Nightrise (13 page)

A distant siren sounded its alarm at 11.45 a.m. – the fifteen-minute warning. On the wind he could hear the distant demonstrators like a faraway football crowd. He heard the blare of megaphones. Somewhere a police siren wailed, adding a note of panic, and from the far side of the river a line of geese, in a rough, elongated V formation, began to cross the sky, honking like vintage cars.

Dryden stood in the boat, looking north, anticipating the sudden percussion of the maroon that would signal the opening of the gates. He watched the geese swing back overhead. It was odd. He loved the landscape, and he loved to see the wildlife set against the landscape, but he'd never really been interested in the wildlife
itself.
The Fens, after all, were essentially to him a lifeless landscape – fixed, no cattle, no sheep, a few horses, perhaps – he liked those, but only when they wandered into town in winter or stood, immobile, in the middle of a drove road. Small deer – the fenland muntjac – were like grey ghosts, and he often felt as if he could see through them they were so slight, so fleeting. They too came to town, and wandered sometimes around the cathedral, but were gone by dawn. So, for him, the landscape was lifeless, which made the sky the most important facet of all, because it was the only moving, living thing.

And so it didn't matter how much water they let through the sluices, the sky would always be there; in fact, there'd be more of it, reflected in the water. Not a sea at all, or even a lake, carrying the inverted outlines of hills or mountains, pine trees, or lakeside homes; but instead just
more
sky.

The maroon went off, the retort echoing twice, three times round the fen. The crowd fell silent as if at the news of a death. And then he heard the water. The Fens are silent, except for the wind, but he could hear from three miles away the spurt of white water through the metal gates. The crowd began to chant again but Dryden felt that even then – just a few seconds after the water began to flow – that the mood had changed: it already sounded like a lament. The demonstrators' leaders had promised a twenty-four-hour vigil but Dryden wondered if they'd just melt away at dusk.

It took an hour for the first signs of rising water to appear: the ditches began to fill first, then the wider dykes, until a new world of water brimmed over into the land. Sitting in his beached boat he ate a packed lunch and tried to enjoy the expectation, imagining what the landscape might look like by the time the moon rose. Smoke made a mazy way into the sky from the distant river bank and he guessed the demonstrators had lit more fires. Through the binoculars he saw occasional tents pitched on the bank side.

He didn't recall lying in the bottom of the boat, or slipping into sleep, or any dreams, but when he woke the sound he heard was like a nightmare: screams, inhuman, and piercing. The water, brimming, was creeping out of the nearest ditch, creating a moat. The source of the sound was harder to find, but eventually he saw them – crowded into a far corner around a single willow. Hares, terrified of the rising water, calling to each other. They weren't the only animals in the field. A small herd of muncjac, about twenty, were standing in the precise centre of the peat, still – as if the scene had been caught in a photograph. They had shadows so Dryden checked his watch: 4.15 p.m.

The moat widened by the minute, edging in like a slow tide, but from four directions. It kissed the boat and he reached down a hand to touch it – warm; and now it was this close he could smell it too, the unmistakable aroma of fresh water – a reedy, dank smell, which made him think of a precise colour: a green, the green of wet moss.

The deer bolted before it was too late – the sound of them running louder than he'd imagined, swinging in an arc across the dry peat and then trying to leap the wide moat, like springbok, but landing short, so that the water was white with them swimming, thrashing, and then they were gone, into a small copse of pollarded willow. But the hares, hypnotized by terror, simply crowded tighter together, the screaming manic and pitiful.

Floating free the boat slipped her temporary mooring at precisely 5.05 p.m. He added the time to his notes so that when he came to write the piece he'd have some solid points of fact in a sea of description. It was an odd moment when it came – the slipping away from the earth – making Dryden grab stupidly for the gunwales, so that the boat rocked and touched the peaty bottom, and then slipped clear. He had an outboard turned up, its blades clear, but he used the paddles, edging out into the water. The screams of the hares had stopped but as he set out towards the hamlet of River Bank he saw one of them in the water, drowned, its angular limbs graceful forward and back, as if running beneath the surface.

