Nightrise (12 page)

By the last set of level crossing gates a goat had been tethered to trim the grass. As they passed Dryden noted the strange, Lucifer-like, horizontal pupils to the animal's eyes.

The shortwave radio fixed to the cab's dashboard with a speaker phone blared into life. ‘Humph – this is Jules, over. Humph – this is Jules, over.'

Dryden knew all the cabs on the Ely rank now. Jules was a woman – at least, he thought she was. Like Humph she appeared to have been welded into her cab. She had forearms like a truck driver and an unruly frizz of red hair. Unlike Humph she had a car with four doors – a Volvo estate. She knew, as did the entire rank, that Humph would either have Dryden on board or be in touch on the mobile, so any news items they spotted en route were relayed into the cruising Capri. It was like being on the news desk at CNN.

‘On the back road to Clayhythe,' said Jules, effortlessly bellowing through a burst of static. ‘A mile short of the village. There's a house – river authority or summat. Weird place. Round windows. Like Bilbo Baggins' house. God knows what they're up to – coppers, traffic squad cars, the lot. Go see. Go quick. Over.'

‘It's on the way,' said Humph, drumming delicate fingers. ‘Sort of.'

‘Water authority,' said Dryden. He thought of the Eau Fen victim and the withheld address.

At the next junction Humph swung the cab east. Dryden kicked his legs out, frustrated by the cab's limited leg room, as if it should have been designed for the comfort of passengers over six feet tall. The heat seemed suddenly to intensify. Not for the first time he wondered if he had some kind of thermostatic dysfunction. He seemed to spend most of his life cold except for odd, fleeting moments of flaming heat. The Capri didn't help: it was a four-wheel oven, with an air-conditioning unit which redirected engine fumes back into the cab. The air seemed dense, like a steam bath. Despite the open windows the plastic seats were too hot to touch.

A big fat moth hit the windscreen with a crackling of its carapace. Humph despatched it with the wipers, leaving an orange arc. For the cabbie this was back-of-the-hand country, so he switched off the SatNav and expertly tracked a zigzag route to Clayhythe: a cluster of buildings and a pub on the Cam which had once been a wharf for barges serving the main village of Waterbeach up the road. Humph stopped the cab on an old stone bridge. Below them was the river, ink-green here, in the lee of a line of willows. On the far side stood the old water authority building. Jules, Humph's informer, had used the word ‘weird' – it was an understatement.

The house was taller than it was wide, like a dovecote with three stories. The facade on each side came to an elegant Dutch gable pierced by a single oculus window. The pinnacles of the brickwork and leaded roof were decorated with stone figures – Dryden guessed the four winds of Greek mythology. What he could see of the interior was more mundane – a poster in an upstairs room of a Dalek, a kid's mobile, a modern fitted kitchen, a wall-mounted flat-screen TV.

But it wasn't the house that was so unusual. It was what they were doing to it, and what they were doing to it was taking it apart: brick by London brick. Scaffolding covered the facade facing the river. Three building skips were on the riverbank – plastic chutes leading down from the roof and upper storey. Dryden watched as a worker in a Day-Glo green bib carefully dislodged a brick, turned it over, turned it back, then dropped it down the chute. Beside him a uniformed police officer was working his way along the guttering, checking inside and out. The interior of the house crawled with coppers: paper being peeled off walls, carpets being rolled and pushed out of windows, while in the garden individual pieces of furniture were being carefully dismantled. Parts of the roof had been removed, along with several courses of the top bricks, so that the structural beams were left against the sky.

‘Skeleton house,' said Dryden.

Humph wasn't listening. He'd got the glove compartment open and was examining an empty miniature bottle of Triple Sec. Dryden got the impression it hadn't been empty very long. Humph's natural curiosity was a fragile, fleeting creature. The police were taking a house apart. Big deal. He slipped on his earphones and pressed the PLAY button on his Estonian language tape.

