Strange Tide Read online

  ‘So what went wrong?’ May asked.

  Cooper made an attempt to look hurt. ‘Who said anything went wrong?’

  ‘Do you share this place with anyone else?’ May nodded at the table. ‘Class As, that’s up to seven years. You don’t care about that?’

  ‘Come on, man.’ Cooper waved the idea aside. ‘You’ve got bigger things to think about than a bit of blow. I had a few mates around from the office.’

  ‘So you weren’t exactly missing her,’ said Longbright.

  ‘What, that’s a crime now? She was the one who lost interest in me.’

  ‘How did that show itself?’

  ‘Let me see. That would be when she started disappearing for several days at a time.’

  ‘You mean she was using again.’ May had seen Giles’s report and knew this not to be the case.

  ‘No, I don’t think so. But she must have been seeing someone.’

  ‘You don’t know where she went?’ May asked. ‘It says here she was working at the Cossack Club in Dalston. That doesn’t sound very Henley.’

  ‘I have no idea what happened to her, and that’s the God’s honest truth,’ said Cooper, taking pains to look as if he might be telling the truth. ‘She stayed away more and more, wouldn’t tell me where she was going or where she’d been, and certainly couldn’t remember enough to lie properly. Finally she moved out.’

  ‘Or did you throw her out?’ asked May.

  ‘No, it was her decision to go.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘About two weeks ago. And before you say it, yeah, I knew she was pregnant, but I also knew it wasn’t mine.’

  ‘How did you find out?’ asked Longbright. ‘She called you?’

  ‘No, someone else, I don’t remember who. I meet a lot of people, hear a lot of rumours.’

  ‘Something like that, I’d have thought you’d remember. Did somebody pop a postcard through?’

  ‘We’ve got some shared friends who talk too much, OK?’

  ‘Was she happy about it?’

  Cooper all but exploded. ‘How the hell would I know? Are you even listening to me? She wasn’t saying and she sure as hell wasn’t sleeping with me.’

  ‘But you must have had some idea of where she was going and who she was going with,’ Longbright persisted. ‘Did you never hear a phone ring or see any texts?’

  ‘No, she had this old phone that barely worked, and nobody rings the house phone except my foreman, usually to tell me that something’s gone wrong at work, or my mother, who can’t figure out how to call my mobile number.’

  ‘Did Dalladay have a laptop?’

  ‘You’re joking. I bought her an iPad a few months back. It’s still in its box.’

  ‘So a fortnight ago she just announced she was leaving.’

  ‘She didn’t announce anything, just packed a bag and walked out.’

  ‘Did you have a fight?’

  ‘You can’t have a fight with someone who makes no sense.’

  ‘And she left no forwarding address.’

  ‘She washed her hands of me, man. Like all the little rich girls who clean up their acts. She got bored. I bored her. She was bipolar and scary and she was driving me nuts.’

  ‘So you got tired of her too.’

  ‘That’s an understatement. She wore me down. After she walked out it was like a weight had lifted. I opened a bottle of champagne.’

  ‘Anything else we need to know before we find out?’ Longbright asked, looking around the room.

  ‘There’s nothing I can tell you about her that would surprise you.’ Cooper shrugged, as if the matter was closed. ‘I felt sorry for her, but she was just another high-maintenance princess with an exaggerated sense of entitlement who went ballistic when people stopped paying attention to her.’

  ‘When she took off, you didn’t try to find her?’

  ‘I didn’t look too hard, if that’s what you mean. Can’t you track her movements over the last couple of weeks?’

  ‘Tell me about the Cossack Club,’ said May.

  Cooper raised his hands. ‘It’s just an after-hours place people go. You’re going to look into it and find out some bad stuff, but I swear that has nothing to do with me, or this.’

  ‘What kind of bad stuff?’ asked Longbright.

  ‘If you’re going to ask me anything else, I want a lawyer.’

  ‘Tell you what, we’ll take a swab and a blood sample for now,’ said May, rising. ‘Just to – you know.’

  ‘And you can show us where you keep your shoes,’ said Longbright, also rising.

