Nightrise (25 page)

‘That's right.'

‘And they wouldn't consider a transplant because of the heavy drinking. The cost too in those days – the cost to the NHS. There'd be a waiting list and you'd be the last person they'd put on it. A middle-aged alcoholic.'

Trelaw's eyes had filled with water. ‘It was a complex decision. My decision. A private decision.'

Trelaw was shaking – Dryden could see that now – very slightly, but at a very high frequency. Buzzing.

Dryden didn't back off. ‘So – what I think is – if we're looking for a motive as to why in 1977 you saw fit to sell my father's identity I'd suggest that you had to buy a kidney transplant on the open market. And that's what you did – because I don't think you're teetotal now – are you?

‘What did it cost –  10,000? Maybe more if you had to travel. So – for the sake of it – let's say that happened. You sold the ID for  20,000 and got yourself a new kidney. Is that wrong?'

‘Yes. I borrowed the money for the operation –  17,000, actually. Although of course it's cost me much more – much, much more. Five times that – six, because I wanted the job back. So I did something very stupid. I went to a loan company. I'm still paying. I'll always still be paying because I didn't read the small print. I have a job but I live the life of a pauper. I pay back every week of my life. If I'd sold your father's identity my life would be very different.'

He straightened his cuffs.

Dryden thought he'd chosen his words carefully. ‘I hope you're telling the truth.'

‘Why?' asked Trelaw, as if he was speaking to a child.

‘Because you're going to have to tell it all again – to the police. I think they'll check the details.'

Trelaw looked at his watch. ‘I've already spoken to the police. In fact, it was Detective Inspector Friday I told.' Another weak smile. ‘You see, it wasn't my duty to inform the central authorities – the GRO. I was a district registrar for the East Fens. We took all our paperwork by hand into Chatteris once a week. That's HQ for the service – has been since the mid-seventies. The office there dealt with London. If the notification failed to get through it was because someone didn't do their job at Chatteris, or in London, or in Southport. I think that's where Detective Inspector Friday has taken his questions. It's where you should have taken yours.'

Dryden felt like a fool, which made him angry, and being angry made his brain buzz, and so – with a kind of desperate relief – he saw there was a flaw in Trelaw's logic.

‘Right. But what if you didn't send them the paperwork? What if you kept the documents? It was months after my dad's death anyway – I don't expect the office at Chatteris could track all the deaths in the district.'

‘There will be records. When we take the certificates in they take a note. Keep a diary.' An emotion finally fought its way on to Trelaw's face: a hint of something devious in his small dark eyes. ‘Mind you, back then it was paper records, of course. I've no idea what's been kept.'

Trelaw struggled to his feet. His spine wasn't straight but he still stood six feet tall. ‘There's a new system now – I was talking to someone in the department the other week. Digital images – all by computer. But then it was paper, of course. I try to keep up with things. I always read
The Crow
– the death notices, carefully. Roger Stutton – at Buskeybay. His sister was Elizabeth Dryden, at Burnt Fen – that's what it said.'

‘Yes,' said Dryden. He couldn't shake off the thought that he'd somehow been threatened in a kind of devious, circular, fashion.

Trelaw held out a hand. ‘I'm sorry for your loss.'

A
UK Border Agency bus stood outside the small block of flats on Gas Holder Lane. The block was three storeys high, in concrete, with balconies in primary colours which had lost their battle with the fen sun: blazing from dawn to dusk, peeling it back to the wood. The street lay in a small district by the railway station beyond Back Hill. Very few knew about the block, which was used for problem families and short-term accommodation for council tenants. The Yorubas had been given a flat while the Home Office considered David Yoruba's appeal against deportation to his native Niger.

The TEXT from Gill Yoruba's mobile had been short and direct.

HELP, PLEASE.

The bus had barred windows, tinted grey, and was about half full. Dryden could see two faces, one black, one white, but both had exactly the same expression: a combination of exhaustion and resignation. The driver and two men he could only class as guards wore Day-Glo jackets and insignia which read CERTIO. Dryden thought it was a private-sector security company.