One of the white-suited coppers in the garden was pointing at Dryden so he got out of the cab and took a quick 360-degree survey of the scene prior to being moved on. Downriver: nothing, just the channel turning gently away in the willows beside a footpath. East: fen, a line of pylons which seemed to diminish with the curvature of the earth. West: fen. Upriver: a boat yard beyond the water authority house, a few river boats, a dredger and a water authority launch, then the lawn in front of the pub with a few drinkers out at the picnic tables. The launch and the dredger were in the water authority livery: orange – that precise shade Dryden had seen the previous day under the fingernails of the man hung from the irrigator.

‘Can I help?'

Dryden swung round to find a uniformed PC approaching. His lapel radio crackled. The words buried in the static never sounded like English, but this time Dryden was pretty certain that was because it wasn't English.

‘We're closing the road. You'll have to move that.' The PC gestured back at the car. Dryden was certain he hadn't woken up in a police state. Had something happened since breakfast?

‘I'd like a word with Detective Inspector Friday.' It was a shot in the dark, but a decent one. Was this Rory Setchey's home? The police had said he worked for the water authority, and the top-level search would explain the lack of home address. For the first time Dryden noticed the house had a name – black stencilled letters on whitewash over the door: Hythe House.

The PC didn't reply but stood back and talked into his radio.

A car came the other way on to the bridge and stopped, almost bumper-to-bumper with the Capri. It was a black BMW and the four men who got out didn't even look at Dryden. They walked away until one of them stopped and produced a packet of cigarettes. A red, chequered packet Dryden had never seen before. Expensive suits, two of them on iPhones, no ties, lots of facial hair shaved for effect: moustaches as thin as eyebrows. The PC appeared to be waiting for a reply on the radio while sweating steadily into his blue collar.

‘What about them?' asked Dryden, nodding at the new arrivals.

The PC's eyes narrowed. Behind him, striding up the road, came DI Friday.

‘Now we can sort things out,' said Dryden. There was a burst of laughter from the BMW suits and some words on the breeze – again, not English. Humph had slipped off his earphones and wound down the side window to listen.

Friday arrived, lit a cigarette. ‘Fuck off,' he said. He took a step closer. ‘Now.'

‘Strange place,' said Dryden, nodding at the building.

‘Water authority-tied cottage. That's it. Now, fuck off.'

‘When did he go missing – our man?'

Friday turned to the PC. ‘Give him a minute. If he's still here caution him and arrest him for obstruction. The fat bloke too.' He tried to put some venom in the remark but failed. His attention was almost entirely focused on the sharp suits from the BMW.

Humph swung the Capri in a half circle, then a three-point turn, then another three-point turn. It was like watching a merry-go-round.

Dryden climbed aboard. As they pulled away he looked in the rear-view mirror. ‘That wasn't English,' he said. ‘The characters out of the BMW – foreign language, right?'

‘I know.' Humph looked mildly shocked. ‘It was Estonian.'

I
t was an odd illusion but a persistent one: whenever Dryden looked out over the newly created Adventurers' Mere the clouds always appeared as if over a sea. He couldn't see the far shore of the lake, and the sky created the sense that there wasn't a far side, just an ocean.

The Capri tracked the shoreline east creating its own weather, a streak of red peat dust which hung behind the cab. The mere seemed to make its own weather too: a sudden squally wind, so that gusts buffeted the side of the car, and there were a few white horses out on the water. White horses forty miles inland.

‘Estonian?' asked Dryden. ‘You sure?'

‘Yup. I've been studying it for eight months. How sure do you want me to be?'

‘And they said?'

‘I only caught words. Migrant – certainly, several times, because it was like German – guest-worker. And hotel, and breakfast, and cigarettes. And coffee – they liked the coffee.' Humph's grip on the vocabulary of the Estonian menu appeared first class. Beyond that he was treading water.

‘Nothing else?'

‘One of them said
milte
and the others whistled.'

‘And
milte
means?'

‘Million.'

Dryden thought about that but came to no conclusion. ‘So – a million. Not millions . . .'

‘Singular. The plural sounds different. At least it does on the tape.'

Dryden called
The Crow
and told the news editor to get Mitch out for some pictures of Hythe House. If he brought his telephoto toys he could get some long shots – the house was disappearing, brick by brick. If he made a couple of trips and took the snaps from the same spot they could run a series:
the disappearing house
.