  ‘What, you think I was involved in her death?’ Cooper asked as he chased behind them.

  Longbright deadpanned. ‘Were you?’

  ‘I’m not the most honest bloke in the world, but if I wanted to deal with a problem I wouldn’t take it down to the river and drown it like a cat.’

  ‘No, I imagine not,’ said the detective sergeant. ‘At the moment we have no reason to assume that you killed her. By the way, did she wear any jewellery?’

  ‘Not much,’ said Cooper. ‘Some rings, cheap things.’

  ‘Nothing around her neck?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘A silver chain with a crescent moon and a lock.’

  ‘No, I never saw anything like that.’

  They headed upstairs to the main bedroom, which had a freestanding white marble bath at one end. May opened the antique wardrobe and emptied out Cooper’s boots and trainers. He was careful not to touch the outsides, knowing that Banbury would be able to tell if any pair had been specially cleaned. He took some shots of the wardrobe’s layout. ‘Don’t touch anything; we’ll send someone along,’ he said. ‘Where’s Dalladay’s stuff?’

  ‘She never left anything here.’

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘She always dragged a bag around with her.’

  ‘Where were you on Sunday night around midnight?’

  ‘I was here, at home, alone in front of the telly, like I always am. I start work at six a.m. on Mondays.’

  ‘What’s your business?’

  ‘I run a road-haulage company. So I am a suspect?’

  ‘Only if you keep asking me.’

  As they left, Longbright stopped May in the gloomy hallway. ‘Do you want to bust him?’

  ‘For recreationals? A bit of work-hard-play-hard? No. He knows we could whenever we wanted. He’d have cleared it away if he was dealing. If we turn a blind eye now he may be useful to us in the future.’

  ‘You know what the Met Drugs Directorate would have to say about that.’

  ‘We’re PCU; they have no influence over us.’

  As they reached the car it was starting to rain finely, glossing the pavements. ‘So, what do you reckon?’ Longbright asked.

  ‘About Cooper? He thinks he’s smooth. He’s just another Flash Harry,’ said May. ‘But I suppose there could be something. Let’s dig a little deeper.’

  ‘Dalladay sounds like she was a pain in the arse.’

  ‘She’s not able to give an account of herself,’ May reminded Longbright. ‘Someone robbed her of that right. I want you to go and see where she worked. We need someone who spoke to her in the last couple of weeks. She couldn’t just have vanished.’

  ‘Maybe she went back to Henley.’

  ‘Not to her parents.’

  ‘You’ve spoken to them?’

  ‘I got somebody local to do the knock. You heard Cooper. She left with an overnight bag.’ May dug out his keys. ‘Can I give you a lift up to Dalston?’

  ‘It’s not far, I’ll walk,’ said Longbright. ‘Where are you going?’

  May checked his watch. ‘We’ve been gone a while. I have to keep an eye on Arthur. I think each day’s going to be a surprise from now on.’

  11

  RATS & LIONS

  ‘Of course, there are only a handful of real motives for murder,’ said Raymond Land, concluding his argument with all the authority of someone who doesn’t
know what he’s talking about. ‘It’s always sex or money, stands to reason.’

  As everyone else was out working on the case, Land found himself answering phones, making weak tea, reorganizing paperwork in such a way that no one would be able to find anything and babysitting his befuddled detective. It was unfortunate that in this case the baby was a faintly unsanitary pipe-smoking senior with oversized false teeth, a whistling hearing aid and a lethal walking stick.

  ‘I must disagree with you there,’ said Bryant, who looked forward to disagreeing with anyone, especially his unit chief. ‘There are many more motives.’ He ticked them off on his fingers. ‘Revenge and power and anger and damage control and cruelty, warnings to others, the hiding of evidence – and plain, simple insanity. Meanwhile you’ve got the Met spending their days chucking quasi-military teams into every postcode with a gang problem when London needs more community workers, not goons inviting themselves into council flats with battering rams. We need to spot the symptoms instead of dishing out cures.’

  Beyond the office windows a sudden squall of rain increased its strength, causing the other side of the road mercifully to disappear. Land blinked back at his charge. He found it hard to believe that this was the same man who’d been reported lost in a department store just a few hours earlier. Bryant never ceased to wrongfoot him.

