Strange Tide (45 page)

Bryant needed to be alone for a few minutes.

The events of the past few weeks had been tumultuous. He had solved the riddle of his own decline; he had glimpsed oblivion and had been spared. Taking a Northern line tube south, he now stood at the centre of Waterloo Bridge looking down into the fast-flowing waters, hoping to find further answers, but the shape of his life still eluded him.

He thought of Nathalie, small and dark, laughing, the touch of her hand as she balanced above him. It had been the evening of her twenty-first birthday. She'd climbed up on to the balustrade and was tripping lightly along it, right where he was now standing. He reached out and ran his hand over the stonework, wondering if it held the imprint of her dancing feet.

Young and broke, they had been invited out to drink and celebrate and were both a little tipsy. He had just asked her to marry him.

It was a spontaneous request foolishly spoken aloud, and yet the moment he heard the words he knew his intention was true. He would never love another.

She had suddenly stopped laughing and looked down at him. Her features had blurred with the passing of time but he could never forget her smile.

She was about to give him her answer when a bus horn sounded behind them, and the noise made her start.

She lost her balance, and when he turned around to grab her she had gone. Arthur threw himself into the water and tried to find her, but the tide was against him and the current was too strong. Nathalie had never learned to swim. In his heavy overcoat and hobnailed boots he was nearly pulled under, and for a moment he wanted to be drawn down with her.

The search teams dragged the river for days, but they never found her body. Across the years, whenever he looked into the Thames he saw her. Even now, she was still there. When the waters turned and began to rise, he imagined her drifting back into the city to find him. He had never loved again, not truly. How could he when she was still here, borne into the city on lunar tides?

Focus on closing the case
, he told himself, digging into his coat pocket and producing a smooth pebble. He threw it into the scudding waters, a symbolic act designed to make him banish thoughts of Nathalie, and turned his attention back to work, and the problem of Ali Bensaud.

He enjoys controlling others. He preys on the lonely, the bored, the vulnerable, the directionless. But is he a Jim Jones, a Colonel Kurtz? Someone who would inflict the madness of control upon others? Is he merely callous and ambitious or does he genuinely believe he's doing good? It would be a matter for a court to decide, and it will mean the difference between capture and release. Someone this Machiavellian might well be able to influence a jury and avoid a conviction.

You shouldn't be worrying about that
, he thought.
Someone else can deal with the problem. Your job is to find a way of reeling him in and to get John off the hook before it's too late.

He had one slender lead left. Mrs Kirkland, the client at the St Alphege Centre to whom he had given an ancient cigarette, had given him the name of another woman who had taken the ‘Sacred Nature: Death & Rebirth' course. Rose Nash, a retired NHS psychotherapist, had agreed to meet Bryant and talk about her experience at the Death House.

From Waterloo he caught a direct train to Shepperton, the picturesque Thameside village mentioned in the Domesday Book that paradoxically became the home of dissident writers and movie executives.

There was certainly something defiantly odd about the place, he thought, alighting from the train and heading for the winding High Street. The locks, weirs and riverbanks seemed to belong to the forgotten summer days of the Edwardian age, and yet it was strongly associated with science fiction.
Star Wars
and
Captain America
had been filmed here.

‘Sometimes I go into my local pub and find a Hollywood legend sitting at the bar,' Rose Nash told him. ‘It's like living in a place that has become unmoored in time and space. I suppose that's why I like it.'

Rose might have been a figurine, Wedgwood or Waterford perhaps, designed to fit a doll's house representing a typical half-timbered English cottage. Her cosy living room looked like a film set designed for Hobbits, and was crowded with horse-brasses, paintings, brass pitchers and thick earthenware pots. Bryant looked perfectly at home amongst the bric-a-brac, sunk into a floral sofa in his great tweed overcoat.

‘I didn't finish the Life Options course,' she explained, serving tea. ‘It all felt so ridiculously bogus, and he was constantly upselling us. I don't like to be coerced. They're peddling inner calm but everyone seemed very tense.'

‘What do you think they were coercing you towards, exactly?' asked Bryant.

‘That's rather the question, isn't it? I'm not sure he knows himself. I didn't think he was talking literally about death and rebirth, not if you mean he wanted anyone to kill themselves and be reborn. Let me show you something.' She went to the sideboard and returned with a pack of tarot cards, sorting through them.

‘This is the Death card,' she said, turning over the familiar figure of a cloaked skeleton riding a white stallion against a sinking sun. In his bony right fist he clutched a black and white flag. ‘His bones live on. His armour makes him unconquerable. His horse is the colour of purity, because Death is the ultimate absolution. Everything that's reborn is fresh and untainted. The rising sun behind him is a symbol of immortality because it dies and lives. But see what else is in the picture – a river. You'll find it on all the Death tarot cards, symbolizing the cycle of death and rebirth. Sometimes there's a boat too, the ferry that transports the souls across the River Styx. Death is associated with the number thirteen, a female number.'

‘I didn't know numbers had sexes,' said Bryant.

‘It's sacred to the lunar goddess as there are thirteen moons in a year. So everything is tied together, death, rebirth, life, all controlled by the moon, which in turn controls the tides, making the river the access path to a new state of purity.'

‘And you believe this to be true?'

‘No, Mr Bryant, I think it's an evocative and rather charming mythology, and I quit the course. I was older than most of the women there, more cynical and still happily married after thirty-five years. We don't listen when we're being told straightforward facts; we would much rather accept what some charismatic character tells us. I got the distinct impression that some of them would do anything their teacher wanted.'

‘So you think he's just in it for the money?'

