Nightrise (23 page)

Dryden checked his watch and knelt down so that he was centre-image.

He spoke into the tiny camera. ‘Well, I'm here again. I'd like to talk about Rory. I'm not police. But I was there when they found him – like I said in my emails.' He held his watch up to the camera eye. ‘I'll be here another hour.' He was going to leave it at that but added: ‘I'll be back tomorrow – last time.' He looked into the lens and felt, for a second, a spark of electricity, as if he'd caught someone's eye.

He settled down on the grass and opened his rucksack to retrieve a bottle of water. The scent of the river was almost hypnotic. It made him think of his boat down at Ely, lying awake listening to the ducks, and the occasional oily slop of something slipping into the water off the bank. He drank water, the sunlight catching the upturned bottle.

The FenFishing website was a mystery. He'd been on the site several times a day and it was always updated with the conditions on the river, tides and winds, and bits of news on fishing in East Anglia. And there was a blog with plenty of chatter from fishermen – loads from Sheffield and the industrial north. Nothing about Rory's death, or Eau Fen. Someone clearly thought business as usual was more than a cliché. He doubted it was Setchey's widow. Other fishermen, perhaps? Guides and ghillies who'd worked for Setchey?

Out in mid-river something breached the surface then plopped back into the deep water. The website had been full of pictures of pike, fen monsters at twenty-five pounds, thirty pounds, even more. There was something primeval about the snaggle-toothed fish, as if it wasn't alive today at all, but an artist's impression from the age of the dinosaurs.

The whine of the boat was audible long before it came into sight downriver. He hadn't thought of that – that they could reach all the webcams by water. A small fibreglass dingy with a powerful outboard came towards him leaving a white V in the blue water, slicing an early morning mist into two churning weaves of white vapour.

He tried to put an expression on his face that wasn't threatening, or needy, or desperate. It froze when he realized it was a woman, blonde, no make-up, an attractive face. She cut the engine and threw a heavy line at his feet which he took and slipped round the metal arm of the sluice.

She didn't get out of the boat or look as if she might. ‘I don't want to talk about Rory,' she said.

‘I'm sorry,' said Dryden, stepping back, hands in pockets.

‘You're a reporter. The police said you were there when they got to Rory and that you knew the details. I told them you left the message – they said I should ignore you. That they'd told me everything. But they haven't – have they?' She couldn't stop herself then, letting the emotion register on her face. The muscles around her right eye seemed to jump so that he could sense the tension.

‘Have they told you how he died?' he asked. He knew it was cruel, and he knew it was controlling, but she had a right to know. ‘His heart.'

‘Yes.' She flipped the rope, creating a wave which ran to the sluice. ‘That's all they said – and that I couldn't identify the body. Why?'

Dryden sat on the bank. She waited, anchoring stray blonde hair behind on ear. She'd looked fifty, but that was almost certainly the effect of the grief and stress of the last few days. There was an unaffected beauty in her face, a fine brittle jaw, and flying cheekbones.

‘Two men took Rory away,' he said. ‘They're called Miiko and Geron Saar. Did they tell you that?'

She shook her head.

‘They're from Estonia. They work for other – criminals – who specialize in the sale of false identities. They call it
ghosting
– they steal the identities of the dead. It's a very lucrative business. I'm sorry – Rory was involved in this. But not with these men. They were customers. He worked for the suppliers. There's a place out on the mere they used. The documents would be left there. Rory did this for them.'

She sat in the boat.

‘He may have done this before, perhaps many times. Some of these documents have photo-ID, details. So they needed a line of communication between the suppliers and the customers – two-way. He was part of this.

‘But this time someone stole the IDs. The Saar brothers thought it was Rory. They took him to a car park in their car, the night before he was found, and tried to make him talk.'

He thought about editing the truth but then he saw a look in her eye and realized she'd already imagined worse. Much worse.

‘They shot him once, probably by accident; there was a fight in the car. Then his heart failed.'

