Strange Tide Page 16

  ‘What’s the date?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘The date?’ The warden looked nonplussed. ‘Friday.’

  ‘No, what month? What year?’

  ‘You sure you ain’t been hit? It’s the fifteenth of November 1940. Leicester Square an’ Charing Craws ’ave bin knocked flat, and now the bloody Luftwaffe’s coming up ’ere.’

  ‘I love your accent. Leicester Square’s gone?’

  ‘Saw it wiv me own eyes,’ the warden told him, ‘’Itler sent ’is bully boys down St Martin’s Street and now it’s just a bleedin’ great ’ole in the ground. Cripplegate’s vanished, the ’ole neighbourhood gawn up in smoke. An’ so will you be if you don’t get back up to Euston Station.’

  ‘I don’t think I will,’ said Bryant. ‘I just live over there. I think.’

  ‘Gawd, it’s allus the old’uns who give me trouble,’ complained the warden. ‘If you’re worried about picking up a shelter infection, don’t be, they’ve sprayed the ’ole place wiv antiseptic.’

  ‘So many beautiful buildings,’ said Bryant sadly. ‘They all went, didn’t they?’

  ‘Dunno abaht that,’ said the warden, taking his arm. ‘They blew up the Ring at Blackfriars so there won’t be no boxing there for a while. That should please my missus.’

  ‘The Luftwaffe – they’re waiting for a bomber’s moon so they can see their way into the heart of London.’

  ‘Bloody right they are, the pilots are following the moonlight on the Thames – we’re being betrayed by our own bleedin’ river.’

  ‘They’ll bomb Leicester Square again, you know,’ said Bryant as they moved out of harm’s way. ‘The worst raid will be on the sixteenth of April, 1941. There’ll hardly be anything left of the West End after that.’

  ‘How do you know so much abaht it? You don’t look like a fifth columnist,’ the warden said. ‘Hang on, where do you think you’re going? Wait!’

  But Bryant had walked off, skirting the edge of the great smoking crater, trying not to breathe in the bitter stench of burned tar, gas, varnish and wood. Across the road one side of a building had fallen away, turning it into an opened doll’s house. I can’t be hurt because this isn’t happening, he thought. I’m only here inside my head, so I must stay on the pavement – who knows where I’m wandering in the present?

  As he approached Euston Road, he saw the chaos that had been caused by the raid there. The area was blacked out, of course, but fires burned on either side, marking the sites of bombs. The building next to the Quakers’ Society had collapsed into a pile of bricks, as if a petulant child had kicked it over. A group of well-upholstered ladies were standing in the little Quakers’ garden beside it, waiting for instructions.

  ‘I say, I don’t suppose you have a ladder about you, do you?’ called one of them, patting the dust from her sleeves. ‘Only the front door got blown in, so we’ll have to use the upstairs window.’

  ‘Has anyone said whether it’s safe to go back inside?’ asked another, a matronly lady who bore a remarkable resemblance to the actress Margaret Rutherford.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ said a third. ‘We’ll be safer with the Quakers than over at the station.’

  ‘We have to get back in because the Reverend Peabody is still inside and he’s stuck in a folding chair,’ the first added, turning back to Bryant. ‘He was giving a most enjoyable talk on the history of the Thames.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t have a ladder,’ said Bryant. ‘Don’t you think you’d be safer at the station?’

  ‘There have been bombers over London every night for two and a half months now, young man,’ said Margaret Rutherford. ‘If one waited for them to finish, one would never get anything done.’

  Young man? thought Bryant. Blimey.

  ‘The Reverend Peabody says the most frightfully shocking things,’ another of the ladies confided. She was covered in little pieces of mortar and sported a preposterous feathered hat. ‘He says they should put another girl inside London Bridge.’

  ‘What does the Reverend mean?’ Bryant asked, puzzled.

  ‘Well of course the Romans started it,’ said the lady with the hat. ‘Human sacrifice, I mean. Putting a virgin’ – she mouthed the word to protect the delicate sensibilities of the others – ‘inside the bridge to consecrate it. The Reverend says that whenever the bridge was rebuilt they did it again.’

