Strange Tide

by Christopher Fowler

  Maggie accepted the biscuit and surreptitiously held it out for Bryant to inspect. ‘Those aren’t currants,’ she whispered, ‘they’re dead flies.’

  They sat beneath the railway arch as yellow-windowed trains clattered overhead and the rain tumbled into brown iron gutters, rattling down drainpipes and flooding the last remaining liminal spaces around Finsbury Park Station. The elderly detective, the white witch and the tramp discussed abstruse matters that seemed of no possible concern to anyone in the bright new London of glazed towers and steel cathedrals, yet the outcome of their talk had the power to affect the lives of many. From such discarded remnants of the city could great ideas be woven.

  41

  LIFE & DEATH

  ‘I’m not at all happy about this,’ said Dan Banbury, checking the boot of his car. ‘Do we have to black up?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ Colin zipped his jacket shut and checked his pockets. ‘We’re not on army manoeuvres. You don’t need to stick dirt all over your face and poke twigs into a bobble hat. The main thing to worry about is whether the place is alarmed.’

  ‘Thank God for that.’ Banbury closed the boot and bipped the car. ‘Couldn’t we wait and do this legally, preferably in daylight?’

  ‘John says the warrant only covers the centre’s main building. We’re running out of time. Have you got everything?’

  ‘I’ve got a crowbar, a pocket knife, a torch and a whistle for attracting attention.’

  ‘What are you, a flight attendant? Come on.’

  They made their way across the soft wet grass towards the Death House. It was almost midnight. This far from the main road it was hard to discern the outlines of the riverbank. ‘No wonder Angela Curtis went arse over tit,’ said Banbury. ‘I can’t see where I’m putting my feet.’

  ‘I can,’ said Colin, scraping his boot against an elm. ‘Bloody dogs.’

  ‘What are we looking for, anyway?’

  ‘Anything that will help us convict Bensaud. According to the old man nobody can agree on what his off-site courses are actually about. There’s no documentation at the centre and the suspect’s not talking, so that leaves you, me and a crowbar.’

  The building was a stilted brick box with green wooden window-frames and a mossy stepped roof. It was attached to the river’s overhanging stony edge like a G-clamp, so that one side of it almost reached down into the water. Banbury shone his torch across the door. ‘It’s not barred, it’s got a Dorland lock,’ he said. ‘They don’t make them any more. I can’t get that open.’

  ‘Window.’ Colin padded around to the side, pushing his way past low-hanging branches. The windows were fitted with steel grilles.

  ‘If you force those off he’ll know someone’s been in,’ said Banbury, always conscious of other people’s property.

  ‘Yeah, well, I’ll try and put it back after,’ said Colin without much conviction. He wedged the crowbar under the grille and put all his weight on top of it until something cracked. The window itself was not locked and slid open easily, but as he pushed it up the entire frame fell out.

  ‘Nice one,’ said Banbury. ‘Why didn’t you just back your car into the front wall?’ He climbed through the torn hole with some difficulty and ran his torch beam over the floor.

  The Death House had been decorated more luxuriantly than the treatment rooms at the centre. Thick maroon rugs and Persian tapestries were matched by half a dozen brightly coloured beanbags. In the room beyond was a workspace designed to hold laptops. The only terminal actually connected, a silver MacBook, was on standby and password-protected.

  ‘In here,’ called Banbury. Colin found him beyond the kitchen and bathroom in the only other open area.

  A double bed was covered in silver scatter cushions and artificial roses. ‘It doesn’t look like a treatment room to me,’ said Banbury, sucking his teeth. ‘View over the river, a client list of bored attractive women, it’s almost worth getting struck off for.’

  ‘You have to have a medical degree to get struck off,’ said Colin. ‘This bloke’s Mr Showbiz.’

  They checked cupboards and drawers but found nothing out of place or untoward. ‘There must be something. He can’t take everything every time he closes up after a class,’ said Dan, whose terrier instinct had now been awoken.

  ‘No cameras. There’s a router over there,’ said Colin. ‘Maybe he’s stashed another laptop somewhere?’

  Banbury stamped on the floorboards, testing them. ‘What’s underneath holding this place up? What would they put down there?’

