Strange Tide (23 page)

‘We don't have to lie to people, we can make them feel better,' said Ali. ‘It doesn't have to be based on science, just common sense, dressed up a little. Think of it as psychological folk-art.'

Ali adopted the alias of Thornberry for his new customers. He'd come across the name in a peculiar magazine called
The Tatler
, which seemed to be about rich people who thought it was the 1800s, and decided that the name carried the right connotations of Englishness. He worked from scripts that the pair developed in the evenings, but soon created his own courses, from exercise and diet to mental clarity, stress reduction and emotional stability, then spirituality, astrology, crystal healing and meditation.

As usual, he absorbed everything he read and quickly learned how to put his new knowledge into practice. Ali hired life coaches working freelance on a per-client basis. He gave them template scripts that added layers of parapsychological double-speak, preaching the kind of life-affirming, positive, undemanding lessons their well-heeled clients were prepared to accept. Most of their repeat visitors came from the wealthy environs of Chelsea, Fulham, Putney and Chiswick. After one visit over half of them signed up for further complementary courses.

A macrobiotic café was opened, then a shop selling lotions, candles, mineral salts, healing stones, pots of earth from sacred sites, CDs of ethereal chanting, whale noises downloaded from the internet and magical luck-bringing paintings.

Cassie now needed proper funding, but couldn't go through a bank. Instead she found a backer for the centre through the LinkedIn website. Freddie Cooper was a smooth-talking entrepreneur who ran a road-haulage business in Nine Elms. Flushed with success right from the start, Cassie had visited their backer at his house in De Beauvoir and discussed the possibility of opening a chain of Life Options wellbeing centres. She explained that they couldn't attract too much attention because none of their experts had qualifications. What would they be able to get away with selling in their shops if they expanded? The outlay wasn't enormous and the potential rewards were huge. Cooper knew a good thing when he saw it. He agreed to put his money down on the condition that Life Options kept to its proposed roll-out schedule, and he drew up a private contract between the three of them.

While Cassie handled the bookkeeping, Ali charmed his way through swathes of wealthy West London women, talking about spiritual fulfilment, music therapy, astrological alignment, sexual healing and the abandonment of guilt, shame and negative energy. Although he had learned all of the terms, he still did not know all of their meanings.

‘Remember to keep the messages simple,' Cassie warned him. ‘People will fill in the blanks themselves. You don't have to say anything that can stand against you in a court of law.'

At first, whenever the questions became too specific, on dietary requirements, say, or the disadvantages of taking prescription medication, Ali danced around the topic and delivered calming platitudes, but after a while he became less cautious and began making the kind of recommendations his clients were anxious to hear. He grew into his London persona as a plant takes to wet soil and sunlight.

‘How do you do it?' Cassie asked once. ‘The way you speak, the way you move and behave – no one would ever know . . .'

‘I watch and listen,' he said simply. ‘My old life is always with me, but you can put it away. You can be someone else.'

This, he could see, was what being an ambitious Londoner was really all about. He listened to what the Prime Minister and the Mayor had to say about people who helped themselves, and resolved to reach his maximum potential. Realizing that he would never be treated like a true insider, certainly not the kind who appeared in the pages of
The Tatler
, he decided to become the man who would tell those on the inside what to do.

The money rolled in. The clients adored him. He and Cassie rented adjoining flats in one of the better streets in Chiswick. Suddenly they were leading charmed lives. It seemed as if nothing could go wrong.

Then came the third week in November, and everything began to fall apart.

Arthur Bryant looked out of the living-room window at the rain cascading into the centre courtyard of his apartment building. ‘I'm missing something,' he said.

‘You always say that whenever you're on a case.' Alma was seated at the table addressing cards to her fellow parishioners. She was forever organizing outings and charity collections for her church. The flat looked more like an Oxfam shop these days, with trays of lurid iced cakes ready for dispatch to fundraising teas and boxes of second-hand clothes awaiting shipment to refugee camps. Alma had always been a large, expansive woman but now as she started to shrink her kindness expanded to fill the rooms. Bryant had managed to keep his quarters sacrosanct, although he noticed she had tried to sneak a crucifix on to his bookshelves. He said nothing, but turned it upside down. She got the message and removed it.

‘No, I don't mean the case – although I'm definitely missing something there, too,' he said with a sigh. ‘The hallucinations are some new side effect of my deteriorating mental processes. Where am I while they're happening? Am I just standing in the street with my mouth open, easy prey for muggers? Am I wandering in the middle of the road liable to be crushed beneath juggernauts? Do I just sit down on a bench and go to sleep? What happens when these states of mind come on?'

‘God is granting you visions,' said Alma simply. ‘He'll protect you until he makes his purpose known.'

‘He can't protect me from the wheels of a number seventy-five bus. I need John for that. I almost wish I had your faith. Wait a minute, what do you mean he'll protect me
until
then? What's he going to do afterwards?'

‘That's for Him to decide. He may choose to fold you into His bosom.'

‘Oh, that's charming. You lot have got all this worked out, haven't you? If I live it's because He has a higher purpose, and if I fall off my perch it's because I'm answering His call. As I'm not planning to assume room temperature just yet He'll have to get on with something else for a while, cause a few famines and start some new wars until I'm ready. I've got work to do.'

‘Oh, that poor girl,' said Alma, setting aside her cards. ‘The one who was drowned. Is that the case you're working on?'

‘You know it is,' said Bryant irritably, ‘I told you all about it yesterday.'

‘Yes, but I only listen to about a quarter of what you say.' She thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps a fifth. Are you getting anywhere?'

