Strange Tide Read online

  ‘I’m not prepared to go through the fine print of investigations that occurred outside your jurisdiction,’ said Link with weary disdain in his voice. ‘You don’t deal with vice. Anything you uncover in that area has to be turned over to the appropriate agency.’

  ‘It may have a direct bearing on the Dalladay death,’ said May.

  ‘If it does we’ll have to take the case away from you.’

  Bryant made an urgent throat-cutting gesture. May took the point. ‘We’ll get back to you when we have something solid,’ he said, killing the line.

  Land was annoyed. ‘You must have known that would happen. It’s not our area of expertise, John. The girl was murdered because someone didn’t want to be linked with a hooker, pure and simple.’

  ‘You don’t know that,’ said May. ‘Janice says some of the other girls saw local officers on a professional basis but not Dalladay. Giles says she showed signs of regular cocaine use. She was a wild card who kept bad company. That doesn’t make her a hooker.’

  ‘You won’t find her killer through a hair sample.’ Land knew that cocaine caused hair growth to slow down. ‘You’ve nothing to connect her death to the club, or to any of Link’s old team-mates.’

  ‘Then we’ll concentrate on Freddie Cooper,’ said Bryant, perking up. ‘I’ll go and talk to him this time.’

  ‘Oh no you don’t,’ warned Land, ‘you’re staying right where we can keep an eye on you. Freddie Cooper isn’t the father. You’re not leaving this room. I can’t have you wandering around out there like—’

  ‘Marley’s ghost? Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner?’ Bryant suggested. ‘Or someone you’ve already written off as no longer being capable of the job?’

  ‘Come on, Arthur,’ said May gently. ‘It’s late anyway. I’ll take you home.’

  It was only a short walk to Bryant’s Bloomsbury flat, but the night was bleak and grey with damp, so May drove him back. They sat in the car looking up at the building in Hastings Street. Alma’s light was still on; she always waited up for him.

  ‘There’s something strange at the heart of this case,’ said Bryant, peeping over the top of his moulting green scarf. ‘You see a girl who was killed because she was pregnant. I see a victim sacrificed to the city’s most ancient deities. I try to look at it your way, the obvious logical way, but I never could and I still can’t even now, just when I need everything to be cogent and consistent.’

  ‘But that’s your great strength,’ said May gently. ‘Are you sure you want to get further involved in this?’

  ‘Are you asking me if I’m up to it?’ Bryant gave a sigh. ‘I can cope with any debilitation if it’s simply a matter of finding the strength. What I can’t handle is the sheer unpredictability of my senses. They’re altering as they depart, and I have no idea what to expect next from them. You know, I always thought of long-term illness as a series of battles with incremental losses, but I swear this is proving to be more like a stimulant. It doesn’t make sense. Earlier this evening when I was down by the river I had a kind of waking dream. I saw and heard and smelled things that were impossible.’

  ‘What do you mean? What sort of things?’

  ‘It’s going to sound ridiculous. I imagined I was back in Victorian times.’ Bryant held his hands before him, as if daring the visions to return. ‘It was as though my subconscious mind was pointing me in a particular direction. I don’t know where the next stop on this strange journey might be.’

  ‘Then make sure you stay close. Alma will keep watch on you when you’re in the flat and I’ll ferry you to and from the unit. But you can’t go out on your own from now on. You know that, don’t you? I need a promise from you.’

  ‘I promise I’ll try,’ said Bryant, and May knew it was the closest he would get to an assurance.

  14

  INVISIBLE & VISIBLE

  Monday had been a long day. Tuesday morning was drained of light and life, the landscape as damp and drab as codfish skin. No computer model of the city’s thrusting new tower blocks had ever envisioned them huddled beneath such lugubrious skies, their gleaming carapaces as mottled and clouded as antique mirrors.

