Nightrise (2 page)

‘A child of his time,' she said.

‘Not Humph,' said Dryden.

‘Not Humph,' she said, looking to the window and missing the shadow of disappointment which crossed Dryden's face. The whole process of naming was oddly disquieting. He felt that the child didn't properly exist unless they could name him – but by naming him they'd somehow capture who he was, and that was too great a responsibility. Dryden was waiting for the child to give them a hint about who he was, a flicker of attitude, or character. So far he was a bundle of bodily functions.

They'd dismissed all the obvious names – her father was Gaetano, which would be memorable, and a tribute to her Italian roots, but difficult in the Fens. It would end up shortened to something ugly – Tano, maybe. Dryden's father had been Jack. But Dryden's father had died young – at thirty-five – swept away in the floods of 1977. The tragedy seemed to taint the name.

‘We're going home,' said Laura, looking at the baby. ‘To a
house
!'

During Laura's long illness Dryden had lived alone on a boat on the river. He'd left his Fleet Street reporter's job on
The News
and got a job on the local paper –
The Crow
– to be near his wife, walking away from his career. Once Laura was well enough to leave hospital they'd lived together on the boat, converted to accommodate a wheelchair, hoist and a specially adapted shower. There wasn't room for a child. They'd used Laura's savings to buy a house on the fen with a distant view of the ruined farmhouse in which Dryden had been born. But domesticity repelled Dryden, who'd come to like his footloose life. He said he'd sell the boat, but he kept forgetting to put the advert in the paper.

‘Humph said he'd run us to the house in the cab,' he said. ‘He's going to tie tin cans to the back.'

They'd lived out at the new house for a month. But tonight would be special.

‘Will you carry me over the threshold?'

‘I'm not carrying Humph.' Dryden squinted at the battered car. ‘He's tied a ribbon to the aerial.'

‘That will make all the difference,' she said.

She had a point. The cab had seen better days. Even the fluffy dice attached to the rear-view mirror were dusty and threadbare. The exhaust wasn't shot, it was dead and buried.

‘For the child he can be a godfather – yes?
Padrino.
'

‘He's got some champagne too,' said Dryden.

‘But only little bottles?' she said.

‘Yup. Only little bottles.'

Humph's car had its own minibar: the glove compartment, crammed with miniature spirits and wines. The cabbie's principal daytime duty was acting as Dryden's unofficial chauffeur. His real money came in late-night runs picking up nightclub bouncers from Newmarket and Cambridge, and working unsocial hours for a Stansted Airport minicab firm. He had regular customers – mainly academics at the university or execs at Silicon Fen's bio-tech and IT companies. They saved him the miniature bottles of spirits dished out in business class on the long-haul flights. His glove compartment looked like a bonded warehouse in Lilliput.

‘But he should exercise more,' said Laura. ‘I will write him a programme – a fitness programme. He can take the boy for walks in the pushchair.'

Laura found it difficult to approve of Humph. There was something unsettling about a grown man who lived in a car.

‘He's been round the cab three times.' Dryden walked to the window. ‘He's back in it now, mind. Oh, no, he's out again.'

The cabbie tottered twenty feet from the Capri and opened a book, looking up at the sky.

‘Ah,' said Dryden. ‘Clouds. The latest collection.' The cab was littered with I-SPY books – fifties and sixties dog-eared copies. Humph was a dedicated ‘spotter' and had worked his way through the classics: I-SPY churches, I-SPY Trees, I-SPY creepy-crawlies, I-SPY pub signs (a particular favourite). Such obsessions were a diversion from the reality of his life: a messy divorce, two girls he didn't see, an inability to be still.

It had been the cabbie's own idea to collect clouds but there'd been no book. So he'd parked outside the library and Dryden had got him a textbook. Fifty different cloud types were listed and he'd already ticked off ten, then run into the complexities of identifying objects which changed their shape as you watched. It was proving as troublesome to name clouds as it was children.

‘He's stuck,' said Dryden, enjoying the moment. ‘He said he saw a cloud in the night, an hour after sunset – like a rainbow, but brighter, cloud-shaped. I reckon he'd been in the glove compartment.'

