Nightrise (22 page)

‘A moment,' he said to Humph, leaving the door open. The cabbie fumbled for his fluffy earphones.

An etched brick over the chapel door read: 1887. The narrow windows were in green glass. The building, Dryden knew, was hired out to various groups but was home to just one. He'd done a story on them the previous summer. A sign, in the style of a hymn board, was nailed to the brickwork and read:

LITTLEPORT HARLEY DAVIDSON SOCIETY.

Artwork included a motorcycle – with long praying-mantis handlebars – and an open road. Dryden had been past on evenings when the bikers met: gleaming machines lined up on the bank top, men with thinning hair drinking tea from flasks. He wondered if Billy Johns, cemetery warden, ever joined them. He doubted it, having sensed a loner who sought private pleasures.

The chapel's biggest crowd turned up on a Sunday for a Catholic Mass. The migrant workers in the fields were mostly Portuguese, Polish, Letts – and most were Roman Catholics, billeted in caravans and mobile homes scattered amongst the farms. A priest came out from Ely to take the service. Dryden had done the story and a picture caption had made the
Guardian.

There were two cars parked on the hard standing beside the chapel. One was Sheila Petit's Morris Minor – railway green, a polished wooden shooting-break, a Save Petit Fen sticker in the windscreen. The other a four-by-four, a Hyundai, spattered in mud, with a gundog barking in the back.

She was inside drinking coffee from a flask with a young man Dryden didn't recognize: twenty, twenty-five, the outdoor type, with a fen wind-tan and red peat ingrained on his hands.

‘It's you,' she said. ‘Everyone else has gone. I suppose you do
want
this story?'

Dryden enjoyed her cantankerous nature. Out in the Fens – even in Ely – most people didn't want an argument. You could get someone to agree to two contradictory ideas quite easily, to your face. Only later might you discover, from a third party, that they had their own opinion. Sheila Petit didn't need third parties.

‘Hi,' said the young man. ‘Edward Petit.'

‘My nephew,' said Sheila Petit. ‘He runs the Home Farm.' Dryden knew the family still ran the land around the old house but he was pretty sure it was rented now, off one of the big agri-companies.

‘I better go. I've got an irrigator running.' He smiled at Dryden and the family resemblance was clear – the strong jaw, the wire-like hair.

Petit didn't watch him go, which was cold of her, but in character. Then she smiled; the smile of the victor.

‘Vee will have told you.' She was nodding, looking at Dryden, but already he could sense she was somewhere else. Speaking to an audience, perhaps, hundreds of expectant faces turned to listen.

‘I think we've done it, Dryden. Stopped this mad scheme in its tracks. Saved the fen. This is history.
History
. Right now, right here. More than three hundred years ago they created this place out of marsh and reed. Created villages, and farms, and churches, and homes for the people who would work on the land: land won from the water.'

Her voice echoed slightly in the old room, bouncing back off the plastered walls, the wooden-beamed roof.

‘This government was going to turn the clock back. What for? To balance the nation's books because some bunch of City whizz kids don't understand the concept of acceptable risk. Bankers, betting billions on a roulette wheel. This was
risk
.' She was almost shouting now, her arms out, encompassing the Fens. ‘Giving a fortune to Dutch engineers to drain a swamp. But this was worth it – because when the water finally left the land they'd created thousands of acres of the best farmland in England – in Europe. Peat – rich, black and deep.'

She produced a flask and poured herself tea, realizing, perhaps, that her flight of oratory had gone too far.

‘Now we've stopped them,' she said simply. ‘Stopped them dead.'

Dryden tried to look impressed but felt uneasy in the presence of a zealot.

She stood, hand on hip, and gave him the details he wanted. It wasn't so much a briefing as a public reading. They were going to stop the proposed re-flooding scheme by buying a crucial strip of land in the middle of the fen. ‘I like to think of it as a poison pill, you see. You want to flood this fen you need to buy this strip of land. And – once we've finalized the purchase – we're never going to sell. And they won't be able to buy – ever. It's all wrapped up in a trust. Absolutely no way of freeing it up ever again. It's the perfect solution. A final solution.' It was a mark of the kind of person Sheila Petit was that she could use such a reference without hesitation.

