Strange Tide Read online

  About the Book

  The river Thames is London’s most important yet neglected artery. And now it is giving up its secrets . . .

  When the body of a young woman is found chained to a post at low tide, no one can understand how she came to be there – Arthur Bryant, John May and the Peculiar Crimes Unit find themselves confronting an impossible crime committed in a very public place.

  It’s an investigation that seems to extend from the coast of Libya to the nightclubs of North London, and proves as sinuous and sinister as the river itself. That’s only part of the problem: Bryant’s rapidly deteriorating state of health confines him to home, while May makes a fatal error of judgement that knocks him out of action and places everyone at risk.

  With the PCU staff as baffled by their own detectives as by the case itself, the only people who can help now are the battery of eccentrics Bryant keeps listed in his diary. But will their arcane knowledge save the day or make matters even worse?

  Soon there’s a clear suspect in everyone’s sights – the only thing that’s missing is any scrap of evidence. And to find that, the whole team must get involved in some serious messing about on the river . . .

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One: Going Away

  1. Queens & Kings

  2. Water & Fire

  3. Rags & Riches

  4. Time & Tide

  5. Caution & Trust

  6. Remembering & Forgetting

  7. Hidden & Drowned

  8. Secrets & Lies

  9. Flow & Current

  10. Rough & Smooth

  11. Rats & Lions

  12. Swords & Scimitars

  13. Narcotics & Stimulants

  14. Invisible & Visible

  15. Ducking & Diving

  16. Signs & Portents

  17. Accusation & Denial

  18. Birth & Death

  19. Ladders & Snakes

  20. Start-Ups & Newborns

  21. Run & Swim

  22. Gloom & Doom

  23. Rain & Speed

  24. Toshers & Mudlarks

  25. Mother & Daughter

  26. Ebb & Flow

  27. Waters & Vapours

  28. Charms & Bracelets

  29. Attraction & Induction

  30. Sinking & Drowning

  31. Victim & Culprit

  32. In & Out

  33. Spoons & Spades

  Part Two: Coming Back

  34. Root & Branch

  35. Chaos & Order

  36. Ready & Able

  37. Afloat & On Board

  38. Q & A

  39. Pigs & Sheep

  40. Deception & Suggestion

  41. Life & Death

  42. Fast & Strange

  43. House & Yard

  44. Call & Response

  45. Time & Tide

  46. Water & Smoke

  47. Sink & Swim

  48. Guilt & Innocence

  49. Innocence & Guilt

  50. Bryant & May

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Christopher Fowler

  Copyright

  For Peter Chapman

  PART ONE

  GOING AWAY

  I walk till the stars of London wane

  And dawn creeps up the Shadwell Stair.

  But when the growing syrens blare

  I with another ghost am lain.

  WILFRED OWEN

  The Thames is too dark to lack a god.

  CARRIE ETTER

  1

  QUEENS & KINGS

  Nothing gave Arthur Bryant greater satisfaction than making his first blotch on a fresh white page. The scratch of the nib as it scarred the paper always sent a tingle through his fingertips.

  ‘I’ve decided to write up that business of the Clapham Common Casanova,’ he announced, turning to the new notebook on his desk and opening it with a theatrical flourish. Uncapping his fountain pen, he made a grand downward stroke.

  Nothing came out.

  He shook the pen violently. Ink spots flew all over the office. Crippen had been happily sleeping beside his desk and sprinted from the room.

  ‘I thought Raymond didn’t want you circulating any more of your dodgy memoirs,’ said John May. ‘You make our investigations sound like terrible old paperback murder mysteries.’ He swiped irritably at his smartphone. ‘Why won’t this thing sync properly?’

  ‘Nothing modern works properly,’ Bryant cheerfully replied. ‘Everything is over-complicated. The office teabags are sentient, apparently. They have a Twitter account. It says so on the box. Dan Banbury bought me electronic bathroom scales for my birthday. They told everyone on Facebook how much I weigh. I don’t need inanimate objects slagging me off.’

