Strange Tide

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘If he’s impervious, you need to find a weak link in someone close to him,’ May replied. ‘What about Cassie North? If we could prove he killed her mother—’

  ‘John, I think she believes you did it, although even she can’t come up with a motive.’

  ‘There’s something that’s been bothering me,’ said May. ‘Bensaud wasn’t born in the UK. All this “sacred Thames” stuff means nothing to him, so why would he run courses in uncovering its origins?’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be about the Thames. He could have a problem with the sea, anything with a lunar tide.’

  ‘No.’ May called a stop to Bryant’s thought process. ‘Arthur, you have to stop theorizing and find physical evidence. You’ve passed your own deadline. Raymond says the internal investigations officer is going to be submitting her report first thing tomorrow. They’re going ahead with the charge of murder. She’s also going to blame him. At the very least, my career is over. There must be something you can do.’

  ‘It’s not just about you, John. I have to protect vulnerable people from this man. Guess where Daisy ended up.’

  ‘Your pig? I dread to think.’

  ‘At the exact spot where you found Dalladay’s body and Dimitri Gilyov’s severed hand. As I suspected, it’s a quirk of the tide.’

  ‘If you tell me the river’s sending you messages, I’m going to hang up.’

  ‘Actually, I’m beginning to think the Thames tricked me. I’ve listened to everyone telling me what the river means and I’m none the wiser at the end of it. If a girl is attacked in a park it doesn’t mean her attacker is obsessed with trees. What if this isn’t about the Thames at all? It could simply be the connection between a number of events.’

  ‘I was trying to tell you that—’

  ‘Dudley Salterton said the trick was to make yourself invisible or become the most visible person in the room.’

  ‘Are you telling me something or just thinking random thoughts aloud?’ May asked. ‘Do you have anything at all that can get me out of here before tomorrow? I’ve paced a hole in the rug. Can’t you do what you used to do, look up something in one of your weird books or study a painting for clues?’

  ‘I have one last idea to try,’ said Bryant. ‘I’ve been seeking out academic experts on the sacred Thames, but now I can see they were the wrong people to talk to. I should have been interviewing people with more practical knowledge.’

  May sounded nonplussed. ‘I really don’t see how it’s going to help—’

  ‘Maybe it’s why the river was used, not for some sacred purpose but simply because it’s familiar territory. The Thames provides the easiest and most obvious solution for the disposal of bodies.’

  ‘No, you’ve lost me,’ said May. Sometimes his partner was like a poorly tuned radio, fading in and out of comprehension. ‘We decided it was impossible to get a girl on to that beach and leave her there to drown.’

  ‘Yes, impossible, exactly,’ Bryant agreed, which wasn’t a useful response.

  ‘I just hope you know what you’re doing, Arthur. My life is at stake here.’

  At least Bryant’s abnormal thought processes showed he was thinking normally again. But it was now a matter of time; if he didn’t come up with the goods, they were sunk.

  42

  FAST & STRANGE

  The Lighterman looked like the sort of pub that turned up in old horror films. From its doors drunken doxies were expected to fall and fights erupt. Once it had sported a pleasing amount of stained and mullioned glass, but too many lads had been put through the windows. Even gentrification had failed to stop revellers from staggering out and being sick in the river. At the rear a small beer garden stood on a platform of warped wooden pilings, and the menus now featured the pub’s new faux-handcrafted logo above the dish of the day (crayfish focaccia), but no matter how often the design changed, most of the clientele remained anchored to the river beneath.

  Bryant sat with ‘Bad Oyster’ Stan Kipps and his old skipper ‘Blotto’ Otto Farmingham, who had been born and raised on the Thames at Woolwich. They preferred to sit outside even though it was bitterly cold.

  Stan had his own pewter tankard, Bryant noticed, and wiped foam from his walrus moustache as he set it down. ‘We transferred to the ferry when the Pool shut for good,’ he explained. ‘It was a bit of a comedown after the tankers. Funny thing was, we got more seasick on the ferry than we ever did in the Atlantic. There’s a right old churn to the tide in the dead centre of the channel, and the constant docking means you’re reversing engines all the time. It messes up your guts.’

  ‘I remember Tower Beach,’ said Otto. ‘The P&O liner Rawalpindi was shelled off Iceland at the start of the war and went down with most of her crew, but its ladders was saved and they was installed to get down to the beach. Big steel grilles with hooks and chains they was.’