He fired the outboard into life at 5.45 p.m. and set out for River Bank. By the time he arrived the village was half-submerged: the little church –
The Little Chapel in the Fen
– and its tower, the sturdy bulk of a large house –
Fenlandia
– with its tall fake-Tudor chimney stacks, all stood clear of the rising waters. But the cluster of farm buildings had gone; the crossroads at the village centre marked only by poplars, their Christmas-tree tops still above water. The chattering of starlings in the trees filled the air. They were in the olive in the churchyard and made it look black and heavy, almost shimmering.

Dryden's camera captured the scene by degrees: the final hours of River Bank. When it was over the only signs of the village that had been would be the trees, the church roof and tower, and the chimney of
Fenlandia.
He tied the boat up to the cedar tree. Lighting a lantern he had some food, and in the cool light of dusk had looked down through the green water to the graveyard six feet below: he could see his mother's headstone, the image buckling slightly in the current. He'd set flowers on the grave itself the day before – sea cabbage, water lilies and samphire which floated now, spreading out green tendrils. Which is when he'd seen the first eel: an adult, maybe three feet long, as thick as a man's arm, moving with that primeval oddity, writing S in the water, over and over again.

T
he farmyard at Buskeybay was protected on three sides by Leylandii hedges twenty-five feet tall, a barrier against the fen winds. The view east, towards the high bank of the mere, was the only one left open. Con sat in the kitchen garden with a bowl of runner beans in her lap, expertly slicing and cutting them into a freezer bag. She radiated a sense of brisk efficiency in whatever she did. She might not be a great enthusiast for the Fens but she never appeared to be a victim of its space and scale. Dryden always thought of her as a typical pioneer, never cowed by nature.

She looked up when Dryden called her name but her eyes went beyond him and he knew she was looking for Laura and the baby.

Disappointed, she tried too hard to smile. ‘Philip.'

They didn't embrace or kiss and he couldn't recall when they'd stopped.

‘So – what's the mystery? You said something about Jack?' She straightened her shoulders. ‘I'll make tea.' She stood quickly, large-boned, the beans held at her hip in a plastic basket.

Dryden stood still, a boy again. He'd played here often with Con and Roger's son Laurie – a year older than him, and long gone to a wife and a new life ‘away' – as they said in the Fens. Manchester, Dryden thought. Certainly somewhere crowded and windless. They hadn't been the only children. The tied cottages down by the Isleham Road had been occupied then with families and farm workers. All the summers of his childhood were compressed into a single memory: him, running, across that wide field to the east on a rare windless day, and turning to find each of his footfalls had stirred a miniature red twister of dust, and that beyond that was a whirlwind of amber peat, a fen ‘blow', like the one in the
Wizard of Oz
. He hadn't tried to outrun it; he'd just stood there and let it smother him. He could still feel the tiny pinpricks of the dust, the sizzle of the particles, the red light seen through his tightly closed eyes.

His aunt came back with tea: mugs, a saucer of biscuits and a dish of the radish from the garden, with salt and pepper. It was good of her – a kind of peace offering – because she knew he loved them, but she couldn't stand the sound of others eating. Indoors it was intolerable, but out here she'd lose some of the grinding of the teeth against the wind in the trees. That had been one reason she'd survived as a fen farmer's wife – that pressing need to be out under the sky.

‘Roger out on the boat?' he asked.

She laughed: ‘Always out. You know Roger. In fact, he didn't come back last night. That's routine now.' She searched for the word. ‘The latest fad. He goes out and sets the traps for eels – then stays out so he can pull them in at dawn. Apparently they run at night. And it's true, the catch is bigger – and at the full moon too. Old wives' tales turn out to be true. So he stays out a couple of days – two nights – sometimes three. Then drives the catch up to the coastal pubs and restaurants, or into Cambridge. It's crazy because he can earn a fortune. All those years trying to coax a living out of the soil and then there's one on our doorstep just waiting to be enticed into a wicker trap. Your dad always said Roger was like Toad of Toad Hall. But this one pays its way.'

Dryden looked to the distant bank of the mere. ‘Where does he sleep?'

