Strange Tide Read online

  ‘I’m not here to network, Mother,’ replied Cassie. ‘I couldn’t talk to you at the centre.’

  ‘Why, do you have a problem? I thought you were both doing very well. I haven’t been able to open a magazine this month without seeing the pair of you smiling out.’

  ‘As usual you’re exaggerating.’ Cassie poured herself water and gave her mother wine. ‘We’ve had three mentions, not exactly in-depth pieces.’

  ‘Lifestyle magazines are terribly important to your potential clients,’ said Marion, accepting the glass. ‘Have you looked around the Thames Valley lately? All those grand riverside mansions full of social-climbing foreigners? Being English is a commodity that they want to buy into. They’ll always be outsiders, of course, but they can at least enjoy the illusion. And setting up a place like Life Options is a part of that.’

  ‘Ali isn’t English,’ Cassie reminded her.

  Having erased her own background details many years ago, Marion waved the thought aside. ‘No, but he gives a very good impression of being so. They always do, the intelligent migrants, and Ali plays the game well. Remember Mohammed Al-Fayed? The poor little shopkeeper thought if he spent enough he’d become respectable one day. He genuinely didn’t understand why the establishment considered him vulgar.’

  ‘Ali doesn’t have some outdated dream of being English. He just wants to make money.’ Cassie called over a confused-looking waiter. She did not want to spend the lunch justifying her partner’s motives.

  ‘English property is so desirable these days,’ said Marion wistfully. ‘The wives are stuck at home with the children and their nannies, bored out of their minds. They don’t care what they spend their money on so long as it fills up their afternoons. I should know. You should see how much my premium phone lines bring in these days.’ She briefly engaged the waiter’s attention. ‘Just a green salad.’

  Cassie had always known that her mother did not really believe in the pseudo-spiritual books she sold. Perhaps she had at first, but these days her website and cable show shifted tons of junk jewellery, lifestyle-enhancing potions and lucky gemstones, even exclusive ‘magical’ artworks that were supposed to bring their owners wealth and good fortune. They were painted by gangs of children in India because HM Revenue and Customs weren’t interested in glittery daubs from ten-year-olds, bundled in cheap brown paper and posted to a school where Marion collected them, repackaged and resold them for increasingly absurd amounts.

  ‘What’s your financial situation like?’ Marion asked after the waiter had departed. ‘Is your cash flow OK?’

  ‘The expansion plans are on schedule and we’ve revised our projections upwards. Freddie is fully on board, although I don’t think he understands the extent of his liability. He just reads the bottom line on his loans.’ Cassie pulled a copy of Hard Press from her bag and slipped it across the table to her mother. ‘I need to know if you’ve seen this.’

  Marion examined the article. ‘I read something similar in the Evening Standard last night. Who is she?’

  ‘Her name is Lynsey Dalladay. She’s enrolled as a client at the institute. Freddie introduced her.’

  ‘So what? You must have hundreds of clients by now.’

  ‘After the news got out about her death I checked which courses she was taking. She only signed for the ones which were led by Ali.’

  Marion’s Botoxed brow furrowed as far as her nerve endings would allow. ‘I’m sorry, darling, I don’t see what you’re driving at.’

  ‘Read the rest of the piece,’ she suggested. ‘Lynsey was pregnant.’

  ‘Oh God.’ She put her nails to her cheek.

  ‘Last night Ali told me he’d slept with her. He said she kept hanging around and suggesting they go for a drink—’

  ‘And what, the poor provoked man didn’t have the willpower to turn her down? What did you say?’

  ‘We had a fight about it. I told him I’d continue to handle the schedules and the accounts and that we would still be partners on the condition that he stayed away from the clients in future.’

  ‘So you’re not – together?’ It pained Marion to ask anything personal. ‘You know I never pry.’

  Cassie turned over a fork, refusing to catch her mother’s eye. ‘I suppose I was infatuated at first. He was unlike anyone I’d ever met. But things change when you work together.’

  ‘What did he have to say for himself about this girl?’