  ‘But you still use them?’ asked May.

  ‘No, tragically they fell under the wheels of my car. Your phone is probably working fine, you’re just losing the ability to keep up with it. You’re deteriorating, like everything else around here.

  ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned. – Yeats.

  ‘No amount of colouring your hair and sucking in your gut will change that.’ Pleased with himself, he sat back and took a sip from his tea mug.

  It is said that the hallmark of a gentleman is that he is only ever rude intentionally. Arthur Bryant was no gentleman. His rudeness came from an inability to cloak his opinions in even the most cursory civility. He believed in good manners at the meal table and bad manners almost everywhere else.

  ‘You’re a very unpleasant old man,’ May replied, returning to his phone.

  ‘What’s the point in consensual opinion?’ Bryant asked, exasperated. ‘If you only discuss matters of interest with like-minded individuals you never learn anything new. Why would I want a peer group on Twitter? They’re just going to agree with me.’

  ‘Nobody ever agrees with you, and besides you’re not even supposed to be here. You’re—’

  ‘Yes, I know what I am, thank you, but I’m feeling a lot better this morning so can we not talk about it until we absolutely have to?’

  ‘Very well.’ May peered across the desks at his partner’s open notebook. ‘If you’re planning to set down those cases in chronological order, the Bride in the Tide should be next.’

  Bryant raised the fingers of his right hand. ‘Three – no, two things. One, please don’t call it by the name a tabloid reporter coined after a five-bottle lunch, and B, it’s the only case I won’t ever be able to write up in my superbly erudite and illuminating chronicles.’

  May gave up with his phone and set it aside. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because,’ Bryant pointed out, ‘it’s one of the only times we nailed the culprit and were given the slip. My public wants to read about the successes, not the failures.’ He rose and walked over to the window, to jingle the change in his pockets and survey his kingdom.

  ‘Your public?’ asked May. ‘You haven’t got a public. You were complaining about your phone not ringing the other day. There’s nothing wrong with it; you’ve never given anyone your number. Anyway, the case wasn’t an entire failure. Your suspicions turned out to be justified.’

  ‘It still didn’t end up with a spell in the pokey for – I forget the name of the malefactor now. It was on the tip of my tongue, began with a B. Boadicea.’

  May looked up. ‘I’m sorry?’

  Bryant was still looking down into the street. The houses on the other side were ochreish and meanly windowed. ‘Queen Boadicea. She’s over
the road, just past the fried-chicken shop. How very odd.’

  ‘Take one of your yellow pills,’ said May, allowing his fingers to creep back towards his phone.

  Boadicea, the great warrior queen, was sitting on a garden wall opposite, dangling her silver sandals over its edge, her coarse-woven purple robe gathered about her waist, her golden breastplate glinting in the cold morning sunlight. The breeze ruffled the dyed red leveret fur on her bronze helmet. She was contemplatively licking the side of a 99.

  ‘I don’t know how you can eat that,’ said the Roman centurion next to her. ‘It’s bloody freezing.’

  ‘I’m the Queen of the Iceni,’ said Boadicea. ‘I don’t feel the cold.’

  The centurion pointed to her ice cream. ‘Why is it that the flakes in those things never taste as good as the Cadbury’s Flakes you buy in the yellow wrappers?’

  ‘I can’t comment,’ said Boadicea. ‘Chocolate hasn’t been invented yet.’

  ‘You don’t have to stay in character all the time.’

  ‘When I was a kid we spelled it B-O-A-D-I-C-E-A. That was how everybody spelled it. Then all of a sudden it was B-O-U-D-I-C-C-A. Where did that come from?’

  ‘You were a Victorian misprint.’

  ‘I’ve got my own statue on Westminster Bridge. You’d think they could sort out my name.’

  ‘It’s B-U-D-D-U-G in Welsh,’ said the centurion, who was Welsh.

  ‘They don’t even know where I died! It was either Watling Street, East Anglia or over there, under platform nine.’ She pointed to the great arched glass roof of King’s Cross Station in the distance.

