Nightrise (19 page)

In the sudden shadows inside the barn Dryden let his eyes piece the familiar images together. In the Second World War Italian PoWs had been billeted at Buskeybay and they'd built a theatre here in the barn – you could still see the remnants of a painted Proscenium Arch under the hayloft. On the far wall was the sketchy outline of a Tuscan landscape – single dark green firs, olive trees and a domed church. Dryden had played here as a boy. The place had held a kind of stage magic, as if all the drama played out within it lingered in the wood. Sadness too – the most enduring kind of sadness – homesickness. It made him shiver even now in the heat of the day, the thought of the Italians huddled in here on a misty fen winter's night.

After Dryden's mother had died and New Farm had been sold, Roger had agreed to store the family's stuff that Dryden couldn't use on the boat – he didn't have much space, so he took a few pictures, an old corkscrew of his father's, his mother's secateurs from the window ledge by the kitchen door. They'd got rid of almost all the rest at auction. The dregs – furniture, books, the papers – they'd put up in the hayloft. Only a week before Roger had said he should come by, see if there was anything they'd like for the new house.

The boards of the half-loft had been swept and two long rolls of roofing material piled along the back wall. But in one corner stood five objects Dryden recognized: a set of golf clubs, a weathered cardboard box that he knew contained a Hornby 00 train set, a kite, a Spanish guitar and a trunk he'd used as a toy box as a child. Opening it now he smelled old paper – it was full of documents and files. He sat back on his heels. It was nearly twenty years since he'd last had a cigarette but he felt the need now, quite urgently, because if he had one he could prolong the moment.

The deeds for Burnt Fen – at least copies – lay on top. He picked up a bundle of papers and they fell from his hands, slewed across the boards.

He saw the edge of a newspaper cutting and pulled it out. It was from the
Barnet Times
.

TEACHER SUSPENDED OVER DEATH OF BOY ON SCIENCE FIELD TRIP

Dryden's legs had gone to sleep so he stood up, holding the cutting. It was the phrase ‘watched my son die' which made him wonder how his father had dealt with the stress, the blame. But the dark heart of the story – the moment when the boy drowned – was still within a black box. Why had Toby Michaels drowned if he was a good swimmer? Why had his father agreed to lead the trip if he couldn't swim?

The newspaper cutting at least gave him a precise date. He was confident he could track down other articles, get a fuller picture; he owed his father that, whether he was the man who died in the floodwaters of 1977 or the man who died in the white van at Manea only last week.

Dryden put the file aside and picked up the next marked ROGER in red capitals. The birth certificate was on the top – all the papers held by a bull-clip. Born April 3, 1951. Hammersmith Hospital. Father's profession listed as school teacher, mother's as office worker. The bull clip slipped and the papers spilt on the floor so he picked them up at random: an HGV licence, an old passport with one corner snipped off, a degree certificate: a 2:1 in natural sciences from Cambridge.

Then he saw his mother's writing, a schoolteacher's hand, clear and unfussy, on a single brown padded envelope which had been sealed but opened. Inside were her own documents and his father's. He held their marriage certificate – the original. And his mother's birth certificate, but not his father's. Had it been in the envelope when sealed? His mother's death certificate was there too: original – the cause of death oblique, lost in Latin.

And then something he didn't expect: his father's death certificate. The original.

‘That's not right,' he said, out loud, the noise startling a bird on the roof, which clattered away. If there had been a death certificate there'd have been no life after 1977: no state pension, no medical card, no dental records, no bank account, no driving licence. How could someone have pretended to be Jack Dryden – or indeed –
been
Jack Dryden – after 1977, if there had been a death certificate? The certificate meant he was officially dead.

Dryden smelled the paper: it reeked of the pre-digital age and had been issued at Swaffham Prior Register Office six months after his father had been swept away off Welch's Dam. Five months after he'd first gone with his mother to see the registrar, Philip Trelaw, and been told they had to wait for the body to be found. But the body had never been found. So how could there be a certificate?

And then he thought he remembered something else. That as he'd shook Trelaw's hand that day as a seven-year-old he'd thought:
I shall meet this man again.

T
he Crow
's library was called the ‘morgue' like all newspaper libraries. The centrepiece was a wooden cabinet with little drawers marked with a single letter of the alphabet. Inside was an index of small brown envelopes, each one a person, each one containing clippings from
The Crow
– or its sister paper the
Ely Express
– or from other local or national newspapers. There was one item for Trelaw. A story taken from
The Crow
for 1979 – two years after Jack Dryden's ‘death'. The registrar had complained about the conduct of two families from Littleport who'd turned up for a register office wedding in Swaffham.

In the quiet of the morgue Dryden read out the key paragraph: ‘Clearly one gets used to the groom and best man being – possibly – slightly jolly,' said Mr Trelaw. ‘I don't suppose a glass of champagne before the event does too much harm. But these people were partying – several brought cans into the ceremony and someone was sick in the civic suite. I like dancing but I think it is inappropriate before the ceremony, let alone during it. We cannot condone this kind of behaviour so I refused to complete the ceremony.'