He killed the signal. ‘Why, that's the question,' he said to the windscreen. ‘Why take a house apart?'

‘They're looking for something,' said Humph.

‘Brilliant.'

Humph shrugged. ‘Drugs?'

‘Nah. Drugs squad would rip the place apart – sure. And they'd use dogs – no dogs there. And they wouldn't demolish it. They were taking the roof off – like –
off
.'

‘Jewels?'

‘It's a bit Famous Five.'

Humph ran a pointed tongue along his plump lips. ‘Espionage?'

Dryden shifted in his seat. ‘Eh?'

‘A microchip? A memory stick? A mobile phone? An iPhone?

‘OK, OK . . .'

‘Stuff – you know. Secrets. Not
family secrets
. State secrets. Corporate secrets. Information. That's power, right? And they don't take up a lot of space.' Humph eased his T-shirt away from his neck. ‘Sometimes, no space at all.'

They came to a T-junction on the bank-top – a drove leading away on the brink of a dyke, a signpost reading Nornea, two miles; the way ahead marked Buskeybay, one mile, running by the new mere.

Dryden had been there the day they'd created Adventurers' Mere – opening the sluice gates at Upware, flooding 2,000 acres in a single day.

It had been the biggest story in the Fens since the floods of 1947. The original plan – put forward by the National Trust – was for a 100-year creeping programme of jigsaw re-flooding – creating marsh, and wildlife habitat, and pasture, with small amounts of open water. But by the mid-1990s global warming had taken sea levels much higher than anticipated while cuts in public expenditure had led to a full halt on drainage work, and on the rebuilding of flood defences. The decision was taken to go instead for an all-out flooding, creating a giant lake. The year-on-year saving for the government was put at  1bn – and a little of the cash was put aside to promote the new water lands as a tourist attraction and a boating area. The National Trust fought the plans, and lost.

When the day came to let the waters back on the land after an interlude of 350 years the press was invited. Most of the media, dominated by the TV crews, were corralled at Reach, strung along the top of the Devil's Dyke. The Environment Agency, in charge of the re-flooding, had constructed a kind of grandstand for visitors and press – a gantry for the cameras – providing food and cabling for computers and satellite phones. And there'd been lots of media interest – fired-up in part by the fierce local campaign waged by residents to save the fen from the flood. Three small villages – barely hamlets – were due to go under the water, and several farms. The crusade had attracted the usual hangers-on: the police expected rent-a-mob to make an appearance, scuffles, maybe worse. One group of green campaigners had built an ‘ark' – a converted Dutch barge with its deck covered with plant pots containing mosses and lichens, ferns and reeds threatened by the rising waters. Overhead a single police helicopter had circled.

Dryden had his own plan that day to get the best story. A story to beat the nationals. He didn't want to watch the fen become a sea, he wanted to be
on
that sea. The Environment Agency was happy to help. They knew him well – he hadn't arrived on a plane from Barcelona, or New York, or – worse – driven up the M11 from London – to watch the great fen flood. He'd covered the story from day one. He'd done them no favours, gave the anti-mere campaigners a fair hearing, but the agency knew he was honest, and serious about the issue, so they helped him on that final day and got him through the security ring they'd had to put in place around the danger area – the 2,000 acres waiting to be flooded.

Humph, a dedicated non-swimmer, had been in a hurry to get back. The cabbie had helped him unload the boat from a trailer attached to the Capri at a spot three miles west of the hamlet of River Bank. According to the OS map that was the lowest spot – twelve feet below mean high tide – and therefore should flood first. Alone, Dryden had scanned the horizon, the distant flood bank of the Cam just in sight, and along it the first signs of demonstrators – placards just visible, thin trails of smoke rising from campfires. The police contingency plan estimated a maximum figure of 4,000. Dryden had rung round and reckoned that by the time the sluices were opened at noon they'd be wrong by a factor of ten. There was also a plan for a mass sit-in the following day at Petit's Fen – the next area scheduled for flooding to the south. Another 1,000 acres, another dozen lonely peatland hamlets.