Strange Tide (44 page)

‘People get into transcendental mediteration because they already feel lost and are looking for peas. Peas and quiet.'

‘Do you have to be put into a trance?'

‘No, but there are many ideas about what trances are. Hitler appeared to put his followers into a trance with cleverly placed verbal signifiers. There's such a thing as hypnotic language, which plants structured commands in the mind. It can be learned, but some people are born naturals.'

‘Could you encourage someone who was suicidally inclined to kill themselves?'

‘You can only draw out what's already there. I can offer you bark tea.'

‘That would be lovely,' said Maggie. Bryant glared at her.

‘I may have a packet of Garibaldis saved. After all, we have something to celebrate, now that Arthur's come to take me home.'

‘Esmeralda, I didn't come here to take you home,' said Bryant gently.

‘But I want to go to the shore,' she said plaintively, digging out the biscuits. ‘Won't you take me to the shore? I can't stay here with my rheumaterism. London Transport's taking away my arch. They're going to build luxury.' She pointed to the sign that had been pinioned to the brickwork above their heads: ‘Number One Finsbury – Luxury Loft Living. One Bedroom Apartments starting at 1.2m'. The words ‘Loft Living' had partially fallen off. ‘They want a million. They don't say a million what, but I haven't got a million anything. Or even a hundred anything. I haven't got anything except my memories and I haven't even got those any more because I've lost the key.'

‘I know your memories,' said Maggie gently. ‘I'll stay with you a while and we'll write them down.'

‘Thank you,' said Esmeralda, her eyes filled with gratitude. ‘Have a Garibaldi.'

Maggie accepted the biscuit and surreptitiously held it out for Bryant to inspect. ‘Those aren't currants,' she whispered, ‘they're dead flies.'

They sat beneath the railway arch as yellow-windowed trains clattered overhead and the rain tumbled into brown iron gutters, rattling down drainpipes and flooding the last remaining liminal spaces around Finsbury Park Station. The elderly detective, the white witch and the tramp discussed abstruse matters that seemed of no possible concern to anyone in the bright new London of glazed towers and steel cathedrals, yet the outcome of their talk had the power to affect the lives of many. From such discarded remnants of the city could great ideas be woven.

‘I'm not at all happy about this,' said Dan Banbury, checking the boot of his car. ‘Do we have to black up?'

‘No, of course not.' Colin zipped his jacket shut and checked his pockets. ‘We're not on army manoeuvres. You don't need to stick dirt all over your face and poke twigs into a bobble hat. The main thing to worry about is whether the place is alarmed.'

‘Thank God for that.' Banbury closed the boot and bipped the car. ‘Couldn't we wait and do this legally, preferably in daylight?'

‘John says the warrant only covers the centre's main building. We're running out of time. Have you got everything?'

‘I've got a crowbar, a pocket knife, a torch and a whistle for attracting attention.'

‘What are you, a flight attendant? Come on.'

They made their way across the soft wet grass towards the Death House. It was almost midnight. This far from the main road it was hard to discern the outlines of the riverbank. ‘No wonder Angela Curtis went arse over tit,' said Banbury. ‘I can't see where I'm putting my feet.'

‘I can,' said Colin, scraping his boot against an elm. ‘Bloody dogs.'

‘What are we looking for, anyway?'

‘Anything that will help us convict Bensaud. According to the old man nobody can agree on what his off-site courses are actually about. There's no documentation at the centre and the suspect's not talking, so that leaves you, me and a crowbar.'

The building was a stilted brick box with green wooden window-frames and a mossy stepped roof. It was attached to the river's overhanging stony edge like a G-clamp, so that one side of it almost reached down into the water. Banbury shone his torch across the door. ‘It's not barred, it's got a Dorland lock,' he said. ‘They don't make them any more. I can't get that open.'

‘Window.' Colin padded around to the side, pushing his way past low-hanging branches. The windows were fitted with steel grilles.

‘If you force those off he'll know someone's been in,' said Banbury, always conscious of other people's property.

‘Yeah, well, I'll try and put it back after,' said Colin without much conviction. He wedged the crowbar under the grille and put all his weight on top of it until something cracked. The window itself was not locked and slid open easily, but as he pushed it up the entire frame fell out.

‘Nice one,' said Banbury. ‘Why didn't you just back your car into the front wall?' He climbed through the torn hole with some difficulty and ran his torch beam over the floor.

The Death House had been decorated more luxuriantly than the treatment rooms at the centre. Thick maroon rugs and Persian tapestries were matched by half a dozen brightly coloured beanbags. In the room beyond was a workspace designed to hold laptops. The only terminal actually connected, a silver MacBook, was on standby and password-protected.

‘In here,' called Banbury. Colin found him beyond the kitchen and bathroom in the only other open area.

A double bed was covered in silver scatter cushions and artificial roses. ‘It doesn't look like a treatment room to me,' said Banbury, sucking his teeth. ‘View over the river, a client list of bored attractive women, it's almost worth getting struck off for.'

‘You have to have a medical degree to get struck off,' said Colin. ‘This bloke's Mr Showbiz.'

They checked cupboards and drawers but found nothing out of place or untoward. ‘There must be something. He can't take everything every time he closes up after a class,' said Dan, whose terrier instinct had now been awoken.

‘No cameras. There's a router over there,' said Colin. ‘Maybe he's stashed another laptop somewhere?'

Banbury stamped on the floorboards, testing them. ‘What's underneath holding this place up? What would they put down there?'

‘Bins,' said Bimsley. In his last year at the PCU they had virtually become his specialist subject. He and Banbury lifted the window-frame back and wedged it in place as best they could. They attempted to replace the grille for a while, then gave up.

