Nightrise (16 page)

‘It's not nothing, is it. It's my father's life.'

‘The boy drowned.'

As soon as she said it he knew he'd known, on some level where fears are made, inherited, perhaps.

‘Your father was haunted by water. Attracted – then repelled. He couldn't shake the memory of it. After he died your mother talked about it – once, at Buskeybay. You were playing with Laurie in the yard. The first Christmas after Jack died.'

‘What did she say?'

‘She said she'd been afraid sometimes that he'd take his own life – to stop the memory. It was a thing he had to live with, Philip. But sometimes it was too much and she felt she couldn't help.'

Dryden thought then that he hadn't inherited this fear; he'd somehow taken it in in some form of emotional osmosis. Soaked it up: the lethal attraction of water. And then he knew exactly what his mother had thought the day his father had been swept away. ‘She thought he'd given up? Let himself be taken away by the water?'

‘She wondered. We'll not know, will we? Ever.'

‘Maybe he just wanted to get away – away from the farm, surrounded by water. Maybe he took the chance to leave us before he hurt us. He took the chance to be alone.'

They sat in silence and the pine trees shimmered in the thinnest of breezes.

‘Thank you for telling me. It explains a lot.'

‘They weren't unhappy.'

‘I know. I don't remember any unhappiness. But there was a tension there – and now I know what it was. And that it's in me.'

He looked at the distant bank of the new mere, a mile away, hiding with its glib green facade the mass of water beyond. And another thought insinuated itself into the scheme of how things might have been. What if there was another son, what if he'd been born
before
his father went missing? Had he left one family to be with another?

‘I want to bury Roger at Manea – the cemetery there,' she said, not apologizing for distracting him from his memories.

‘It's all clay. I just couldn't bear a fen burial. Would you find a plot for me? I don't like to ask – while there's this . . .' She searched for a way forward. ‘This uncertainty about Jack – whether this man is him. I know it must be filling your mind – but could you find time for this?'

‘Of course.'

‘And the view's good and I'll have to visit and it's got a station,' she said. ‘The place is desolate but he's not going to be worried – is he? Although it's true he never loved the Fens – not like Jack.'

Dryden thought about telling her to let it be. That she had plenty of time to think about burials. But perhaps it was her way of grieving. Or her way of avoiding more questions about Jack.

The air rumbled across the fen as if there was thunder under a clear sky. They watched a heavy fuel-tanker taking off from Mildenhall – ten miles distant, rising up like a whale surfacing.

She sighed. Dryden remembered then what day it was – the day after this woman's husband had died. He'd already pushed her too far. He got her fresh coffee. Put his arm round her.

She shook her head. ‘Roger liked trees too much to love the Fens,' she said. ‘Oaks, sycamores, birch, walnut. Trees you don't see here.'

They looked around. Apart from the windbreak of pines the nearest copse was spruce. A lone, shapeless, blackthorn. ‘If you can find a nice tree at Manea that would be the spot. Although they're regimented now, cemeteries. Like caravan sites. But we can try. Would you do this for me? He'd have been grateful too.'

She seemed to force herself to look at Dryden. ‘He was very fond of you, Philip. You'll know that. I'd like you to have his watch – the compass watch, your father's watch. It was a gift – but now I think it should go back to you.'

Never a materialistic person he considered the watch, the memory of it, and was shocked how much he wanted it on his wrist. He had a craving to touch it as vivid as thirst, or hunger. And to hold it, watching the compass needle swing to the north. But now he recalled that fleeting image of Roger's body, reaching for the surface of the mere, and felt sure the wrist was watch-free.

T
he railway station which bore the town's name – Manea – was two miles beyond its last house, out on the black soil, a halt marked by a single wooden building. It looked like the set from a western. Tumbleweed Town. Dryden watched the Peterborough train set off west until it slipped from sight. There was silence but for the wind rattling the level-crossing gates. A mile away a goods train trundled towards the station on a spur-line: then stopped, carriages screeching with rusted couplings.

