Nightrise (32 page)

The DPP report concluded with a note on the inquest held at Barnet Magistrates Court. Toby Michaels was examined by pathologists at Aberdeen Infirmary who concluded that he died of heart failure due to shock. The verdict was
death by misadventure
. The coroner said a file would be sent to the DPP and that it might consider legal action against the organizers – Heather Adventures. He added that the courage shown by the boys' teacher had been exemplary and that he should in no way consider himself to blame for the accident.

Dryden held his head in his hands.

Below, in the flooded nave, he heard a languid slap of water against stone. The noise made his emotions stir: the fear of water, the love of water, never mixing, just existing in dynamic tension to each other. Whatever happened now he knew that at least his uncle's death had brought him this one – unexpected – gift: an understanding of his father, and of himself.

A
mechanical sound, a single note, floated down into the room from the ringing chamber above. A marine engine, the shape of the sound clear and sharp, as the noise came to them over the unmoving surface of the mere. By the time Dryden had climbed silently to the upper chamber window the boat was in sight, the pale hull almost luminous in the moonlight, a clear V-shaped wake etched in white on the black water.

It was a river authority boat, a Hereward, Rory Setchey's boat – thought Dryden – missing since the day he died. The forward wheelhouse was lit within and they could see a figure standing, peering forward. The ticking of the engine slowed as the power ebbed then died, and in complete silence the boat drifted forward.

The black-and-white waterscape was shattered by a single burning light: a searchlight, mounted on the wheelhouse of the Hereward, probing the shadows until it locked on the single chimney of the sunken villa of
Fenlandia.
The figure came out on the deck carrying what looked like a billhook, moving with the easy grace of one who has lived on boats – the hook in one hand balanced by a coil of rope in the other hand. Dryden realized he'd seen that loping stride before: the man walking quickly across Market Square, carrying his son in his cradle.

The forward motion of the boat was now almost dissipated so that by the time it reached the chimney the boatman could lean down and snare the brick structure with a loop of the heavy rope. The boat pivoted in slow-motion, the figure turning the searchlight so that it remained on the chimney.

The figure straightened its back. A man, a heavy cloth cap, the light catching a high straight jaw, wide, brutal cheekbones. He sat then, one hand trailing in the water, the other holding a cigarette.

Kross touched Dryden's shoulder. They dropped quickly down the stairs and into the waiting launch. The diver in the prow paddled soundlessly to the arched open window. Out in the moonlight, but still shielded from Saar by the chapel, Kross lifted a mobile to his lips. ‘This is Kross. Now.'

Light and noise ripped the night apart. The two police launches beneath the carapace of the old oak tree shot searchlight beams across the water, their engines igniting in a single mechanical wail. Dryden shielded his eyes as their own launch jumped forward, so that he was thrown back off the plank seat and into the bottom of the boat.

By the time he regained his seat they were thirty yards from Saar. He stood pinioned by the lights, both arms thrown up to protect his eyes. The scene stood in stark three-dimensions, so vivid that when Dryden closed his eyes a negative image remained: a white boat on black water, the figure motionless, caught in the moment of recoil.

Kross used a megaphone to broadcast in urgent Estonian.

Saar dropped his arms, thrust both hands into his pockets and looked away from the light.

‘Miiko, this is over, please.' English this time. Kross set the megaphone aside. The night was so still his voice carried perfectly. Their boat was drifting towards Saar's on a perfect collision course.

‘You must come with us,' said Kross, his voice calm, almost bored. ‘There will be a trial. We have your brother too – today, at Maardu. Already he is talking to us.'

Saar squinted into the lights. ‘Kross?'

‘We have Geron.' Then a long sentence in Estonian.

‘That's a lie,' said Saar. The voice surprised Dryden because there was no hint of an accent and it was quite high – not feminine, just sharp and brittle.

Dryden felt Kross stiffen beside him.

‘There is no way other than this,' said the detective. ‘We cannot undo these things.'

