Free Strange Tide by Christopher Fowler

flustered.
    Morwenna took charge. She came over and stood before him with her hands on her dimpled fat knees. ‘Do you know where you are?’ she asked, kindly enough, but speaking loudly as if to a child.
    â€˜Of course I do, you silly woman,’ Bryant snapped. ‘I’m at number seventeen, Albion House, Harrison Street, Bloomsbury.’
    â€˜No,’ she said, flourishing her palm at the rest of the view behind her, ‘you’re in the soft-furnishings department of British Home Stores, Oxford Street.’
    He looked around and took stock of the scene. Shoppers were drifting about, hypnotized by swivel chairs, standard lamps and other knick-knackery. He looked down at himself. He was wearing his oldest and most worn-out brown tweed suit. He had one torn sock and there were mud splashes all over his legs. ‘I’m most frightfully sorry,’ he said, trying to extricate himself from the sofa’s powerful gravitational pull and failing. ‘I seem to have lost my bearings for a moment.’
    â€˜Here,’ said the sales lady, a look of empathy crossing her features. ‘Give me your hand.’ And reaching down she gently pulled him to his feet, patiently waiting until he had found his sea-legs.
    â€˜Thank you, Morwenna,’ he said, grateful for this small gesture of kindness. ‘I’m afraid my confusion about being here is far greater than yours. I’m sorry about all the books.’
    â€˜Well, I hope you find what you’re looking for,’ she said, watching him go before turning to berate her junior employee.
    Find what I’m looking for
, thought Bryant as he tacked towards the exit.
Fat chance of that. I’ve lost my mind. How can I ever find that again?
    As he stepped out among the blank-faced shoppers of Oxford Street, there before him at the pavement’s edge was a familiar figure. John May, resplendent in his navy Savile Row overcoat, was standing beside a waiting black cab, welcoming him towards its open door.

7

HIDDEN & DROWNED
    â€˜What were you doing there, anyway?’ asked May as they settled back in the taxi for the short journey to King’s Cross.
    â€˜I think I meant to buy something for Alma’s birthday,’ Bryant decided. He always picked up a little gift for her, a china owl for her collection, or bedsocks (prior to his discovery that no woman in the world liked being bought bedsocks). Alma Sorrowbridge had been his landlady for decades, and had moved with him to a flat in Bloomsbury after they had foolishly mislaid their old home. Although it had been agreed that they would now share on equal terms, the devout Antiguan found herself cooking and cleaning for her former tenant, a role she adopted with an air of resignation, feeling it was God’s will that she should do so, although why this devotion should extend to peeling his corn plasters off the cooker hood – he tended to treat them like Post-it notes – was beyond her.
    â€˜What, and then you confused the shop with your home?’
    â€˜I suppose I must have done. I really have no idea how I got there.’
    â€˜So how did you remember that it was her birthday?’
    Bryant rattled his lips. ‘Oh, that’s easy. November the eighteenth, 1686. It’s exactly three hundred and thirty years after Charles-François Félix famously operated on King Louis XIV of France’s anal fistula. In order not to incur the wrath of the king, he first practised the surgery on several peasants. Understandably, most of them died in agony. It’s also the day of the state funeral of the Duke of Wellington in 1852, the end of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, the date of the first appearance of Mickey Mouse in
Steamboat Willie
in 1928 and Alma’s birthday.’
    â€˜So you can remember all that, but not where you live?’
    â€˜Oh, I’ve always favoured abstruse facts over prosaic ones.’ Bryant removed his damp felt