  In Highgate, Janice Longbright finished applying Smudge-Proof Cherrybloom Foundation (‘Alma Cogan’s Favourite!’ said the jar) and closed the 1950s make-up box she had inherited from her mother. She glanced back at her neatly made bed, feeling a pang of regret for driving away the man who had filled its other side. Her independence had quickly reasserted itself but right now it would have been nice to depend on someone again, just to pick up a few of their habits rather than always falling back on her own. Being in control was different from being a control freak, but she knew that sometimes one state led to the other. That won’t be me, she thought, defiantly pulling off her black unit sweater and replacing it with a Jezebel Crimson Leopard Bust Dress and leggings.

  In Shad Thames, John May stood at the front door of his manicured minimalist apartment, looking out at the falling rain. Reluctantly, he exchanged his elegant Church’s shoes for a pair of hated but practical Adidas trainers. Once the narrow street beyond had been filled with the rumble of coopers’ trolleys, the clanking of cranes, the aroma of cardamom, cloves, pepper and tea. Now there were only single professionals with cyberspace jobs who had no time for anything as unproductive as passing conversation. The thirty-somethings took one look at his silver mane and neatly knotted tie and fled back to their phones. No matter how non-judgemental they tried to be in their day jobs, they couldn’t countenance the idea of talking to older people in their precious spare time.

  Since moving to the flat from St John’s Wood he had failed to make a single friend in the building. Residents’ meetings had been abandoned after it was discovered that most of the owners existed as offshore addresses lodged in company ledgers. May’s world revolved around the unit. It was where he came to life. The question was what would happen when his tenure ended. He had no safety net of family, friends or even savings to rely on. He would simply cease to exist.

  You know what Arthur would say, he thought disapprovingly. This is no time for morbidity, stop being a miserable old ratbag and pull yourself together. Choosing his favourite red scarf, he stepped out into the half-light and prepared to face the day.

  In Bloomsbury, Arthur Bryant folded his Rupert the Bear pyjamas beneath his pillow and removed the sardine and tomato sandwiches Alma had left in his Tibetan skull, sliding them into a paper bag which he then squashed into the pocket of his overcoat. The sight of the falling rain pleased him immensely. It would rinse the pavements and keep the day dark enough for thinking. Who knew what it held? Would there be hours missing? Would he black out and come round in the Whispering Gallery or the London Sewing Machine Museum? Would he find himself serving under Boadicea in her final battle against the Romans, performing before a Jacobean audience as Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi or agreeing to bomb the Belgrano in Margaret Thatcher’s war cabinet? Life was suddenly an adventure to be seized upon.

  In Hammersmith, Raymond Land sat in a workmen’s café watching a fried egg drip out of his sandwich. Leanne, his ex-wife, had taken their house, so he had moved into a rented top-floor flat off Shepherd’s Bush Road, sharing the building with a bad-tempered Chinese pensioner, a cheery Latvian pastry chef, a pair of unbelievably shrill Brazilian dancers and a clearly deranged cockney landlady who changed the locks on a weekly basis and spoke like a character from an Ealing comedy.

  This is what happens to people like me, Land thought gloomily. This is where we wash up, the disappointed, in the last remaining transport caffs and laundromats, betting shops and old-geezer pubs, milling around like paddle-tubs on a boating lake waiting to be called in when our hour is up. Once I had ambition and drive. I should have done something important while I still had some hair. Why didn’t I stand up for myself and make people take me seriously? What happened to the springtime dreams of my gilded youth?

  ‘You’ve got egg on your trousers,’ said the waitress, taking his t
eacup.

  Janice Longbright shook out her umbrella and entered the darkened hall of the Peculiar Crimes Unit, the first one in again. It was easy to get out of bed early when there was no one else in it. She ignored the video security system that had not worked since its installation, stepped over Crippen’s litter tray and headed into the staff kitchen to put the milk away. While it was nice not to come across any severed fingers in the salad crisper, something that had happened on more than one occasion, she found herself wondering if the badly behaved Arthur Bryant of old would make a final reappearance, or if he would now subside into the darkness of his disorder, never to resurface as the appalling old man she had so long adored.

