Nightrise (3 page)

Humph didn't move from the driver's chair, merely eyeing the bank top balefully.

‘I need to show you something,' said Dryden, getting out and squatting down to eye-level, his angular frame folding like a deck chair.

‘I thought you didn't like water.'

Which was half true. Dryden was drawn to water with the power of an emotional magnet, but he also lived in fear of it, as one might live in fear of the dark. It was a dramatic tension he knew might kill him one day. He always said it went back to an incident in his childhood when he'd been trapped under the winter ice on the river. But it felt deeper than that: something atavistic, like his eye colour.

‘Can't I see it from 'ere?' asked Humph. ‘The dog's tired.' He did want to know what it was that DS Stan Cherry had told Dryden but he didn't see why he had to get out of the cab to hear it.

Boudicca, the greyhound, barked in response, scrabbling at the back of the passenger-side seat.

‘I'll take the dog,' said Dryden, flipping the seat forward, losing patience with Humph's laziness.

Wooden steps had been set into the bank up to the brink and a metal footbridge over the Old Bedford. The water was streaked with green algae and weed and a flotilla of swans headed towards the sea. There were no boats in sight but the wreck of one – fibreglass and covered in slime – lay just beneath the surface. Across the bridge a staggered gate led through a bird hide to a path with a view over the marshland, and of Ely cathedral in the far distance.

The dog ran south along the bank, taking the very slight bend in the great artificial river, leaning into the curve to pick up speed. As it ran it kicked up a miniature red sandstorm. To the north the bank ran straight until the eye lost it in a blue horizon. It was like standing on the lip of the world, thought Dryden: as if he'd reached the edge of the map.

He heard Humph's rasping breath before the cabbie appeared above the bank. There was a bench and the cabbie sat on it, his chest heaving, avoiding Dryden's eyes, looking along the bank at the receding form of Boudicca.

Dryden pointed at a stone cairn. Humph hauled himself up on to his feet and stood before it. There was a slate plaque which read:

IN MEMORY OF JOHN ‘JACK' DRYDEN

LAST SEEN HERE ON JANUARY 22, 1977.

HE GAVE HIS LIFE IN THE BATTLE OF THE BANKS.

Humph would have looked at his feet if he could have seen them. He knew about the floods of 'seventy-seven. He'd been ten, and the school house at Black Horse Drove had been closed so he'd played on the edge of the village, watching the water level inch up the side of Tyler's Barn. The nationals had called it the ‘battle of the banks' after the Army had been called in. Millions of sandbags, amphibious vehicles, trains loaded with rubble and sand. None of it had stopped the water.

‘I didn't know,' he said. ‘I thought . . .'

‘No,' said Dryden, guessing the missing sentence. ‘They never found the body. Mum had this put up.' He looked around. ‘I've seen press cuttings, pictures taken that day, right here. It's like another world.'

One picture had shown the far bank, the one they'd parked beneath, water pouring through a gap the floodwaters had breached. White water blew over the bank tops, thundered through the breach – a noise people said could be heard in Ely, six miles east. On either side of the gap men stood, everyone in caps, the rain grey, the water grey, the sky low and lightless. No two-thirds sky to lift the spirits. Military lorries were parked along the bank, loaded with sandbags. In the river barges packed with cement were ready to push into the breach. It was the day after the accident and some of the men held their caps to their chests as if already at the funeral.

‘They held an inquest at Reach – the old school house,' said Dryden. He'd been there, in the front row, more curious than moved. ‘There was a witness over here, where we're standing, and he said he was watching Dad – Dad and his mate, a bloke called Boyle. They were checking the bank. A kind of night watch, although there was still a little dusk left. Then they heard this wrenching noise – you can't imagine it, can you? What a thousand tonnes of earth just sliding away sounds like. I always remember what he said – that witness:
And then they just sort of went away from us.
I guess they did. They were lit on the bank by an arc lamp and then they were gone, but for a second they saw them moving away, out of the light.'

The dog was back, hurtling straight past them, heading north.

‘Nobody ever saw him again,' said Dryden.

Humph pursed his baby-lips, aware that saying anything was likely to be inappropriate, but impelled to say something. ‘Nothing?'

‘Just his watch. He'd taken it off and left it with one of the overseers – for safe keeping while he filled sandbags.' The thought opened up an emotion in Dryden. ‘I loved that watch as a kid. Roman face – classic – but with a compass set in the middle. I've never seen another. My uncle's got it.'

‘What happened to the other bloke – Boyle?'

