Strange Tide (10 page)

The auditorium held four hundred but was less than a quarter full. Saturday matinees always seemed to coincide with mall sales, and the few who were here were not enjoying themselves. At least there was no shuffling or talking – audiences of this generation had been raised to behave politely in theatres – but they were a very old, very English crowd. After all, who else would be attracted to a show called
The Good Old Times Variety Show
?

He was in the Roebuck Theatre, Sevenoaks, typical of a thousand small venues scattered across the country. A painted ceiling, gold cherubs, red velvet curtains, unused side boxes smelling of damp, a provincial lighting rig with a single follow-spot and a box flood, coughing pensioners and an uninterested girl hawking programmes at the rear of the stalls.

Ali picked up the first of the rectangular metal blades and inserted it horizontally in the cabinet's midsection. He added a second, dividing the box into thirds. He pretended to push at the blades, as if they were encountering resistance. Cassie gave a squeal. There were murmurs of interest in the audience.

With a flourish Ali slid the cabinet's midsection apart from the top and bottom, pulling Cassie's torso away from the rest of her. Then he summoned a member of the audience.

He usually picked a pretty young girl. Pensioners took too long to reach the stage and children were liable to start poking around the back, trying to spoil the illusion. Today nobody wanted to come up, so the programme-seller stepped in.

Ali opened a small door on the cabinet's midsection so that the usher could make a point of examining and prodding Cassie's stomach. The drummer missed his cue again because he'd been at the bar in the intermission.

The trick was old and easy to perform. The black stripes down the sides of the casket made it look narrower, and the blades weren't as wide as their handles. The left foot was false, and could be moved from inside. Some assistants could perform the so-called ‘Zig-Zag' by actually sticking their feet out, but Cassie didn't have enough flexibility.

The illusion only received a patter of applause. They were used to seeing better on TV. He released Cassie and they took their bows. They had only just started the act together, but he already knew they needed to move on to something bigger. If they stayed on this circuit they would never make real money. By the time they'd paid off the booking agent they hardly had anything left over, and the receipts would never make them rich. They'd only managed to get this far by sabotaging the resident magician's van.

After years of sitting on the sun-warmed stone of the dock, staring at the sea's horizon and waiting for each day to pass, Ali was facing a world of opportunity. It was already becoming hard to remember who he had been. Everything was new, everything was exciting, everything was there for the taking.

A plan was fizzing inside his brain, but he needed to run it past Cassie. She would know whether it was something they could handle; she had a good head for business. As the curtains swished shut behind them and they headed offstage to make way for Olga and her Performing Poodles, he decided to tell her about his idea that night. The decision would eventually, in the fullness of time, bring him into contact with the detectives of the PCU.

Back in the present, DS Janice Longbright turned sideways in the mirror and pinched the roll of flesh at her waist. She usually blamed her weight gain not on portion control but corset failure. Her hair was currently Harlow Blonde, but the roots needed touching up. On the right side of her desk sat some pumpkin seed crackers and a tub of quinoa with edamame beans, prepared for her by Meera's sister. On the left, challenging these, was a sausage sandwich oozing brown sauce, lovingly placed there by Colin Bimsley. Life was full of such choices. She loved the fact that everyone called the condiment ‘brown sauce' without knowing what was in it. On the other hand, South American farmers were suffering because of the sudden increased demand for quinoa. So really it was a matter of putting the planet's needs before her own.

No contest: she took a bite from the sausage sandwich and slumped back at her desk. Longbright had put up with a lot of aggravation during her time in law enforcement, from the bad old days of institutional sexism to cruel personal comments about her racy past in the press. It didn't seem to matter that she was on the front line when it came to protecting the city; someone was always ready to dredge up old stories about her student days, when she had paid for her education by performing in Soho's now-vanished burlesque shows. Her years at the Peculiar Crimes Unit had dealt their fair share of blows, too, starting with the death of her mother and ending, most recently, with the departure of a lover. She had made more sacrifices than she had ever intended, and now, somewhere between lying about her age and proudly telling everyone what it was, found herself alone and facing an uncertain future.

At least she had always been able to take refuge in the company of her fellow officers. She thought of John May as her surrogate father, and the idea that she would have to watch him losing his greatest friend and ally was almost too much to bear. Now they would have to fight for stability in the face of irrevocable change.

Arthur Bryant was sitting in the armchair opposite her, his prehistoric overcoat rucked up about his shrinking form like a mammoth-skin, his white tonsure standing vertically above his ears like frightened fur.

He had shuffled in and asked to talk to her, a permission he had never bothered to seek before. She knew at once that he was going to officially take her into his confidence, not realizing that John May had already spoken to her about the doctor's prognosis.

‘The worst part,' said Bryant, typically beginning in the middle of a thought, ‘is feeling so powerless. Illness is an insidious trickster, a time-thief that plays spiteful emotional games. I really feel I must apologize.'

‘Don't be ridiculous,' she said briskly, knowing that she wouldn't be able to stand it if he became maudlin.

‘It's a progression that's hard to calibrate,' he continued, accepting the tea mug she handed him. ‘Fascinating, really. In its later stages it will become unforgivably dreary, rather like a dull partner brought to a party by a gregarious guest, a parasite attached to its host. I'll be boring to be around, and I'll be bored by doctors and nurses and waiting about, and all those ghastly prosaic things I've never had to bother with before, and the conversation will be about illness and nothing else. You know I have no patience. If there's anything more spectacularly mind-numbing than having to undergo
tests
, it's people wanting to talk to you about them.'

