Nightrise (8 page)

Vee liked the room, which exuded the almost hypnotic aroma of authentic industry: machine oil, rubber and wood. The floor was worn parquet, the frames oak, the wooden chutes in old pine. The pigeon holes were marked in an exquisite gold copperplate. Vee knew that the post office had installed the latest technology – Optical Character Recognition – down at Cambridge, but that the low volumes they took through Ely meant it was pretty much better to do it by hand like they'd always done. There'd been a plan to mechanize back in the 1990s but that had been shelved in one of the perennial rounds of cuts. As Vee worked her way down the back of the sorting booths she passed an office, cut off by wire grilles, two men inside at desks, sorting registered mail.

An open metal staircase took her up to a mezzanine floor – a series of offices opening off an overseer's balcony. Sheila Petit's was the last in the row. She was one of several managers who shifted paper and monitored performance.

The sign on the door said: District Inspector – Eastern Fens.

The room was brutally functional except for a large framed aerial photograph of a set of farm buildings around a house on an open fen and a page of the
Cambridge Evening News
showing Petit toasting victory after the last district council elections.
Councillor
Petit was nominally an Independent, accepting the Tory Party whip. Unlike most independents she wasn't just a Tory in sheep's clothing. Vee had sat on the reporter's bench at enough meetings to know she was her own woman: liberal, broad-minded, tough.

The desk and chairs were MFI, a kettle and coffee-making kit on a table by a socket. But once the room had held some grandeur – the ceiling was plastered and decorated, and a dado-rail ran around the walls. Sheila Petit was, like Vee, class with no cash. Vee, of course, was aristocracy – the daughter of a penniless knight. Sheila had humbler origins – a fact she liked to point out on her election leaflets. The daughter of a shopkeeper from Clacton, she'd seen her father's business fail and the family home repossessed. She'd escaped poverty by winning a scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge. There she'd met, then married, Arthur Petit. An only son of a long-established fen family, he came complete with a landed fortune. Vee had seen him once at a harvest festival out on the fen. He'd given out trophies for fishing – catching pike on the Little Ouse. He'd been as plump and self-satisfied as the first-prize fish, that rarity in the Fens, a gentleman farmer.

Petit stood by the open window, smoking, her arm bent up at the elbow, the hand flopped back. She had grey hair fashioned like a cycling helmet and robust teeth, and those peculiar good looks which in England are called ‘handsome'.

‘Vee. Sorry – bad morning. Needed this and I can't leave the office.' Vee guessed she was in her late sixties, early seventies but she'd embraced new technology – there was an iPhone on the desk top and a laptop beside the PC. ‘Could you tell Dryden I'd like to see him,' Petit said, stubbing out the cigarette in an ash tray on the window ledge, which she then hid under the desk.

Vee didn't like being used as a messenger.

‘He's not answering his phone,' said Petit.

‘Reception's dodgy at the new house,' said Vee. ‘He'll get it when he sets off.'

‘I thought I saw him on that boat of his the other day. They've moved, have they?'

‘A child.'

‘Did you hear the radio?' asked Petit, switching tack. ‘They've officially announced their intention to go-ahead.'

Petit headed up a campaign to stop the second phase of the fen re-flooding, a phase which would include her home and what had been the family estate – most of it remortgaged or sold off. The government planned to use compulsory purchase orders to brush aside objectors, or offer over-the-market prices to buy up parcels of land from others.

‘Well, we knew it was coming. But we can stop it. There's some money – a donation. We can buy a piece of land which runs right across the fen. Put the ownership in a trust, tie it up legally. It'll take them years to mop it up.' She beamed. ‘It's a form of sabotage. Totally legal, totally brilliant.'

There was something predatory about Petit's need to win the fight for Petit Fen – it wasn't just the family name, her husband's family, after all. It was personal – Vee understood that – but there was something else. She wondered if she was haunted by her own childhood – the moment her own home had been taken from her. Perhaps she was simply determined not to let it happen twice.