‘On the boat – he takes a flask, food. Moors up near River Bank – the chapel's still above water.' Her face hardened. ‘And whisky. Remember your grandad had a pewter flask?'

He smiled, nodding, but realized he'd been led into a trap.

‘That's upstairs on the bookshelf – not big enough. He bought another, stainless steel. Says it keeps him warm.'

‘I wanted to speak to him – to you too. About Dad.'

Sipping his tea he told her what had – possibly – happened to Jack: the secret life, the sudden death. He left aside the word betrayal. Then he told her the police thought it was identity theft. That the DNA test would settle the matter.

Con was a still person but she seemed to freeze completely as if the frame had stuck on a DVD. Dryden expected to see her face pixelate then fly apart.

‘If it is Dad why would he do that, Connie? Why would he want a different life?'

She put down her mug of tea. ‘Well, you don't know he did, do you? You've said the police think it's identity theft, that someone stole his identity. Why are you right, and why are they wrong? The idea that it's him, Philip. It's fanciful. Bizarre.'

‘I went to see the body.'

‘And did that help?' It was a cruel question and he hated her just a bit for asking.

‘Not really. I don't know if it is him or not.' He shook his head: ‘I'm
afraid
it's him. I've seen his house – in Ely. It could be Dad's – might be. We'll know when they get the DNA results but they're not in a hurry. Why would they be – it's just a lonely bloke killed in a car crash. They're not overly bothered who it is.'

‘You should speak to Roger.'

‘I will. But right now I'm speaking to you.' He'd never spoken to her like that before and he was shocked to see the tears start in her eyes.

Dryden's mobile rang, zigzagging across the tin tea tray. He grabbed it, stabbed the call button. ‘Dryden.'

His aunt looked away and one of the tears fell.

It was Sam Clarke, Editor-in-Chief of Fenland District Newspapers, the group of local businessmen which had bought
The Crow
just eighteen months earlier. Clarke had an office in March, where the papers were printed. He was a distant figure in more ways than one. His interventions were rare.

‘Guess what I've got on my desk, Philip?'

Dryden stood, trying to concentrate. ‘A chocolate digestive?'

Clarke had played rugby union for Bedford and was built like a side of beef. Dryden had never seen his desk without food on it.

‘Good try. Pasty, actually – chilli beef. And a packet of Doritos. It's the piece of paper I'm talking about.'

‘My application for the editor job?'

‘Well, yes. I've got that, thank you. You'll get a date and time for the interview. No. I was thinking of something else.'

‘A writ?'

‘No – worse. A D-Notice. Well, a digital image of one printed up to be exact. Real thing is coming by messenger.'

‘Shit.' The Ministry of Defence issued D-Notices – effectively gagging orders, which editors hardly ever ignored, restricting coverage of specific stories or the publication of certain facts or images.

‘Shit indeed,' said Clarke. ‘And it is hitting my fan at barrister's rates. They get more in an hour than you get in a week. What am I saying – more than I get in a week.'

‘One of my stories?'

‘Bullseye. Hythe House – you got Mitch to take some pics too. D-Notice is the result.'

‘Specifics?'

‘Nothing at all about the property, the search, the personnel on site, or any speculation about what they were looking for. We can say, however, that the murder victim lived at that address. But that's it.'

‘But it's a DA-Notice right?'

Clarke sniffed, impressed. D-Notices had been phased out in the 1980s. DA-Notices were broader – covering categories of sensitive information.

‘DA-Notice 18. National Security.'

Dryden let the words hang in the air. ‘What do we do?'

‘We don't print the pictures, and we don't write a story telling our readers that the security services – and presumably Scotland Yard – have been crawling all over a house in the middle of the Fens and taking it apart brick by brick. Which is a fucker, given that it's a decent tale. Although – let's look on the bright side – we do have a murder case running. We can still run with that. So what we do is keep on it and wait for our chance. They can't block it forever. And when the DA-Notice gets withdrawn we can go back to the original story. But – in the short term – we keep away. Roads are blocked both ways, and – wait for it – there's an aerial exclusion zone, so I don't want you slipping off to hire a helicopter. Got that?'