Strange Tide (20 page)

‘Speak up, madam, so that everyone can hear you.'

Maggie went for the Oscar, laying a hand on her throat and looking pathetic, a sympathy-gaining trick she had learned from Arthur. She beckoned at Pastor Michaels, summoning him to her.

Ali stepped closer.

Now, if you've ever had the pleasure of visiting the beautiful city of Hanoi, you'll know that the Vietnamese have a wonderful way with vegetable knives, which they make and sell at the river market. In fact, they've proven so popular that many of these kitchen implements have made their way around the world. One particular pair of scissors has tiny razor-sharp spring-loaded blades, and is used for cutting up herbs. They can be bought in Columbia Road for about a fiver.

As Ali bent down, Maggie stretched up to whisper to him and used the scissors she had secreted in her palm to snip through the slender white wire that extended from his earlobe into the top of his shirt. It looked like part of his throat-mike but was the transmission device that allowed him to toggle between his conversations with Cassie and his pronouncements to the audience. As Cassie found herself suddenly silenced, Maggie stood up and addressed the stalls.

‘This man is a fake,' she said in a loud, clear and extremely authoritative voice. ‘He and his assistant have been listening to your conversations and pretending to guess your problems.'

She turned just in time to see a pair of bouncers loping down the aisle towards her. ‘Pastor Michaels does not have healing powers, he's a liar and a cheat and is stealing your money, and that's not even his real name.'

The audience sat there in stupefaction as the security staff seized her.
They don't care
, Maggie realized with a sinking heart.
I'm the crazy one, not him. It's not me they've paid to see. They'll do whatever he wants.

‘I'm terribly sorry, ladies and gentlemen,' said Ali, correctly gauging the mood of the auditorium, ‘sometimes we do get non-believers in who try to trick us – and you – into leaving the path of our faith. But they cannot and will not prevent the truth from being told; that there is a world beyond our own and that if we can only open our minds and reach it, we can learn more than we will ever know here on earth, trapped in these too mortal bodies.'

Up in the box Cassie leaned forward, smiling in the dark.
Nice save
, she thought. Not that he'd ever lost them. The little white witch in the stalls had completely misjudged the audience. Cassie cupped her hand to her ear as the other line came through.

‘What do you want done with her?' one of the security guards asked her.

‘Take her outside, shoot her in the head and throw her into a skip,' Cassie snapped back. ‘Have you been watching reruns of
Breaking Bad
? God, she's an old lady and a paying customer, there's no harm done. Apologize to her, make sure she's all right and offer her free tickets for another performance.' She cut the line and checked her watch. It was just as well that the show was coming to a close; she had no way of contacting Ali now. There had been no harm done but part of her wondered how much longer they would be able to get away with this life without going to jail.

It turned out that Cassie didn't have long to wonder. When she got home she found that Maggie Armitage had uploaded the footage she had secretly shot in the auditorium to her website, revealing Pastor Michaels's tricks of the trade, starting with footage of his assistant singling out the most vulnerable members of the audience and ending with close-ups of the bruises left on her arms by the two security guards who walked her out to the theatre foyer.

The video didn't go viral – it only got around four hundred hits – but Ali Bensaud watched his career collapse over the next few days as venue managers ran background checks and cancelled his shows. At night he lay in bed wondering how things had gone so wrong. It seemed to him that his troubles had started on the day he'd convinced Ismael Rahman that they should escape and take their chances at sea. Watching his best friend vanish beneath the black waters had only driven him to greater heights of ambition. But London was not an apple ready to be plucked for the eating. The apples were on higher branches than he'd imagined, and now they had moved far beyond reach.

This time it was Cassie who found a way to reach them.

Arthur Bryant sat with the volume propped open at his desk, studying the illustrations as he munched the last squashed piece of his sardine sandwich. Lowering his trifocals, he peered closer until the tip of his snub nose was almost touching the paper. ‘John!' he bellowed suddenly.

‘I'm standing right here,' said May. ‘You nearly gave me a heart attack.'

‘I think it's a lighthouse.' Bryant stabbed at the page with his greasy finger. ‘The tapering brickwork, and those things above it could be beams of light – it matches the drawing fairly closely, and that makes it a Russian prison tattoo. A lighthouse means that the owner spent time in jail. It's a reminder to pursue a life of freedom after a life of crime.'

‘What, you mean by going straight?'

‘No, I don't think so.' Bryant read on a bit. ‘It can simply mean that from now on he'll stay out of jail.'

‘The severed hand of a Russian prisoner,' sighed May, ‘and the fingerprints aren't on a British database.'

‘Unfortunately Putin's Federal Security Service isn't very free with its information these days. We can give it a try, but I wouldn't hold your breath.'

‘Max Wright doesn't think we should get our hopes up about the hand being connected to the Bride in the Tide.'

‘Don't call her that,' said Bryant. ‘Point one, she wasn't a bride, and B – just don't call her that, all right?'

‘Max thinks there are two other possibilities: that the switching current simply deposits random items at the reach, or it was thrown from the window of a building near the foreshore.'

‘Maybe Dalladay's killer had used the spot as a dumping ground before.' Bryant closed his encyclopaedia of prison tattoos. ‘That would suggest a gang slaying, which fits with the symbol.'

‘You think someone with criminal connections at the Cossack Club fathered her child?' May asked. ‘Is it worth staking the place out for a while?'

‘I wouldn't have thought he'd be likely to go back there, would you?' said Bryant. ‘I could go and talk to—'

‘For the last time, I can't have you wandering around on your own,' said May firmly.

Bryant replaced the book on his shelf, between
WWII Carrier Pigeons
and
Farming Smocks of Somerset
. ‘I don't want to feel like a hospital patient confined to a ward.'