Vee still found it unseemly, this bitter tussle to own something, not for itself, but to keep it from others. Vee's childhood home, a rambling fortified house, had long gone in a deal with the National Trust. She'd been back once as a paying punter and found the experience oddly cold. It was the same place in which she'd spent her childhood but it wasn't in the same time – change the date and you alter the place. It was as simple as that for her.

‘We can write this?' asked Vee.

‘I'd prefer you to wait. Dryden and I usually have an arrangement.' She pressed a hand to her forehead as if she'd been suddenly struck down with a headache. Vee noticed that her finger fluttered slightly, a rare sign of frailty. She'd never seen this woman betray any indication of stress or anxiety. Suddenly she seemed overwhelmed by events.

‘Next week's paper would be fine.' She took a breath, regaining herself. ‘I can give him the detail – the amount, where it's come from, and what we can do with it. Well, maybe not the amount, as the donor's a bit shy. Anyway, we're initialling the sale tomorrow. So for now –
entre nous
.'

‘All right.'

‘Tell him to meet me Saturday evening, about six. A bunch of us are meeting, totally informal. Petit Fen – the old chapel. I can give him enough for a story. He knows the place.'

The phone went and Petit grabbed it, immediately engrossed in the call, her hand holding the packet of cigarettes as if she could suck the nicotine into her bloodstream through the cardboard.

Vee left. She knew the chapel on Petit Fen and it seemed like another world compared to this: the ringing phones, the blinking computer screens, the serried ranks of post office vans and lorries in the car park. Petit Fen was primeval, as if the earth had just been made. A brick chapel stood on a flood bank in the heart of the peat fields. The building always reminded her of the living quarters on Noah's Ark – just four walls and a pitched roof, as if the biblical boat had come to ground after the flood, sunk to its gunwales into the black earth.

S
tefano's was one of Ely's best kept secrets, an authentic Italian restaurant hidden in an alleyway off the High Street. Laura had discovered it one evening waiting for Dryden to finish covering a council meeting. Starving, she'd ducked in out of the rain expecting cardboard pizza or floppy
farfalle
, only to discover a menu limited to home-made pasta dishes, each one made to order. And Dryden had discovered Stefano's other secrets – imported village wine from Liguria and a small roof terrace used by the staff for smoking, plus coffee that could accelerate your heartbeat after one minuscule cup. They knew Stefano now, and his English wife, and were allowed to take their morning coffees up on to the roof.

Laura ascended the spiral staircase into the open air, her son in a papoose on her back, hitched high on her shoulders so that his head lolled in the crook of her neck. Dryden sat on one of the aluminium seats, his feet up on the low balustrade, taking in the view over St Cross' Green to the long wall of the cathedral nave just fifty yards away. He often played echoes here, in this great bowl of stone created by the cathedral and the curving embrace of the old monastic buildings which formed one side of the High Street.

He always felt it held the magic of a theatre, as if the sound of applause had just died away.

Laura pulled up a chair and sat, swinging the papoose round so that the child was held to her chest, keeping level her small china cup of black coffee.

Head down, rearranging the baby's clothes, she said something Dryden couldn't understand because he hadn't seen her lips move. And they were outside so the sound was lost to the sky.

He tugged his ear.

‘Do Not Ask,' she said pointedly, each word distinct.

One of the reasons she'd been keen to get out of hospital had been a long-arranged driving test. She'd left the child with friends in one of the High Street charity shops for the test – the first of the day, timed for eight. Dryden understood that Do Not Ask was Italian for Failed. Which was bad news: if they were going to live out at Flightpath Cottages she was trapped on the fen unless she could use the car. Either that or she did what they'd done that morning and Humph brought her into town with Dryden. She found that both humiliating and irritating. She valued little above her independence, a view only strengthened by the two long years in a hospital bed after her accident.

‘What went wrong?'

‘He didn't like Italian cars,' she said, making an effort to pronounce the sharp ‘i' at the start of ‘Italian'.

She had a Fiat 500, a stylish icon of her homeland she'd bought from an importer near Felixstowe. It was racing red with white-walled wheels.

‘Or Italian driving?'

