Nightrise (29 page)

He was lying in a grave.

An open grave – not a six by two plot, but one of the public open graves. Admitting it to himself helped quell the next rising scream. One of Manea's open public graves. Unless it was full they wouldn't be filling it in for months. So that helped reverse the spiral of panic because the one thing he feared was a shovel full of earth, thrown against the stars, blotting out his view of the sky.

And then a phone rang. He felt its warm throb in the pocket on his chest. It rang and rang – emitting the clanking sound of an old Bakelite phone. Then it cut off and he imagined the message being left: Laura, perhaps, from Cromer. He imagined her on the little promenade where you could get a signal. The sea white under the pier where the waves had to thread their way through the iron stanchions. The image was so immediate he felt his consciousness slipping, as if he would faint into the dream.

He kicked out instead and the pain made him shout – a thin noise which seemed to get swallowed by the earth walls. His left leg was useless, not broken, but the joint was so painful he wouldn't be able to move it again, knowing it would trigger that electric pulse to his brain.

His eyes were beginning to adapt to the starlight above, which is when he saw the other coffins. The pit was ten feet by ten and he could see four of them, arranged like little jigsaw pieces to save space in one corner. The cardboard coffins were already rotten, sagging. He thought he caught a glimpse of a bone and looked away.

He should shout out. But he felt that if he started to shout he wouldn't be able to stop, that the shout would shift to a scream, that he'd lose control, and that if no one came he'd scream and shout until he'd shredded his vocal cords. But what if he didn't shout? Would he live until morning? Yes. He would live until he was found. His only enemy was himself. If he couldn't control his fears: of the dark, of the grave, of the rats, perhaps, and the insects.

But if he lost his courage his heart might fail. He could feel it now, lurching out of kilter. He'd shout. Once. Then wait. Keeping control.

Filling his lungs he made his ears pop, ready to shout, when he heard a new noise: not so much heard, as felt. A rumble, in the earth under his sore shoulders. And a beam of light, cutting across the stars, then swinging away. A machine, moving in the graveyard, moving closer. He thought about the little digger truck, how it could trundle up to the side of the grave and tip in the spoil, and how that would silence him, how it would be in his eyes and his mouth, and then he'd never see the stars again.

He didn't shout anything coherent, he just started to scream. It started as the word HELP, but then became blurred and wailing. No one came and he tasted blood in his mouth so he stopped, his chest heaving, and realized the mechanical sound was louder, closer; not just the base notes now but the clanging of the machinery, the screeching of a rusty suspension bar.

Then silence, so he shouted again, straining so that he felt a muscle in his throat convulse.

A flashlight stabbed his eyes with pain, which seemed to set off a chain reaction in his body that led to his brain and closed his nervous system down. Just before he lost his sight he saw a figure against the stars, the head lost in a trailing cloud of cigarette smoke.

H
e was able to think about what had happened only when Billy Johns lit the fire: coke and a lump of bog oak from the fen. Watching the flames he realized how close fire and life were – how you couldn't have one without the other. Up to that moment his mind was hopelessly entangled with the opposite of fire and life, the coldness of the grave, and the broken rotting coffin boxes which had surrounded him. Standing in the shower block – an institutional addition to the caretaker's Victorian house – the heat had warmed his skin but not his bones. The flesh on those bones seemed oddly bloodless as if – and the thought made him retch – he had in some way been partly dead in the grave, that he'd started to rot, and been brought back in this damaged form. His hip was bruised – blackening – but he didn't think anything was broken, except one of his fingers, crooked from the second joint up. And his arm was lacerated. When he thought about falling down the stairs in Trelaw's house his legs buckled at the knees. He could remember the pain, not the sensation of falling. He didn't think about coming to in the grave: his brain wouldn't let the image form.

Overalls and a jumper added warmth but the shivering – which had begun when he'd come round beside the grave – would not abate. It was a summer's evening, the temperature in the sixties, but the quaking shivers made his jaw ache. So Johns had made the fire. Then he'd gone to the kitchen to make soup, leaving Dryden to stare into the flames. Questions continued to rise in his mind: was it a coincidence that he'd been found by Johns – cemetery keeper, son of an undertaker? Why had he been dumped at Manea? Why had Johns been out after dark working by the open graves?

