Strange Tide Read online

  ‘Could you give me the name of her doctor?’ Bryant asked. ‘I’d like to know a little more about her medication regime.’

  ‘I can do better than that,’ Jade said. ‘I have all her pills right here, together with her medical notes. They were just returned to me. I didn’t know what to do with them.’ She rose and came back with a clear plastic bag. ‘Please take them if you think they’ll help you in any way. Just let me know if you find anything. I loved her very much.’

  Bryant made one more stop before heading back to the unit. The last time he had met Darcy Sarto he had spilled a glass of Rioja down Sarto’s shirt at a book launch, not because the room had been crowded but because he wanted to shut him up. Sarto was an absurdly arrogant self-styled expert in the lore of London, about which he wrote a great many preposterous and fanciful doorstops, but Bryant realized he might have some information to share, so he called ahead and made his way to Biblio, the grand literary club in Whitehall where Sarto hung out with his chirruping acolytes.

  The porter was clearly not happy about letting the detective inside. ‘Are you here for dinner?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I’ve had me dinner, it’s nearly time for me tea,’ said Bryant, just to prove his working-class credentials. ‘I’ll see myself up, I know the way.’

  He passed between a pair of intricate ceramic-tiled pillars and made his way to the first floor, past marble busts of forgotten statesmen and dun-coloured paintings of high-collared noblemen, heading for the club bar, where he knew he would find Sarto.

  ‘I suppose you know it virtually has its own weather system?’ said Sarto, swilling a brandy glass that looked as if it had been grafted on to his hand some time during the Thatcher years. His appearance had been described by desperate interviewers as ‘Pickwickian’, ‘Falstaffian’ and plain ‘portly’. A handful of other armchairs in the clubroom had occupants who ruffled themselves and resettled every now and again, rather like bats in a cave. ‘There’s a breeze that blows across the river unlike anywhere else,’ Sarto explained. ‘London’s winds are generally westerly but not on the Thames, where it’s south-west, stronger and colder than on the shores. In the eighteenth century it was infamous for plucking wigs off.’ He released a series of short, sharp laughs that sound like geese being shot. Several bats fluttered disapprovingly.

  ‘Have you written a book on the subject?’ Bryant asked.

  ‘Oh, probably.’ Sarto twirled his free hand airily. ‘Who can honestly remember all that one has done? I probably won an award for it. I’m getting you a brandy; you look as if you need it.’ An ancient waiter crept out of the gloom, took the order and retreated. ‘Where was I?’

  ‘Wind,’ said Bryant.

  ‘Ah yes.’ His thoughts changed direction. ‘The Grand Order of London Druids believe the Thames encourages death in order to start over again, an idea that recurs through the history of the river. Like all mystic landscapes it starts life in a sacred form and eventually becomes corrupted. In the case of the Thames it was exploited by industrialists, its magic destroyed by the pollutant of greed. But that doesn’t stop some people from believing that it still brings death and rebirth, the core of any sacred belief. I remember Margaret Thatcher once said to me—’

  ‘Yes, your book about Mrs Thatcher is on my list,’ said Bryant. He thought it best not to say which list. ‘The Thames is just a river. Why would people think it could grant rebirth?’

  ‘Because its nature is akin to religion. You can’t trust the Thames any more than you can trust God, and like God it knows how to stage a good disaster.’ The waiter crept back in, set down the brandy and crept off. ‘It washed away London Bridge with sweeping high tides that swallowed men and cattle, and burst its banks century after century. It could rise twelve feet in five hours and drown passers-by strolling on main roads. On a bitter January night in 1953 a great cliff of water moved up the Thames and drowned many in their beds, including, if I’m not mistaken, your great-uncle Charlie. He was living in the slums of Deptford, was he not?’

  ‘Yes, he was,’ said Bryant, thinking back. ‘How would you know about that?’ But he already had the answer to his question. Sarto made it his job to know about anyone who threatened his supremacy, and the detective was the only man who knew more about London than he did. The difference was that Bryant wore his learning with humility. Sarto had a fine mind that had been led astray by the sound of his own voice.