The cabbie stood stock still studying a single cloud, a billowing chef's hat, a cathedral of water drops. He looked between the page of the book and sky repeatedly as if one or other image might re-form itself to provide a match.

Another vehicle entered the empty car park. Police markings, just through the car wash. It parked right next to the Capri, and the driver's window slid down. Humph nodded then turned towards the hospital, beckoning Dryden with a small, delicate hand.

T
he hospital swimming pool was one of the few remaining parts of the original buildings, built in the 1940s to care for wounded RAF pilots and crew. Hydrotherapy had been offered to burns victims, their skin taut and raw, frightened to touch the world, but enticed by the cool embrace of the water. Dryden always imagined the pool back in that first summer of the war – young men being lowered into the water by hoist. Two walls of the building were made of glass doors which could be opened on to a lawn. He'd seen pictures of patients set out on chairs, swaddled in bandages, limbs stiff and awkward, watching bombers overhead bound for Germany. Today there was just a single woman in the water, in a black one-piece swimsuit, cutting efficiently through the pool, notching up languid lengths.

A coffee machine stood by the exit to the changing rooms with a set of cheap plastic chairs. Dryden took one and watched Detective Sergeant Stan Cherry struggle with coins to get two black teas. DS Cherry was the local coroner's officer: bluff, a northerner who'd never lost his accent, a few years from retirement, stiff-jointed. Cherry's skin was like a baby's – pink and shiny, and almost completely without lines on his round face.

‘There you go, my man,' said Cherry, passing Dryden a plastic cup. ‘Get yourself on the outside of that.'

Dryden watched the swimmer turn, her body an agile corkscrew. He was in no hurry to find out what Cherry wanted. He was very rarely in a hurry for anything, nurturing his natural inclination to be an observer, letting it deepen and flourish. When he watched ticking clocks he made a conscious effort to try and slow down the second hand.

Cherry's mobile rang but he killed it without looking at the screen. The little tactic made Dryden uneasy, creating a small frisson of anxiety. What was so important about what he had to say to Dryden? Then Cherry smiled inappropriately. He'd built a career on being jovial and he clearly wasn't going to let being a coroner's officer stop him now.

‘I've got some bad news, Philip.' Dryden had covered many inquests in the last five years and Cherry was a good contact, a helpful officer. They were on first-name terms. It was the kind of mannered friendship which can mean nothing. ‘Well – startling more than bad,' Cherry went on. He took a breath: ‘Look.' He leaned forward and fixed his watery eyes on Dryden's. ‘It's about your father.'

Consulting a notebook he gave Dryden the full name. ‘John Philip Vincent.' Cherry looked for some sign of recognition but Dryden didn't flinch. ‘I've got a body in the morgue, Philip. Male – roughly between sixty and seventy years of age. It might be his.'

His father had been swept from sight in an accident on the fen during the floods of 1977. They'd searched for the body but it had never been found. He'd always pictured white bones uncovered in some fenland ditch, or emerging in a fisherman's net. ‘Bones?' he said.

Cherry shook his head impatiently. ‘It's not that simple. There was an accident out on the road to Manea last week. You carried a paragraph in the paper: the car hit a dip, lost control, ended up in the ditch. There was a fire so we couldn't ID the driver. Well, we've got a name now. The name's John Philip Vincent Dryden. Born April 8, 1942.'

‘There's been a mistake,' said Dryden, although the skin on his scalp had begun to crawl. ‘Last week? This happened
last week.
You're saying Jack – my father, Jack Dryden – was alive this time last week?' Dryden shook his head, laughing. ‘It's a common name,' he said. ‘He's been dead thirty-five years.'

‘We started with the vehicle, of course,' said Cherry. ‘But there was some sort of problem at Swansea with the computer. We got the vehicle licence this week – and an address. He lived in town, Jubilee Estate, a rented house. Neighbours didn't know a thing – kept himself to himself. Old bloke – retired, solitary. A loner. Like I said – name of Jack Dryden. He didn't tell many people his surname, by the way – so just plain “Jack” to most. Local GP had his file, which went right back to London. Born in Hampstead – right? It's your Dad's records all right. We got his dental file too – a rough match, but nothing cut and dried. And fillings are post-1977, after your Dad went missing. So that doesn't prove owt.'