  He’d tell me off for thinking like this, she reminded herself, making tea and settling at her terminal, determined to concentrate on today’s subject: the last days of Lynsey Dalladay. Bryant had been right about the parents. They had been anxious to distance themselves from their daughter. It was as if by dying she had finally found a way to publicly blame them for the way she had lived.

  She scanned Dan Banbury’s summary of the crime scene. Only one set of footprints leading across the beach. No CCTVs covering the river. A lone homegoing witness who had heard a cry but thought nothing of it. Why? ‘Because there’s always someone screaming around here – the pubs were turning out.’ Fair enough, she thought, there isn’t much to be learned from her death so the answer lies somewhere in her life.

  The phone log showed that Freddie Cooper had already called this morning to ask about the status of the case. She wondered if anyone had informed him about the paternity result, and called him back.

  ‘I went down there,’ he said before she could give him the news.

  ‘Down where, to the river?’

  ‘To the spot where you say you found her. I thought I might see something.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Hey, I don’t know. Something that would explain why he took her there. She liked the river. She couldn’t swim. Maybe she wanted to go for a walk and asked him along for company. Maybe he was just a stranger and they got into an argument. She could be incredibly stroppy. He might have just lashed out—’

  ‘Mr Cooper, she was shackled to the remains of a concrete post. It was premeditated. I’m sending you over a photo of the chain that was locked around her wrist. Take a look at it and tell me if you’ve ever seen it before. And we have your results back. You’re not the father of her child.’

  ‘I told you I already knew that.’

  ‘We needed proof. You still don’t have any idea where she went or who she was seeing?’

  ‘She made new friends all the time, then dropped them.’

  ‘You said she partied a lot. You also said she spent time trying to find herself. Did she belong to any groups?’

  ‘She tried AA, a couple of religious things – those people who have the happy-clappy place in Finsbury Park – not a cult, but not far off. Some mystical societies, getting in touch with the elements and your inner child. When I first met her she told me she’d been a water goddess in a past life. I should have been warned off right then.’

  As Cooper was keen to help, Longbright gave him a series of questions to answer and told him to call back. Dan Banbury arrived in a yellow plastic rain hood with a Mumsnet logo on the side. ‘It’s just started bucketing down out there. I had to borrow this from the missus,’ he said, slapping it against the radiator.

  ‘Did you have any luck with the chain?’ Longbright asked. ‘Cooper says she didn’t wear one.’

  ‘It’s solid silver, not made here,’ Banbury replied. ‘There’s a hallmark – 84, the outline of a woman’s head and the initials PT. That’s not someone’s name, it’s an assayer’s mark that was stamped on imported Russian silver. There’s also a little triangle – a delta symbol standing for “Moscow”. The links can only be opened if you know the trick, so she had no chance of getting it off. It’s quite old, maybe as early as 1920s. However, they’re fairly common and can be picked up in jewellery markets around the world. The crescent moon makes it a narrower search. There’s something else. The red bus, Golden Dreams, the one Mr Bryant mentioned, it just paid off.’

  ‘I’m not with you,’ said Longbright, correcting her notes from Cooper’s conversation.

  ‘The old man was right. It parks outside the Tower of London every weekend. It’s an Anglo-Japanese company used by tourists from Tokyo and Kyoto, and of course they all have good cameras, Go-Pros, selfie sticks, you name it. I started running checks last night. They’re all in the same hotel, and very helpful. I found a couple who went down to the water’s edge late on Sunday night to take some shots. Look at what they came up with.’

  He plugged a USB stick into the back of Longbright’s screen and opened the file. The flashlit shots showed the foreshore and the glittering black water beyond. At a distance of about two metres into the water was a dark, ragged hump. To the tourists it would have looked like a rock, but Longbright knew from the position that it had to be Dalladay’s body. It exactly matched Giles’s shots from the following morning.

  ‘They must have arrived there just after she’d drowned,’ said Dan. ‘There’s no depth. You can almost see through the water. They were trying to take shots of themselves against the skyline with the selfie stick but you know how difficult it is to hold those things still. See what they got instead?’