  ‘I’m surprised to see you still working,’ Sarto was saying now. ‘Doesn’t it bore you? Surely you’d be happier at home putting your feet up? It will never really change, you know. London will continue to appal and amaze in equal measure. Although murder is disappearing in the capital, isn’t it? It always struck me as such a Victorian conceit.’ He gave a theatrical shudder.

  ‘I’m sorry you think murder is unfashionable,’ said Bryant, ‘but unexplained deaths still occur every day. Most go unnoticed, but when aggregated they create unrest. The city isn’t quantifiable in mere numbers, Darcy. Ill humours arise; distrust of public services and corporations, disillusionment with one’s fellow man. That’s why the PCU still exists. You saw what happened during the banking riots. London is a place of vapours and residues. They have to be dispelled before they’re allowed to infect the population.’

  Sarto grimaced. ‘You sound like a sanitary engineer sprinkling Harpic around a lavatory bowl. Arthur, you really should raise yourself from the gutter.’

  ‘I was born in the gutter,’ said Bryant, rising to leave. There was no point in talking to any more experts about the river. Back at the unit the rest of the staff would be data-trawling, analysing evidence, creating spreadsheets and cross-checking statements. May had been right; it was the only way to solve a case like this. Bryant couldn’t help being naturally drawn to wilder suppositions, but the Thames had misled everyone who studied it.

  Making his goodbyes, he replaced his hat and stepped back into the drizzle. It was now Wednesday evening, and approaching the moment when everything began to go terribly wrong.

  28

  CHARMS & BRACELETS

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ May called to Colin Bimsley. ‘He’s gone again. Is somebody helping him to escape? Did he slip past you?’

  ‘No, I thought Raymond was looking after him,’ said Bimsley.

  ‘So did I,’ said May, ‘but I can’t find either of them. Raymond’s not answering his mobile.’

  ‘Mr Bryant’s tracker is on his desk,’ said Dan, emerging from the detectives’ office. ‘I thought he might leave it somewhere so I sewed another one into his overcoat.’

  ‘So you’ve got him?’ asked May, relieved.

  ‘No, I’ve got his overcoat.’

  May ran his fingers through his hair, thinking. ‘He could be anywhere. Take Meera and Fraternity with you and check around the block. I’ll call Alma and Maggie – maybe they’ve spoken to him.’

  ‘What about King’s Cross Station?’ asked Banbury. ‘He often goes there when it’s raining because it’s under cover.’

  ‘Good idea,’ May said. ‘This is the last bloody time. If I find him in one piece I’m going to lock him in his bedroom and throw away the key. Alma can slide his dinners under the door. He likes dover sole and pizza, he’ll be fine.’

  Arthur Bryant found himself at the station, but it wasn’t King’s Cross. It was Victoria. And that wasn’t the only odd thing; the electronic dot-matrix destination board above his head had been replaced by one with green wooden slats that clattered as they rolled over to reveal the routes. The taste of Sarto’s awful brandy had seared his mouth and he looked around for a coffee shop, but there was only an ancient WHSmith stand surrounded by porters pushing a convoy of two-wheeled trolleys. In front of the platforms, stacks of rectangular brown leather suitcases were piled in geometric mountains.

  Bryant pulled his scarf free and looked up. Everything was brown; the walls were streaked with dirt and the glass roof was sepia with soot. Some of the men wore belted overcoats, baggy pinstriped
trousers, trilbies and bowlers. The women were in short flared jackets and odd little hats that clenched their perms like skullcaps. The headlines pinned to boards outside the paper shop were all about the coronation. ‘The Radiant Hope Of Millions’, read the Evening Chronicle; 1953, he thought, that’s odd.

  At Platform 3 he was ushered through the barrier and a blast of steam momentarily blinded him. When it cleared he found himself confronted by a polished green train with brass door handles and three separate classes. For a moment he wondered if he’d drifted on to the set of The Railway Children, but there was no Edwardian elegance here, just the charcoal coats and crumpled collars of a city still feeling the after-effects of a world war.

  He dumbly followed the ticket number, stamped on thick pale green cardboard, then climbed up and entered a corridor, settling himself in a first-class carriage. The single compartment had six smartly upholstered seats with white antimacassars and red leather armrests. Above four of them were framed rectangular paintings of British holiday destinations. Over the centre seats were two gleaming bevelled mirrors.