With easy movements Miiko threw his dog-end into the water and produced a packet of cigarettes and a lighter – vivid plastic yellow. From the darkness the sound of a rifle being cocked was pin-sharp. Miiko froze, holding up the cigarette.

‘It's OK,' said Kross into the radio.

Saar lit the cigarette, looking around, taking in the three police launches, the searchlights – and then, faintly at first, the thudding rotars of a police helicopter approaching.

‘I am not surprised by this,' he said, drawing in the nicotine deeply.

‘Then why come?' asked Kross.

‘No choice. Our masters demand their money's worth. I cannot go home empty-handed. I must risk everything. I have.' Dryden watched him lick a shred of tobacco from his lip.

They all heard another gun being cocked on board one of the police launches.

‘The trial – in Tallinn?' asked Saar. It was a teasing question, almost light-hearted, as if the answer didn't matter. As if no answers mattered any more – let alone questions.

‘No. Here,' said Kross. ‘There have been murders. There must be justice for those left. Maybe – afterwards – prison will be in Tallinn. One day. But there are no promises.'

The Estonian spat in the water.

Dryden could hear in the tone of this conversation other conversations. He wondered just how close the Estonian CID had got to the Saar brothers. Too close, perhaps, to tell the difference between good and evil.

They were twenty feet apart now. Dryden could see Saar's hands – the hands that had tied a rope round Roger's foot, knotted it to the edge of the eel boat then wielded the hammer, breaking through the clinker-hull. They were smudged with oil and brown grease from the wheelhouse. Dryden thought of Rory Setchey's body hanging on the irrigator on Eau Fen – his hands had been clean, reeking of marine fuel.

‘Please,' said Kross again. ‘Now – my officers come. Three are armed, Miiko. Remember this.'

They heard the other boats moving forward from the shadows of the great oak tree. A series of three blue lights began to strobe on one of the cabin roofs and the colour took Dryden's attention so that when he looked back he saw that Saar had moved – just a few feet, to a small flip-down wooden seat beside the engine housing.

‘A minute?' asked the Estonian, sitting, smoking.

Kross said something into the mobile. The sound of the launch engines died to a murmur.

‘Please, Miiko, it's over.'

Saar shrugged, smiling, and pulled up his sleeve so that Dryden saw his father's compass watch, the watch he'd taken from Roger Stutton before he'd killed him. Saar laid it on the edge of the bulwark as if to time his minute. ‘Do you have the missing twenty-five packages? No? I wonder where he put them, this man, Setchey. Because we think it was him.' He shrugged. ‘An accident. We will never know.'

Saar shook his head, the weight of his skull seeming to overbalance his head so that it fell forward. Then his neck muscles flipped the chin up, and he leaned forward over the metallic casing of the engine, unscrewed the fuel cap in an easy motion, drew on the cigarette, and dropped the butt into the dark hole.

The sound – before any flame – was of steel tearing. The explosion seemed to punch through the darkness of the night, the dense heart of it burning into Dryden's eyes. The sound of the blast was compressed into a single note, trapped in his ears. Ringing. He held an image of Kross, his face contorted into a shout, but no sound of the words.

Then came the fire. A ball of red, with violent edges of amber and blue. All this Dryden saw through tightly closed eyes.

In the water. Without knowing how, he was in the water. He could taste moss, fresh water and marine fuel. A hand grabbed his collar and hauled him back aboard the police launch. The Hereward was still afloat too – but only as a pool of debris, the flames already dying, almost domestic, warming, an open hearth on water.

Dryden was aware that things were falling out of the sky – pieces of wood, rope, and material – linen scraps, tarpaulin. He breathed in and found some shreds of burnt paper in his mouth, sticking to his lips. He held out both hands as if taking communion and caught a piece of cardboard zigzagging down. The breeze blew it away, but another scrap settled on his damp hand. Then more scraps, like two-dimensional snow. The largest piece looked like a banknote, with very subtle blues and reds in complex mathematical designs. Picking it up, he held it in the flickering light and saw the watermark. It was limp with soaked fuel but he knew it for what it was – the first right-hand page of a British passport.