  ‘Bins,’ said Bimsley. In his last year at the PCU they had virtually become his specialist subject. He and Banbury lifted the window-frame back and wedged it in place as best they could. They attempted to replace the grille for a while, then gave up.

  At the side of the house they found an access panel leading to a crawlspace. Bimsley pushed open the wooden trapdoor and climbed inside. ‘Thank God for recycling,’ he called back, shoving out a green plastic crate filled with paper. They set down their torches and began going through the printouts.

  ‘I’ve got a feedback questionnaire from the sacred nature course,’ said Banbury. ‘Sounds like a bunch of old toss to me.’

  ‘Show me.’ Colin felt at home sitting in the pile of sodden rubbish that had become caught around his boots. ‘“From the alignment of sacred barrows on its shores to the mysteries of the moon-driven tides that lap its banks, the Thames represents the healing power of Isis, a path of hope, a living fluctuation of life and death.” So that’s “a bunch of old toss”, is it?’

  ‘Totally,’ said Banbury. ‘The sort of thing my wife likes, along with pedicures, Fifty Shades of Grey, scented candles, coconut oil, book clubs and the box set of Downton Abbey.’

  ‘That’s a bit harsh.’

  ‘She’s not soft, though. She started reading all this stuff about warrior women and empowerment, then replaced our bathroom stopcock. If she can figure out how to update her phone software I’ll become surplus to requirements.’

  ‘It says here the nymphs of the river guide lost souls to healing lands on the Other Side. Doesn’t say the Other Side of what. “The fair nymphs of Thamesis, keeping time with the billow of her crystal waves, carry us to the Ocean with her ebb.” “Crystal waves” is pushing it. I saw a dog with its guts out in there last week, right by Dead Man’s Stairs. You think he gets them to believe in all this?’

  ‘It’s not enough,’ said Banbury. ‘There’s a difference between sounding like Barry White and persuading someone to padlock themselves in the river. There’s got to be something solid.’

  ‘Like what?’ Colin asked. When no reply was forthcoming, he looked up at Dan and found him reading pages in the torchlight.

  ‘Like this,’ he said, turned the page around. ‘“Death & Rebirth: Removing Anxiety from the Last Taboo”.’

  ‘What’s the picture at the top?’ asked Colin. ‘I recognize it.’

  ‘It’s a painting.’ Banbury read out the caption. ‘“Théodore Géricault. The Raft of the Medusa. The work depicts survivors from a ship wrecked off the coast of Senegal in 1815 who survived by eating their dead companions. Of 147 crew members set adrift on the unstable raft, only fifteen survived.” That’s a bit grim.’

  ‘Grim?’ said Colin. ‘It’s a masterpiece of French romantic chiaroscuro, you nonce. The painting’s an analogy of France’s corrupt government. The commander ran the ship into sandbanks, then took the longboat for himself and the high-born, leaving the rabble to the raft, which was so loosely tied together that men got their legs trapped between the logs. The abandoned crew rioted. They were forced to eat their leather ammunition pouches, then they ate each other.’

  ‘How come you know so much about it?’

  ‘Mr Bryant showed me the picture in one of his books.’

  ‘Confronting death, eh?’ said Banbury. ‘I can’t imagine too many people signed up for that one.’

  Colin took the pages from his colleague and carefully folded
them away. ‘Maybe there were three women who did,’ he said. ‘We need to check everyone who took the course.’

  ‘This is the big revelation, is it?’ asked Land, his patience rapidly fraying. ‘You’re telling me this fellow Bensaud holds separate private meetings at his “Death House” or whatever you call it in order to make sacrifices to the river?’

  It was Wednesday morning, and Bryant had brought his tea into Raymond Land’s office while he explained the previous day’s events.

  ‘I’m just telling you what Colin and Dan found, mon petit cafard.’ Bryant fished a teabag from his mug with a tuning fork, the only item he could lay his hands on which approximated a spoon. ‘They think he’s bedding his clients and preying on their fragile states of mind to offload them when things get messy.’ He flicked the teabag nonchalantly in the direction of the wastepaper basket and missed.