  ‘You didn’t get no more fogs on the river after the Pool went,’ said Stan. ‘Hay’s Wharf had all these panels along the front, pictures of barrels and crates and drums – “The Chain of Distribution” it was called – is that still there?’

  ‘It’s all flats for them oligarchs now,’ Otto told him. ‘Shad Thames had hundreds of walkways for moving goods. They got tore down in 1983. My old man used to be down there shovelling tea, spuds, tapioca, you name it.’

  ‘Did both of your families work only on the river?’ Bryant asked.

  ‘Of course.’ Stan sounded surprised by the question. ‘My grandma worked at Tilbury Dock passenger terminal ’cause most people travelled by boat back then. But we was mostly lightermen. Your watermen carried passengers but we shifted goods. You can still see some of the old lighters, the flat-bottomed barges, down towards Southend, but they was replaced by tugs. Right up and down the Thames, they was, tanners at Bermondsey, candle-makers at Battersea, soap-makers at Isleworth, lots of breweries.’

  ‘Does it surprise you that body parts were found by Tower Beach?’ Bryant asked.

  ‘Not really. We used to see all sorts washed up on the starlings.’

  ‘Starlings?’

  ‘Yeah, the stone palings that protect bridge arches. They’ve got curved iron spikes around them.’

  Bryant’s eyes narrowed. ‘What kind of spikes?’

  ‘Sort of Victoriany ones with four sides.’

  Now it made sense – the contusions on Dalladay’s skull, Curtis’s back and Mrs North’s shoulder had been caused by the spikes around the starlings. The river had hurled their bodies at them. Even Daisy had picked up a scar on her journey when she had slammed into the bridge.

  ‘It flows fast and strange around there,’ said Stan. ‘Rather than risk going under London Bridge, passengers used to get off at Old Swan Pier and walk around the bridge to get back on board at Billingsgate. So many watermen drowned. My old man had six brothers and we lost two to the river.’

  ‘Did all the families know each other?’ Bryant asked.

  ‘Of course. We were all members of the Guild, so our kids went to school together,’ said Otto.

  ‘And you still see each other?’

  ‘Yeah, at special occasions and that, down the Waterman’s Hall. We knew everyone, didn’t we, Stan?’

  ‘Did you ever come across either of these?’ Bryant unfolded a photocopy showing mugshots of Gilyov and Crooms.

  ‘Blimey, that’s Bill Crooms,’ said Stan. ‘I don’t know the other one.’

  ‘Me neither,’ said Otto, ‘but that’s definitely Bill. He got himself into a lot of dodgy stuff.’

  ‘What sort of stuff?’

  ‘You have to remember, Mr Bryant, when the lightermen went out of business they still had to make a living. We weren’t fishermen, saving the wages from three-week trips out of Grimsby.’

  ‘I had a cousin at Grimsby,’ Stan added. ‘They were a superstitious lot; no women on board, nobody could wear green, you couldn’t draw a pig or a rabbit on a boat. We were all Londoners so we needed London jobs. Some went to the boatyards; Bill started rep
airing engines for the MPU.’

  ‘The Marine Policing Unit?’ Bryant was surprised. ‘I thought you said he was dodgy. The MPU have a reputation for being above corruption.’

  ‘The officers themselves, yeah. But Bill and some of the others ran rackets on the side. Import-exports.’

  ‘So he was smuggling?’

  ‘Machine parts mostly, and we heard’ – he checked his mate’s face for approval – ‘that him and his mates was selling recon goods to a boatyard in the East End.’

  ‘Do you have any idea how they hooked up with buyers?’

  ‘We don’t want to get no one into trouble, Mr Bryant,’ said Otto. ‘It’s hard making a living on the river now.’

  ‘There have been five unnecessary deaths,’ said Bryant. ‘There could be more. I’ll keep your names out of it but I need to check out every lead.’

  The pair discussed the matter between themselves for a minute. ‘All right,’ said Stan finally. ‘There’s this club in Dalston. I can give you some names.’

  Meera and Fraternity descended on the Cossack Club and found Joe Easter in his usual place at the bar, reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. They left with one name circled from the club’s guest list, and headed towards an address in the City Road. Here, a new corridor of luxury apartment buildings had been built along the north side, creating an intimidating palisade of angled steel.