The money for the purchase came from an anonymous
donor. ‘Local,' said Petit. ‘I'm going to
be a bit reluctant to provide detail here. There're reasons.
How about we say the donation is around  20,000. I'd like to leave the actual extent of the land a bit vague – but the point is that doesn't matter. It could be an inch wide and still be as effective, because they can't flood it unless they own all the land. So you see – it could just as well be a postage stamp.'

‘But it's on Petit Fen?'

‘Yes.'

Dryden had brought an OS map of the fen with him, with the proposed area to be flooded mapped out.

‘The government says this scheme – unlike the one that created Adventurers' Mere – would be different. That there'd be marsh, dry ground and woodland.'

‘That's what they said about Adventurers' Mere – look at it,' said Petit. ‘I don't blame them entirely – I'm not some flat-earther. I know that global warming exists. Sea levels are rising. Once you let the water on to the land it will get deeper – not now maybe, but one day, then the sea will be back. That's the end game here. The return of the sea. And Ely – an island once again. But that day has not arrived, Dryden. It's decades away, possibly centuries. The fight needs to go on.'

Dryden memorized the quote.

Taking a red pencil she drew a thin line across the map – roughly from north-west to south-east – right across the proposed flooded area. ‘That's it – broadly.'

‘What if they go for compulsory purchase?'

‘Our advice is that's a long shot. We're talking a referral to the Secretary of State. The High Court, maybe. But one of the attractions of this scheme is that we can lock the land up in a very complicated trust system which actually makes it very hard for any purchaser – compulsory or otherwise, or else I could have just used Petit Hall to stop them. But they could have used compulsory purchase on that, and while I'm prepared to fight, I can't vouch for those who come after me – can I?'

It was a rhetorical question. Dryden knew little about Petit's family – only that her husband had died young and there was a son.

‘The trust we create will be bound by covenants preventing sale,' said Petit. ‘Getting round those will require the full majesty of the law, Dryden. And the great thing about that is it costs the earth and will take years.' She laughed; a kind of hearty bark. ‘Even if they got it we'd exact a price. Then we'd have more money to buy land with – we'd get ahead of them every time. Which is why we want the publicity, of course. Once the local landowners know the government isn't the only show in town they'll up their prices. It's perfect.'

She was locking the door when Dryden asked the question he'd come to ask. Humph was out of the cab rolling the ball along the road for Boudicca. Laura stood fifty yards away, her face turned to the setting sun. The local squad car was fifty yards down the road, all the doors open, both occupants apparently asleep in the front seats – heads back, the thin strain of a radio crackling on the hot air.

‘Do you remember when the fen had its own registrar – this is back in the seventies? There was an office at Swaffham Prior which would have covered Petit Fen – the back droves.' The back droves was an area of fen crossed by mathematically ruled roads at half-mile intervals. The goods line to Newmarket ran across the landscape creating a series of unmanned level crossings. Remote, backward, it was a byword for rural obscurity.

Petit pocketed the key.

‘The registrar was called Trelaw. Philip Trelaw,' said Dryden.

‘Yes. Why?' She asked the question but she was already walking away towards her car.

‘You met him?'

‘I guess. Several times. I think he signed Edward's birth certificate, in fact. And Martyn's.'

‘Your son?'

‘We had a party at the town hall in Chatteris one Christmas,' she said, ignoring the question. ‘We run the registration service locally – births, deaths and marriages, although the data is centralized at Kew, I think.'

It was typical, thought Dryden, that she could refer to West Fen District Council as ‘we'.

‘So he came – this Trelaw. Shabby man – a giant. Typical in many ways of the fenman – hulking. Poor shoes – brown.'

Dryden nodded. He was always fascinated by the different ways people judged each other. Looking at shoes was a common tic amongst the well-heeled. It was never about how old the shoes were – always the colour, the polish. He looked at his own – leather, battered, red peat dust caked around the laces.

‘There was a time when such a position demanded certain attributes,' said Petit. ‘Education. Erudition. Still, one shouldn't mock the afflicted . . .'

‘Afflicted?'