‘Good for you,' said Dryden. Attached to the clipping was a paragraph from
The Sun
based on the same item.

The Crow
couldn't afford a librarian – even part-time – to keep things up to date, a problem which undermined its reliability. They had past copies on microfiche and both the papers were now held digitally on a database. But the three systems not only overlapped, they missed each other out, creating blind spots in the record.

He went back to his own desk and flipped open the diary. His only appointment for the weekend was that evening out on Petit Fen to meet Sheila Petit and he could do that on the way home. So he had time – time to dig. He fired up his iMac laptop. He hadn't been in the office for several days so a pile of post stood two-feet high in his tray, roughly mimicking the tilt of the Tower of Pisa. It didn't bother him. News arrived by email these days, or text, or flashed up on to a website. The post was largely irrelevant except for fat official surveys or government reports.

The blinds were down on the bay window into Market Street so he had his desk light on. The office was always locked up on Saturday but the front counter stayed open and he could hear voices down below through the floorboards. Outside, close by, he could hear a busker singing ‘Yesterday'
.

He fed ‘Trelaw' into the digital database for
The Crow
and got a lot of articles on a local bowls player who'd got through to the world championships in Preston. A picture appeared across two columns: a thin man, with weak arms and an old face. Certainly not the Trelaw he was looking for. The search put up nearly fifty items and he was on the ninth page when he saw a one par filler on the appointment of a new registrar at Burwell to replace Philip Trelaw – who was looking forward to taking up another appointment with West Fen District Council – the exact nature of which wasn't specified, which made him think Trelaw's enthusiasm might be manufactured.

The next item mentioned the same Trelaw – now described as the ‘former registrar of the East Fens'. He stood beside a gleaming classic Rover – grey, polished like a diamond, with an AA insignia in the front grille. The story said Trelaw had set up a club for Rover owners with the P4 model living in the Fens, and already had 100 members. This was the man Dryden had seen that day at Swaffham Prior – big, bony, with sloping shoulders. The article referred to Trelaw as a security officer for the district council.

The council site had a list of staff and Trelaw was listed under CCTV unit. There was a direct line so he had a desk job, and the address was the town hall in Ely. He put CCTV into the council search engine and got a page which outlined the service. In Ely there were thirty-six high-definition public cameras: black globes of glass on posts sprouting spikes to stop offenders snapping up the ultimate souvenir of a drunken night out – a security camera. The screens were ‘live' 24/7 – although the site didn't claim they were filming 24/7. The pictures were monitored by staff, one of whom was present at all times. Dryden had an eye for this kind of equivocation – note
present
, so not necessarily viewing the CCTV.

The page stated under ‘history' that the unit had opened on January 1, 2008 – just in time to miss any trouble over New Year's Eve. He wound up the microfiche machine and got the
The Crow
for the first week of that year. There was an article on page three showing the unit in operation, a staff of eight, Trelaw in the background.

Dryden went back to his desk to take a note of the number for CCTV. As he did so he saw that the parcel holding up his tower of post had the name and address of the sender on the side in capital letters:

ROGER STUTTON

BUSKEYBAY FARM

NEAR ISLEHAM

ELY

CB6 6GY

It was dated the day before he'd found Roger's body. Posted at Ely.

He couldn't stop himself looking round the room. The window's blinds were shut, the door closed, but he stood to make double sure by locking it from the inside.

Had two people been murdered for this parcel? For what lay inside?

The idea of just taking it to the incident room, to Kross and Mahon, never entered his mind. The extent to which he'd been excluded from the investigation was an insult he found it difficult to forget. After all, it had been his uncle who died out at River Bank, and it might be his father whose death had, according to Kross, triggered the whole series of events. Why shouldn't he look first, then report to Kross? The package was addressed to
him.
And sometimes curiosity is a force of nature.

It was eighteen inches long and otherwise nine-inch square in cross-section, like a CD box set but bigger. Dryden tore the paper off but when he saw the next layer of material – that greasy waterproof pouching fishermen use for wallets – he knew his uncle had probably found it out on Adventurers' Mere when he was laying his traps.

The busker outside had been through his repertoire and was back with ‘Yesterday'
.

There was a single piece of loose paper in the package with the words FOR SAFE KEEPING written in hurried capitals. And the note triggered a sound – his uncle's voice on the telephone that last time: ‘Come to think of it – I have a mystery for you.' He'd tell him when he saw him. But he never saw him.

With a pair of scissors Dryden cut open the oiled plastic package to reveal within a whole series of smaller packages – like the individual DVDs in the box set, but fatter, and supple. He counted them out – twenty-five. Each envelope could be opened like a CD wallet. Each had a name on the front in capital letters in a Gothic black script.

PAUL ROBYNS, JAMES EWART, PETER RADCLIFFE. He flicked on, somehow sensing that this was important, this small act of thoroughness.

Then he saw a name that stopped his fingers moving: SAMUEL SETCHEY.

He thought of Rory Setchey hanging from the irrigator. A rare name, even in the Fens.