S
heila Petit heard the explosion on Adventurers' Mere from her bed. She'd been lying in the dark thinking, quite systematically, if there was anything else in the flat she should burn in case the police came with a warrant. Miiko Saar had watched her incinerate the master list of the original fifty IDs that she'd supplied. His brother Geron, they knew, was back in Estonia with the twenty-five IDs they'd found on Dryden's desk, the twenty-five IDs Roger Stutton had found lodged in the nets tangled with his own at River Bank. Who had the missing twenty-five IDs? If it had been Rory Setchey, he'd taken the secret of their hiding place to an early grave. They had to hope it hadn't been Rory. It was their only hope. The Russians wanted half their money back, but Sheila Petit didn't have the money because she'd used all of it to buy the parcel of land that would save Petit Fen. So they had to get the missing IDs back, whatever it cost.

Geron had gone back to Tallinn to buy them time with the Russians. Miiko had laid low in the boathouse, waiting, hoping that if someone had the missing package they'd calculate eventually that he was their only buyer – only he could channel the IDs back to the customers whose names and pictures made a match. It had been an agonizing wait. Miiko had hardly spoken since the moment she'd found him sitting arrogantly at her own kitchen table: he was a brutal man, uncivilized, with what she would characterize as base emotions. He ate, she'd noted, like an animal, his fingers sifting through the food on his plate. He'd only hit her once, that first morning after they'd killed Rory. A casual slap which had dislodged a tooth in the back of her mouth. Geron had laughed, picking something from his own teeth.

And then, the evening before, the call had finally come on Miiko's mobile. Someone they trusted relayed the message: the twenty-five IDs were for sale at  50,000. Rory Setchey's regular midnight voyages to River Bank had, apparently, been noticed. Their intermediary hinted at migrant workers, organized crime, and a Polish connection. It mattered little, as they had no choice but to keep to the deal they had been offered: midnight – at River Bank. She'd helped Miiko get Setchey's boat ready and hauled up the doors for him to slip out into the Lark: the journey ahead sketched on a map, two miles to the sluice at Upware, then out on to Adventurers' Mere, three miles south to River Bank.

She'd gone to her bed, waited, and for the first time in many years, prayed. And then she'd heard the explosion. A dull percussion, but she knew it for what it was. The bedside clock numbers glowed 12.09 a.m. She'd run out on the lawn expecting to see the sky gashed, wounded by fire. But there was just a pale glow, and then a little later a distant siren, then others, zigzagging from the main road out towards Upware. And the helicopter above circling out over the unseen water, a single beam seeming to anchor it to the earth like a gyre.

The explosion meant it was all going to unravel, and that the trail might lead back to her, so she had to be ready: armed, as it were, with a story. She got one of the heavy wooden chairs from the kitchen and took it out to Arthur's graveside where she always went to think. The night sky was still perfect, turning overhead like a planetarium. She sat listening to the whisper in the heavens, as if there was a wind which blew the stars round. After an hour she went back to the house, made tea, brewing it in the mug, and then returned to the graveside.

It would be dawn in an hour but already the sky was lightening, the stars in the east flickering out.

The gravestone only caught the light in the early and dying minutes of the day – and the face, with its inscription, only at dawn. She wouldn't have been able to read the inscription if she hadn't known it by heart.

Raymond Arthur Petit

Born 1930. Died 1970.

Remembered and respected by his wife and son.

He loved this place which was his own.

She smiled, sipping her tea, then bit her lip as the tears came. Being here, at this time, always made her recall the day he'd died, a month short of his fortieth birthday.

When they'd sent Arthur home from hospital she'd put him in the bedroom at the top of the house, in the roof, because it had the best window. It was only later, at the funeral that his sister told her it was the room he'd been born in.

Lying in bed he'd only been able to see the sky, and in clear weather the vanes of the wind farm beyond Wicken, so they'd raised him up and tilted the frame forward so that he could – from the pillow – open his eyes and see
his
land. It had been September 1970, the harvest, and the crop was good. They still had their own farm hands then, and the tied cottages were all full, so the landscape had been alive with people, not just machines.