At the side of the house they found an access panel leading to a crawlspace. Bimsley pushed open the wooden trapdoor and climbed inside. ‘Thank God for recycling,' he called back, shoving out a green plastic crate filled with paper. They set down their torches and began going through the printouts.

‘I've got a feedback questionnaire from the sacred nature course,' said Banbury. ‘Sounds like a bunch of old toss to me.'

‘Show me.' Colin felt at home sitting in the pile of sodden rubbish that had become caught around his boots. ‘“From the alignment of sacred barrows on its shores to the mysteries of the moon-driven tides that lap its banks, the Thames represents the healing power of Isis, a path of hope, a living fluctuation of life and death.” So that's “a bunch of old toss”, is it?'

‘Totally,' said Banbury. ‘The sort of thing my wife likes, along with pedicures,
Fifty Shades of Grey
, scented candles, coconut oil, book clubs and the box set of
Downton Abbey
.'

‘That's a bit harsh.'

‘She's not soft, though. She started reading all this stuff about warrior women and empowerment, then replaced our bathroom stopcock. If she can figure out how to update her phone software I'll become surplus to requirements.'

‘It says here the nymphs of the river guide lost souls to healing lands on the Other Side. Doesn't say the Other Side of what. “The fair nymphs of Thamesis, keeping time with the billow of her crystal waves, carry us to the Ocean with her ebb.” “Crystal waves” is pushing it. I saw a dog with its guts out in there last week, right by Dead Man's Stairs. You think he gets them to believe in all this?'

‘It's not enough,' said Banbury. ‘There's a difference between sounding like Barry White and persuading someone to padlock themselves in the river. There's got to be something solid.'

‘Like what?' Colin asked. When no reply was forthcoming, he looked up at Dan and found him reading pages in the torchlight.

‘Like this,' he said, turned the page around. ‘“Death & Rebirth: Removing Anxiety from the Last Taboo”.'

‘What's the picture at the top?' asked Colin. ‘I recognize it.'

‘It's a painting.' Banbury read out the caption. ‘“Théodore Géricault.
The Raft of the Medusa.
The work depicts survivors from a ship wrecked off the coast of Senegal in 1815 who survived by eating their dead companions. Of 147 crew members set adrift on the unstable raft, only fifteen survived.” That's a bit grim.'

‘Grim?' said Colin. ‘It's a masterpiece of French romantic chiaroscuro, you nonce. The painting's an analogy of France's corrupt government. The commander ran the ship into sandbanks, then took the longboat for himself and the high-born, leaving the rabble to the raft, which was so loosely tied together that men got their legs trapped between the logs. The abandoned crew rioted. They were forced to eat their leather ammunition pouches, then they ate each other.'

‘How come you know so much about it?'

‘Mr Bryant showed me the picture in one of his books.'

‘Confronting death, eh?' said Banbury. ‘I can't imagine too many people signed up for that one.'

Colin took the pages from his colleague and carefully folded them away. ‘Maybe there were three women who did,' he said. ‘We need to check everyone who took the course.'

‘This is the big revelation, is it?' asked Land, his patience rapidly fraying. ‘You're telling me this fellow Bensaud holds separate private meetings at his “Death House” or whatever you call it in order to make sacrifices to the river?'

It was Wednesday morning, and Bryant had brought his tea into Raymond Land's office while he explained the previous day's events.

‘I'm just telling you what Colin and Dan found,
mon petit cafard
.' Bryant fished a teabag from his mug with a tuning fork, the only item he could lay his hands on which approximated a spoon. ‘They think he's bedding his clients and preying on their fragile states of mind to offload them when things get messy.' He flicked the teabag nonchalantly in the direction of the wastepaper basket and missed.

‘I've never heard of anything so ridiculous. Are you trying to tell me we're dealing with a modern-day Bluebeard?' Land picked up the teabag, which had landed on his foot, and dropped it into the bin with distaste.

‘I've been doing some checking on the way he runs his businesses. He's been a very busy lad in the last couple of years. “All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room” – Blaise Pascal.'

‘Spare me the cod psychology, Bryant. If you really think this bloke's knocking off women, why are you so against bringing him in and sitting on him?'

‘Because we'll lose him that way.' Bryant passed Land a mug of tea and gave him a small electric shock. ‘Sorry, I keep doing that. Something to do with my treatments. I think Bensaud is teaching them how to live, then taking away that gift when they no longer deserve it. “Men live as if they were never going to die, and die as if they had never lived” – the Dalai Lama. “If we don't know what life is, how can we know what death is?” – Confucius.'

‘That's enough!' Land raised his voice in a forlorn attempt to sound authoritative. ‘You've searched the premises and turned up nothing. You've questioned him, his staff and his clients. If you're not prepared to drag him off the streets and subject him to some decent psychological torture, you're going to have to admit defeat and let someone else take over.'

‘No,' said Bryant. ‘I need something that will irrefutably incriminate him. Talking won't work. He's mastered mental manipulation magnificently. Try saying that with my teeth.'

‘So he turns up out of nowhere as a mind-reader, a healer and what-have-you – but what does he actually want?'

‘I imagine he wants what people like him always want,' said Bryant. ‘A foot on the throne. The attention of those in power. Rasputin had the ear of the Tsar of Russia.'

‘Cherie Blair had an astrologer,' added Land. ‘We need to find the anomaly that will undo him. Before we bring him in here, the case has to be absolutely watertight.'

‘How are we going to get that?' asked Land. ‘We're out of time. Link is pressing to go ahead with charging your partner tomorrow.'