‘It was weak,' she said. ‘His heart. His father died young, and an uncle.' Something about the way she said it made it sound as if this fault in the mechanism of the heart was something vindictive in itself, almost a curse.

‘When they took Hythe House apart I was there,' said Dryden. ‘There was a child's room.'

‘The boys.'

‘No – they're teenagers, right?' asked Dryden, recalling the police statement. ‘This was a child's room.'

She shook her head as if to dislodge a memory.

‘Can you tell me about Samuel?'

‘No.' She covered her mouth. Her eyes seemed to lose focus and for a second Dryden thought she might faint. He took a step towards the boat and helped her out on to the bank where she sat down quickly in the grass. She wore felt boots and they touched Dryden's leg but she didn't pull them back.

‘You OK?'

‘Yes. Samuel's heart failed. Like Rory's. He was crying in the night. We tried to ignore the screaming because they say you should otherwise they never sleep through. I left him – ten minutes, no more.' She couldn't help looking at him then, trying to convince him, even after all the years, that it wasn't her fault.

‘Then he was quiet but I knew. I ran to the room. He was already cold. We buried him and came back to Hythe House and I locked the bedroom and threw the key in the river. I've never wanted to talk about it, and I don't want to talk about it now. He was six months old. We never got over it. Rory did, I did, but together – somehow together we couldn't get past it. Even when the boys came.'

For a moment Dryden didn't understand, and then he did, and for the first time he felt a shiver of real fear about uncovering the truth. He'd made the fatal error of
presumption
. He'd thought of them all like his father – their lives lost as adults, the rest stolen. How much better, how much more
lucrative
, to steal a life before it's lived.

Were they all children? All the envelopes containing the lives of people who didn't really exist, people who'd never lived a full life. Like Samuel: dead within a year. And this idea introduced, without warning, a note of genuine evil. Because if you stole the lives of children you'd have to wait, and plan, build their make-believe lives and let them grow up in the world.

He hoped she didn't ask now, why he'd been interested in Samuel, because he didn't want to say any of that out loud. And it would destroy her image of Rory – a father who'd stolen, perhaps, the life of his own child. Did he tell himself it was a victimless crime? You only had to look at this woman's face in profile to realize what an empty phrase that was.

‘Was there a death certificate, Mrs Setchey – for Samuel?'

‘Yes. We have that – we were very interested in it because it lists the cause of death and we were angry then. It was natural. We wanted someone to blame. But there was no one to blame. It just happened.'

So: an identical case to Jack Dryden. Death, a certificate, but still they stole his life.

‘You don't recall the registrar's name?'

She shook her head. ‘I don't remember very much – not afterwards. I'm sorry.'

‘But it was in Ely?'

‘No. Clayhythe fell under Burwell, I think – or Swaffham Prior?'

Dryden nodded. ‘I'm sorry to ask so many questions. If I find out more I'll let you know – can I ring? If you've got a mobile.'

He fished out a scrap of paper and a pen. But when she handed it back her movements had slowed down, as if what she was thinking – what she was
daring
to let herself think – was sucking the energy out of her limbs.

‘And Rory was involved with these men – the men who stole identities?' she asked.

‘Yes. Certainly – but we don't know when, or what he did. It looks like he was just the messenger, the postman if you like. Just a cog in the wheel.'

‘There's always been something hidden – since after Samuel died,' she said. ‘I thought it was grief that he couldn't share. But it was this, wasn't it – this . . .' Her face had taken on a hardness so that she could use the word: ‘
trade
.

‘I asked once. I knew he went out alone at night, in the boat. And he wouldn't talk about it – just fobbed me off. I didn't think it could be bad – because he wasn't a bad person. And I knew where the money went; it went into the website and the business, and it's a good business – that's why I'm keeping the site running because I can sell it then. That's the words they use, isn't it – the money men. A going concern.

‘So I said to him: what do you do at night? No one else who worked for the FRWA went out after dark. He said that I wasn't to worry, that it didn't hurt anyone. He said I could sleep nights.'