  ‘He said he could see into her soul.’

  ‘I thought he only believed in making money.’

  ‘So did I. He promised to keep more distance between himself and his pupils.’

  ‘And it only took a death to wake him up to that? You’re on to a very good thing here, Cassandra – we all are. He can’t make it work without you, and you can’t do it without him.’

  Cassie leaned forward, lowering her voice. ‘You’re missing the point. The girl is dead. She’d been staying with him.’

  ‘Ali? Why?’

  ‘She left Freddie. Ali agreed to put her up for a few days. She has other places to stay, but she asked to be with Ali.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘A couple of weeks ago. He said she didn’t come home on Sunday, so he assumed she was at her own flat. She has a history of not sticking around. One of the courses she was taking involved going down to the river’s edge, specifically near the stretch of water where she was found.’

  Marion’s eyes widened. ‘My God, you don’t think Ali did it?’

  ‘I don’t know. How can I know something like that? Hell, I can’t afford to believe he did. What does such a person even look like? I don’t understand her state of mind. What if she threatened him? She could have wrecked everything.’

  ‘You’re talking about—’ The word murder stained the air between them. ‘How long is it going to be before the police uncover the connection between her and the centre?’

  ‘I don’t suppose it’s the most obvious lead to follow up, but it won’t take them long. They’ll want to talk to Ali.’

  ‘And what if they ask him to take a paternity test?’

  ‘I’ve done some checking online.’ Cassie took out the small leather notebook she always carried and opened it. ‘They’ll need what’s called a court-admissible test, where the collection of samples is carried out through a controlled chain-of-custody procedure – it requires a third party to act as a witness and to verify the authenticity of the samples. It’s almost impossible to cheat because the swabs will be taken by a qualified medic. The only thing that can go wrong is if the swabs are contaminated.’

  ‘Wait, stop this.’ Marion made sure the waiter wasn’t within earshot. ‘You’re talking about breaking the law. I mean really breaking the law.’

  ‘I’m just trying to explain what we’re facing,’ said Cassie.

  ‘You mean after all your years of hard work it could blow up in your face, just because Ali isn’t able to resist the advances of some stupid lovestruck girl?’

  ‘I’m just saying that we have to be aware of what could happen, that’s all.’

  ‘Have you spoken to that ghastly little money-man to see what he thinks?’

  ‘Freddie told me the police have already been to see him. Obviously they uncovered his connection to Dalladay at once, and he had no reason to lie to them. He mustn’t find out that Ali’s the father. If he gets wind of anything involving the police he’ll pull the plug on us. We can’t afford to have any kind of scandal attaching itself to the centre. Freddie’s not too bright but he’s got a sixth sense about business opportunities. If he thinks there’s going to be trouble he’ll pull out his stake and vanish, and we’ll be left twisting in the wind.’

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ asked Marion.

  ‘Me?’ Cassie looked surprised. ‘You’re in this as well.’

  ‘I’m just one of the resident instructors – what do you expect me to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. We need some kind of a game plan.’

  �
��You’ve got to protect your asset,’ said Marion. ‘Whatever he’s done, you have to make sure it never gets out.’

  ‘How do I do that?’ At moments like this Cassie took her mother’s advice. Marion was a survivor.

  ‘First you have to totally disconnect yourself from this girl,’ she said. ‘Go through every piece of paperwork you’ve got and make sure there’s nothing that could get either of you into trouble. The centre has to be clean. I may have to take a few of my products off the shelves. And as soon as you’ve done that, talk to Ali and brief him. He has to understand the devious ways in which the British police can work.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Cassie asked.

  ‘I already had someone from an independent unit visiting me,’ Marion explained. ‘A funny little old man asking a lot of peculiar questions about the Thames. I tried to find out what he actually wanted but he wouldn’t be pinned down. At first I thought he wasn’t all there, but now it looks like he was playing a much smarter game. The police are very fond of sending round people like that. They’ll try to catch you both off your guard.’ Marion thought for a moment. ‘You need to find a way of controlling Freddie Cooper. He has to be kept away from the centre, so maybe he only gets his information via you from now on. Hold any future meetings off-site and limit his channels of access. And let me do some checking on Ali. He won’t be expecting me. If I think he might have had a hand in this girl’s death, we’ll decide what steps to take next.’