  No other passengers arrived to take up the other places in the compartment, and the train pulled out shortly after he was settled. The grey factories of South London were pocked with so many overgrown bomb sites that it looked as if the remaining buildings had been left behind as a provocation.

  He was shocked at how suddenly the city ended. The switch from town to countryside happened moments after leaving Clapham Junction. I am dreaming, thought Bryant; let me dream some more. He felt tired and cold and closed his eyes, allowing his head to loll against the antimacassar as the rhythm of the tracks matched the beating of his heart.

  He woke up in Brighton. It was a bright sunny morning. Light streamed in through the terminal’s dusty brown canopy. How long was I asleep? he wondered. The train stood at the buffers, fifty-three miles from London.

  He was in for another shock when he alighted and left the station, for time had rolled further back with the passing of the miles. It was no longer winter but high summer. The street outside was covered in red and yellow flags, but not to mark the coronation. Now he was surrounded by men in straw boaters, bright red blazers and baggy white flannels. The ladies wore fussy full skirts of white calico. He knew Brighton well and headed for the seafront, as every visitor from London was predisposed to do. An immense floral clock bore a date picked out in peonies: 1887. Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee, he thought. Well now, I wonder what this is about?

  There were a few motorcars, unwieldy and seemingly all built along vertical lines, but they were far outnumbered by coach parties disembarking from horse-drawn charabancs while an astonishing assortment of local men fussed around them, hired to help water the animals and lug wicker hampers on to the beach.

  Brighton was as yet unruined. There were still two piers; the West Pier had not burned down. It ended in a great square promenade, and looked more sedately elegant than its brash counterpart. Why am I here? he wondered. Is it simply a random hallucination, or am I supposed to learn something from this?

  Oddly, Bryant did not look out of place in the slightest. Sartorially challenged at the best of times, his wardrobe looked to have been purchased secondhand somewhere between the invasion of Poland and the first season of Monty Python, incorporating elements of both events. In Victorian Brighton he simply looked like a gentleman of the road. Thanks to the fact that he always had a few coppers in old money somewhere about his person, he was able to buy a plate of cockles. He decided to enjoy the experience.

  It’s hard to say what took him to the Hall of Varieties at the end of the Palace Pier but it probably wasn’t the bill of fare, which included Beryl Flynn, the Lancashire Contortionist, Horace Allcock, Derby’s Finest Female Impersonator, and Walter Wainright and His Cheeky Otters. Sandwiched in between these acts was the resident compère. Dudley Salterton was a Yorkshireman who did a Mr Memory act and some ventriloquism with an eye-rolling sailor dummy called Barnacle Bill. He dyed his hair ginger and stopped removing his stage make-up after his wife died, until it finally gave him a skin disease. He came from a long line of entertainers and used to work with his wife at the intermission, threading balloons through her neck. He tried it with a sword for a while but she hated going on stage wearing a bandage.

  ‘I’ve not seen thee for a while,’ said Salterton. ‘Not since you were a wee lad. My, you’ve put on some years.’

  ‘No, that was my father,’ Bryant explained. ‘I’m Arthur, his son. He said you died before I was born.’

  ‘I’m not surprised with my dicky colon. It’s the diet. You get right fed up with boarding-house rissoles. What do you do?’

  ‘I’m a detective.’

  ‘Then you’re someone to notice.’

  ‘Do you want a cockle?’

  ‘No, son. There’s summat in them that builds up in me system and I can’t afford to get caught short onstage. I’m assuming you’re not here for the air.’

  ‘Is that you doing your mentalism act?’ asked Bryant. ‘Or a lucky guess?’

  ‘Neither, lad. Human nature. Your dad was never one for visiting out of friendliness.’ Salterton scratched at his nose, removing a chalky teardrop of panstick. ‘I don’t do me mentalism any more.’

  ‘Why not?’ Bryant moved his plate of cockles away from a seagull that was hovering in sinister proximity.

  ‘I haven’t got the looks for it. Time marches on, and soon it marches over your face.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Surely all you need for your mind-reading is a good memory.’