Laura had been taught how to drive by her uncle on the mountain roads of the Lunigiana. ‘He said I drove too close to the . . .' She used her hand like a cleaver.

Dryden knocked back his coffee like vodka. ‘The white line?'

She dismissed the truth of it. ‘And my three-point turn is not up to standard.'

‘Why?'

‘I did it in one point.'

She watched his laugh, and Dryden felt she was gauging it, assessing his mood.

He checked his watch. They'd talked briefly the night before about his plan to visit the morgue and see the body of the man called Jack Dryden. Humph was due to pick him up at nine by the cathedral's West Door.

Taking both his hands over the table, she said, ‘Please do not do this. We know what this means, Philip – dental records. Why . . .' She held both hands up, indicating the sides of a box, perhaps. ‘Why have this memory?'

He checked the watch again. She took that as an answer.

‘It will not be him,' she said. ‘You will feel nothing.' She knew she was being cruel but she couldn't stop herself.

Out on St Cross' Green a group of school children were trying to put together what looked like a long, thin Chinese dragon, the head complete with fangs. There was a child inside each segment, while others held steel drums and Scout and Guide banners. The gathering looked like a dress rehearsal, lacking the buzz of the real event itself.

‘The eel, for Eel Day,' said Laura, smiling. ‘This Sunday.' It was one of the town's best celebrations – a parade, from the green down to the riverside, a crowd behind the giant eel, a band in front, then a fair and music. Like the fiesta in her home village in the mountains above Pontremoli, it was a celebration of community. ‘We must take him,' she added, picking a flake of dried skin from the baby's scalp. In the past she'd complained about the lack of a community life in the Fens, in England. On bad days she wondered out loud if they could live in Italy.

‘I have something to say.' She unpacked a notebook and a wad of A4 printed sheets curled into a tube. Laura had grown up as part of a large, loud, bickering family. Direct statements came naturally to her. Dryden loved her for it, but like most only-children found it difficult to confront issues. ‘I talked to Katie.' Katie was her agent. ‘I said I won't act. Not again. I said I have to write – scripts. The BBC's doing a new soap – Sky Farm, a kind of Emmerdale in the south, set near Norwich. They need storyliners?'

Dryden nodded. She'd acted in an ITV soap for years – Clyde Circus, a kind of suburban EastEnders. So she knew the ropes. Storyliners were like shop stewards for scriptwriters. Looking after the big picture, setting the parameters within which the writers worked, making sure characters stayed consistent, drawing all the threads together.

‘She's got me a three-month trial. First episode is in January.'

‘You'll be brilliant,' he said. He meant it, and she knew it, so her face relaxed with the smile.

‘Thanks.'

She took a deep breath. ‘It's three days a week in Norwich. Starting in December. Two days at home. Once we start filming it'll be four in Norwich, one at home. Sorry, it screws things up. I know.'

‘Next driving test?'

‘Ten days. I've put in for a whole load – several centres. I have to pass.'

On cue, the child cried.

‘Childcare. We need a plan,' he said.

‘We can make it work.'

‘OK.'

They watched the dragon ducking and weaving on Palace Green.

‘I read this last night,' said Laura. ‘After you'd gone to sleep.' She turned the A4 pile around and Dryden saw that she'd downloaded a Home Office report: Migrant Workers and Crime in East of England. ‘My first plot line.'

‘Anything I don't know?' he said, touching the papers. The night before, over dinner, he'd told her about the murder on Eau Fen, and the silent audience of Polish pickers.

‘The English are not a fair people,' said Laura. ‘You do not like immigrants because they do not work – they
sponge
.' She smiled at the word. ‘Then – they come only to work – and you do not like this either. They steal your jobs.'

‘Whereas Italians organize bunting and hand out plates of pasta?'

‘Sometimes they commit crime – more crime than the locals. Drink-driving is bad, and car theft. In many of these countries you do not need licences or MOT. Illegal gaming too – dogs, perhaps, hare coursing. To them it is perhaps not a crime. Or taking fish from the river without a licence.'