‘Then don't think of it like that,' said May. ‘Make the most of it, Arthur. Do a Mycroft Holmes, run things from here without leaving the comfort of that ratty old armchair. Get us to do all the running about.' He had a sudden thought. ‘Suppose Tower Beach
has
been used before? It's one of the few really secluded parts of the Thames Path. What if Dalladay wasn't the first? You can get access to every cold case going back over the last decade, you might turn up something.'

‘Could you be any more condescending?' asked Bryant with a grimace. ‘Perhaps you'd be happier if I sat here doing a nice jigsaw or taking the clock to bits.'

‘Well, the case is sort of like a jigsaw if you prefer to think of it—'

Bryant threw a shoe at him. ‘Go on, hop it,' he shouted. ‘I will not be treated like a mental defective.'

‘I think perhaps you're in denial about your situation,' said May.

‘I'm not in denial, I'm in an extremely aggravated state of furious despondency,' Bryant barked back.
And I'll go where I damn well please
, he thought, waiting until the coast was clear before picking up his overcoat and hat once more.

Arthur Bryant made two clandestine trips on Tuesday evening, and got an unwelcome surprise. First he went to visit Marion North in Chelsea, having been put in touch with her by his old friend Maggie Armitage. ‘If you really want to talk to an expert on the sacred river,' she said, ‘you need to talk to Marion.'

‘Is she an academic?' Bryant asked.

‘No,' Maggie replied, ‘she's a rather glamorous New Age evangelist and property developer.'

‘That's an unusual hyphenate.'

‘She's also a crook, but she's very well connected and knows a lot about spiritual matters,' said Maggie. ‘Let me give you her address.'

Cheyne Walk had long been the most fashionable street in Chelsea, thanks to its extraordinary roster of residents, which had included Whistler, Turner and Ralph Vaughan Williams, Henry James, Laurence Olivier and Mick Jagger. Big names still lived there, but they were no longer drawn by the nature of the light dancing on the water. They were there to say
I've arrived, I'm important, see what I can afford
. But in truth it was hard to know if there were any residents at all, so rarely did Marion see anyone coming and going. They had to exist, of that she was sure, but perhaps they were mere names in company registers held overseas, investors in prime real estate they had only ever seen on a website.

Marion North lived just beyond the walk in an ex-council flat on Cremorne Road, which veered away from the river and therefore became a less desirable location. She could see the back gardens and catch tantalizing glimpses of the river sparkling between the trees, but she might as well have been on Mars for all the good the proximity did her. Mrs North was a social climber, eaten up by the idea of getting on, and to be so close to so many rich and powerful people was a torture in which she luxuriated.

‘So lovely to have a visitor,' said Mrs North, beaming her sunniest smile as she opened the door. She was small, neat and attractive, with gimlet eyes that missed nothing. She actually craned her head forward as she studied the elderly detective, noting the frayed lining of his oversized tweed coat, the hand-knitted scarf which appeared to have been knotted underneath his shirt and the darned hatband on his trilby from which protruded a ticket stub for a 1959 production of
Ruddigore
. As her eyes swept up and down, her smile lost a little of its effervescence. And those trousers – were there really pyjama bottoms sticking out from beneath them? She quickly invited him inside before anyone passing could see.

‘Thank you for meeting me at such short notice,' said Bryant. ‘Do you have a bin?' He pulled what appeared to be a sardine from his pocket. ‘It fell out of my sandwich,' he explained cheerfully, handing her the fish.

Marion managed to conceal her revulsion beneath a determined smile, and offered tea. ‘I have camomile, mint or elderflower.'

‘Builder's will be fine,' said Bryant, looking around like a burglar casing the joint. ‘And a biscuit.'

Mrs North looked flustered. ‘I don't think we have—'

‘Nothing fancy, just a custard cream will do to settle me. Gyppy tummy. Ta.'

Mrs North led him through to a front room that had enough dried flowers in it to choke an asthmatic. Bryant found himself in a hell of pastel shades, beige, soft olive and mauve. Locating a gigantic, dusty-pink armchair, he disappeared into it.

His hostess returned with a rough approximation of regular tea, acknowledging her visitor's social status by providing him with a mug, keeping a Spode floral teacup for herself. Of biscuits she found none. ‘Before my husband and I divorced we travelled the world,' she said. ‘We lived in Geneva – for our daughter's schooling, you understand – and were going to live in Cheyne Walk when we returned.' She was unable to resist a peep out of the faux lead-light window. ‘But it transpired that he had debts and, well, one was forced into more straitened circumstances.'

‘I wouldn't complain,' said Bryant. ‘It's a nice gaff, this. Mind you, these old drums near the river get wicked damp.' Bryant did not enjoy the company of the upwardly mobile, and tended to exaggerate his use of the vernacular when he was in their presence. He could get quite jellied eels-ish if the wrong person wound him up, and there was something about Mrs North that wasn't quite right. ‘As I explained on the phone, you know a friend of mine—' He moved a china Buddha back from his elbow, just in case.

‘I wouldn't say “friend”, exactly,' Mrs North replied, anxious to distance herself from Maggie Armitage. ‘More of an acquaintance.'

‘I understand she met you at a spiritualist's meeting.'

Mrs North shifted uncomfortably on her too-small chair. ‘It was all terribly Victorian. I thought she was quite wrong about the medium, who was quite marvellous – but surely this isn't why you're here.'

‘Maggie tells me you're a bit of an expert on certain elemental subjects, specifically the Thames.'

Mrs North set her teacup aside. ‘If one is interested in matters spiritual it's only natural to study the elements. After all, water is their mother. It has the ability to purify itself, which is one of the requirements of motherhood, since life must begin in purity. Do you wish to take notes?'