  ‘I can see you’ve never trodden the boards.’ Salterton sighed. ‘It’s got very little to do with the brain, has prestidigitationary gubbins. What do you know of hypnotism?’

  ‘Not much,’ said Bryant, popping a cockle in his mouth and chewing ruminatively. He’d under-peppered them. ‘From the Greek god Hypnos, presumably.’

  ‘You presume correctly. But it were a term first coined by a Manchester surgeon forty-six years ago.’

  ‘You mean in 1841, assuming this is 1887.’

  ‘Hypnosis,’ said Salterton, rolling the word around his mouth. ‘What is hypnotism, really? Misdirection? Magic? Suggestion? A special state of mind? If you think of a lemon you can make yourself salivate. If I say the word “lemon” will it produce the same effect, or is that just neurolinguistic programming?’

  ‘Steady on,’ said Bryant. ‘That won’t be invented for another eighty-odd years yet.’

  ‘I do beg your pardon.’ Salterton craned forward alarmingly. ‘Shall I tell you about those times I picked someone from the audience and got them to reveal a secret to me? I chose them because I looked for signs of gullibility, an eagerness to be deceived, a certain summat’ – here he dappled his bony fingers around his face – ‘that suggested they were happy to be in on the act, going along with me to be gulled, because back then I were a handsome, confident young fellow holding them in the palm of me hand. I had charisma – and that’s not a new term; it means “the gift of grace”. My mother used to call it allure. Those folk in the auditorium, they hoped some of it would rub off on them.’

  Bryant flicked a cockle at a passing dog. ‘You think some people have a natural ability to control others?’

  ‘I think some people have the ability to make others surrender to control. To become complicit. There’s a difference, lad.’

  ‘And you knew you had that power.’

  ‘Aye, for a while, yes. I capitalized upon it. I could be found on the billboards with lightning bolts flashing from me eyes. But when the petals fell from this rose, the public took a second look at me and no longer wished to assist in the deceit. In short, I got old. You know what they say a pretty young girl can do? Anything she pleases. Only they never realize it, of course, or if they do they must doom themselves.’

  ‘It’s not the same in our time,’ said Bryant. ‘Everyone thinks they’re the bee’s knees.’

  ‘What I’m saying to you is, I attracted audiences
not because of what I said or did, but because of who I was. Not how I was born but who I thought I could become. I created meself. I wore a special suit and shoes with raised heels. I tanned on the beach, brilliantined me hair and bleached me teeth, and I dazzled them. Do you see?’

  ‘No, not really,’ said Bryant honestly.

  ‘There are two tricks to fooling people, laddie. One is to make yourself invisible. The other is to be the most visible fellow in the room.’

  ‘I don’t see how this helps our investigation,’ said Bryant, emptying vinegar from his plate into the sea.

  ‘No, but you will in the century after next. Because you’re wrong; underneath all the nonsense people never change. What you think you see is what you see. See?’ Salterton arose with an audible crack of the knees. ‘I weren’t bamboozling them with my cleverness. I’m not that smart. They just liked t’ look of me. I was all “gawk, tousle and shucks”, as we say round our way. The trouble with you is, you always think murderers are clever. Truth is, most of ’em are as slow as a tortoise.’ He checked his pocket watch. ‘It’s nearly intermission; I must be getting on. I’m producing coins out of kiddies’ ears in the foyer. Sometimes they get stuck right inside and I have to use me rubber tube. The parents kick up a fuss but it’s better than doing nowt. You have to keep working when it’s in t’ blood.’

  Bryant rose also. The sun had vanished behind a lone cloud and it had grown suddenly cold.

  ‘One other thing,’ said Salterton, looking back. ‘Spoons. You’re on the right track, but don’t be too diverted by the spoons. Think about them lads and lasses in t’ Congo. You gave that book to Dr Gillespie.’

  And with that the ancient performer vanished through the swing doors of the variety hall, leaving Bryant alone on the pier.

  Well, this is an interesting development, he thought. My hallucinations seem to be leaving me cryptic clues. For a minute he looked through the planks and watched the green waves crashing far below. Then, pulling his scarf more tightly around his throat, he headed back to the seafront.