He got out his mobile and sent a text. Humph replied within thirty seconds: GIVE ME TWENTY MINS.

Dryden had an almost overpowering urge to run from the house. To put miles between his warm body and the cold grave. But he knew running was a bad idea – his hip was still numb, the joint swelling. He wouldn't get a hundred yards. The bog oak cracked, sending sparks showering on to the wooden floorboards where they glowed and died.

Johns brought in a mug of soup and took the other seat – a beaten armchair like the one in which Dryden was curled. They both heard a floorboard creak above their heads, someone stirring in a bed.

‘I should ring the police,' said Johns. The clock on the mantelpiece said it was nine o'clock. He picked a shred of tobacco from his lip even though he wasn't smoking. The hand that held his mug seemed to envelop it so that it was lost to sight. An institutional phone stood on the floor by the armchair, the landline snaking to the old skirting board. Johns didn't look that keen to use it.

‘No – please. I'll talk to them, but not now.' He thought of Trelaw's bedroom. There was nothing he could do for the man now. Had the body been found?

‘I probably deserve a bit more information than that,' said Johns, but his voice lacked confidence.

‘It's about a boy called Samuel Setchey,' he said.

Johns stiffened.

‘The child died four months after he was born in 1986. He's buried here – a private grave, I think. The death certificate was issued within twenty-four hours. But there's almost certainly no central registration of the death – nothing at all on a national database.'

Johns shrugged. ‘You think that's unheard of? Someone's slipped up – it's a bureaucracy. A badly paid bureaucracy. They fuck up all the time, Dryden. Believe me. Dad used to despair of the paperwork. I was down there the other day and they're getting ready for computers – digitizing the service. Imagine – it'll get worse, not better.'

‘It wasn't the first time, or the last – there's a pattern. Someone has been consistently not reporting deaths. Particular
kinds
of death, I think – the very young. Children.'

‘Why?'

Dryden didn't like the tone of the question. Curious, perhaps, but it sounded like a challenge. He decided to ignore it.

‘I heard a machine – when I was out there.'

Johns blinked and Dryden thought: he's trying to decide if he should repeat that question or let it go.

‘Tipper truck. I was just moving stuff.'

‘By starlight?'

‘The council's decided to change the layout – because of the Yoruba baby. We'll use the iron covers for a while – six months, then it's all change. They think when you've written the story people will be shocked. They will – I know they will. Open graves,
multiple
open graves. I'd be shocked. So they're going to open up the far end – let some private burials in, landscape it.

‘The coroner's office is going to store bodies in future – we'll wait; when the time is right we'll dig a grave, complete the burials, all on one day.'

Even Johns was struggling with the euphemisms. ‘Brass is coming out from Chatteris tomorrow to look at the site. I had to tidy up – it's supposed to be neat down there. So I was out on the tipper. It's got a searchlight.'

Dryden recalled the light in the sky.

‘The engine cut out – it does that if I overdo the clutch. I heard you scream,' said Johns.

Dryden felt sick then at the thought that his life had hung on that narrow thread, and that if the tipper hadn't stalled he'd be out there now, in the grave, under the earth. Which meant that if Johns was telling the truth Miiko Saar had meant to kill him, and had devised a neat way to dispose of the body. But how did the Estonian know Johns would be working by searchlight on the paupers' graves? Again, Dryden felt the urge to run.

‘I still think you should ring the police,' said Johns. ‘Mind you – police are busy.' He sipped his tea. ‘The radio says there's been another murder. No name – a house on the edge of Ely. They're not saying if it's linked to that one on Eau Fen.'

Johns looked at him over the top of his mug.