  Marion North had a sharp, analytical brain. Cassie knew that if there was anything unpleasant to be discovered, she’d find it and know exactly how to use the knowledge.

  26

  EBB & FLOW

  Freddie Cooper stood at the river edge and looked down. The tide was at its highest point, so that when a police launch passed it sent water on to the flagstone walkway. ‘I’ve been trying to talk to Ali all day but I just keep getting his voicemail,’ he said. ‘Do you know where he is?’

  Cassie was walking back from lunch when she took Cooper’s call. She tried to sound calm. ‘He’s taking classes today,’ she replied. ‘One of our instructors didn’t come in this morning. You can tell me anything you’d say to him, Freddie, you know that. In fact it’s probably easier to go through me. I’m handling the business plan.’

  ‘I wanted to let him know that the money made it through the transfer and is now in your account,’ said Cooper. ‘When are we going to go over the plans?’

  ‘How about this weekend?’ Cassie knew that Cooper was anxious to start the franchise roll-out as soon as possible. He had already told her that every day they waited was a day’s profit lost. He was hungry, and that made him eager to extend credit to them. ‘Where are you?’ she asked.

  ‘In Greenwich, seeing my little boy.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t know you had—’

  ‘Yeah, his mum and me, we got divorced when he was three. I came down to the river. I can’t stop thinking about her, Cassie. The police don’t seem to be any further on than they were two days ago. I told her about the centre. Was she taking any of the classes?’

  In the middle of Notting Hill, Cassie stopped on the pavement and held her breath. It was imperative that Cooper did not make the connection. If he did, he’d realize that the police would be interviewing Ali in the near future. The Life Options brand was a cash cow, and if everything went according to plan there would soon be one in every major city in Britain. It needed to be rolled out smoothly. There was too much at stake for anything to go wrong now.

  ‘I don’t believe she was taking any,’ she said, trying to sound as relaxed as possible. ‘I can check if you like, but I’m pretty sure—’

  ‘There’s no need,’ said Cooper, to her relief. It didn’t sound as if he’d realized the possible consequences of his question. ‘I should let you get on. Tell Ali the good news about the money, and I’ll see you at the weekend.’

  Cooper rang off and went back to staring into the olivine water as the wake of a passing tourist boat sent waves to shore. He tried to think everything through. The latest tranche of his invested cash had been sent to the Life Options account. It looked like smooth sailing from here.

  ‘Why don’t you let me get that?’ asked May, watching with trepidation as his partner stood on one leg at the top of his library steps, trying to reach a box on top of his bookcase.

  ‘I’m barmy, not paralysed,’ Bryant snapped. ‘And I feel eerily back on form today, so watch it.’

  ‘What are you trying to reach?’

  ‘Spoons,’ said Bryant through clenched dentures. ‘I electroplated some and put them up here where no one could get at them. They were the control part of the experiment, obviously. I buried the others in my window box. I have this theory that— Ah, here they are. Now I just need to compare the two sets.’

  Half a dozen silver dessert spoons bounced off Bryant’s head and clattered to the floor. He nearly lost his balance, but managed to hang on to an enormous leather-bound book that slowly divorced itself from its placement in the bookshelf. ‘That’s a piece of luck, just the thing I was looking for,’ Bryant had time to say before the book came free, sending it and him flying. He landed on his armchair, but the book split its spine and cascaded pages all over the room. Along with it came several other volumes, including Penny’s From Heaven: Girls Who Returned from the Dead, Behind You!: Famous Pantomime Ghosts and The Encyclopaedia of International Shoes (missing one section: ‘Espadrilles–Estonia’).

