Strange Tide (39 page)

‘I thought the two Daves were supposed to have fixed that,' said Arthur Bryant, examining the splintered lintel. He was dressed in a deafening three-piece suit covered in huge mauve checks, his unravelling olive scarf knotted at his throat, a red carnation in his buttonhole, his hair (what little there was of it) combed and a cleanish chequered handkerchief folded in his top pocket. He looked like a cross between a Bavarian bandleader and a badly colourized bookie from an old Ealing comedy.

‘What on earth are you wearing?' was all Land could think to say.

‘I thought I should make a statement.'

‘Why, who have you killed?'

Bryant sauntered in and waved a finger at Land. ‘I can tell you're down in the dumps, Raymondo. I don't like to see you depressed. I prefer to see you in a miserable state of poorly suppressed panic. I rose to your challenge and I'm here to help. Once more I am strong in mind and body – and
mind
– full of pep, zip, whizz, beans, vim, vigour, inner cleanliness, get-up-and-go, and this time nothing will interrupt my train of – hang on, I'm going to sneeze.' He sniffed the air and foghorned into his checked handkerchief. ‘Mothballs. I haven't worn this whistle in a while.'

‘You can't be here,' Land stammered, suddenly realizing that his depression had turned to alarm. He should never have involved his most unpredictable detective. ‘We're under investigation. If they find you in the building—'

‘—they won't be able to do anything,' Bryant said cheerily. ‘Why is that, I hear you ask?' He cupped a hand around his right ear, listening.

‘Why?'

Bryant threw his arms wide. ‘Because,
mon petit crapaud
, I'm cured. Fixed. Repaired. Ameliorated. I'm Arthur two point zero.'

‘What are you talking about? You can't be cured, you have Alzheimer's.'

‘No, I don't. You thought I did but I didn't. I'd been poisoned.'

‘Poisoned? By who?'

‘
Whom
. I poisoned myself.'

‘What on earth for?'

‘I didn't do it deliberately, you invertebrate.'

‘How did you reverse the effects?'

‘I had a wash.'

Land started to feel the old familiar sensation of going slowly mad around Bryant, but for once it wasn't unwelcome. ‘I'm not even going to ask about that. Are you really cured?'

‘Insofar as we all start dying past the age of eighteen, yes. There may be the odd side effect, but nothing I can't handle.'

‘But this is incredible. Do you need to rest? Can we get you signed off and back to work?'

‘Already taken care of, old sock. I'm supposed to take it easy for a while but sod that for a game of soldiers. Letters have gone out to all the right people.' He slapped his hands together. ‘When you have a convenient moment, call everyone together in the common room. Let's see if we can't get my partner off the hook and back in action. What we need around here is a little order.'

‘Are you sure about this?'

‘Absolutely. I feel like a million drachmas, as fresh as morning dew and ready for anything. But first I need a wee, two chocolate biscuits and a cup of tea so strong it could send Peter Pan through puberty. Can I leave you in charge of that?' He beamed a terrifying grin at Land and headed off in the direction of the toilet.

‘I never thought I'd say this, but welcome back, Arthur, I think,' Land told the empty room.

‘Why are we here?' Colin asked Meera. ‘What's going on?'

‘Your guess is as good as mine,' said Meera, glancing around at the common room with distaste. ‘Look at the state of this place. I only just cleared it up this morning. Who comes in here, eats an entire box of Krispy Kremes and leaves the box on the desk?'

Colin coughed and looked away.

‘I wanted one of those cronut things,' said a familiar voice. ‘I never got to eat one before the craze was over.'

They looked round to find Arthur Bryant sitting behind them, counting out on his fingers. ‘Pea-shooters, ant farms, spud guns, mood rings, hula hoops, Sea-Monkeys, mullets, “Gangnam Style”, Google Glass, planking and twerking. All the things that didn't last. I'm still here, though.'

‘Mr Bryant?' For a minute Meera thought she was hallucinating. ‘Is that really you?'

