Strange Tide (31 page)

He was shocked at how suddenly the city ended. The switch from town to countryside happened moments after leaving Clapham Junction.
I am dreaming
, thought Bryant;
let me dream some more.
He felt tired and cold and closed his eyes, allowing his head to loll against the antimacassar as the rhythm of the tracks matched the beating of his heart.

He woke up in Brighton. It was a bright sunny morning. Light streamed in through the terminal's dusty brown canopy.
How long was I asleep?
he wondered. The train stood at the buffers, fifty-three miles from London.

He was in for another shock when he alighted and left the station, for time had rolled further back with the passing of the miles. It was no longer winter but high summer. The street outside was covered in red and yellow flags, but not to mark the coronation. Now he was surrounded by men in straw boaters, bright red blazers and baggy white flannels. The ladies wore fussy full skirts of white calico. He knew Brighton well and headed for the seafront, as every visitor from London was predisposed to do. An immense floral clock bore a date picked out in peonies: 1887.
Queen Victoria's golden jubilee
, he thought.
Well now, I wonder what this is about?

There were a few motorcars, unwieldy and seemingly all built along vertical lines, but they were far outnumbered by coach parties disembarking from horse-drawn charabancs while an astonishing assortment of local men fussed around them, hired to help water the animals and lug wicker hampers on to the beach.

Brighton was as yet unruined. There were still two piers; the West Pier had not burned down. It ended in a great square promenade, and looked more sedately elegant than its brash counterpart.
Why am I here?
he wondered.
Is it simply a random hallucination, or am I supposed to learn something from this?

Oddly, Bryant did not look out of place in the slightest. Sartorially challenged at the best of times, his wardrobe looked to have been purchased secondhand somewhere between the invasion of Poland and the first season of
Monty Python
, incorporating elements of both events. In Victorian Brighton he simply looked like a gentleman of the road. Thanks to the fact that he always had a few coppers in old money somewhere about his person, he was able to buy a plate of cockles. He decided to enjoy the experience.

It's hard to say what took him to the Hall of Varieties at the end of the Palace Pier but it probably wasn't the bill of fare, which included Beryl Flynn, the Lancashire Contortionist, Horace Allcock, Derby's Finest Female Impersonator, and Walter Wainright and His Cheeky Otters. Sandwiched in between these acts was the resident compère. Dudley Salterton was a Yorkshireman who did a Mr Memory act and some ventriloquism with an eye-rolling sailor dummy called Barnacle Bill. He dyed his hair ginger and stopped removing his stage make-up after his wife died, until it finally gave him a skin disease. He came from a long line of entertainers and used to work with his wife at the intermission, threading balloons through her neck. He tried it with a sword for a while but she hated going on stage wearing a bandage.

‘I've not seen thee for a while,' said Salterton. ‘Not since you were a wee lad. My, you've put on some years.'

‘No, that was my father,' Bryant explained. ‘I'm Arthur, his son. He said you died before I was born.'

‘I'm not surprised with my dicky colon. It's the diet. You get right fed up with boarding-house rissoles. What do you do?'

‘I'm a detective.'

‘Then you're someone to notice.'

‘Do you want a cockle?'

‘No, son. There's summat in them that builds up in me system and I can't afford to get caught short onstage. I'm assuming you're not here for the air.'

‘Is that you doing your mentalism act?' asked Bryant. ‘Or a lucky guess?'

‘Neither, lad. Human nature. Your dad was never one for visiting out of friendliness.' Salterton scratched at his nose, removing a chalky teardrop of panstick. ‘I don't do me mentalism any more.'

‘Why not?' Bryant moved his plate of cockles away from a seagull that was hovering in sinister proximity.

‘I haven't got the looks for it. Time marches on, and soon it marches over your face.'

‘I don't understand. Surely all you need for your mind-reading is a good memory.'

‘I can see you've never trodden the boards.' Salterton sighed. ‘It's got very little to do with the brain, has prestidigitationary gubbins. What do you know of hypnotism?'

‘Not much,' said Bryant, popping a cockle in his mouth and chewing ruminatively. He'd under-peppered them. ‘From the Greek god Hypnos, presumably.'

‘You presume correctly. But it were a term first coined by a Manchester surgeon forty-six years ago.'

‘You mean in 1841, assuming this is 1887.'

‘Hypnosis,' said Salterton, rolling the word around his mouth. ‘What is hypnotism, really? Misdirection? Magic? Suggestion? A special state of mind? If you think of a lemon you can make yourself salivate. If I say the word “lemon” will it produce the same effect, or is that just neurolinguistic programming?'

‘Steady on,' said Bryant. ‘That won't be invented for another eighty-odd years yet.'

‘I do beg your pardon.' Salterton craned forward alarmingly. ‘Shall I tell you about those times I picked someone from the audience and got them to reveal a secret to me? I chose them because I looked for signs of gullibility, an eagerness to be deceived, a certain summat' – here he dappled his bony fingers around his face – ‘that suggested they were happy to be in on the act, going along with me to be gulled, because back then I were a handsome, confident young fellow holding them in the palm of me hand. I had
charisma
– and that's not a new term; it means “the gift of grace”. My mother used to call it
allure
. Those folk in the auditorium, they hoped some of it would rub off on them.'

Bryant flicked a cockle at a passing dog. ‘You think some people have a natural ability to control others?'

‘I think some people have the ability to make others
surrender
to control. To become complicit. There's a difference, lad.'

‘And you knew you had that power.'

