Nightrise (9 page)

‘But that's all small beer, right?'

‘Small beer?'

‘Ah. Forget that. Petty crime – nothing serious, nothing violent.'

‘Yes. Little crimes.'

‘But you'll want organized crime. Some decent Balkan villains in your plot. Some half-shaven tattooed psychopath called Drac.'

She laughed, shaking her head.

Down on St Cross' Green a little band of drummers began to pound out a beat so that the giant eel could dance. The sound seemed to captivate the baby, his eyes widening with each bass note. The eel began to writhe and dip, the movement practised enough to prompt screams from some of the younger children.

‘Do you know the truth? Mostly this is the surprise to me because much more often the migrants are the victims, Philip. People smuggling. Drugs. Illegal alcohol stills. Stolen goods. All this is organized by gangs. But the migrants are the
market
. They must take what they are given and not complain. This is what we do not see. They have to buy bad drugs . . .' She rubbed the tips of her fingers together as if indicating money. ‘Adulterated – this is the word?'

‘It is.'

‘And cheap, bad alcohol. And second-hand clothes. And rotting meat. They must take what the gangs give them. If they want to come to this country without the proper papers they must pay too – very much money. Fortunes.'

Dryden's mobile rang. It was DI Friday. He stood and walked to the safety rail.

‘Dryden. I've got you a name for the stiff on Eau Fen. Rory Setchey, aged fifty-four, married, two kids, teenagers. Fen Rivers Water Authority bailiff. Had been for twenty years.'

‘Spell.'

‘S.E.T.C.H.E.Y'

‘Address?'

‘Withheld.'

‘Why?'

‘Next question.'

‘Can you tell me anything more?'

Friday sniffed. ‘He had a boat – a water authority Hereward – and we can't find it. The ignition key was round his neck. You know the kind of boat?'

‘Sure.' The Herewards stood out on the river. Wide, with a stand-up wheelhouse, an inboard engine, a small cabin in the stern.

‘We need to find this boat. It's got to be out there – we've tried all the moorings, marinas, the lot. It'll be in some backwater out on the fen, which is where your readership comes in.'

‘OK. I'll get it on the front in the splash for
The Crow
.'

‘Great.'

‘Any luck with the Poles?' Dryden knew Friday had interviewed all the migrant workers from Eau Fen.

‘You're joking. They heard nothing, they saw nothing, and they said even less. But it isn't a coincidence, is it? We're pretty sure Setchey was killed somewhere else, then taken to Eau Fen. Then hung up on the irrigator and shot full of holes. Why?'

Friday rang off before he got an answer.

Down on St Cross' Green the giant eel was moving, a sinuous dance over the grass, the drum beat thudding to a faster rhythm, its jaws wide open to reveal fairy-tale teeth dripping with blood.

T
he sky, clear blue, was motionless above the Capri, which moved beneath it in a straight line across The Great Soak – the flat silt fenlands of the west – en route for the morgue outside Peterborough. The only movement in the landscape, besides Humph's cab, came from the wind farms which seemed to shimmer on every horizon, the white blades catching the eye, turning with that graceful speed which always induced in Dryden a desire to sleep. As if they were eyelids falling.

Out here the soil was so light it was almost white, as if dressed with chalk – a stark contrast to the Black Fen which they'd left behind. The fields were either green with crops or bare – almost dazzlingly pale, with no shadows because there was virtually nothing to
throw
a shadow. Mid-morning and already the sun had that quality of bearing down, like a weight. Dryden wondered what unit of measurement could be invented for the heaviness of sunlight. Rays? No – beams.

The cabbie swung the Capri north at a T-junction, ignoring the SatNav's instruction to turn right, so that they were headed straight for a Magnox power station – a glittering knuckle of aluminium and blue, blowing its own smoke rings, creating small jet-black clouds which drifted, then vanished.