‘It seems to be,' said Bryant, poking himself with a sausage-finger. ‘Actually I cheated on that list. I'm still not sure what twerking is. There was a lot of waiting around between treatments. Colin emailed me with pub quizzes and memory tests.'

Colin grinned sheepishly.

‘I don't understand,' said Meera.

‘No, none of us do,' Bryant agreed. ‘That's what makes life so interesting. But I'm here now, refreshed and restored, so perhaps I can help.'

The room quickly filled. Dan Banbury arrived with Giles Kershaw. Fraternity DuCaine and Janice Longbright lugged in a trolley filled with case files. Raymond Land entered, expecting to sit at the front desk but found himself without a chair. Only John May was missing. Usually the briefing-room meetings were marked by a level of chatter that reminded Land of a classroom when it starts to snow, but today there was total silence. Everyone was clearly amazed to see Bryant calmly standing before them, just as if he had never left. London's most senior detective now walked to the front of the room, lowering himself on to the edge of the desk. There was something different about him, Meera thought, more focused and controlled.

They anxiously waited for him to speak.

‘It only takes forty-eight hours for a trail to evaporate,' said Bryant. ‘What happened? You've all seen how John and I work, yet somehow the investigation stalled.' He paced across the front of the room, studying each of them in turn. Colin noticed that he wasn't using his walking stick.

‘Let's recap.' He stabbed at a photograph on the whiteboard. ‘Lynsey Dalladay, seven weeks pregnant, chained to a chunk of concrete on the Thames foreshore at Tower Beach. We assumed from the contusion on the back of her skull that she'd been beaten unconscious, locked in place with her boyfriend's neck-chain and left to drown. Freddie Cooper's a shifty little bugger who showed no remorse upon hearing about his girlfriend's death. It could have been straight-forward but complications arose: Cooper hadn't seen her for two weeks, turned out not to be the father and it wasn't his neck-chain. Whose was it? Did any of you try to find out?

‘Dalladay had a history of dysfunction and depression. She stayed on the move, joined self-help organizations, rarely contacted friends or family, stopped taking her medication. She was lost and on a downward trajectory. She walked out on Cooper. Where did she go? Hold that thought in your head while you consider this. There have been four other deaths.'

The atmosphere in the room tensed. People shifted in their seats. ‘The engineer Dimitri Gilyov, a second engineer named Bill Crooms, a former CEO and river suicide called Angela Curtis and New Age guru Marion North, making five people drowned, three of them with the same spear-like contusions. Curtis had one in her lower back. Her coroner had made a note of it, but nobody ever followed it up. Why kill them in the river? Because it's not covered by cameras, and it was convenient. Even so, there should have been witnesses.'

‘We looked,' said Colin. ‘We talked to everyone and didn't get anything.'

‘Perhaps you talked to the wrong people,' said Bryant. ‘I can believe there was no one on the embankments but on the Thames itself? There are houseboats, barges, canal boats all on short moorings, which means they move on and you need to track them down. Did you liaise with the River Police?'

‘We talked to them but they had nothing to add,' said Banbury.

‘Maybe they're being territorial. They have a problematic history with the CoL police. Gilyov had a dodgy background and his severed left hand was found near Dalladay's body. He'd been tortured and then killed for some transgression. A few of his pals are known to us, but you don't seem to have pursued this line of inquiry with any rigour because you weren't linking the cases together. Why not?'

‘The only evidence we have is circumstantial,' said Land. ‘Come on, you thought they'd all committed suicide.'

‘It was a line of inquiry, and I was not thinking as clearly as I am now. I'll return to that in a minute.' He faced the whiteboard, tapping another name. ‘Crooms died after checking on Gilyov. Why did he go back to the body?'

‘We assumed he murdered him,' said Banbury.

‘Do you have any evidence?'

‘No,' Banbury admitted.