Dental records. It was one of those euphemisms that didn't work, because it just conjured up its own horrors.

‘The fire was bad?' asked Dryden.

‘If you want to know what I think,' said Cherry, ‘I think this is ID theft. I think someone took the chance when your Dad went missing. There was no death certificate. So, officially, he's still alive unless your mum applied to have him certified dead?'

Dryden shrugged, then shook his head.

‘See – that's got to be it. Somehow they got hold of his documents. If they got the birth certificate they could build a whole new ID. Like I say – got to be.'

But Dryden could see in Cherry's eyes that it hadn't
got to be
. That there was another solution.

Cherry leant forward and produced a passport in his hand like a magician.

Dryden flicked the stiff old-fashioned black wallet open. It was his father's – dated 1974. So, again, it didn't prove anything. It was thirty-eight years out of date. The corner wasn't clipped, so it had never been sent in for a replacement. ‘This is crazy,' said Dryden. ‘There must have been pictures in the house – up-to-date ones?'

‘Nothing. There's nothing on the walls 'cept wallpaper. I think we're going to have to take a DNA swab – if you're OK with that. Can't see any other way forward. We can hardly ask his neighbours to identify any of your family snaps. They're a lifetime out of date.'

‘Trade, profession – any work?'

‘We're on to that, but it looks like he was some kind of tutor – you know, GCSEs, A-Levels, that kind of lark. Somewhere he'll have picture ID – bound to have. Then we might know. But it could take time and I'd rather, you know, rule out the
real
Jack Dryden.'

‘What subjects did he teach?'

Cherry blinked, his good humour strained by Dryden's peremptory tone. ‘Looks like biology, chemistry, maths. All the paperwork's in the house.'

His father had read natural sciences at Cambridge. They were his subjects. If someone had stolen his ID that was a hell of a coincidence. Dryden's heart was racing and he was glad he was sitting down. His father's death had always felt unfinished, insubstantial – not just because they'd never found the body. He'd always felt that his mother – the family – had kept something from him. The whole episode had the aura of a myth about it. It was that uncertainty that made him think of the other solution to the conundrum. ‘Maybe it was Dad. Maybe he just didn't want to come back that day. Maybe he didn't want to come back to me and Mum. There was no body. Why's that impossible?' The coffee cup Dryden was holding had begun to vibrate. He held it in both hands. He pressed on: ‘And he lived –
here
. In Ely?'

‘Right. But not for long – just the last three years. And the bloke next door says he hardly ever went out – chip shop, that pub with the shutters – The Red, White and Blue.
But before Ely the medical records say Peterborough until we get back to 'seventy-seven – then it's Ely again.'

Dryden felt dizzy, his mouth dry. He was thinking about that year – 1977. After his father's death, after the floods, after the inquest, they'd fled back to London. His mother had got a job teaching in a suburban comprehensive, swapping the farm at Burnt Fen for a faceless, nameless semi. He'd never understood why. Then he thought of one of those questions which make your heart freeze. ‘Seven days ago, Stan – this accident. So it was a Thursday. Time?'

Cherry checked a notebook. ‘Late rush hour – what passes for a rush hour in Manea. Call to nine-nine-nine timed at 9.08 a.m.'

An hour after Dryden's son was born. If it was his father then they'd been alive together on the same earth for those fleeting sixty minutes, unaware of each other. Grandson and grandfather.

Cherry produced a DNA swab kit. ‘This way we'll know.'

‘And the body?' asked Dryden.

‘You don't want to see the body.'

T
he steep bank of the Old Bedford River ran like a slide rule across country: twenty-five feet of earth, holding the flowing water above the land, crossing a world turned upside down: rivers above the land, land below the distant sea. On the bank top cows grazed – the only living things likely to break the fen horizon. Dryden got Humph to park just below the electric pumping station at Welch's Dam – one of the many along the length of the artificial river. Beyond it, a mile distant over the marshland was the New Bedford – its twin. In the winter they'd open the sluices and flood the land between, creating a huge lake. But in summer rough pasture lay where only a few months before the winter storms had whipped up white horses.