Dryden let the passing landscape paint pictures on his eyes, but the image in his mind was very different. He'd only ever seen a body ‘laid out' once before – and that had been a stranger's. It had been at the chapel at River Bank – a hamlet now lost beneath the waters of Adventurers' Mere. Late October: he'd have been seven, no more. The church was four walls, a pitched roof.
The Little Chapel in the Fen
his mother called it, and he'd always taken the name as her own creation. He was shocked – on the day they buried her there – that the name was official, painted in amateurish gold letters on the wooden board above the preacher's pulpit.

He'd caught furtive glimpses of the body within the open casket, the candle-like skin, the strange see-through flesh, as if the dead man had been made of soap which the light could penetrate. He'd expected the body to move because of the wind. That was the sound he always recalled. Not the discordant singing of
Shall We Gather by the River
, or
We Plough the Fields and Scatter,
but the buffeting of the wind, as if they were in a boat at sea. The wind and the peat dust blown against the windows. That had been the sound that made the toddlers cry – a kind of whispering sizzle, like milk boiling over on the stove. And finally a gold light had gilded the body in its coffin and someone said – from the pulpit – that he looked like an angel.

Dryden blinked once, swapping that image from his memory for the image beyond the cab window. They'd arrived. The mortuary was on a trading estate beside the power station, surrounded, inexplicably, with a high wire-mesh fence through which the constant wind had laced several decades' worth of airborne litter. The result was oddly pleasing, as if some giant prayer wall had been thrown up by the living for the dead. The stiff north-easterly breeze made the litter vibrate, as if the fence was alive, almost sparkling; the colour and movement in sharp contrast to the mortuary building itself which was in brick, with a few dismal corporate flourishes – a stone shield over the door, a green lead roof with finials in gold, an incinerator chimney badly disguised as a bell tower.

Stepping over the threshold, Dryden felt worse. There was piped-in musak for the grieving –
Massenet
– and a reception desk decked with flowers that could have been in the lobby of a pharmaceutical company, perhaps, or an IT consultants. The receptionist, a young man in a dark suit, was listening to something else on headphones. But it wasn't the wildly inappropriate sense that this was the foyer of some ring-road motel that unsettled Dryden, it was the thought of what it was all designed to hide.

It wasn't death that was the problem. Dryden loved graveyards with their ranks of the dead, their elegiac sadness, the Gothic symbolism, and the hard yet comfortable benches. But morgues were different. There was no peace here: the bodies waited, sometimes for years, sometimes forever, before the final release. It was purgatory in brick.

The room they were shown to was eight foot square with metal walls. Why did everything have to be aluminium? It was as if they had to remind you constantly of the room you couldn't see: the metal pigeonhole drawers, the slickly oiled runners, the clatter of trolley wheels and the audible
pop
of doors, so tightly fitted, so secure, that when they opened and closed the air pressure changed. There was a single window eight feet up on one wall which, with an inexplicable flourish, was half blue glass, like the windows in
The Little Chapel in the Fen
. It was so deep-set you couldn't see out; the light was lambent, limping in to cast a flat, shadowless beam.

‘It's not a good idea,' said Humph. ‘They've said. You won't be able . . .' The sentence faded out with the idea. ‘There's nothing to see,' he added, his light voice catching on the last word. The small plastic chair on which Humph sat was not visible: just the legs, slightly splayed. The cabbie was outside his comfort zone, an area slightly smaller than the Capri.

‘I just need to finish this,' said Dryden, the acoustics in the room emphasizing the sharp, tinny consonants. ‘I'll know.' He looked at his clasped hands.

Sgt Cherry came into the room and pulled up a chair, the legs screeching, although he didn't seem to notice. ‘All right?' he asked, again oblivious to anyone's sensitivities.

‘We'll have the DNA result in twenty-four hours. And there's the house where he lived. Maybe there is something there – something we missed. Maybe we all missed something. If it was your Dad you'd maybe know – the food he eats, the pictures he likes, the books. I can get you the key. It's a better bet than what's in there . . .' He nodded towards the door. ‘All I'm saying is that you don't need to do this.'

Humph nodded at his feet.

Dryden said he'd still like to see the body.