  ‘Do you believe it?’

  ‘No, of course not. This is England, for heaven’s sake, we don’t tamper with our virgins, we leave that sort of thing to foreigners.’

  ‘You’re wrong, Muriel, quite wrong!’ said the most rotund lady. ‘Somebody really should make a sacrifice to the river, trinkets perhaps, just to be on the safe side.’

  ‘You do talk nonsense, Lavinia,’ said Muriel. ‘Why on earth should anyone do that?’

  ‘Because it’s the river that’s guiding the bombers directly to us.’

  ‘It’s the moon that’s doing it, not the river,’ Bryant reasoned as an alarming series of thuds sounded in the distance.

  ‘They’re the same thing,’ cried Lavinia impatiently. ‘Don’t you see? The moon and the waters are female. Betraying women! Betraying London!’ And with that she led the little group back inside the Quakers’ House.

  ‘You’re sure he’s OK?’ asked John May. He had been leaving the PCU when the call came through.

  ‘I think he’s fine,’ said Alma Sorrowbridge. ‘He found his way back all right but he’s still a little bit confused. It was another hallucination. He says he thought he was in the Blitz.’

  ‘But he’s all right now?’

  ‘He’s just put away two slices of ginger sultana cake and a pint of tea so I think he’ll live,’ said Alma, ‘but you really can’t let him go wandering again.’

  ‘It’s my fault,’ May admitted. ‘We had a bit of a miscommunication here. Keep him there, can you? Lock him in his room if necessary. Call me if there’s a problem. I’ll be there in the morning as usual to bring him to the unit. He’ll drive you mad if I don’t.’

  ‘He’s driving me mad right now. I’m going to tell him to turn down those Vera Lynn records. We’ve had “Bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover” four times in a row, and before that, “London Bridge is Falling Down”.’

  In the seventeenth century, Nine Elms still had its eponymous riverside trees. The area was swampy and miasmic during high tides, when the Thames overflowed into it. The marshes were drained and filled with stones and factories; a gasworks and a locomotive depot arrived, remaining until they attracted the attention of German bombers. Now, after decades of dereliction, the area was starting to rise into something approaching cohesion. Covent Garden Market relocated here, Battersea Power Station was being restored (albeit for the pleasure of the wealthy 1 per cent) and the American Embassy was building a moated fortress at its riverbank. But for the time being there were still ugly, desolate pockets beyond the reach or interest of pedestrians.

  The Thames might have been turbulent in its olivine depths, but its surface was smoothed by the onslaught. Overflowing drains led to outlets in the riverbank walls, cascading torrents of water on to the foreshore.

  The falling rain was incessant and pernicious. It glossed the empty road beside the river, haloed the street lamps and pooled on Janice Longbright’s black PCU jacket, spitting icy droplets down the back of her neck. She tried to check the address on her phone but the rain obscured its screen.

  Turning to get her bearings, she spotted the sign that read ‘Medusa Holdings’, one of five companies sharing the name-board beside the floodlit truck depot. The big hauliers moved vessels ranging in size from three to sixteen metres, while the dry-bulk pneumatics shifted salt, gravel, sand and cement to building sites across Europe. Beneath the glare of metal halide lights they trundled past the detective sergeant as she stepped across ditches, crossing the tarmac yard. At the back of the depot, the lorries manoeuvred their way into berths like exhausted prehistoric beasts.

  Longbright found t
he main office in a blank brick building near the front entrance. The counter clerk ignored her until she laid down her badge, then merely looked annoyed.

  ‘It’s OK, Leon, I know her,’ said a familiar voice. She turned to find Freddie Cooper on the stairs. ‘Longbright, isn’t it? What are you doing here?’

  She had forgotten how dissolutely handsome he was. Now she understood his line in sharp suits; it made him stand out from the drivers, otherwise he might have been mistaken for one. He was a throwback to an earlier era, unreconstructed man, a vanishing breed.

