Strange Tide

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Your partner is an unofficial suspect in the murder of Lynsey Dalladay,’ Longbright explained.

  ‘What do you mean, unofficial?’ Cassie asked angrily, checking that none of her clients were within earshot. ‘Either he’s a suspect and you have to take him into custody for questioning with a lawyer present, or he’s not.’

  ‘There’s an outfit called the Metropolitan Police, you might wish to try them if you’d prefer a milder service,’ said Longbright as Colin squeezed past her with a stack of clear plastic boxes. ‘We’re more your Take It Away and Smash It to Bits to See if Anything Incriminating Falls Out Brigade.’

  Two smartly dressed middle-aged women stopped on their way back from a treatment room and stared at the fracas in the foyer. ‘But you’re required to stay within the limits of their laws,’ Cassie hissed.

  ‘That depends on who wrote our laws, which in this case was our Mr Bryant. The wording he settled on isn’t very precise. In fact it doesn’t even make sense.’

  Cassie looked around wildly. Doors were opening everywhere. ‘You are going to drive a stake through the heart of this business.’

  ‘It’s better than somebody killing off your clientele,’ said Longbright. ‘I don’t understand you. Don’t you want your mother’s murderer found?’

  ‘Well, of course I do but—’

  ‘That’s the problem right there,’ said Longbright. ‘There can’t be any conditions to murder. Now let us do our job.’

  In one of the unused treatment rooms that had been commandeered for evidence, Dan Banbury was standing in for John May, sorting through the online records they had printed out from Cassie North’s computer.

  ‘Nothing out of the ordinary so far,’ he warned. ‘The bookkeeping’s almost too clean; there aren’t even any admin errors or spelling mistakes.’

  ‘I’ve got an admin error,’ said Meera, holding up a pair of pages. ‘The weekly schedule of events repeats itself after one month, yes? These are the courses actually taken by the clients.’ She pointed to the second document. ‘I’ve matched them against the hours billed but the numbers don’t tally.’

  Banbury read over her shoulder. ‘Why not?’

  ‘We’re a course short. Look, seven classes paid for by Neema Pradesh, six marked on the schedule, eight classes paid for by Amanda Kirkland, seven marked on the schedule. I checked the list of courses offered in the online brochure and the one that’s not listed is something called “Sacred Nature: Death & Rebirth”,’ Meera said. ‘Why isn’t that down here?’

  ‘Maybe it’s not held at the centre,’ said Banbury. ‘They also run site-specific classes. According to the spreadsheets—’

  ‘For God’s sake, go out there and ask someone,’ said Longbright. ‘You’re like kids walking down the street staring at phones instead of looking up. You—’ She stuck her head out of the door and grabbed a passing staff member. ‘The sacred nature class, where is it held?’

  ‘I think it takes place outside,’ said the startled manicurist. ‘In another building.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘By the river in Chiswick.’

  ‘Meera, were any of the victims booked on it?’

  Meera Mangeshkar ran a bitten nail down the list. ‘It looks like Dalladay was.’

  Meera ran out to find Bryant. Of the other women who had taken the course Neema Pradesh was not at the centre, but Amanda Kirkland had just finished a relaxation class. Bryant thanked Meera and took shelter under the eaves of the centre’s internal courtyard.

  A few minutes later Mrs Kirkland came hopping across the wet grass in a white bath-robe to tap him angrily on the shoulder. ‘Excuse me, but you can’t come in here smoking that thing.’

  Bryant removed his pipe from his mouth and looked about. ‘Come in, madam?’ he said. ‘I haven’t come in. That thing above us is the sky. I’m not “in” anywhere. It only becomes an enclosed space if you’re looking at it from beyond the earth’s atmosphere, and even then that’s metaphysically debatable.’

  ‘The grounds are private and the secondary smoke drifts back,’ Mrs Kirkland complained.

  ‘Tell me, do you drive a car, use a phone, get on a plane?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘Then you might as well smoke.’

  ‘I voted Green,’ said Mrs Kirkland, wilting.