So they'd been left in the waiting room. Twice Dryden decided that it wasn't a good idea and went to stand. Twice he sank back into the seat. Humph read a small book:
The Little Book of Trivia 2012
. Dryden might have gone when he stood the third time but as he rose the connecting door to the mortuary viewing room opened.

Sgt Cherry stood back as they entered. The room was no more than ten foot square; one wall was a glass sheet, beyond it an identical room containing a metal trolley, the body covered by a sheet. The shroud was blue, where Dryden had expected white.

‘I'd like to be in the same room,' said Dryden.

‘That's not possible,' said Cherry, and something in his voice persuaded Dryden that this wasn't red tape. There was a good reason for the glass wall.

Humph breathed in some of the air-conditioning and caught a note of lavender, and lemon, where he was searching for burnt flesh, singed bone and hair. A young woman in a lab coat entered the other room.

‘Ready?' asked Cherry.

Dryden nodded but the speed of things made him feel sick. It was like a judicial hanging, as if they were rushing him now he was through the door, so he wouldn't buckle. The young woman quickly pulled back the sheet so that the face was revealed. They hadn't lied: there was nothing to identify.

Three seconds: ‘That's enough,' said Dryden.

The woman covered the head again. Dryden put a hand to the dividing window, the fingers splayed, as if he could communicate by touch, but felt nothing. He hadn't recognized the face; he hadn't recognized it
as
a face.

‘Fire's a terrible thing,' said Cherry.

‘It's all right,' said Dryden. ‘I should have listened. I can't say anything about that man. I can't say it's him, I can't say it isn't. I'm sorry.'

They shuffled out, Humph first, forgetting to hold the door open for the rest.

Dryden almost ran from the building, from the piped-in musak, the brushed aluminium. He hardly heard Cherry promise again to get him the key to the dead man's house. Then they were out under the sky and Dryden filled his lungs while Humph got them coffees from a café on wheels in the car park. Workers from the industrial estate sat around on plastic chairs. Dryden stood watching the litter vibrate in the prayer-wall fence. A page of
The Mirror
wrapped itself round his leg so he picked it up and walked over to the mesh and thrust it through. He wanted to say a prayer for the man he'd seen, whose body even now would be back in its aluminium drawer. But then he thought that if it
was
his father he didn't deserve a prayer.

W
hen Dryden got back to
The Crow
David Yoruba was in reception. He didn't see Dryden come through the door and so the reporter was able to observe him at rest: the straight back, the eyes forward, sat neatly on one of the squishy, threadbare sofas. Dryden was struck by a certain innate dignity in the man. His daughter had died, he was threatened with being sent back to a country he had – apparently – good reason to fear; he was a foreigner in a country increasingly wary of outsiders. And yet he was patient, calm, meticulously mannered. It seemed like an African virtue: dignity.

They shook hands and Yoruba eyed the interview cubicle in which they'd talked before. The memory of that made Dryden uncomfortable. ‘The newsroom,' he said. ‘It'll be chaos – but there's tea.'

They found themselves a quiet corner in the old clippings library. Dryden got Yoruba tea – black, no sugar. Did he have lemon? He did. Vee kept a little bottle of lemon juice on her desk which he stole. Yoruba sipped the acrid, scalding brew with relish.

‘I've made some progress with your daughter,' said Dryden, aware he could have phrased that better but still unable to think how. ‘The council will talk, but I have to wait – maybe twenty-four hours. It's all a ritual I'm afraid; they'll be considering their options.'

‘Aque,' said Yoruba. ‘My daughter's name.'

Dryden sipped his tea.

‘I wanted to be honest with you, Mr Dryden.'

The implication was obvious and Yoruba had the decency to look away. ‘I thought if I was honest I could ask a favour.' He smiled, the white teeth too large for the small mouth. ‘I'm a journalist too,' he said. ‘Like you. I worked in Niamey – the capital. I own the paper. I did own it – now the government owns it – although there is not much to covet. An office, two phone lines, broadband, PCs.'

They looked around and both laughed.

‘But here is the difference,' said Yoruba. ‘We have many governments – like buses in the English joke. You wait for years – then along come three or four. But all are bad. All pay lip service to the idea of the freedom of the press.'