Her face seemed to sag, as if someone had just snipped the tendons that held her features in place. ‘I think that's a lie. That's what he's left me with – us – a lie.' And then, inevitably, the final question. ‘Did they steal Samuel's life – the rest of his life?'

He didn't have the right to deny it. ‘Yes. I think they did.'

‘I hope they rot in hell.' She covered her mouth but couldn't stop herself finishing the thought: ‘All of them.'

D
obbs Café (no apostrophe), Chequer Lane, just off the High Street, 8.55 a.m. It served coffee in glass cups on glass saucers and had a lino embellished with musical clefs. Starbucks, Costa Coffee and Café Nero were all within 100 yards but Dobbs survived, offering all-day breakfasts and a roast lunch accompanied by the one advertising cliché guaranteed to succeed in the Fens: All You Can Eat. Dobbs had a single table outside. Dryden always took it if he could – if thwarted he'd sit on the low wall by the back of the ironmongers. This morning he'd got the table. A small victory which lifted his mood.

Dryden and Laura had separate appointments to view the body of Roger Stutton at the funeral directors just along Chequer Lane. She'd gone first, and taken their son. Dryden had touched base at
The Crow
, using his own key. Two developments:
The Cambridge News
was reporting that detectives hunting for the killer of Rory Setchey now believed he'd died in a multi-storey car park in Ely the night before his body was found at Eau Fen. They'd asked for information on a black four-by-four seen in the area with shattered windows that night, or in the early hours of the following morning. The report matched Kapten Kross' version of events.

Dryden also had an email from Kross. Interpol had monitored the freighter which had brought the Saar brothers to England as it left Felixstowe for the return journey to Tallinn. Dockside CCTV revealed only one brother on the dockside prior to sailing. Miiko, it appeared, had stayed behind. Kross said he felt there was no cause for concern but confirmed the local police unit would stay with Dryden's family 24/7. Dryden had already decided that wasn't enough. He was no longer prepared to outsource his family's safety to the police.

Dryden sent a text message to DI Friday asking if any progress had been made in identifying the man who had posed as Jack Dryden – successfully – for the best part of thirty-five years. Dryden was perplexed by the details of the case. Someone had stolen the identity of his father: end of story. But not quite. How had they done it? And while he accepted the man who'd died at Manea wasn't his father there were those worrying echoes of his father's life in the house on the Jubilee Estate. This man had become a tutor in natural sciences – his father's degree. Why live in Ely where there would always, surely, be a chance the name would be recognized, if not the face? He'd considered giving Friday the intelligence Humph had gathered on the fake Jack Dryden at The Red, White and Blue – the link to Lincoln Jail – but decided he had a better idea. He had contacts in the prison service; he'd try to trace the link himself.

The cathedral clock struck nine thirty. A crocodile of schoolchildren crossed Back Alley. He saw Laura emerge from the funeral directors on the corner carrying the baby, walking towards him: head down, her face in shadow. He'd bought her a fresh mug of tea which he edged towards her once she'd sat down.

‘You all right?' he asked.

She nodded, looking at him for the first time. Her brown eyes were liquid, the whites pink.

‘Sure. He looks peaceful. If you can face it go.'

Dryden took the baby.

‘In Italy the children see the dead. It is not a big thing,' she said, answering a question he hadn't asked.

‘But I had to insist. I said it was his great uncle. That maybe he takes his name.'

‘Really?'

‘Not Roger – the second name. I saw it on the casket. Eden.'

It
was
a good name. Dryden had once asked his uncle where it had come from. Not the family, not some notable ancestor, just the prime minister in Downing Street when he was born. But still – it spoke of something grander: paradise, peace.

‘Maybe,' said Dryden, giving her the child. ‘I'll see.' And that was precisely what he meant – that he'd see his uncle and then decide. ‘I won't be long,' he said, standing and walking quickly away, his footsteps clattering on cobbles.