  ‘I once voted for Tony Blair. We all suffer disappointments in life. Go on, have a fag, don’t be a coward. I can see the bulge of the carton in your pocket. If you light up they’ll all want one. We could start a revolution.’

  With a sigh of relief, Mrs Kirkland stuck a pastel-coloured cigarette between her lips.

  ‘That’s not a proper oily rag, have one of these, you can feel them biting your lungs.’ Bryant dug in his coat and dragged out a battered packet.

  ‘Woodbines?’ said Mrs Kirkland, reading the carton. ‘How old are these?’

  ‘I bought them in 1982. I keep them in a humidor to preserve their flavour.’

  He held out his lighter. She inhaled and coughed violently. She glanced sideways at him. ‘You’re a very strange man.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Bryant said, ‘what do you think of him?’

  Mrs Kirkland looked at him in surprise. ‘Who, our dashing guru? You mean apart from the fact that Thornberry is obviously not his real name? He’s very charismatic. Rather sharper than your average counsellor.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He has an answer for everything.’

  ‘Give me an example.’

  ‘Well, if you tell him that you’re unable to visualize spiritual energy, he’ll always explain how you can change – and how much it will cost.’

  ‘He’s running a business.’

  ‘Yes, but he lets you see that he is and then negotiates, which I find rather refreshing. I mean we all know, but he lets you know he knows. If you see what I mean.’

  Bryant studied his smoking companion. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘The truth?’ Mrs Kirkland jetted blue smoke over a potted clump of love-lies-bleeding. ‘My husband runs the third largest insurance company in Toronto. Do you have any idea how ghastly that is?’

  ‘The money isn’t boring,’ Bryant observed.

  ‘Why must these things always be mutually exclusive? If you have an interesting job you get paid peanuts. If it’s deadly dull you command a high salary.’

  ‘The therapies that take place off-campus, know anything about those?’

  ‘I think one is ceramics, at a potter’s workshop in Putney. The other is just past Barnes, at the Death House.’

  Bryant’s interest was piqued. ‘The Death House?’

  ‘That’s what they call it. Something to do with cholera victims in the nineteenth century. Bodies washing into the river or some such nonsense. I went there once but didn’t take to it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Mrs Kirkland waved away smoke, recalling the day she went. ‘There was a most peculiar atmosphere. I was the oldest pupil in the class. There was something about the way the younger girls all hung on his every word. It felt like—’ She stopped.

  ‘Like what?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘Like a bit of a cult. Some women can be such dreadful sheep.’

  ‘You think he exerts a strong influence over them?’

  ‘Oh, definitely.’

  ‘And there are improprieties?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised. But then that’s what we oldies always think about the pretty ones, isn’t it?’ The watery sun vanished again behind black clouds. Mrs Kirkland shivered and pulled her robe more tightly over her bosom. The Woodbine had burned halfway down and was putting its knee into the back of her lungs, so she ground it out. ‘I’m going in,’ she announced. ‘Thank you for the cigarette; I’ll probably have a sore throat for a fortnight. It was interesting to meet you, Mr—’

  Bryant had vanished.

  40

  DECEPTION & SUGGESTION

  ‘He’s a very attractive charlatan,’ said Maggi
e Armitage as they walked from the station, ‘there’s no question about that. But why would he kill? That’s what you want to know, isn’t it? Does he deliberately set out to harm?’

  ‘In a nutshell,’ said Bryant, looking around at the dank, shadowy railway arches that lay ahead of them. It was lunchtime, and the rain was back with a vengeance. ‘Do I really have to see this woman?’

  ‘She might be able to help. You sent Mr Land to see her last time. The poor man must have had the fright of his life.’

  ‘He did. How we laughed. You were saying.’

  ‘It was about two years ago, at the Finsbury Park Rainbow just over the road. They called themselves the Ministry of Compassion. He had a choir with him, but the show was careful to avoid any mention of religion. There was a lot of vague nonsense about spiritual energy, life waves and the mental path to healing. His name back then was Pastor Michaels. I rather liked him. There was intelligence in his eyes. But I couldn’t sit there and let him deceive people, so I cut him off.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I severed his earpiece cord. He had an assistant who was feeding him information. They’d probably downloaded it from Facebook or something. You could argue that he was providing comfort to those in need but I think such people do a lot of damage, whether they realize it or not.’

