Strange Tide (21 page)

‘No, ta,' said Bryant, ‘I've got a brain.' He flicked the side of his head.

‘Right, well, er, water – moving water is spiritually pure. It calms and harmonizes. It is clear, yet contains all. It changes constantly, and can never be stilled. It is consciousness personified. No wonder we revere it.'

‘You can freeze it,' said Bryant.

‘I'm sorry?'

‘You said it can never be stilled, but it can turn to ice.'

‘Yes, but only to thaw and start flowing once more.' Mrs North's smile slipped a little. She was not one to be beaten by a common little policeman dressed like a rag-and-bone man. ‘Please feel free to ask me anything. If I can't answer I'm bound to know someone who can – I know simply everyone. For example just the other day—'

‘Why are rivers considered sacred?'

‘They bring life. They
are
life. But as a rule they are not Christian. They contain deities, promote fertility and bring about destruction, so in that respect they behave like pagan gods and demons. There was a spot in the Thames known as “Black John's Pit” from which imps leaped forth to push the heads of children underwater. I've always thought that the indentations along Blackfriars Bridge look like pulpits, with a backdrop of pedestrians forming a moving congregation.'

Bryant tried the tea. It was awful. He didn't bother to suppress a grimace. ‘If rivers are gods, do people make sacrifices to them?'

‘But of course! All kinds of sacrifices were made to the Mother Thames, from sheaves of corn and loaves to money and animals, and thus the future was divined. The Thames possesses the power of hydromancy. Its roots are sacred. Even the tree that grows at its source has been worshipped for centuries.'

Bryant set the tea down and pushed it away. It was so weak that he could see through it even with milk in. ‘I read somewhere that the Thames has its own saint.'

‘Indeed, Mr Bryant, St Birinus, who converted the Saxons to Christianity by baptizing them in the river during the seventh century. And later, in the eleventh century, St Alphege, who was said to have parted the Thames and was beaten to death with ox-bones.'

‘Well, nobody likes a smartarse.'

‘There are many, many other saints, both male and female. Some of the men had their left hands cut off and cast into the river.'

‘Oh?' Bryant perked up. ‘Why?'

‘To transubstantiate, to unite them with the water. This was the line where penitence crossed into punishment. The church was always a political body, and wherever there is water there is worship. That's why so many churches and abbeys line the Thames Valley.'

‘What about this area?' Bryant dug into his coat and produced a crude map he had scribbled out on the back of a takeaway falafel menu. ‘Tower Beach?'

‘That's an area associated with St Mary the Virgin,' Mrs North replied without a moment's hesitation. ‘Masses were held at Greenwich for the souls of mariners. Some of her churches are the sites of prehistoric settlements. One arch of London Bridge was actually known as Mary Lock. There were a great many monasteries built on the banks, and there are still more than fifty riverside churches dedicated to St Mary over the course of the Thames. Virgins bathed in its waters to become fertile.'

‘So it's possible that a female might also be sacrificed to the river?'

Mrs North pursed her lips. ‘Unlikely,' she said. ‘The river is a giver of life.'

‘But you said it also destroys.'

‘It does, indeed. But it would have to be a male sacrifice. The waters can only move in conjunction with the moon, which is of course the greatest female goddess.'

Bryant had the distinct sense that he would get nowhere further here. Mrs North was selecting facts that suited her own particular world view. He knew that the Reformation had all but destroyed the spiritual significance of the Thames, because of the dissolution of so many monasteries along its banks. The saints were replaced by the pageantry of monarchs, and then the commerce of maritime trade.

He mentally crossed out the line of inquiry. If anyone recalled the sacred origins of the Thames today, it was hardly likely they considered the Square Mile to be best suited for conducting such a ceremony.

‘Take a look at this,' said Ray Kirkpatrick, the ursine head-banger who happened to be an English literature academic. They were standing in the conservation department of the British Library on Euston Road, a long white hall filled with wide, antiseptically clean tables and plans chests. Kirkpatrick raised the battered brown leather volume in his great paws, which were barely covered by a pair of white cotton gloves. ‘Back in 1623 it went for about a quid. Seven hundred and fifty copies were printed. There are two hundred and twenty-eight left, one recently found in a Calais library. Most of the remaining copies are owned by bloody dot.com millionaires. Be careful with it.'

‘May I?' Bryant goggled at the pages, as brittle as dried rose petals. ‘A Shakespeare first folio. I've never seen one before.'

‘Check out the dedications,' said Kirkpatrick, ‘especially from John Heminge and Henry Condell, the actors who edited it.' He raised the volume and read aloud.

‘To the great Variety of Readers. From the most able, to him that can but spell: there you are number'd. We had rather you were weighed; especially, when the fate of all bookes depends upon your capacities and not of your heads alone, but of your purses. Well! It is now publique, & you wil stand for your priviledges wee know: to read, and censure. Do so, but buy it first.

‘They're making jokes and saying don't just stand there reading it, buy the bloody thing! Nearly four hundred years later and people are making exactly the same joke on their book jackets.'