Walking to town he decided he should have rung Humph, despite it being Saturday morning. The cabbie always marked the beginning of the weekend with a lie-in, usually in the cab, parked down by the river in a shady spot, followed by a slap-up Full English. Instead Dryden had let Con run him into town on her way back to Buskeybay. Then he'd got the train. But he should have called Humph because this was going to take half an hour just to walk into the town. And in the Fens half an hour was an eternity of straight lines.

A car swept past at seventy, picking up speed towards the thirty mph sign. A single roadside house flew the Confederate flag. Then he saw it and realized why – subconsciously – he'd chosen to walk. A single bunch of cheap flowers in cellophane tied to a lamp post, the verge still scarred where Jack Dryden's van had slewed off the road and into the ditch, and the grass black, burnt back to the black earth. It was a thought that he'd avoided but now carried its own comfort – it was the ditch that would have killed him, not the fire. That was the point about fen roads. You were belting along at seventy mph, or eighty, and then the road started to buckle under you, a sinuous dip sending the wheels off the ground. Then you lost the road and flew into the ditch – ten feet wide, full of water. And it didn't matter what you hit: the far bank of the ditch or the water itself. The end result was the same. Your body went from seventy mph to zero in less than two seconds, and the forces involved in that tore you apart, not on the outside, but on the inside. He wouldn't even have felt the flames.

The card said: ‘In Heaven Now', and was signed ‘From No. 135'. There were two houses opposite the crash site – and he could see 134 in big numbers on the off-pink stucco. He thought it was a good thing to do even if they were God-squad. Perhaps he'd leave a tribute too, although he couldn't begin to think what he'd say. In a strange and disturbing way he had come to care less about the identity of this man who had died on a lonely road and more about the identity of his own father
before
the day he'd been washed from the flood bank. What kind of man had he been? The idol that Dryden had made of him as a boy – or an idol with a fatal flaw? How had he failed in his duties as a teacher on that field trip? Dryden had already used his iMac to try to Google up a newspaper report of the story from the time but there had been nothing online. It was nearly forty years ago. He'd have to go back to the borough records, track down dates and times. He'd go to London when this was over, go alone.

Walking, he used the mobile to call Sgt Cherry in the coroner's office. There was still no news on an official cause of death for Roger Stutton or from the lab on the DNA match with the man who'd died right here, on the road to Manea. Dryden said his visit to the victim's house had been inconclusive. Cherry promised he'd text the results when he had them.

Dryden reached the town sign. ‘Welcome to Manea,' he said out loud. ‘Twinned with Chernobyl.' He'd made the second bit up, but he enjoyed his own jokes, and he took care to pronounce the town name correctly in fen-fashion, so that it rhymed with Ely, the long
ee
a relic of Roman occupation, signifying the town stood on an island.

Manea wasn't ugly just odd, haunted by its own dead-endedness. Not a bad place, Dryden thought, to be buried. There was a strange mound in the centre, man-made, egg-shaped, and he recalled a story of some crackpot seventeenth-century plan by the king to turn the place into a port – thirty miles inland, close to the new artificial rivers built by the Dutch. A project, like the town itself, that came to nothing.

There was a Spa shop by the church, partly obscured by a tractor with giant wheels caked with dry peat. There was a video-hire shop that appeared to be closed and a pet parlour which seemed to be open. There was a hairdressers' called Curl Up And Dye. There was a pub whose windows were crowded with DIY signs advertising Happy Hour, vodka chasers and As-Much-As-You-Can-Eat suppers on Mondays. It was one of those buildings which even now, on a blazing hot fen day when you could taste dust on your lips, seemed to radiate the damp of winter.

He walked quickly through the little square and was struck by the idea that if anyone spoke he'd be unable to understand the language. The Fens had that quality of being not here, not now, of providing that small jolt you always get when you wake up in a country that isn't your own.

The cemetery was on the edge of the town, beyond a cluster of farm buildings and a brace of ugly MFI-style warehouses which seemed to be for storing grain. The whole town rested on a spit of clay – the remnants of a fossil river-bed – and the cemetery had taken up the last half-mile. Beyond a neat brick wall he could see neater gravestones, gravel drives, and a backdrop of poplars. Flowers filled a low bank, an arrangement of blooms picking out the word GRANDMA.