  ‘Do you know what’s happened to the murder rate in London, Raymondo? It’s dropped by 30 per cent in five years and is still falling.’ Bryant poked at his pipe bowl with a meat skewer, disrespectfully emptying its reeking contents on to Land’s desk. ‘Great Britain now has one of the lowest murder rates in the world. It’s lower than Norway’s, for heaven’s sake. Have you ever met a Norwegian? If they were any gentler they’d be hamsters. Do you know who has the highest murder rate? Honduras. Now before you tell me it’s down to hot-blooded Latins, let me point out that it can’t be related to temperature because the place with the lowest murder rate in the world is Polynesia. I suppose you can’t hide a gun in a grass skirt.’

  ‘Wait, wait,’ said Land, feeling as if he was once more stepping into the wobbly funhouse corridor of Bryant’s mind. ‘You have no way of knowing how each country classifies its cases. In the UK you can’t count homicides unless there’s a conviction. There’s no international standard. Knife crimes are up.’

  ‘True,’ Bryant agreed, ‘and the number of unexplained deaths has risen sharply in London. By “unexplained”, I mean open verdicts, unsolved cases, disappearances, people simply dropping off the grid and ceasing to exist. Now, what does that suggest to you?’

  ‘Poor accounting?’ asked Land hopefully.

  ‘No, mon petit débile, it suggests that the nature of lawbreaking is changing. London is much more populous and transitory these days, so theoretically the crime rate per capita should have risen. I think it has risen, and we’re misreading the figures.’

  ‘How would that make a difference?’ Land eyed the pipe debris with disgust. ‘A person is either there to be counted or not.’

  ‘Not strictly true, if you believe in quantum superposition.’

  Land gave him the blankest of looks.

  ‘Schrödinger’s Cat? No?’ Bryant shrugged. ‘Never mind, you were talking about motives, and forgive me but the motives you selected are the same ones that have been trotted out for the past century and a half. Motives for murders that were committed by rats.’

  Land was lost. ‘What do you mean, rats?’

  ‘Germ-riddled squeakers that flee from the light, hungry and cowardly opportunists from what used to be called the criminal classes. What if crime rates haven’t changed but criminals have? We’re in a fast-evolving, fluid society that’s almost impossible to track, despite the fact that you can’t nip out for a Kit-Kat without triggering an electronic Post-it note. There’s no nice old PC Plod popping in for a cup of tea and keeping a friendly eye on all at 999, Letsby Avenue any more.’ Bryant squinted into his pipe and blew. ‘Look up “police station” for this area and you know what the interweb tells you? That there is one, only it doesn’t seem to exist at the listed address. That’s because it got closed down due to lack of use, which just leaves specialist units like us. We tackle crime after the event, we don’t keep the peace. Nobody keeps the peace any more. We punish but we don’t prevent. The politicians are letting society do that for us.’ Bryant saw that Land was still having trouble following him. ‘Look, if someone chucks a McDonald’s bag on to the pavement in front of you, you don’t tell him off for fear of getting a knife in your gut, right? You keep your head down and your eyes averted, and hope that someone else does something. Fear is what’s keeping the population in line nowadays.’

  Land shot him a look of concern. ‘Are you feeling all right?’

  ‘No, of course I’m not. Victims go unnoticed because we no longer know who’s preying on them, and they don’t report half the things that happen for fear of having their own histories investigated. What kind of a person would tie a pregnant girl to a post and let the tide drown her? Maybe she wanted to have the child and expected this Cooper fellow to support her, so he did her in.’

  ‘I think he’d have tried to talk through the options before dragging her down to the river and planning an impossible crime, don’t you?’ said Land.

  Bryant patted his pockets, looking for tobacco. ‘We don’t know enough about the girl yet. The father of her child could be a married man with a lot to lose. We need to drive her family and friends mad with questions. And I want Dan to tear Cooper’s house apart. I want him pushed through the hoops. I should have gone with them this afternoon. I feel like I’m under house arrest being stuck here with you. No offence.’