  ‘None of his staff have professional qualifications,’ said Bryant, helping Maggie over a pond that had been formed by broken paving stones. ‘Marion North was persuading clients to give up their medication with a load of old bobbins about natural energies replacing toxic pharmaceuticals. As a result one of them became suicidal and drowned herself. That doesn’t make Bensaud a murderer because it was surely not his intention to kill off his clients, but it could make him a joint principal. Did he independently contribute to causing the actus reus, the “guilty act”, rather than just giving advice which she was free to take or discard?’

  ‘From what you’ve told me so far, it sounds as if your man knows his legal position,’ said Maggie as they crossed the road, slipping between shushing vehicles. ‘That’ll make him hard to trap. I could mix you a potion that would force him to tell the truth, although I’d have to swing by the Co-op for a sliced white loaf, and I don’t know how you’d get it on him.’

  Bryant was puzzled. ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s a bread poultice. Esmeralda should be somewhere over here.’ The waste ground was all but invisible from the road, but she knew exactly where to go. She held open a torn section of chicken-wire fence for Bryant to climb through. Ducking down, she peered through the passenger window of an upturned blue Nissan. ‘Esmeralda? Are you here, dear?’

  ‘I have a feeling she’s over there,’ said Bryant, raising his index finger in the direction of a particularly unappetizing railway arch festooned with dirt-encrusted power cables. A strange burbling noise, something between a pregnant pigeon and a tyre being tested for punctures underwater, emerged from the shadows.

  ‘That sounds like her,’ Maggie said, peering ahead. ‘I bring her food and medical supplies whenever I’m passing. She doesn’t trust doctors. She thinks they want to steal her organs. Why don’t you like coming to see her alone?’

  ‘Oh, she thinks she’s married to me,’ Bryant explained, pulling his scarf higher as if preparing to hide. ‘It’s hard to believe that she once had a fine academic mind. The establishment punished her for teaching sedition.’

  ‘Why does she think you and she are—?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it; she also thinks she’s married to Robert Redford and Batman.’

  The pair advanced through low light and falling rain to find a strange scene reminiscent of a bad touring production of The Mousetrap. A living-room set had been laid out under the protection of the archway: sofa, armchairs and a Primus stove stood on a mouldering carpet beside a table with only three legs and a moth-eaten, yellow-tasselled standard lamp. Bundled in the armchair was an object like a poorly rewound ball of grey wool.

  ‘Esmeralda,’ said Maggie softly, venturing nearer. ‘May we come in?’

  The crooning stopped and a filthy head appeared out of the bundle. ‘Who is at my door?’

  ‘It’s me, Maggie. I brought you something to eat.’

  ‘If it’s curried goat from the Ethiopian takeaway, you can stick it up your arse. The last one I had was old enough to vote.’

  Maggie stepped on to the mildewed carpet and opened her shopping bag. ‘Here you are, everything you need to make a nice mutton stew.’

  Esmeralda snatched the bag and peered inside. She removed a large onion and bit into it. ‘Lovely,’ she said, spraying pieces, ‘I’ll have the rest later. Who’s that with you?’

  ‘Hello, Esmeralda,’ said Bryant, reluctantly moving into the tramp’s odour zone.

  ‘My husband! Where have you been? With that other woman, I suppose. I knew you’d be bigeramous.’

  ‘What other woman?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘Princess Margaret,’ said Esmeralda. ‘I suppose you’re here to see your son. This apple’s off.’ She chucked the onion into the shadows and hauled herself to her feet, leading them over to a broken crib stuffed with filthy blankets.

  ‘My God, she hasn’t kidnapped a baby, has she?’ whispered Bryant in horror. Esmeralda rose with something coddled in her arms. Whatever it was, it seemed to be thrashing about and crying.