‘The Thames,' Bryant prompted his old friend once more. Kirkpatrick spent too much time working alone in the library stacks and was apt to drift off into its byways.

‘I can't recall any direct Shakespeare quotes about the river, but there must be some. Most London books have something about the Thames in them. Are you sure this is the right way to be tackling a murder investigation?'

‘Why have you got this out anyway?' asked Bryant.

‘Running repairs, innit? We had the Magna Carta in here for treatment against mites last week,' said Kirkpatrick, sounding like a cabbie mentioning a celebrity fare. He scratched about in his voluminous beard and dislodged heaven-knows-what in the way of breakfasty residue. ‘Now
that's
a Thames document, signed on the river itself, at Runnymede. The Thames is central to all London history. What about Dickens? There's a whole book on the subject:
Dickens's Dictionary of the Thames, 1887
.'

‘Which Charles Dickens didn't write,' said Bryant dismissively. ‘His son banged it out. Unfortunately he wrote like a tea merchant, which is what he was. He died with just seventeen quid to his name. Dad had cut him out of the will for marrying a barmaid. Don't try and test me.'

‘Sorry.' Kirkpatrick laughed and shook his great head, which reminded Bryant of the stone bust of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery. ‘I heard that you were losing your marbles, but you seem pretty much all there to me.'

‘Let's not talk about illness, it's as boring as looking at photos of babies,' Bryant responded. ‘I've got a problem.'

‘Of course you have, that's why you're here.'

‘A drowning.'

‘Whereabouts?'

‘In the Thames Tideway.'

‘Oh, come on, Arthur, the tidal reach stretches all the way from Teddington Lock. Can't you be a bit more specific?'

‘Only if you keep your fat mouth shut this time,' said Bryant, indignant. ‘Remember when I told you about the Shepherd's Market black sausage scandal? “In the strictest confidence”, I said. I had half a dozen blokes armed with nail-studded cricket bats threatening to make me the mystery ingredient in their catering packs, all because you talked to someone in a pub.'

‘All right,' sighed Kirkpatrick, holding his thick fingers over his heart. ‘I swear not to tell a living soul. Who's brown bread?'

Bryant explained the situation. ‘Normally you look for motive and opportunity among those closest to the deceased, right? So far we're getting nowhere with that. In this case it's the location that's puzzling me. Why the Thames, why Tower Beach? There are some obvious answers – the seclusion and lack of cameras – but I can't shake the feeling that there's something else. The location. The river must mean something.'

‘Of course, Chuck Dickens wrote a load more about the Thames,' said Kirkpatrick, rolling his chair over to the nearest monitor and flicking open the digitized works. ‘At the start of
Bleak House
he speaks of “Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.” But most obviously, he speaks of the Thames throughout
Our Mutual Friend
. Towards the end of his life Dickens was heading into some pretty dark places. His marriage had fallen apart, his friends were disappearing and none of the things that fired his lifelong anger had changed since he'd begun writing. London's grinding poverty was still all about him, and the ambitious were climbing on to the backs of those less fortunate to reach the top.
Our Mutual Friend
is Dickens's last complete novel, and it's about shit. Making money from it, to be precise. It's a book about ambition in London, turning waste into gold, and of course it starts with a corpse being dragged from the Thames between Southwark Bridge and London Bridge, like something from a horror film. But parts of the book are also a bloody good laugh. And the river courses through it, flowing and swirling and frothing around the characters, befouling everything it touches. Once it had been something pure and fresh, but after the Great Stink of 1858 it became the personification of misery and death. The Thames was a signifier of class, too. Its upper waters, where higher society resided, were far cleaner than the lower reaches. It affected everyone. Even the railway arches that scar South London were put there because the river had turned the land to marshes.' Kirkpatrick shook his head again. ‘Is it such a surprise to find one more body there?'

‘A sacrifice, no,' said Bryant, ‘but a murder, and in such merciless circumstances . . .' He searched about for his hat and jammed it on his head. ‘I wish I could say you've been a great help, but it feels like every step forward I take involves another step back.'

‘Then you're behaving like the Thames itself,' said Kirkpatrick, giving a great bellow of a laugh. ‘You're just another courtier to the tides and the moon.'

The tides and the moon
, Bryant thought as he headed home. It had gone 8.00 p.m., and as his flat was just across Euston Road and the weather was clement, he decided to walk back.

He had only got as far as Bidborough Street when the bomb went off.

‘Oi, you, don't just stand there, get to a bloody shelter!' shouted the man in the green tin helmet. The fat little ARP warden was pointing right at him. Bryant had been planning to cross the road and cut through to the alleyway connecting the two grey halves of Cromer Street, but when he looked up it had gone, blasted away in a great tumbling torrent of tarmac, bricks and plaster. Flames flourished at the mouth of a shattered gas pipe, sending shafts of saffron light through the smoke, painting the street in the colours of hell.

Bryant looked down at his coat, his trousers, his boots. He was covered in dust but didn't seem to have been harmed in any way. The siren soared and dipped as the warden ran over to him. ‘Didn't you 'ear what I just said? You want to get your bloody head knocked off?'

‘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.'