‘Then let's move on to Angela Curtis and Marion North, both linked to Dalladay by Life Options courses. Curtis signed up for them, North taught them and North's daughter is the co-owner of the company running them. All of this would seem to be sending you in one direction, but only Janice checked out the St Alphege Centre. At this point the next logical step would have been to apply for a search warrant.'

‘We didn't do that because we found nothing out of the ordinary,' said Longbright defensively.

‘Of course not,' Bryant replied. ‘Why would you? You weren't looking for tax infringements, you were trying to find evidence of multiple murder! The CID would have been all over this like a rash. And perhaps they're not murders as we usually see them.'

‘What do you mean?' asked Kershaw.

‘Let's deal with these matters seriatim. You assumed that because of the locked chain and the contusion that Dalladay had been dragged there by her killer. But I kept coming back to the idea of the Thames as a sacred source of rebirth. Dalladay had reached the end of her tether. She was tired of making mistakes in her life and wanted to be “reborn”. She was attending classes designed to teach her how to do exactly that. But it isn't what Marion North taught – she specialized in astrology and aromatherapy, and sold bits of coloured rock to dunderheads. Marion North was there to do some social climbing and make money. Her daughter got her the job. You see my point.'

‘No,' said Raymond Land, slightly too emphatically.

Bryant ploughed on. ‘Angela Curtis was a woman in need of help, but her need was a physical one. She suffered from depression and hormonal imbalance. I went through her doctors' reports. Ten days before she killed herself she suddenly stopped taking all her medication and handed her prescription pills to her daughter for safekeeping. Why? Because she couldn't trust herself not to start taking tricyclic antidepressants again. The daughter didn't want her to stop taking them but Angela blamed them for her sudden weight gain. She'd stopped them once before and had become suicidal.' He looked around the silent room. ‘I trust the connection's clear.'

‘Not remotely,' said Land.

‘Well, let's move on. Giles made a more detailed examination of the damaged tattoo on Gilyov's hand. It's been subjected to hydrolytic tissue collapse, so this is the best he could get.' He pinned the design on the board behind him. ‘It's still not clear, but what I took to be a lighthouse and beams of light could be snakes around a head: a Greek symbol for the Medusa. The name of Freddie Cooper's company. An odd coincidence.'

The general sense of puzzlement increased.

‘If we could just pop our Dan Brown novels down for a moment,' said Land impatiently, ‘can I point out that there's nothing here that we don't already know?' He waved his hand at the design. ‘Er, apart from the Gorgon thing.'

‘There's nothing new except this,' said Bryant, holding up a folded yellow sheet of A4 paper. ‘Giles?'

Kershaw rose and addressed the group. ‘Gilyov had a scar on his left thigh, a messy exit wound, the result of a bullet being fired into him some ten years earlier. It had damaged his muscle tissue and had never healed properly.'

‘He also had a girlfriend who left him because she thought he was mentally disturbed,' said Bryant. ‘She says he was obsessed with the idea of conquering pain because his leg hurt so badly. When he stopped seeing her he vanished and never called her again, and all she could find in his belongings was this.' He unfolded the page and pinned it on the board.

The paper read: ‘Mind Over Matter – An Evening of Magic, Mystery & Mentalism'.

‘Take a look at this magician, the Great Hidini, and his assistant,' said Bryant, pointing to two small monochrome photographs. ‘Unless I'm much mistaken, they're the couple who took over the St Alphege Wellbeing Centre and turned it into Life Options. You had a single source connecting the deaths. Why didn't you continue testing for paternity down there, starting with Cassie North's business partner?'

‘There's no indication that he and Dalladay—' began Land.

‘Don't worry, I did some further checking and got Dan here to take a cell sample. We're awaiting results on that.' He unfolded a flyer for Pastor Michaels, and another for the sacred Thames course. ‘Thornberry's real name is Ali Bensaud. He has no criminal record but he did accidentally sign his real name once, and that's all it took to track his ID. On the surface of it he has only the most tangential of connections to any of the victims, which I presume is why you didn't interview him.'