‘I don't know. He doesn't seem to have any actual qualifications. But there's certainly an air of mystery around him. He talks about reinvention and rebirth a lot. Perhaps he went through something similar himself.'

‘You mean an intimation of mortality? We all have those.' Bryant was thinking of his own recent brush with fate.

‘Yes,' said Rose. ‘Maybe he's encouraging others to cope with the same thing.'

Bryant called his partner on the way back. ‘We could search for some kind of by-law infringement and get the centre temporarily shut down, but it's not going to solve the bigger problem. We simply don't have the evidence to make it stick.'

‘If he's impervious, you need to find a weak link in someone close to him,' May replied. ‘What about Cassie North? If we could prove he killed her mother—'

‘John, I think she believes you did it, although even she can't come up with a motive.'

‘There's something that's been bothering me,' said May. ‘Bensaud wasn't born in the UK. All this “sacred Thames” stuff means nothing to him, so why would he run courses in uncovering its origins?'

‘It doesn't have to be about the Thames. He could have a problem with the sea, anything with a lunar tide.'

‘No.' May called a stop to Bryant's thought process. ‘Arthur, you have to stop theorizing and find physical evidence. You've passed your own deadline. Raymond says the internal investigations officer is going to be submitting her report first thing tomorrow. They're going ahead with the charge of murder. She's also going to blame him. At the very least, my career is over. There must be
something
you can do.'

‘It's not just about you, John. I have to protect vulnerable people from this man. Guess where Daisy ended up.'

‘Your pig? I dread to think.'

‘At the exact spot where you found Dalladay's body and Dimitri Gilyov's severed hand. As I suspected, it's a quirk of the tide.'

‘If you tell me the river's sending you messages, I'm going to hang up.'

‘Actually, I'm beginning to think the Thames tricked me. I've listened to everyone telling me what the river means and I'm none the wiser at the end of it. If a girl is attacked in a park it doesn't mean her attacker is obsessed with trees. What if this isn't about the Thames at all? It could simply be the connection between a number of events.'

‘I was trying to tell you that—'

‘Dudley Salterton said the trick was to make yourself invisible or become the most visible person in the room.'

‘Are you telling me something or just thinking random thoughts aloud?' May asked. ‘Do you have anything at all that can get me out of here before tomorrow? I've paced a hole in the rug. Can't you do what you used to do, look up something in one of your weird books or study a painting for clues?'

‘I have one last idea to try,' said Bryant. ‘I've been seeking out academic experts on the sacred Thames, but now I can see they were the wrong people to talk to. I should have been interviewing people with more practical knowledge.'

May sounded nonplussed. ‘I really don't see how it's going to help—'

‘Maybe it's why the river was used, not for some sacred purpose but simply because it's familiar territory. The Thames provides the easiest and most obvious solution for the disposal of bodies.'

‘No, you've lost me,' said May. Sometimes his partner was like a poorly tuned radio, fading in and out of comprehension. ‘We decided it was impossible to get a girl on to that beach and leave her there to drown.'

‘Yes, impossible, exactly,' Bryant agreed, which wasn't a useful response.

‘I just hope you know what you're doing, Arthur. My life is at stake here.'

At least Bryant's abnormal thought processes showed he was thinking normally again. But it was now a matter of time; if he didn't come up with the goods, they were sunk.

The Lighterman looked like the sort of pub that turned up in old horror films. From its doors drunken doxies were expected to fall and fights erupt. Once it had sported a pleasing amount of stained and mullioned glass, but too many lads had been put through the windows. Even gentrification had failed to stop revellers from staggering out and being sick in the river. At the rear a small beer garden stood on a platform of warped wooden pilings, and the menus now featured the pub's new faux-handcrafted logo above the dish of the day (crayfish focaccia), but no matter how often the design changed, most of the clientele remained anchored to the river beneath.

Bryant sat with ‘Bad Oyster' Stan Kipps and his old skipper ‘Blotto' Otto Farmingham, who had been born and raised on the Thames at Woolwich. They preferred to sit outside even though it was bitterly cold.

Stan had his own pewter tankard, Bryant noticed, and wiped foam from his walrus moustache as he set it down. ‘We transferred to the ferry when the Pool shut for good,' he explained. ‘It was a bit of a comedown after the tankers. Funny thing was, we got more seasick on the ferry than we ever did in the Atlantic. There's a right old churn to the tide in the dead centre of the channel, and the constant docking means you're reversing engines all the time. It messes up your guts.'

‘I remember Tower Beach,' said Otto. ‘The P&O liner
Rawalpindi
was shelled off Iceland at the start of the war and went down with most of her crew, but its ladders was saved and they was installed to get down to the beach. Big steel grilles with hooks and chains they was.'

‘You didn't get no more fogs on the river after the Pool went,' said Stan. ‘Hay's Wharf had all these panels along the front, pictures of barrels and crates and drums – “The Chain of Distribution” it was called – is that still there?'

‘It's all flats for them oligarchs now,' Otto told him. ‘Shad Thames had hundreds of walkways for moving goods. They got tore down in 1983. My old man used to be down there shovelling tea, spuds, tapioca, you name it.'

‘Did both of your families work only on the river?' Bryant asked.

‘Of course.' Stan sounded surprised by the question. ‘My grandma worked at Tilbury Dock passenger terminal 'cause most people travelled by boat back then. But we was mostly lightermen. Your watermen carried passengers but we shifted goods. You can still see some of the old lighters, the flat-bottomed barges, down towards Southend, but they was replaced by tugs. Right up and down the Thames, they was, tanners at Bermondsey, candle-makers at Battersea, soap-makers at Isleworth, lots of breweries.'