  ‘This is little Arbuthnot. Say hello to your daddy.’ Esmeralda crept up to Bryant and presented him with the infant. It was brown and woolly and had big red eyes the size of ping-pong balls.

  ‘That’s a sock puppet,’ said Bryant wearily.

  ‘I’m not,’ said Arbuthnot in a ridiculous high-pitched voice, its little mouth squirming as Esmeralda moved her fist. ‘I’m born of the loving union between Esmeralda Sparrow and Arthur Bryant in this year of Our Lord, 1978.’

  ‘Oh God,’ Bryant whispered to Maggie, ‘that was the year I met her, when she’d just been sectioned after trying to set fire to Trinity College.’

  ‘Esmeralda, we need your advice,’ said Maggie firmly. ‘Do you remember those lectures you used to give about hypnosis and the power of suggestion?’

  ‘I still give them,’ said the tramp, gently placing the sock puppet back in its filthy bed. ‘I can cure anything, heating disorders, anemorexia, fear of yoghurt, you name it.’

  ‘Do you think a person can be made to do something against their will?’ asked Bryant.

  Esmeralda’s manner changed as she gave the matter her professional attention. ‘Not against both the conscious and subconscious will, no. That’s a mythicism. But you can get someone to change their behavioural patterns. And it can produce secondary harm.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The little tramp flopped into an armchair and forced her wandering wits to a level of deeper concentration. ‘First you need a suscepterible subject,’ she explained. ‘Suppose you hypnotize them into believing that they’re about to experience an electric shock – one of the oldest hypnotic tricks – a hormone called prolactin is released from the pituitary gland that can actually kill the subject. In very rare cases hypnosis can cause schizophrenia or exaggerate existing conditions.’ She raised a filthy digit. ‘But, but! There’s no such thing as a properly qualified hypnotherapist, not in medical terms. Coaching suggestions can be used to weaken negative messages which are already in the subconscious. And they can help in healing processes. They can reduce pain and symptoms of dementia, stop cravings, enhance the memory. Are you staying for tea? There’s trifle. I didn’t make it, I found it.’

  ‘No thank you,’ said Bryant politely. ‘Who’s most likely to prove susceptible?’

  ‘Children, readers, artists, open-minded and emotional people, seekers of enlightenment, people who like trying alternative therapies. And hippies, of course.’

  ‘Why hippies?’

  ‘Because of the terrible times we live in – Vietnam, Kent State, Watergate.’

  ‘She taught American politics in the late 1970s
,’ whispered Bryant.

  ‘People get into transcendental mediteration because they already feel lost and are looking for peas. Peas and quiet.’

  ‘Do you have to be put into a trance?’

  ‘No, but there are many ideas about what trances are. Hitler appeared to put his followers into a trance with cleverly placed verbal signifiers. There’s such a thing as hypnotic language, which plants structured commands in the mind. It can be learned, but some people are born naturals.’

  ‘Could you encourage someone who was suicidally inclined to kill themselves?’

  ‘You can only draw out what’s already there. I can offer you bark tea.’

  ‘That would be lovely,’ said Maggie. Bryant glared at her.

  ‘I may have a packet of Garibaldis saved. After all, we have something to celebrate, now that Arthur’s come to take me home.’

  ‘Esmeralda, I didn’t come here to take you home,’ said Bryant gently.

  ‘But I want to go to the shore,’ she said plaintively, digging out the biscuits. ‘Won’t you take me to the shore? I can’t stay here with my rheumaterism. London Transport’s taking away my arch. They’re going to build luxury.’ She pointed to the sign that had been pinioned to the brickwork above their heads: ‘Number One Finsbury – Luxury Loft Living. One Bedroom Apartments starting at 1.2m’. The words ‘Loft Living’ had partially fallen off. ‘They want a million. They don’t say a million what, but I haven’t got a million anything. Or even a hundred anything. I haven’t got anything except my memories and I haven’t even got those any more because I’ve lost the key.’

  ‘I know your memories,’ said Maggie gently. ‘I’ll stay with you a while and we’ll write them down.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Esmeralda, her eyes filled with gratitude. ‘Have a Garibaldi.’