‘It's very rare, you know – out on the fen.' She looked directly at the spot where the sun was just disappearing. ‘The demon drink. You'd think – well, I'd think . . .' She laughed at herself and Dryden liked her for a moment. ‘I'd think that the boredom of it, the days when then there's no sky, the grey days, that they would drive you to a vice, a vehicle of escape.'

Dryden thought that was an eloquent phrase: vehicle of escape.

‘Perhaps it was opium once – that seems to suit the fen character, don't you think, Dryden? Morose, self-contained.'

She smiled, opening her mouth wide so that she revealed the slightly crooked oversized teeth. ‘Insular.'

She got in the car, leaving the door open, so that Dryden had to squat down. ‘But drink is rare. No pubs out here . . . Not much money in the pocket. Market days were always lively – but other than that . . . So Trelaw stood out.'

Dryden tried to recall Trelaw from the visit he'd made to the register office at Swaffham more than thirty years before. A big man, yes. And she was right about shambling. But the worse for drink? He didn't think he'd have noticed the signs. He'd had a baby-like face, he recalled. So maybe flushed, a little shiny.

‘It did for him in the end – or so we thought,' she said. ‘Kidneys packed up so he had to go on dialysis. No way he could do that and keep the job. I remember the issue coming up – I was on personnel at the time. No suggestion we'd let him go, of course. Quite rightly in many ways – you have a duty, don't you, to an employee. You shouldn't be able to just walk away. So we found him a job, in Ely, I think – highways? Somewhere close enough to the hospital anyway. Why?'

‘I need to talk to him. I thought you'd know some background.'

‘He's still alive then?'

‘Yes. Probably. Surprised?'

‘Yes. Bloody amazed. I think we were given to understand the disease would kill him. Dialysis would help – but in those days fancy transplants were rare. And as I say, he'd given the bottle a pretty good thump. I thought he'd be dead in the year.'

‘Who got his job?'

‘No one got his job. Well, we named a successor but he never got his feet under the table. We took the chance to centralize – just the office in Chatteris now. So that's his claim to fame, Dryden. He was the fen's last registrar.'

Dryden watched her drive away, the Morris turning on half-a-sixpence and heading east. He recalled that while she still lived in Petit Hall she'd rented most of it out, converted to flats.

As Dryden followed her east he looked in the rear-view mirror but there was nothing behind them but the tracking squad car. The road itself, which the map said was a straight line, buckled in the last tangled folds of the day's heat, like a twisting tail.

D
ryden had found the webcam by a process of deduction. The FenFishing website showed a view along a stretch of the Little Ouse with a houseboat in the distance, and, on closer examination, there was a single church tower on the horizon – a Dutch-style leaded pinnacle. He'd spread the OS map out on the kitchen floor. The only candidate for the spire was St Mary's Southery – The South Island – a Norfolk village on the edge of the Black Fen. He'd taken a still from the webcam and zoomed in on the spire, looking for something in the foreground which he could match with the lead pinnacle: and there it was, on the far bank, a wooden landing, long disused, but still with three steps – rough wooden planks, and hanging from a post a mooring rope.

He'd tried again to ring Setchey's number at Hythe House, and a mobile number he'd squeezed out of a contact at the water authority, but there'd been no answer on either. So he thought he'd try a long-shot. The spot on the webcam was two miles from Flightpath Cottages. The first time he'd missed it because there was no sign of the lead spire but then he realized that the silvery metal was reflecting the sky perfectly – reflected any sky perfectly, like a shard of mirror. Then he'd seen rooks circling it and realized his mistake. He'd been twice now – at dusk or just after – and each time he'd sent an email to the website, and a time when he'd return. He didn't believe in third time lucky but he'd give it a go. This time at dawn. He left the house at just after four, the air thrillingly cool.

When he reached the spot the sun was rising – like a headlamp, emerging between trees on the edge of Thetford Forest, burning off a water mist. There was an iron sluice gate with a brick footing. The round handle of the sluice meshed to a cog wheel and a vertical piston. The camera, no larger than a watch-face, was bolted to the machinery and had been covered in hessian painted to match the rust. A wire, also camouflaged, ran up the piston which stood proud of the sluice by four or five feet, providing an aerial to transmit the image.