  ‘I’ve never heard of anything so ridiculous. Are you trying to tell me we’re dealing with a modern-day Bluebeard?’ Land picked up the teabag, which had landed on his foot, and dropped it into the bin with distaste.

  ‘I’ve been doing some checking on the way he runs his businesses. He’s been a very busy lad in the last couple of years. “All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room” – Blaise Pascal.’

  ‘Spare me the cod psychology, Bryant. If you really think this bloke’s knocking off women, why are you so against bringing him in and sitting on him?’

  ‘Because we’ll lose him that way.’ Bryant passed Land a mug of tea and gave him a small electric shock. ‘Sorry, I keep doing that. Something to do with my treatments. I think Bensaud is teaching them how to live, then taking away that gift when they no longer deserve it. “Men live as if they were never going to die, and die as if they had never lived” – the Dalai Lama. “If we don’t know what life is, how can we know what death is?” – Confucius.’

  ‘That’s enough!’ Land raised his voice in a forlorn attempt to sound authoritative. ‘You’ve searched the premises and turned up nothing. You’ve questioned him, his staff and his clients. If you’re not prepared to drag him off the streets and subject him to some decent psychological torture, you’re going to have to admit defeat and let someone else take over.’

  ‘No,’ said Bryant. ‘I need something that will irrefutably incriminate him. Talking won’t work. He’s mastered mental manipulation magnificently. Try saying that with my teeth.’

  ‘So he turns up out of nowhere as a mind-reader, a healer and what-have-you – but what does he actually want?’

  ‘I imagine he wants what people like him always want,’ said Bryant. ‘A foot on the throne. The attention of those in power. Rasputin had the ear of the Tsar of Russia.’

  ‘Cherie Blair had an astrologer,’ added Land. ‘We need to find the anomaly that will undo him. Before we bring him in here, the case has to be absolutely watertight.’

  ‘How are we going to get that?’ asked Land. ‘We’re out of time. Link is pressing to go ahead with charging your partner tomorrow.’

  Bryant needed to be alone for a few minutes.

  The events of the past few weeks had been tumultuous. He had solved the riddle of his own decline; he had glimpsed oblivion and had been spared. Taking a Northern line tube south, he now stood at the centre of Waterloo Bridge looking down into the fast-flowing waters, hoping to find further answers, but the shape of his life still eluded him.

  He thought of Nathalie, small and dark, laughing, the touch of her hand as she balanced above him. It had been the evening of her twenty-first birthday. She’d climbed up on to the balustrade and was tripping lightly along it, right where he was now standing. He reached out and ran his hand over the stonework, wondering if it held the imprint of her dancing feet.

  Young and broke, they had been invited out to drink and celebrate and were both a little tipsy. He had just asked her to marry him.

  It was a spontaneous request foolishly spoken aloud, and yet the moment he heard the words he knew his intention was true. He would never love another.

  She had suddenly stopped laughing and looked down at him. Her features had blurred with the passing of time but he could never forget her smile.

  She was about to give him her answer when a bus horn sounded behind them, and the noise made her start.

  She lost her balance, and when he turned around to grab her she had gone. Arthur threw himself into the water and tried to find her, but the tide was against him and the current was too strong. Nathalie had never learned to swim. In his heavy overcoat and hobnailed boots he was nearly pulled under, and for a moment he wanted to be drawn down with her.

  The search teams dragged the river for days, but they never found her body. Across the years, whenever he looked into the Thames he saw her. Even now, she was still there. When the waters turned and began to rise, he imagined her drifting back into the city to find him. He had never loved again, not truly. How could he when she was still here, borne into the city on lunar tides?

  Focus on closing the case, he told himself, digging into his coat pocket and producing a smooth pebble. He threw it into the scudding waters, a symbolic act designed to make him banish thoughts of Nathalie, and turned his attention back to work, and the problem of Ali Bensaud.

  He enjoys controlling others. He preys on the lonely, the bored, the vulnerable, the directionless. But is he a Jim Jones, a Colonel Kurtz? Someone who would inflict the madness of control upon others? Is he merely callous and ambitious or does he genuinely believe he’s doing good? It would be a matter for a court to decide, and it will mean the difference between capture and release. Someone this Machiavellian might well be able to influence a jury and avoid a conviction.