  ‘There’s plenty for you to do here,’ said Land. ‘You can give us moral support, and there are your books, and the phones and the internet.’ He sounded like a sports teacher consoling a child who’d forgotten his kit for the big match.

  ‘Fine,’ said Bryant, unwrapping a packet of HMS Nautilus Rough Cut Rolling Tobacco. ‘If you’re going to patronize me, I shall retire to my thought-chamber and ponder the problem. But don’t expect me to get very much further without being allowed out in the field. You might do me a favour, though. That so-called “public-private area” near Tower Hill Beach. Find out if it bans dogs, will you? And see if there’s a bright red coach parked by the Tower called “Golden Dreams”.’

  Savouring the mystified look on his colleague’s face, Bryant returned to his own office and threw himself down into his old green leather armchair, taking in his half of the room, which had been filled with even more furniture while the two Daves were laying new floors.

  To his left were the bowed bookcases stuffed with forgotten periodicals, lost treatises, banned tracts, esoteric catalogues and misleading textbooks. Next to them was a late-nineteenth-century Vernis Martin bonheur du jour writing desk with slender cabriole legs and ormolu mounts, its top inlaid with cherrywood marquetry, its value somewhat diminished by the half-litre of ‘Peach Bellini’ Dulux matt emulsion Bryant had accidentally tipped over it during an experiment. The staff had trodden pink paint around the building for days. There was also an astonishingly ugly sideboard, a veritable Quasimodo of Victorian furniture that contained several hundred files, souvenirs, mementoes, gee-gaws and postcards of a distinctly dodgy nature, as well as a hundred millilitres of nitroglycerine stored in an old bottle of Dr Japp’s Colonic Rejuvenator. There was a ventriloquist’s dummy that had once belonged to Charles Dickens and a plaster figurine of Dame Nellie Melba minus its right leg. It was a measure of Bryant’s mind that he thought such items might one day come in useful.

  In amongst this old rubbish were far more serious effects, of course, including a number of documents so sensitive that they still had the power to destabilize governments. Bryant was very selective about what he kept, and everything was stored for a reason. Like Edgar Allen Poe in ‘The Purloined Letter’ he believed in hiding the most important items in plain sight, which was why his black book of conta
cts lay open on his desk.

  As a lay historian and a self-taught academic there was very little he did not know about the secret synchronicities of London, but very occasionally he drew a blank, and then the black book came into its own, for its pages contained the addresses of hundreds of men and women who shared his odd passions. He searched for names now, carefully jotting down the details of a few eccentrics and social misfits who might prove useful. Then he sat back for a quiet smoke and a think.

  By the time the pipe was finished he had decided that the key was the river. It gave life to London, but could just as easily take it away. The question that hung in his mind was this: Why keep Dalladay alive until the Thames consumed her? Why not kill her and weight the body, throwing it from a bridge as so many had done before? Why tie only the left hand? And what was to be gained by taking such a risk, by doing something so utterly cruel? What kind of devious mind were they dealing with?

  Bryant’s bookshelves contained half a dozen esoteric histories of the Thames, but none proved to be of any help. He stuck a hand into his overcoat pocket and pulled out two leaking cheddar and chutney sandwiches, making a mental note to ask Alma to wrap them before leaving them inside the brain-pan of the carved Tibetan skull he kept beside his bed. What kind of person are we looking for? he asked himself as he munched. Does he have a special association with the river? Does she? Or is it simply because that spot is dark and inaccessible and free from cameras? How did the killer get in there anyway?

  So far, they didn’t have enough physical evidence to answer his questions. For all of London’s much-vaunted crime-prevention technology, it was amazing how often the system failed to record illegal activities. Hard drives froze, motherboards overheated, lights burned out, substations flooded, suspects blurred before camera lenses; for every major advance it seemed there was half a step back.

  He needed to go and look at the site, just walk around on the foreshore and get a feel for what had happened. Janice was off paying a visit to the Cossack Club. It was already dark. Tower Hill was less than twenty minutes away. He could slip out via the fire escape and get back before John returned. No one would ever know that he had even been away.