  ‘It seems you’re back on our radar, Mr Cooper. We found your calling card in Lynsey Dalladay’s flat.’

  ‘I imagine you did,’ said Cooper. ‘When she was by herself she suffered from night panics. She was incapable of finding numbers on her phone so I gave her the card and told her to call me any time of the day or night. Do you want to come up?’

  He led the way to a steel platform running the length of the building. From here Longbright could see the full extent of the truck operation below. ‘Are these all yours?’ she asked.

  Cooper looked out over the lumbering lorries. ‘No, I have a fleet of ten at the moment, but I’m expanding.’

  ‘So business is good?’

  ‘In this climate you can never tell. That’s why I diversify into other markets. I have to stay one step ahead.’

  Longbright watched one of the drivers dropping down from his cabin. ‘Where do they go?’

  ‘Right now they’re delivering engine parts from factories in the Midlands to the south coast. Our safety certificates are all up to date, if that’s what you’re wondering.’

  ‘I’m not here for that,’ said Longbright. ‘I’m just following up every lead we can think of, Mr Cooper.’

  ‘So you’re not getting anywhere. I assume you went to the Cossack Club.’ He smiled darkly. ‘If you can understand why she would want to work in a dump like that, maybe you can let me know. It’s not the sort of place that’s kind to women. Still, you’re the detectives, you should be able to figure it out.’

  Longbright turned to face the entrepreneur. ‘It’s not our job to understand why people do the things they do, Mr Cooper. Even the well-intentioned ones can end up lying, and the best lies come when they’re finally convinced they’re telling the truth.’

  ‘Then your job is to make sense of that, isn’t it?’

  ‘People omit truths in order to ease their pain. We have to get the full story so that we can decide what to do.’

  He looked at her levelly. ‘And what you decide changes lives.’

  ‘It’s not always possible to know if you’ve made the right decision. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if a crime has been committed at all. People can hurt each other without breaking laws. We’re very good at finding ways to punish ourselves. I think Ms Dalladay was doing that.’

  ‘So you’re applying a bit of cod-psychology to poor old Lynsey now, are you? She was a bitch, did I tell you that? A self-centred flower-child born fifty years too late. She went looking for herself and found there was nobody inside.’

  ‘She found you,’ said Longbright. ‘That didn’t help, obviously, given the amount of cocaine you keep lying around the house. Were you actually hoping we would bust you? Right now we’re after bigger fish.’

  Cooper turned to face her. ‘So why are you here? I told you I’d call if I thought of anything else. There’s really not much more to say about Lynsey. She made bad choices.’

  Longbright raised an eyebrow. ‘I’d say somebody else made the choice for her, wouldn’t you?’

  Cooper checked his watch and let her lead the way back down from the platform. ‘Is there anything I can do for you before you go?’

  ‘Yes, the name – Medusa. How did you pick it?’

  Cooper laughed. ‘I bought it off the peg. It’s cheaper to buy a bankrupt holding company that’s already set up than to start from scratch. I’m just a capitalist trying to make a living, and you’re looking a bit too hard, Longbright.’

  ‘Maybe, but I’ve not finished looking yet,’ she said.

  ‘You know, you’re a handsome woman.’ He bounced to the bottom of the stairs, moving closer, examining her. ‘What’s the attraction of a job like yours? Dealing with the scum out there on the streets? Does anybody ever thank you? Do you go home alone at night and wonder why you bother? Do the people you try to help ever do anything except hate you?’

  ‘I don’t expect anything from them so I’m never really disappointed,’ she said. ‘The work suits me.’

  ‘Then maybe my job isn’t so different from yours,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you for your time, Mr Cooper. We may see each other again.’

  Longbright stepped back into the night drizzle. When she glanced back she found him motionless behind the glass, still watching her.

  20

  START-UPS & NEWBORNS

  And so for Ali and Cassie we arrive at the present year, and a further refinement in the couple’s plans. This time, Cassie had decided the course they would take.