‘Do you want me to come with you to the hospital?' she offered.

Bryant's blue eyes widened. ‘Good Lord, no, why would you want to do that? I'll take a paperback. Reading a book is the finest way of attaining inner peace. It seems as though our adult lives are entirely spent fighting to regain ground, first against stasis and then against actual decay, but it's a battle we can never fully win. What was the point of me learning so much if all that knowledge is simply going to be chucked into the soil?
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
– T. S. Eliot.' He suddenly clapped his hands. ‘But that isn't why I wanted to talk to you. I'm going to need your help.'

She had half expected something like this. ‘Oh yes?' she said warily.

‘I struck a deal with poor old Raymondo. I promised I would stay home whenever I felt seedy, and that John would secretly cart me to and from the office. It's only a ten-minute walk but there is a slight risk that I'll wander off into traffic or start pretending I'm Catherine of Aragon or something. But I want to be involved.'

‘In what?'

‘The case, of course – the girl in the river. John says she was pregnant and thinks it's simply a matter of
cherchez l'homme
, but he's wrong. It rather goes without saying that there are several alternative courses of action you can take if you get a girl pregnant, not one of which is chaining her to a concrete post in the Thames. There's much more to this than meets the eye, and I have a few ideas about where to start looking. However, it will involve a certain amount of subterfuge.'

Longbright was puzzled. ‘Why? If John is going to bring you to the PCU whenever you feel up to working, what kind of subterfuge are you thinking of?'

‘That's the thing. I can't just sit behind a desk. I'll need to take trips out and get my hands dirty in the great seething metropolis. But I don't want to get John into trouble. He won't if someone else covers for me.'

‘By “covers” you mean “lies” and by “someone” you mean me.'

Bryant pursed his lips, thinking. ‘That's about the size of it, yes.'

‘You already know what I'll say.' Longbright talked to the ceiling. ‘Why do I do this? Why me?'

‘Because—'

‘It was a rhetorical question. I'll do it on one condition: that you wear the transmitter Dan made for you. If you won't turn on your phone's GPS tracker you can at least do that.'

‘It's a deal,' said Bryant, rising and flashing a grin made wider by his oversized false teeth.

He knows all of our flaws and works them
, she thought irritably as he left.
Not bad for someone who's losing his mind
.

As the two Daves had now cordoned off the basement and one of the staircases while awaiting instructions about what to do with their coffin-sized discovery, the staff met in the temporary ground-floor common room. It was a little after 3.00 p.m. on Monday when Dan Banbury turned his laptop to the others and began running footage.

‘I've sent these files to all of you,' he said, ‘just in case you spot anything I've missed. Lynsey Dalladay was found chained up here, between the pier and the shore wall, just after dawn this morning.' He tapped the centre of the visual, which showed an area of sand at the base of the river steps. ‘She'd just turned twenty-four. She'd been rendered unconscious with a blow to the back of the head, but the contusion is abraded and therefore ambiguous. Giles found particles of grit in the wound that match the concrete she was chained to. She drowned in a few centimetres of water as the tide came in. There was nothing in the pockets of her jeans, no tube card, no wallet, no mobile phone. She has an old Nokia but it hasn't contacted any of her network provider's transmitters since yesterday afternoon, when she rang her mother but hung up before it answered.'

‘What have you got on the pregnancy?' asked May.

‘I was getting to that. She attended a walk-in clinic at the Cavendish Health Centre just off Oxford Street on the previous Wednesday and was informed that she was seven weeks pregnant. Before then she was registered at the Royal Free. We're still trying to find her medical files. They've got computer problems.'

He raised a small evidence bag so that they could see it clearly. ‘This is the chain that attached her wrist to the iron ring. We're assuming it belonged to her and the killer slipped it from around her neck. Now, at this point the tide – what did you say about that, Mr Bryant?'

Bryant unfolded his trifocals and checked his book of tide tables. ‘At this time of the year the tide comes up high and fast. Look at the figures.'

Bimsley read over his shoulder and gave a low whistle. ‘Does it normally do that?'

‘At London Bridge there's a tidal range of nearly eight metres. The speed of flow increases the further downstream you go, as other tributaries add their water. It's a good way to kill someone.'

‘And yet there's no CCTV on the shore?' asked Raymond Land.

‘There are several areas of increased sensitivity like the Houses of Parliament, MI5 and the Tower of London, but generally why should there be?' asked Bryant. ‘There's been no need to patrol the tideline since the docks were moved out. Before, when thieving was rampant in the Pool of London, it was policed—'

‘Pool of London?' Meera repeated. ‘Where's that?'

‘You were born in the Elephant and Castle and you don't know where the Pool of London is?' Bryant was incredulous. ‘It's the part of the Thames that goes from London Bridge to Limehouse. There are two parts, Upper and Lower. It's where ships arrived from the rest of the world to deliver their cargoes for inspection by the customs officials. And it was where most of the smuggling went on. That's why there's a bloody great wall running along one side of East Smithfield and the old Ratcliffe Highway: to stop tea leaves from getting in. You don't know about the Night Plunderers? A representation of the Londoner in his most atavistic form? A thousand-year-old history that starts—'

Land flagged down the conversation with his hands. ‘Wait, wait, before you get into all that old history rubbish let's stick to the facts. What about Dalladay's boyfriend?'