  May bit his tongue and resisted the temptation to yell. He couldn’t tell if Bryant was being his usual eccentric self or if his mind was taking another left turn into Narnia. ‘Next time, just ask me to help you,’ he said testily.

  ‘I was looking for one of the volumes of my Dead Diary,’ Bryant explained, struggling back out of the armchair. He had long kept daily files of all those who died in suspicious, inexplicable or unusual circumstances in the Greater London area, but several of the earlier volumes had become unusable. Crippen had been sick in one and another had become impregnated with potassium chlorate, which made it unstable and highly explosive.

  With a sigh, May helped him gather up the pages and reassemble them. ‘There’s a section somewhere on unattributed deaths occurring in disputed jurisdictions,’ Bryant explained. ‘Obviously, that includes the Thames.’

  ‘I don’t understand why you think the river is so key to this,’ said May.

  ‘There are two answers to that.’ Bryant shuffled his loose pages back into shape. ‘One, London has become the most observed city in the world, and the only place where a killer may now ply his grisly trade unseen is on the river and its shores. It gives him free rein to work anywhere within seven counties along a two-hundred-and-fifteen-mile length, from the Thames Head in Gloucestershire, at its reaches, on any of eighty islands and around any of forty-seven locks, all the way to the Sheerness estuary, which is five miles across. Arguably he could go further to Whitstable, eighteen miles across, but I start to count that as open sea.’

  ‘OK,’ May agreed, marvelling at Bryant’s continued ability to marshal figures. ‘What’s the other answer?’

  ‘OK, Point B is slightly more esoteric. The Thames holds the collective memory of the city and all its dwellers, and there’s a long history of belief in the idea that it’s a sacred river granting death and rebirth. If someone as vulnerable as Lynsey Dalladay came to believe that this was true and she really thought she had wrecked her life, she just might be persuaded to kill herself in order to attain rebirth and a fresh start.’

  ‘You mean persuaded by someone else.’

  ‘Yes, someone powerful enough to have a hold over her. We have witness statements from Freddie Cooper and Joe Easter, the barman at the Cossack Club. They both stated that she wished she could wipe the slate clean and begin her life over again. Do you think that’s feasible?’

  ‘When you put it like that, yes,’ May agreed. ‘There’s precedent for it. Jonestown Syndrome.’

  ‘Good.’ Bryant slappe
d his hand on the huge unkempt tome before him. ‘So now I want to look through the Dead Diary and see if there’s anyone else who might fall into this category. Surely the best way to murder someone is to first persuade them that their life is worthless.’

  ‘Why do I always underestimate you, Arthur?’

  ‘We inhabit slightly different worlds, that’s all. You’re like the spoons that were up there, the control part of our grand experiment.’ Bryant began pulling out selected pages and laying them on his desk. ‘All right, off with you and let me be for a while. This will take the rest of the day and the best part of the night.’

  ‘How is he?’ May came out to find Raymond Land wringing his hands in the hallway. ‘I heard a lot of crashing about.’

  ‘Well, he seems quite normal,’ said May, pulling the door to behind him. ‘I mean in his abnormal way.’

  ‘Why, what’s he doing?’

  ‘Going through historical files. And examining spoons.’

  ‘Oh. So he really is back to normal, then. I wonder how long it will last this time.’ He saw the crooked painting of Sir Edward Henry on the wall and flinched. ‘God, that’s not one of his relatives, is it?’

  ‘Arthur’s safe so long as he stays in there,’ said May, ‘but there’s no way of telling how long this current mood will hold.’

  ‘I wish I knew what was going on,’ Land complained. ‘Three bodies pulled out of the river in three days: it’s not exactly our finest moment, is it?’

  ‘The Dimitri Gilyov killing may not be connected,’ May pointed out, ‘and Crooms’s death was Misadventure. There’s no reason to suppose he even knew Gilyov. He could have been set up.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Land, confused.

  ‘For all we know someone may have sent him there to check on the site. It crossed my mind that it may have been a drop-point for drugs, and that Gilyov was part of a deal that went bad. That could be an entirely separate situation.’