‘It's one of those hidden worlds, isn't it?' asked Dryden, not expecting an answer. ‘You probably don't realize. You're part of it. A cog. When someone dies it's like a secret society takes over. You're told not to worry, to let the system take over. It's like magic – once you contact the undertaker it all works. There's a grave allocated, a day allotted, the documents filed, the hearse on time, the body . . .'

Dryden leant forward into the heat of the fire.

‘The body is the weirdest thing. When my mum died it wasn't till the ambulance took her away I thought – where's she going? Who'll look after her? Where will she be? The undertakers bury her – but when do they pick her up? It's because it's all about death. We don't want to ask, we don't even want to use the word. So we let other people take over. It's painless that way – but maybe, when you look back years later, there's more pain in the end, not less.'

They heard a car beep its horn, then the sound of a door opening on rusty hinges, a single bark.

‘My cab,' said Dryden.

H
umph was in a good mood because he'd picked up a return fare at Stansted. One of his regulars, an academic – a biotech engineer from MIT – so his passenger knew the ropes and so there was the thirty-five-pound standard fare, plus a five-pound tip, plus eight of those miniature bottles of hooch from the first-class trolley. Four malt whisky – a brand Dryden didn't recognize – and four white rum.

The cabbie's mobile rang twice on the journey but he didn't answer.

‘It's that copper – from Eau Fen.'

‘Detective Inspector Friday?'

‘Right. Wants to know where you are. Keeps ringing. Why does he keep doing that?'

Dryden told him about Trelaw and the gunshot in the pillow. Had someone seen him going into Trelaw's house? Maybe. But more likely they'd simply talked to the CCTV department and been told the reporter had been asking after Trelaw. And Dryden hadn't been wearing gloves, so they'd get his prints eventually.

They drove to the minor injuries unit at Ely in silence. When they got there all the little miniatures were empty. Dryden's mobile had started to ring too. He ignored the phone and told the nurse on duty he'd had an accident. She asked how it had happened, sniffing the alcohol.

‘I fell down the stairs,' said Dryden, which was at least only a lie by omission. Two of his fingers were bound together and he declined to show the nurse his hip, which was stiff, so that he hobbled.

‘I'd have a very hot bath and go to bed for a week,' said the nurse, which was when she noticed the blood soaking through the sleeve of Dryden's shirt. It took them half an hour to bandage the lacerations.

‘Anything else I should see before we set you free?'

‘Thanks,' said Dryden, standing up too quickly, so that the room went round.

Back in the Capri Dryden scrabbled through the glove compartment to find a fresh miniature: a Martini this time. They drove to The Red, White and Blue
.
The effect of the alcohol was magical. A sublime warmth this time, suffusing. That was the word –
suffusing
. The pain, especially the pain in his hip, was a long way away now, almost in another country.

‘You realize that you're the witness to a murder?' said the cabbie. ‘Maybe you should call Friday?' He took the Capri out of gear and swung it into the car park of The Red, White and Blue.

The car park was empty but the pub was open. It was nearly closing time. They could see two teenagers playing pool through the main window.

‘Can I kip at yours?'

Humph nodded. ‘Car can stay here.'

They walked into the bar together and Humph saw Lionel Wraight, convener of the Ely Singles Club, sitting down, alone, nursing a pint.

Dryden bought Humph one, himself a tequila, and offered Wraight a refill – he took a double Bells – as Humph introduced them. The name: Dryden, made Wraight's eyes widen.

‘I wanted a word,' said Dryden. ‘Just give me a sec.' He took out his mobile and sent Laura a text saying all was well. It crossed his mind DI Friday might try to find her. And that was the last thing he wanted. So he should ring Friday – stop the search, end it soon.

They took a seat under the TV which was showing rugby highlights.

‘You were a friend of Jack's?'

‘You related?' asked Wraight.

‘Kind of. He stole my Dad's name. Well – after 1977 he stole his life. I don't have any bones to pick with him – or his mates. I've just got a couple of questions.'

Wraight nodded, drinking the whisky.

‘Jack was a friend then?' Dryden prompted.

‘Yeah. Good mate, actually. Saved my life when I was inside – I told your man here.'