  You shouldn’t be worrying about that, he thought. Someone else can deal with the problem. Your job is to find a way of reeling him in and to get John off the hook before it’s too late.

  He had one slender lead left. Mrs Kirkland, the client at the St Alphege Centre to whom he had given an ancient cigarette, had given him the name of another woman who had taken the ‘Sacred Nature: Death & Rebirth’ course. Rose Nash, a retired NHS psychotherapist, had agreed to meet Bryant and talk about her experience at the Death House.

  From Waterloo he caught a direct train to Shepperton, the picturesque Thameside village mentioned in the Domesday Book that paradoxically became the home of dissident writers and movie executives.

  There was certainly something defiantly odd about the place, he thought, alighting from the train and heading for the winding High Street. The locks, weirs and riverbanks seemed to belong to the forgotten summer days of the Edwardian age, and yet it was strongly associated with science fiction. Star Wars and Captain America had been filmed here.

  ‘Sometimes I go into my local pub and find a Hollywood legend sitting at the bar,’ Rose Nash told him. ‘It’s like living in a place that has become unmoored in time and space. I suppose that’s why I like it.’

  Rose might have been a figurine, Wedgwood or Waterford perhaps, designed to fit a doll’s house representing a typical half-timbered English cottage. Her cosy living room looked like a film set designed for Hobbits, and was crowded with horse-brasses, paintings, brass pitchers and thick earthenware pots. Bryant looked perfectly at home amongst the bric-a-brac, sunk into a floral sofa in his great tweed overcoat.

  ‘I didn’t finish the Life Options course,’ she explained, serving tea. ‘It all felt so ridiculously bogus, and he was constantly upselling us. I don’t like to be coerced. They’re peddling inner calm but everyone seemed very tense.’

  ‘What do you think they were coercing you towards, exactly?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘That’s rather the question, isn’t it? I’m not sure he knows himself. I didn’t think he was talking literally about death and rebirth, not if you mean he wanted anyone to kill themselves and be reborn. Let me show you something.’ She went to the sideboard and returned with a pack of tarot cards, sorting through them.

  ‘This is
the Death card,’ she said, turning over the familiar figure of a cloaked skeleton riding a white stallion against a sinking sun. In his bony right fist he clutched a black and white flag. ‘His bones live on. His armour makes him unconquerable. His horse is the colour of purity, because Death is the ultimate absolution. Everything that’s reborn is fresh and untainted. The rising sun behind him is a symbol of immortality because it dies and lives. But see what else is in the picture – a river. You’ll find it on all the Death tarot cards, symbolizing the cycle of death and rebirth. Sometimes there’s a boat too, the ferry that transports the souls across the River Styx. Death is associated with the number thirteen, a female number.’

  ‘I didn’t know numbers had sexes,’ said Bryant.

  ‘It’s sacred to the lunar goddess as there are thirteen moons in a year. So everything is tied together, death, rebirth, life, all controlled by the moon, which in turn controls the tides, making the river the access path to a new state of purity.’

  ‘And you believe this to be true?’

  ‘No, Mr Bryant, I think it’s an evocative and rather charming mythology, and I quit the course. I was older than most of the women there, more cynical and still happily married after thirty-five years. We don’t listen when we’re being told straightforward facts; we would much rather accept what some charismatic character tells us. I got the distinct impression that some of them would do anything their teacher wanted.’

  ‘So you think he’s just in it for the money?’

  ‘I don’t know. He doesn’t seem to have any actual qualifications. But there’s certainly an air of mystery around him. He talks about reinvention and rebirth a lot. Perhaps he went through something similar himself.’

  ‘You mean an intimation of mortality? We all have those.’ Bryant was thinking of his own recent brush with fate.

  ‘Yes,’ said Rose. ‘Maybe he’s encouraging others to cope with the same thing.’

  Bryant called his partner on the way back. ‘We could search for some kind of by-law infringement and get the centre temporarily shut down, but it’s not going to solve the bigger problem. We simply don’t have the evidence to make it stick.’