Three flights of exterior stairs got him up to the Yorubas' flat. He took them two at a time. Two guards, in the same livery as the men on the bus, were trying to get David Yoruba out through the front door. Dryden didn't like this moment, the one just before violence becomes clear-cut. The security men had him by the arms but in a kind of fake-assistance stance, as if he had trouble walking. And he was resisting, using every muscle in his body to prevent them moving him forward, but controlling his temper, directing all that anger inwards, not outwards. It was the moment just before something snaps.

Behind them, standing in the corridor, was Gill Yoruba, trying not to hold on to her husband, but pawing at his back nonetheless.

‘Do you have the right to do that?' asked Dryden. He took out his mobile phone and started pretending to take pictures with it. ‘I'm press. I said – do you have the right to do that?'

A third man appeared in the corridor carrying a holdall.

‘Can you stand aside, sir.' He flashed an ID wallet at Dryden. ‘I have explained to Mr and Mrs Yoruba. Mr Yoruba is required to attend at Yarl's Wood detention centre for the final tribunal into his case. He had twenty-one days' notice of the date. We do have the documentation.'

Dryden didn't see the punch but he saw David Yoruba's head flip back and a sudden flash of red blood. He lost his footing for a second and they had him out on the balcony, and down on his face, in a few seconds. Handcuffs were on swiftly and then they pulled him up again. He looked murderous, and Dryden thought he probably feared that this was it, a bitter goodbye to Britain, to his wife. Through his mind must be running every avenue still open, like a map of hell. Run for it. Head butt one of the security guards. Get back in the flat. Or let them put him on that bus. If he did that, then within a minute, his facial expression would be exactly the same as the bus's other two passengers.

‘Go, David,' she said. ‘Go. There is still a chance. I'll talk to Mr Dryden. Just trust us, David.'

One of the security guards was nodding and Dryden noticed he had blood on his lip too, but when he cleaned it away there was no cut. ‘Yeah. That's it. We might even overlook the assault.'

‘I'm a witness,' said Dryden. ‘And I'll turn up at court.'

The guards exchanged glances, trying to judge the moment.

They bundled him away and down the stairs. Yoruba looked back at his wife. ‘I will call this evening – stay by the phone,' he said, then turned to Dryden. ‘If the appeal fails do as we discussed. You will do this?'

‘Yes. I will,' said Dryden.

Gill came to the edge of the balcony and she and Dryden watched the bus pull away. She said the lawyer had advised them that if the tribunal did not allow the appeal David would be deported within seventy-two hours.

‘Tomorrow I'll go to Yarl's Wood,' said Gill. ‘I can't just stay here.'

They went inside and she made him tea. He said he'd contact the UK Border Agency and try and get a statement. If it helped he'd run the story of their missing daughter in the
Ely Express
– but that might be too late. He'd try the local MP, the MEP too. If they could apply any pressure directly on the Home Office it might help.

When he stopped talking they both listened to the silence in the flat.

‘I'm sorry – do you remember if Aque was given a death certificate?' asked Dryden. ‘You sent the council the birth certificate – a copy. But was there a death certificate?'

Aque's story had been in his mind since he'd spoken to Rory Setchey's widow, the mother of Samuel, whose identity had been stolen after just six months of life. A child, dead tragically young, buried at Manea. If they stole Jack Dryden's identity in 1977, and Samuel Setchey's in 1986, were they still in business?

Gill Yoruba's eyes seemed to brim with tears. ‘Yes. I have it. We were going to buy a stone and have it put in the cemetery – not the pauper's graves, with the rest. A memorial stone. They said we could not do this without Aque's body. Instead we can place a plaque in the memorial garden. It's not the same of course, because she's not there. She'll never be there.' She looked to the window which framed a view of a patch of allotments. ‘I had to send them the death certificate for that.'

‘I'm sorry. I know it's painful. But I need to see it.'

‘I have a copy.'

Dryden sat alone, thinking of the memorial plaque for Aque: a brass plate, like the ones you find outside a solicitors' office. A brief comfort to her parents, but little else. They'd always think of her as missing. Placeless. Lost.

Then he remembered a story he'd covered back on his first paper. It had been the 1980s and an IRA bomb had blown up a patrol in Irish border country. One of the soldiers had been local so they'd planned to give the funeral the full treatment: running copy, on press day. He'd been given the job of filing running copy from a spot in the graveyard.