  Longbright spotted it at once. ‘That’s not possible,’ she said. ‘Those are her footprints?’

  ‘Let’s have a look.’ He magnified the shot as much as he could. ‘You can see that they’re going the wrong way. They’re leading down to the water’s edge.’ The photographs clearly showed a single track of trainer-prints going to the stanchion, and none coming back.

  ‘Where the hell are the rest of the footprints?’ asked Longbright. ‘That sand looks soft enough to have picked them up. What are we dealing with, the Invisible Man?’

  For once the crime scene manager was at a loss for words.

  ‘You want to know how I think? It’s very simple,’ said Bryant, allowing his worn silver pocket watch to turn on its chain. ‘Do you know why I keep this?’

  ‘As your every move is a mystery to me, no,’ said May, leaning back in his chair. ‘You told me it hasn’t worked since the old king died.’

  ‘And indeed it has not, which at least means it tells the correct time twice a day. It belonged to my grandfather on my mother’s side. Look.’ He picked open the back and revealed some tiny, illegible scrollwork. ‘It was supposed to be presented to him for long service. They handed out a silver watch to any employee who lasted fifty years in the same government department. He started there when he was sixteen and left when ill health drove him out at sixty-five. But that was after forty-nine years and eleven months. So they said no, you can’t have a long-service pocket watch, you weren’t here for the full fifty years. My mother was furious. She put on her best coat, jumped on the first tram that came along and went up to Whitehall, where she had a word with his boss. She never told anyone what was said, but the very next morning my granddad was given the watch. On his way home after the presentation the old man dropped dead in the Whitechapel Road. You would have thought his heart had been wired to the lights in his office. The watch landed in the gutter and never worked again. My mother said she kept it to remind herself of what happens to London’s invisible, loyal workers.’

  May shrugged, puzzled. ‘Well, that’s a fantastically depressing story. Am I supposed to attach a moral to it?’

  ‘The city rewards the ambitious and dumps on everyone else,’ said Bryant. ‘For half a century my grandfather did exactly what he was told, and at the end of it they tried to gyp him out of a cheap silver-plated watch. That’s why my father never held down a steady job. He hung around the streets of Whitechapel doing a favour here and there, scoring a few bob whenever he was short of beer money. If you just keep your head down and do what’s expected of you, you vanish and get less than nothing. If you want an
ything more, you have to stand up and make yourself visible. Our victim, Lynsey Dalladay – we know nothing about her so far except that she was “lost” and attractive and got pregnant. Do you see my point?’

  ‘I want to say yes,’ May began, ‘but . . .’ He waved his hands at the air.

  ‘She wasn’t ambitious, but she stepped in the way of someone who was. A pregnant girl in a skanky club with a history of unpredictable behaviour explains that she wants to keep her lover’s child, and that’s why he gets rid of her. She blocks his path and puts his future at risk. Do you understand now?’

  May sat down on the edge of his desk, amazed. ‘Do you know, that’s the first time in all our years together that you’ve even come close to explaining how your brain works? I can see the kind of person we’re looking for.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Bryant with a shrug. ‘I told you it was very simple.’

  15

  DUCKING & DIVING

  The auditorium was over half full; not bad for mid-week. It had been built as a concert hall, then converted to a nightclub, an African temperance hall, a recording studio, an Indian disco and now a council-leased community centre. The audience could see the new red curtains and gold paintwork coating an art deco sunburst, but if they looked any higher they’d spot the peeling paintwork on the ceiling and the damp patches at the back of the upper circle.

  Cassie looked out from her position behind the mixing desk at the top of the hall and flicked the switch on the black plastic box at her hip.

  ‘We need to run another sound check,’ she said. ‘I was picking up static every time your lapel moved last night.’

  ‘There’s no time,’ said the voice in her ear. ‘Just give me the rundown.’

  ‘OK, who are you going to use as a spirit guide?’

  ‘I thought I might switch between Hiawatha and Dr Millingen.’

  ‘Who’s he?’