‘Aye, for a while, yes. I capitalized upon it. I could be found on the billboards with lightning bolts flashing from me eyes. But when the petals fell from this rose, the public took a second look at me and no longer wished to assist in the deceit. In short, I got old. You know what they say a pretty young girl can do?
Anything she pleases.
Only they never realize it, of course, or if they do they must doom themselves.'

‘It's not the same in our time,' said Bryant. ‘Everyone thinks they're the bee's knees.'

‘What I'm saying to you is, I attracted audiences not because of what I said or did, but because of who I was. Not how I was born but who I thought I could become. I created
meself
. I wore a special suit and shoes with raised heels. I tanned on the beach, brilliantined me hair and bleached me teeth, and I dazzled them. Do you see?'

‘No, not really,' said Bryant honestly.

‘There are two tricks to fooling people, laddie. One is to make yourself invisible. The other is to be the most visible fellow in the room.'

‘I don't see how this helps our investigation,' said Bryant, emptying vinegar from his plate into the sea.

‘No, but you will in the century after next. Because you're wrong; underneath all the nonsense people never change. What you
think
you see is what you see. See?' Salterton arose with an audible crack of the knees. ‘I weren't bamboozling them with my cleverness. I'm not that smart. They just liked t' look of me. I was all “gawk, tousle and shucks”, as we say round our way. The trouble with you is, you always think murderers are clever. Truth is, most of 'em are as slow as a tortoise.' He checked his pocket watch. ‘It's nearly intermission; I must be getting on. I'm producing coins out of kiddies' ears in the foyer. Sometimes they get stuck right inside and I have to use me rubber tube. The parents kick up a fuss but it's better than doing nowt. You have to keep working when it's in t' blood.'

Bryant rose also. The sun had vanished behind a lone cloud and it had grown suddenly cold.

‘One other thing,' said Salterton, looking back. ‘Spoons. You're on the right track, but don't be too diverted by the spoons. Think about them lads and lasses in t' Congo. You gave that book to Dr Gillespie.'

And with that the ancient performer vanished through the swing doors of the variety hall, leaving Bryant alone on the pier.

Well, this is an interesting development
, he thought.
My hallucinations seem to be leaving me cryptic clues.
For a minute he looked through the planks and watched the green waves crashing far below. Then, pulling his scarf more tightly around his throat, he headed back to the seafront.

When he awoke, somebody called the police.

‘He's all right, he's not far away,' said Raymond Land, cutting the call. ‘There's some kind of theatre at the back of King's Cross Station. They're doing a version of
The Railway Children
.'

‘I should have thought of that,' said Fraternity DuCaine. ‘They've built the stage around a railway siding and a real old-fashioned steam train comes in during the show.'

‘An usher found him in one of the carriage compartments,' said Land. ‘He timed his escape well. I only nipped out to buy some socks. He says he doesn't remember anything. John, can you go over and get him? If he cuts up rough stick him in bracelets if you have to, just don't bring him back here. Take him home and call the doctor. This has gone far enough.'

‘I'm on my way,' said May, grabbing a coat.

‘How did he get out?' Land demanded to know. ‘I knew we should never have let him come back.'

‘We were supposed to be watching him,' said Longbright. ‘I didn't see his door open. We've been busy. We don't have Jack any more, and with Colin, Meera and Fraternity out on rounds there aren't enough of us here to provide proper cover.'

‘It's taking a toll on all of us, Janice,' said Land. ‘I had to cancel my watercolour course two weeks ago. Thirty quid down the drain. It's about quality of life, not just the ackers. I get a nervous rash if I don't sit myself behind a piece of Daler board at least once a month.'

Janice decided to ask the one question no one else had dared to broach. ‘What are we going to do without Arthur? There's no unit without him.'

‘Do you really think so?'

‘Yes, of course.'

‘Then it'll be our job to prove that's not the case. We're a unit, not a one-man band.' Land didn't sound as if he believed himself.

‘I understand, but he lifts us to another level, you must see that,' Longbright persisted. ‘Nobody else thinks like him, not even John.' The argument, she realized, was pointless. Right now it would probably suit Raymond to get the unit closed once and for all and take the redundancy package, but what about the rest of them?

She could see what was about to happen. With Arthur out of the way, Darren Link would set spies in their midst to gain the intelligence he needed, and the rest would be a mere formality. This situation had been building for months. For the first time she started to think about getting out, and what she would do in the aftermath.

Alma Sorrowbridge had wrapped Bryant in a tartan blanket and placed him in front of the electric fire so that he looked like a crofter who'd just returned from a long day of peat-cutting. She attempted to dry what little hair he had with a towel, but he irritably shrugged her off. The night was one of secret rain, a London speciality, where you couldn't see the rain falling but knew it must be because the roads were shining.

May shook his head as he accepted a mug of tea. ‘I can't ask them to take you back, Arthur. I know you'll just bolt again the second we take our eyes off you. Where did you think you were going?'

‘Brighton, back in time,' muttered Bryant miserably. ‘Old Gillespie warned me about hallucinations but he couldn't explain why they might occur. Now I think I know.'

‘So what do you think is happening?'

‘My subconscious has gone into overdrive. I'm not sharp enough to handle the case because of my memory loss, so something below my level of consciousness has awoken to try and help me deal with it.'

‘That would mean these delusions are there for a purpose. What did you think you saw?'

‘This time? I met up with an old family friend. He was an entertainer on the pier, a magician like his father and grandfather before him. They all kept the same stage name. Actually, I think it must have been Dudley's grandfather that I met up with.'

May sniffed. ‘You smell of vinegar.'