t get her over the parapet by myself. I think we can rule out her daughter.’

  ‘Her daughter was a suspect? You just threw a pig into the river?’

  ‘Is there some particular reason why you feel the need to repeat everything I say?’ Bryant asked. ‘She was a dead weight; it took several of us to get her over the wall and she didn’t hit anything on the way down, so there’s no explanation there for Marion’s contusion. I’m hoping she’ll wash in at Tower Beach but the river’s flowing much faster than I can walk. You see, I was thinking . . .’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘. . . it’s not such an easy way to kill someone after all, lifting a dead weight over a wall. But if the victim wanted to drown, you could assist them.’

  ‘If they wanted to drown in order to be reborn. You’ve already been there and discarded the idea. Are you sure you’re better?’

  ‘I haven’t felt this good since Meera ran over the Mayor’s foot on her motorbike. I have a theory of sorts but the odd one out is Dimitri Gilyov, obviously. He doesn’t seem like someone who would have been susceptible to the power of suggestion, so he had to be killed in a more straightforward manner, one that involved a higher level of risk. He was drowned and hidden under the bridge.’

  ‘Wait, why did Crooms come for him? Did Crooms kill him?’

  ‘I think he knew where to stash the body until he could get around to disposing of it. Of course I don’t have proof of anything yet. Goodness!’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I think my pig just hit the bridge. Excellent, that would explain it! I have to go. If I can get the carcass up on to the foreshore I fancy there’ll be chops for supper.’

  Bryant’s belief that Ali had persuaded the women to kill themselves was now partially restored. But his nemesis seemed impregnable, and so much time had been lost that he feared it might not be possible to regain the lead. He was at least determined to keep the element of surprise. By 9.30 a.m. that morning, the entire PCU team was down at the centre sequestering its documents. Cassie North turned up and furiously demanded to know what was going on.