  ‘You’re thinking of Harry Potter,’ said the centurion.

  ‘Did you even bother to do any research before you took this part?’ Boadicea asked, gnawing the end off her cone.

  ‘It was hardly worth it,’ said the centurion. ‘I just come on, shout a bit and get a spear shoved through me.’ In the gardens behind him, the second assistant director called everyone back to their places. ‘Looks like they’re going for another take,’ he said. ‘Are you in this scene?’

  ‘No, I’ve finished for the day.’ She crunched up the last of her wafer and wiped her fingers on a dock leaf. ‘I’m going to get out of this clobber. I thought it would be a bit of a novelty doing location work instead of green-screening everything down at Pinewood, but I’ve spent most of my time staring out at King’s Cross, watching plain-clothes coppers going in and out of that building on the corner.’ She pointed up at the headquarters of the Peculiar Crimes Unit on Caledonian Road.

  ‘How do you know they’re coppers if they’re in plain clothes?’ the centurion asked.

  ‘They have big feet and matching jackets and they’re always carrying takeaways,’ said Boadicea. ‘What else could they be? I wonder what they do in there all day.’

  The centurion shrugged. ‘What do you care? You’ve been dead for nearly two thousand years.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ said the warrior queen. ‘I’m an actor. I observe humanity.’

  ‘You’re an extra, love,’ said the centurion. ‘And what could you possibly learn from watching a bunch of plain-clothes plods?’

  Boadicea waved a ringed finger in the direction of Raymond Land’s first-floor window in the Peculiar Crimes Unit. ‘I’ve learned that the bloke who sits in that room doesn’t do any work,’ she said.

  Across the road from Boadicea in the offices of the PCU, two rooms along from where Bryant and May sat, Land also stared down into the street, just as he had on the Monday morning before he or anyone else at the PCU had ever heard of the Bride in the Tide murder . . .

  Look at it, Land thought, King’s Bloody Cross, the armpit of the northern hemisphere. I looked out of the window earlier this morning thinking there was a rare bird in that tree opposite, but it turned out to be a pigeon with a plastic bag stuck over its head. I know how it feels. What do I have to do to get out of here, apart from die?

  With an exhausted sigh he sat at his desk and examined the ‘Lifemates’ dating form on his screen once more.

  Tick the Adjective that Best Describes Your Personality:

  Assertive. Serious. Amusing. Calm. Outgoing. Adventurous.

  He ticked ‘Outgoing’. Just last week the City of London Police Commissioner had described him in a meeting as ‘our outgoing head of analogue services’. He moved on to the next question.

  Tick the Adjective that Best Sums Up Your Approach to Life:

  Daring. Cautious. Analytical. Impetuous. Outrageous. Risk-Averse.

  He hovered over ‘Cautious’ but finally ticked ‘Risk-Averse’.

  Tick the Adjective that Friends Are Most Likely to Use When Describing You to Others:

  Charming. Witty. Intellectual. Powerful. Courageous. Manly.

  After staring at the choice for a full minute he irritably shut the page and turned his attention to more important things: namely, the weekly spreadsheet his detective sergeant had prepared for him.

  Peculiar Crimes Unit

  The Old Warehouse

  231 Caledonian Road

  London N1 9RB

  STAFF ROSTER MONDAY 18 NOVEMBER

  Raymond Land, Unit Chief

  Arthur Bryant, Senior Detective

  John May, Senior Detective

  Janice Longbright, Detective Sergeant

  Dan Banbury, Crime Scene Manager

  Fraternity DuCaine, Information/Technology

  Meera Mangeshkar, Detective Constable

  Colin Bimsley, Detective Constable

  Giles Kershaw, Forensic Pathologist (off-site)

  Crippen, staff cat

  Having checked that the date was correct he thought for a moment about what he should dictate, then decided it was better not to think because he would only get himself into a tangle. Instead he clicked the microphone symbol on the screen to make it start recording and emptied his mind into a staff memo, as he did every Monday morning.

  PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL MEMO

  FROM: RAYMOND LAND

  TO: ALL PCU STAFF

  Well, I never expected our handling of the so-called ‘Burning Man’ case to earn us a commendation, but I didn’t think the Police Commissioner would actually insult us in public. At the Benevolent Society Fundraising Dinner last night he told everyone that the Peculiar Crimes Unit reminded him of a Remington typewriter, ‘noisy, slow and cumbersome, but still capable of hammering out results if you punched it hard enough’. The Met officer next to me laughed so hard that trifle came down his nose.

  This is all your fault. Do I have to remind you yet again of this unit’s remit? We’re here to ‘prevent crimes capable of causing social panic, violent disorder and general malaise in the public areas of the city, without alarming the populace or alerting it to ongoing operations’. That’s a direct quote from the original ‘Particular’ Crimes Unit handbook of 1947, and it means you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

  In our most recent investigation you not only threw the baby out with the bathwater, you killed the baby and burned down the bathroom. You upset everyone from the Governor of the Bank of England to the executive board of the Better Business Bureau, while managing to ruin the nation’s biggest firework display in the process. The idea is to get the public to trust us. That means not having to duck into doorways when they walk past. Good God, if I’d wanted to be feared and hated I’d have joined the Special Branch.

  Why do I feel like I’m dealing with a bunch of bright students who can’t resist sticking a traffic cone on a statue of Winston Churchill? Sometimes I sit here trying to imagine ways in which this unit could be more disrespected than it already is. Maybe Mr Bryant could apply for a post as a Selfridge’s Santa this Christmas and traumatize hundreds of small children, or you could falsely arrest a national treasure: Dame Judi Dench perhaps, or Paddington Bear.

  From now on, none of you makes a move without me approving it first, do you understand? Do nothing. If you’re struck by an epiphany, sit on your hands. Pretend y
ou’re in the Met. You don’t catch them thinking. Take a leaf out of their book; if you come up with a unique way of single-handedly slashing the capital’s crime rate, go to Costa Coffee and read Hello! magazine until you’ve forgotten it. You’re not here to innovate, you’re here to keep a few seats warm in an outmoded government department until it expires.

  And just for once, can you not go around arresting high-ranking government officials and public figures? We’re supposed to be engaged in police investigations, not class warfare.

  There are days when I honestly miss the Metropolitan Police Service. It would be nice to catch an Essex plumber with a car boot full of lead for a change. I’d be very happy to go back to the days of shining an anglepoise in some nonce’s face and taking away his fags until he talks, but that’s not how we’re meant to do it any more. The City of London wants us to ‘engage in meaningful dialogue’ every time some junked-up razzhead carrying bolt-cutters swears blind he was on his way to the shops at two a.m. and tweets accusations of harassment while you’re questioning him. The Met can hire yoga instructors and take young offenders to the opera for all I care. What their officers do is no concern of mine. Not my circus, not my monkeys.

  I care about what happens to this unit. I used to dread coming to work in the mornings, but that was before I realized I’d never swing a transfer so now I’m making the best of it, and so should you. After all, you nick all the most interesting cases. Met officers are so busy untangling neighbourhood disputes about bin bags that they never get to find headless bodies in canals. That’s why they hate us so much: we have job satisfaction. We’re a crack team of highly skilled professionals.

  (Indistinct.) Don’t spill it in the saucer, Janice. Aren’t there any custard creams? I thought we had – Look, now I’ve got tea all over my trousers.

  But we’re back-room operatives, not social reformers. We don’t qualify for Orders of Merit. Even the duty officer at Bloomsbury Police Station gets sent a tray of cupcakes from the neighbours whenever he threatens to duff up a traffic warden, but we have to settle for being treated like piranhas.

  ‘I think he means “pariahs”,’ said John May, reading the memo aloud to the rest of the staff, an occupation which afforded them weekly amusement.