‘I'm not about to tell you, am I? It'll be all round your church by this evening.'

‘Mr Bryant, I'm shocked you should think that. You know I never talk to my ladies about you. I haven't dared to mention your name ever since you accepted their offer to deliver the weekly sermon.'

‘I don't see why that should have upset you,' he huffed. ‘It was about God.'

‘Yes, but it wasn't about
our
God, was it?'

‘I didn't expect them to be so proprietorial. I thought they'd be interested in hearing about a different belief system.'

‘You frightened the life out of them. All that stuff about biting the heads off monkeys and burning people to death.'

‘Very well, to answer your question, so far we've utterly failed to find out anything useful at all. Why?'

‘It's just that I saw her picture on the news and thought it was funny it should have happened on that spot.'

Bryant turned, intrigued. ‘What do you mean?'

‘My mother told me she used to see the vicar of All Hallows conducting services right on the beach there, after the church was damaged.'

‘What sort of services?'

‘Hymns and readings – and baptisms, she said. It makes sense, doesn't it? The Black Friars and the White Friars were just a bit further along, and they used to conduct ceremonies beside the Thames, didn't they? You know – the monasteries. I know most people think it's dirty and dangerous, but if you have faith the river is life. It can wash away your sins. I was just thinking, she'd sinned, hadn't she?'

‘How do you mean?'

‘By getting pregnant out of wedlock.'

‘Good Lord, it's not the 1950s. So you think someone was trying to purify her in a sort of perverted baptism ceremony?'

‘I didn't say that, Mr Bryant. I suppose it was just the idea of babies and water. The unborn and newly birthed are innocent even if the mother isn't.' In the kitchen the oven pinged, so she struggled to her feet. ‘Would you like some cabinet pudding?'

‘Only if I can get my teeth in first,' said Bryant. ‘You always leave the stones in the plums.' He rose and set off in search of his dentures. He kept several sets in order to cope with the inconsistencies in Alma's cooking. On the way he grabbed a pencil and paper.
The innocence of the newborn absolves the sins of the mother
, he thought. Then:
There's someone I have to see.

Looking through his reference books, an idea had begun to form about the uniqueness of his condition, and once it had taken root he knew it would not be shaken off without thorough exploration.

James Crawley hated his sedentary job, but since he worked as a risk assessor in a government office on Millbank he was doomed to a life of sitting in meetings, sitting behind his desk, sitting in the canteen at lunchtime and generally – sitting. As he lived in nearby Vauxhall he had recently started running to work, pacing along any path that still ran close to the river to finish at Lambeth Bridge.

His exercise regime had its good and bad points. The downside was that he frequently found himself running in squalls of rain driven in by the river winds, and on fine, mild days the air pollution from Westminster's traffic was suffocating.

On Wednesday morning he discovered another bad point; you might accidentally be confronted by a corpse. At first he thought a workman's tarpaulin had blown off the bridge and become entangled in the steel rafters underneath. But tarpaulins didn't have feet, and this one was hanging by them. When he touched the tarpaulin it slid away to reveal a man in a grey boiler suit, his arms dangling down on either side of his head, almost invisible in the shadows.

As a risk assessor Mr Crawley should have been able to work out the odds of such a bizarre accident occurring – for that's what he assumed it was, because what else could it possibly be? Down here, beneath the thrum of the traffic and the warbling of pigeons, was one of London's lonely recesses. It was a spot where the dankness of the Thames could permeate your marrow and any vile deed could pass unnoticed.

Mr Crawley called an ambulance rather than the police, figuring that the workman might still be alive, in which case he would require urgent medical attention, but the police and the ambulance crew arrived at the same time. The assessor gave his name and address, then headed back to the Economy-Plus 2-Lever Lumbar Support office chair he had lately grown to despise. His strange discovery became just another anecdote to be trotted out in public houses, the gristle upon which Londoners daily fed and thrived.

It was 7.53 a.m. on Wednesday when John May arrived with Dan Banbury and an ambulance from St Thomas' Hospital. Banbury had caught the incoming call because he had gone in early and reset his incident parameters to prioritize anything unusual happening on or around the Thames foreshore between Hammersmith Bridge and Tower Bridge.

Even as the EMTs were cutting the body loose and lowering it on to the stones, May knew it had a connection to the discovery two mornings earlier on Tower Beach; the workman was missing his left hand and the cauterized stump of the wrist showed the frayed upper edge of a tattoo.

The pair followed the body to the St Pancras Coroner's Office, then ran through their notes in Rosa's room while they waited impatiently for Giles Kershaw to carry out a preliminary examination.

Giles finally called them in, booting a plastic bucket across the floor until it was positioned under the worst of the leaks. ‘This place is falling apart,' he complained. ‘We need a new roof.'

‘Why don't you have a word with one of your friends in high places?' May suggested. ‘I'm assuming you still have the Chancellor's ear.'

‘Not so much these days, since I stopped going out with his niece,' said Giles gloomily. ‘I think the initial thrill of hanging around a mortuary at night wore off. She said I smelled of death. Not terribly conducive to a relationship.'

‘If you really want to prove yourself useful, couldn't you start dating the Metropolitan Police Commissioner's granddaughter or something?'

‘As surprising as it sounds, John, I'm not seeking career advancement, I'm looking for a soulmate.'

May sighed. ‘That's very selfish of you. Right now we could do with all the help we can get. Arthur's illness has become a lot more serious, Raymond couldn't organize an egg-and-spoon race and the rest of us are just trying to keep things together.'