The day before the funeral the news editor read in one of the nationals that the soldier's body had never been found after the blast. Nothing. So what was in the coffin? Dryden, junior reporter, was delegated to find out. He rang the undertaker and learnt a key lesson – that if he was professional in the way he did his job, he'd get answers from other professionals. So he was honest and upfront: if there was no body, what were they going to bury? The answer was common sense: any ‘remains' from the scene of the blast would be included in the coffin – scraps of clothing, bloodstained, perhaps, splinters of metal and wood and possibly bone. There were several victims of the blast – so the debris from the scene would be divided between them. Then they'd weight the coffin to match the weight of the deceased. They'd start with his uniform, his medals, his gun, and anything else the family wished to place inside. If it came up light they'd add a lead weight.

They'd covered the funeral service, with its flags and addresses. But he'd kept his distance in the graveyard. Telephoto lenses were lined up beyond a wall to take discreet shots; the Fleet Street boys smoking, not trying too hard to keep their voices down. He'd stood apart, partly shielded by a large Victorian monument to the Boer War. But he'd been struck by the sense in which the burying of the coffin was a cathartic act. Even the widow smiled, clutching her children, leading them away from the grave. And the dead man's comrades, huddled, lighting up once it was over, their voices gaining power after the family had gone, after an hour of whispers.

He'd thought then that the secret of a funeral, its potency, lay in being able to walk away and know that if you ever want to, you can go back, even if you never do. And that's what a gravestone could be: a window on the dead. And that's what the Yorubas had been denied, that connection with their daughter.

Gill Yoruba came back with the death certificate. Dryden took a note of the reference number and went online using his laptop to the GRO site – which he'd explored after his discussion with the undertaker. He went to order a copy of a death certificate and punched in the code: up came the document.

‘Right. Well – that's good. All in order.'

He smiled but she didn't smile back.

‘I wanted him to disappear,' she said. ‘I'd have gone with him. We could have started again, somewhere they didn't know us. The Midlands. He wouldn't do it.'

‘He wants to be free, and one day he wants to go home.'

‘I know.' Her face changed shape as she seemed to summon up all her bitterness. ‘Will I get to bury him there?'

T
he Beat Club had initially been a big disappointment to Dryden. He'd had in mind somewhere subterranean, moodily lit, with lava lamps placed ironically in niches above banquet seating. And one of those little cupboard offices on the stairs where a shady character took your coat and gave you a raffle ticket. The building itself gave nothing away: an anonymous town centre two-storey block hidden down an alley by The Lamb Hotel. Just a door with a keypad entrance lock that nobody used because the door was always open.

But when he'd walked in that first time he'd realized his mistake immediately. It wasn't The Beat Club at all, it was The
Beet
Club. How typical of the Fens to name a club after a vegetable. And such a dull vegetable. Mean and moody – no. Just a working man's club with a bar and rooms – snooker, pool, a dart board. At least it had banquet seating, but the lighting was stark, good enough for the legion of domino players who took up most of the tables.

Then he started to like it. The jukebox was retro and he was often the only one feeding in coins so he got to hear his selections. The bar was a decent place to pick up gossip, listen to gossip, or start gossip running. Prices were subsidized, the beer was good, and someone gifted he never saw made wonderful pies which he occasionally asked them to wrap so he could take one to Humph, who was a member, but never set foot over the threshold. Perhaps he was disappointed that having paid his subs he couldn't actually drive the cab into the bar.

The club had originally been set up for the workers at the Ely Beet Factory, down on the river, but its life had gone on beyond its demolition in the 1980s. Black-and-white photos of the factory lined the walls: a glimpse back into a time when working men – and women – had jobs for life, even if they came with an almost lethal dose of boredom. Now the clientele were people who liked the atmosphere of a working man's club: affable, friendly, as down to earth as a sugar beet. The place confirmed Dryden's belief that the east of England had more in common with the north than the south. The flat landscape shouldn't really fool anyone. Or the wide open fields. The people worked hard and were paid little, crowding together where they could, and finding entertainment in small pleasures.