  The St Alphege Wellbeing Centre was situated in a converted boathouse that had belonged to the Chelsea Rowing Association, which had been closed down after the council found asbestos in the ceiling. It had been rebuilt and transformed into a lacuna of tranquillity in SW1, which was already considered to be one of the most elegant and expensive quadrants of the metropolis.

  At first there were spa treatments and yoga classes, but the business was poorly run and failed. Determined to find a new way to use Ali’s persuasive charms, Cassie took over the lease from the old owners and set up a company called Life Options, launching a new schedule of courses that required no teaching qualifications in order to comply with local laws.

  As soon as Ali started leading the new classes she knew their fortunes were finally made. He radiated the kind of charisma that made people stop talking and pay attention. With lifestyle coaching he found himself on firmer ground than magic or ministries. It helped that he was over six feet tall, lean and lightly muscled, so that he appeared to practise what he preached. He was the very picture of wellbeing.

  ‘We don’t have to lie to people, we can make them feel better,’ said Ali. ‘It doesn’t have to be based on science, just common sense, dressed up a little. Think of it as psychological folk-art.’

  Ali adopted the alias of Thornberry for his new customers. He’d come across the name in a peculiar magazine called The Tatler, which seemed to be about rich people who thought it was the 1800s, and decided that the name carried the right connotations of Englishness. He worked from scripts that the pair developed in the evenings, but soon created his own courses, from exercise and diet to mental clarity, stress reduction and emotional stability, then spirituality, astrology, crystal healing and meditation.

  As usual, he absorbed everything he read and quickly learned how to put his new knowledge into practice. Ali hired life coaches working freelance on a per-client basis. He gave them template scripts that added layers of parapsychological double-speak, preaching the kind of life-affirming, positive, undemanding lessons their well-heeled clients were prepared to accept. Most of their repeat visitors came from the wealthy environs of Chelsea, Fulham, Putney and Chiswick. After one visit over half of them signed up for further complementary courses.

  A macrobiotic café was opened, then a shop selling lotions, candles, mineral salts, healing stones, pots of earth from sacred sites, CDs of ethereal chanting, whale noises downloaded from the internet and magical luck-bringing paintings.

  Cassie now needed proper funding, but couldn’t go through a bank. Instead she found a backer for the centre through the LinkedIn website. Freddie Cooper was a smooth-talking entrepreneur who ran a road-haulage business in Nine Elms. Flushed with success right from the start, Cassie had visited their backer at his house in De Beauvoir and discussed the possibility of opening a chain of Life Options wellbeing centres. She explained that they couldn’t attract too much attention because none of their
experts had qualifications. What would they be able to get away with selling in their shops if they expanded? The outlay wasn’t enormous and the potential rewards were huge. Cooper knew a good thing when he saw it. He agreed to put his money down on the condition that Life Options kept to its proposed roll-out schedule, and he drew up a private contract between the three of them.

  While Cassie handled the bookkeeping, Ali charmed his way through swathes of wealthy West London women, talking about spiritual fulfilment, music therapy, astrological alignment, sexual healing and the abandonment of guilt, shame and negative energy. Although he had learned all of the terms, he still did not know all of their meanings.

  ‘Remember to keep the messages simple,’ Cassie warned him. ‘People will fill in the blanks themselves. You don’t have to say anything that can stand against you in a court of law.’

  At first, whenever the questions became too specific, on dietary requirements, say, or the disadvantages of taking prescription medication, Ali danced around the topic and delivered calming platitudes, but after a while he became less cautious and began making the kind of recommendations his clients were anxious to hear. He grew into his London persona as a plant takes to wet soil and sunlight.

  ‘How do you do it?’ Cassie asked once. ‘The way you speak, the way you move and behave – no one would ever know . . .’

  ‘I watch and listen,’ he said simply. ‘My old life is always with me, but you can put it away. You can be someone else.’

  This, he could see, was what being an ambitious Londoner was really all about. He listened to what the Prime Minister and the Mayor had to say about people who helped themselves, and resolved to reach his maximum potential. Realizing that he would never be treated like a true insider, certainly not the kind who appeared in the pages of The Tatler, he decided to become the man who would tell those on the inside what to do.