The crematorium was fifties built, of a utility design with all the grace of a toilet block on a camp site. But beyond it was what looked like a caretaker's house: stately, late Victorian, but rendered stark by a lack of curtains and an ugly information board showing a plan of the cemetery like a Tube map for the dead. A metal sign stuck in the flower border pointed to the house and said: Office.

Dryden walked in through an open door. There were no carpets and the floor boards were unpolished. The hallway smelt of tomato plants and oil – the source of the latter being obvious: a motorbike stood on the lino blocking the way forward to the kitchen. Dryden knew it was not any old bike but a Harley Davidson, the model spelt out in a fluid gold script: Electra Glide. It was probably second hand but still must have cost a cool  20,000. The bikes were a local fad. William Harley, one of the founders, was the son of a fenman who'd emigrated to the Mid-west in the 1900s. Dryden had covered several of the annual Harley Davidson conventions held in late summer. Strings of bikes roared across the flatlands, the riders trailing greying ponytails.

There were footsteps down the stairs – two at a time – and a man appeared drying his hands with a J-Cloth. He was thirty-five, perhaps forty, with one of those buoyant chests that men get if they do lots of exercise to expand their lungs – running, squash, rugby. Or joining the Army. But he had long, well-brushed black hair and wore jeans and a T-shirt for the Ely Folk Festival. The smell he brought with him was a cliché too: cannabis, an unmistakable earthy tang.

He smiled with the confidence of someone who thinks they have charm. ‘She's beautiful, right?' he said, caressing the fuel tank and offering his spare hand. ‘Billy Johns.'

‘She
is
beautiful,' said Dryden, wondering about the gender, thinking that the object didn't radiate anything feminine to him.

‘Yeah. Great thing about the Fens – especially out here. Great bike country.'

Dryden had thought before that the Fens were essentially a US landscape-mathematical, Great Plains-flat. Easy Rider country.

They went into the office which held a single security video screen, a safe, a locked filing cabinet – or rather a cabinet with locks – and an empty swivel chair. Dryden noted a can of Special Brew on the blotter, the tab pulled, and an unopened can of Red Bull.

‘How can I help?' said Johns, his hands lose by his side, globes of knuckle on tanned stringy arms. His eyes swam slightly, green, but beneath a milky wash. Dryden wondered if he was always high.

‘Philip Dryden –
The Crow
at Ely. I think Mr Dudley-Rice rang?'

‘The Yorubas,' he said, looking businesslike. ‘The people who lost their baby. I'm Superintendent here. It's all down to me.' He laughed at the pomposity of the title. ‘Caretaker, dogsbody.'

Dryden liked him a little bit more for taking responsibility.

‘Tea? Or shall we just do it. There's a burial at ten – it's dug, but I need to check things out. There's time either way.'

‘Tea's good,' said Dryden because he was a reporter, and it almost always paid to take your time. The Fleet Street foot-in-the-door model was the exception, not the rule. Softly, softly was almost always better.

Johns plugged in a kettle and arranged cups. While they waited for it to boil Dryden asked idle questions. Johns had been at the cemetery for fifteen years since leaving college. His father was an undertaker, his grandfather too. He'd grown up in the business. In his own way he was still in it. He just had more freedom. His own boss, unless someone from the town hall came past, and they hardly ever did. ‘Unless they're in a box,' he said. Graveyard humour suited him.

He mashed tea bags and led the way out to a bench in the memorial garden he'd clearly used earlier because there was a small iron ornamental table and that morning's
Guardian
open on the grass beside it, weighted with a piece of stone broken off a memorial – an angel's foot.

‘My uncle's just died,' said Dryden. ‘He lived out at Buskeybay.'

Johns watched him over the surface of his mug of tea. ‘I'm sorry. Illness?'

‘He was murdered. Probably.' It was the first time Dryden had used the word and it was a shock. It begged questions: like who and why. He couldn't imagine Roger creating an enemy – not consciously. He'd been so separate from the lives of others.