  Mick Draycott’s apartment was on the twenty-third floor. A bored-looking concierge sat in a bare Plexiglas cabin, blue-skinned in the light of the monitors that guarded the secure compound. He might have been protecting a prison. His filtered voice reached them through a window microphone. Draycott was home, and he wouldn’t let them use the swipecard-protected elevator because they didn’t look like police officers.

  Fraternity slapped his PCU card against the glass but the concierge stood his ground. ‘You’ve got no rights here,’ he said. ‘We have our own private security unit based on the site.’

  ‘You’re all still under city police jurisdiction,’ Fraternity replied. ‘Open the door before I come in there and taser your ears off.’

  The concierge hit two buttons, one to unlock the lift, the other to buzz Draycott’s apartment and warn him that they were coming up.

  ‘Can you believe he just did that?’ said Meera. ‘I’m taking you in, mate.’

  They barged into the security cabin and saw a figure on the concierge’s monitor.

  ‘He’s already in the hall,’ said Fraternity. ‘He can get straight down to the car park from his flat.’ He pulled Meera back towards her Kawasaki. ‘I’ve been in this building before. The underground levels are a maze. Let’s wait for him to come out.’

  Back on Meera’s bike, they headed around to the car park exit just as the shutters rolled up. ‘He’s in a Ferrari,’ she said, ‘now what?’

  Fraternity shrugged. ‘Maybe he’ll pull over?’

  The guttural roar of the customised yellow 488 GTB suggested that its owner might not be amenable to a stop and search. The Ferrari came out at such speed it nearly ended up in the front garden opposite. Fraternity glimpsed a cannonball-headed man behind the wheel and called in the licence plate just as the vehicle took off in the direction of City Road.

  Meera figured the Kawasaki had an advantage over any high-performance car attempting to negotiate London’s afternoon traffic at speed. ‘He doesn’t know how to drive it,’ she called back. ‘It’s not a car, it’s a chromium-plated posing pouch. He’s probably never taken it over thirty.’

  They were coasting awkwardly towards Old Street roundabout when Draycott realized he was losing ground and jumped the lights, clipping a builder’s van. Meera winced. Her motorcycle was easily able to nip between the circling vehicles and draw alongside. The traffic on Great Eastern Street was building up towards the rush hour. The Ferrari hung a right into Bishopsgate.

  ‘Smart move,’ Fraternity shouted. ‘He must know about the closure.’

  These days the venerable ward of Bishopsgate looked like a Minecraft scenario. A third of the office buildings along its length were being torn down and replaced with immense glass boxes. Mobile cranes stalked the highway, which was shut to general traffic. The Ferrari was able to manoeuvre at speed around the obstacles but it couldn’t second-guess the behaviour of pedestrians, who were likely to recklessly sprint across the asphalt.

  Fraternity had expected the Ferrari to pull over somewhere here, but it accelerated. ‘He’s screwed if he crosses into Gracechurch Street,’ he called out. ‘It’s one way at the end.’

  The only exit open to Draycott was via a series of ever-narrowing junctions and clogged dead-ends. Ahead lay the Thames, and unless he could find a way on to London Bridge from these corridors, most of which were blockaded by Department of Works machinery, he would be forced to abandon the vehicle.

  He had made a mistake; turning left on to Eastcheap, he would now miss his only route to the bridge. The makeshift layouts would have defeated the presenters of Top Gear. Not a single road led to the edge of the Thames unless they were traversed on foot.

  The Ferrari roared to a halt and its owner made an ungainly scrabble from the driver’s seat. He ran for it, but part of Monument Place, which lay ahead, was filled with steel Portakabins, reconfiguring the cityscape into a labyrinth that befuddled seasoned foot patrols. Meera slammed the Kawasaki up the kerb and across the pedestrianized square, cutting off Draycott’s exit. Their suspect decided to cut between the cabins and make a beeline for the bridge. Meera pulled the bike over and they followed on foot.

  ‘I love it when we get a runner,’ said Fraternity. ‘I could do with the exercise.’ He caught the slow-moving Draycott with ease but decided to go for a more aggressive form of obstruction by landing feet-first on top of him.

  ‘You got an urgent appointment somewhere?’ he asked amiably, allowing Draycott to draw just enough breath for a reply.

  ‘You’re making a bloody huge mistake, pal,’ the man beneath him managed to gasp out. ‘I’ve got a lot of pull around here. I’m a senior partner of the Findersbury Bank.’

  Fraternity burst out laughing. ‘If I’d known, I would have worn my kicking boots.’ Then he read Draycott his rights and booked him for dangerous driving. An hour later, after an argument with Draycott’s lawyers, they were reluctantly forced to release him.

  43

  HOUSE & YARD

  As he had only been drinking lemon squash at the Lighterman, Bryant was able to take Victor, his ancient rusting Mini Minor, from North Woolwich to Chiswick. As he parked and alighted outside the tree-covered Death House, a gang of kids pushed away from the shaded wall and came over.

  ‘Mind your motor for you, mate?’ said one who looked somewhere between eleven and thirty years old.

  ‘Not unless you want me to mind your broken arm for you,’ said Bryant cheerily. ‘What do you know about this building?’

  ‘A lot of fit birds go in there,’ said a lanky lad with terminal acne.

  ‘They come with this man?’ asked Bryant, showing them a photograph of Bensaud on his phone.

  ‘That’s a picture of a kitten in a shoe,’ said Spotty.

  ‘Ah, hang on.’ The boys waited patiently while he tried to find the right photograph.

  ‘Yeah, he’s the one.’ They all agreed on Bensaud’s identity. ‘There’s a lot of singing in there an’ that,’ said the oldest. ‘And I think he’s giving ’em some of that.’

  ‘Some of what?’

  ‘You know, some of that.’

  ‘If you aren’t even able to articulate your grubby little fantasies I’m not listening,’ said Bryant. ‘Anyone else ever come here?’

  They talked among themselves. ‘Nah,’ said the oldest. ‘Not since Finston’s.’

  ‘The estate agent?’ asked Bryant. He’d assumed the building had been rented out to the centre.

  ‘Yeah, them. ’Cause it was like empty for years before that.’

  ‘That’s useful to know.’ Bryant attempted to make a
note on his phone and succeeded in erasing one of the specialist apps that Banbury had painstakingly installed. Since his cleansing treatment electrical objects were behaving more erratically than ever around him.

  ‘Useful enough to pay us?’ asked Spotty.

  ‘You’ll have to settle for the knowledge that you’ve earned the heartfelt thanks of a grateful nation,’ Bryant told them.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Oh, sorry, complex sentence structure, I should have realized. Well, it’s been a pleasure to trade monosyllables with you. Anyone want a sherbet lemon?’ He dug out a crumpled packet and offered it around.

  ‘Peedy bait?’ said one, snapping a shot of Bryant on his phone just in case. ‘Cheers but no, ta.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, I’m not trying to poison you. Go on.’ Another lad reached out a hand and received an electric shock. ‘Ow.’ He thrashed out his hand.

  ‘Oh, sorry about that,’ said Bryant. ‘I’ve got too much energy.’

  Yong-nyeo Kim, the agent at Finston’s, was surprisingly helpful. ‘It was on our books for quite a while,’ she told Bryant, waving him into a giant lime-green oven glove that turned out to be some sort of fashionable sofa. ‘Sparkling water or cappuccino?’

  ‘I’m not a punter,’ said Bryant, presenting his PCU card, which he had managed to crumple in spite of the fact that it was laminated.

  ‘Oh.’ She seated herself beside him and had such a disheartened look on her face that he wondered if she was going to be beaten later for not making a sale. ‘What can I do for you then?’

  ‘So it was empty before?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘Yes, for many years,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t very helpful that the building was known locally as the Death House.’

  ‘Why did it get that nickname?’

  ‘Hang on, I have some notes on it.’ Tapping her tablet, she pulled up the property’s file. ‘Purchasers love a bit of local colour, even when it’s scandalous. It was once a tavern called the White Hart. In the late 1800s some local men who worked on the barges disappeared after drinking there. The landlord and his wife got them drunk and robbed them, then supposedly sent their bodies down a chute into the river. They thought the men would wake up further downstream, but they drowned. The landlord and his wife were hanged and the nickname stuck. We tried changing it back to the White Hart, but that didn’t work. It’s not a residential property. The new owner was very keen.’