‘Survived. I couldn't think it at the time, but that made it worse. He was at the inquest, although he didn't have much to say. He left – left the Fens, tried to find a new life. That's the problem with surviving, I guess. You end up being this constant reminder to everyone of the dead.' Dryden pointed to the distant smudge of a village in the mid-distance. ‘Boyle was washed up over there, near the bridge. He couldn't remember anything. Came round looking up at the sky with a stomach full of sea water.'

‘But there was a search?' prompted Humph. ‘For . . .' He looked at the memorial stone, not wanting to use the word ‘father'. ‘For Jack?'

‘He went into the water holding some loops of heavy rope they'd used to snare cattle. The coroner said he might have got caught up, dragged down. When he said that the men all nodded, as if they knew the truth. I thought it sounded right too, as if he'd been tangled with a serpent, a fen eel.

‘When the water finally fell away there was mud, of course – mud everywhere. So we thought he'd be in the mud and he'd stay there. Buried. But if he'd got free of the rope he'd have been swept north – the current was running with the tide then, and the body might have got round the sluices at Denver. Then there's the sea. That's what I always hoped – that he'd just got taken out to sea. Like he'd been diluted. I used to think that on the beach sometimes, and when I swim. That I can sort of feel him around me. I'd sink my head under and listen. He had a voice like that – a rumble, bit like mine, gravelly, like stones being turned over by the tide.'

Humph nodded, appalled at the thought.

Dryden looked up, letting the sky lift his mood. A single wisp of cumulus sliding past at speed, changing shape. That was Humph's problem, of course – that clouds weren't fixed even if you could name them.

The cabbie flexed his hands, wondering if they could go now. ‘I'm sorry,' he said again. He didn't really like making emotional contact with anyone, and had always understood Dryden to be the same. He strongly suspected that this rare breach of their unspoken etiquette was going to get worse, not better. The warm plastic interior of the Capri beckoned.

Dryden looked at him, puzzled, then disappointed. ‘I didn't bring you here to tell you that,' he said. Humph looked away, embarrassed to see that his friend's eyes were flooded with tears.

‘Stan Cherry – the coroner's officer. He said there was an accident out on the Manea Road. A car crashed, caught fire. They didn't give the name out because they couldn't trace the vehicle licence to start with. In fact, we ran a paragraph in the paper – I wrote it. Asking for someone to come forward. He must be missing: missed. Someone's father, someone's son. That kind of thing. The body was destroyed, charred. They've got a name now. John Philip Vincent Dryden.' Dryden took out the piece of paper. ‘This is his address. It's 500 yards away from yours, on the Jubilee.'

He walked to the memorial and put a hand on the smooth slate.

Humph's head moved from side to side like one of the nodding dogs he had on the back sill of the Capri. ‘Yeah, but it's not him, is it? It can't be him. Is that what Cherry said – that they think it's him?'

‘No. He thinks it's ID theft. But I wonder. It might be Dad. There was no body. I don't know what he had on him when he was swept away – driving licence, I guess. Wallet – some cash. I don't know . . .' Dryden threw his hands out wide as his voice rose almost to a shout. ‘No death certificate. Mum and I went to see the registrar after the inquest but he wouldn't issue one without a body. So he could have just picked up his life again. The farm was in Mum's name, and the bank account. So it could be him, Humph. Maybe it is him.'

Humph took a step back and almost fell over, his hand searching for the bench again.

‘Question is, why?' said Dryden. ‘Why leave us? Mum and me. Why didn't he come back?
How
didn't he come back? What did he do – just walk out of the water into another life?' An image had been haunting Dryden since he'd talked to Cherry. A scene from
Beowulf
, perhaps – a man, only half-human, walking out of the mere, dripping mud.

Humph's shoulders sagged, unequal to the task of finding an answer. Then he had it. ‘Amnesia,' he said.

There was just a trace of something lighter in Dryden's voice when he answered. ‘But how does that work? He gets washed up – he can't remember who he is. But every copper in the Fens, every medic, every doctor,
everyone
knew we were looking for him. His mate was alive, so maybe he was too. There was hope. It's not like we weren't looking.'

Humph was speechless. This was the problem with getting involved in conversations. You made a perfectly reasonable suggestion and then got pilloried for it.

‘Cherry said there was no point in a visual ID because of the condition of the body,' said Dryden.

Humph nodded, agreeing.

‘I said I didn't care. I want to be sure, so I'm going to see him – tomorrow. I'd like you to come with me.'

Humph felt oddly elated at the request. It included him but he didn't have to do anything. Above all, say anything. Then he remembered something and he couldn't stop himself articulating the thought. ‘I was going to suggest Jack – for the boy. It's a good name. Solid, honest.'

He turned away, beginning the long trek back to the car.

D
ryden got out of the Capri while it was still trundling to a stop on the rank. Looking up and down Market Street he tried to breathe in the everydayness of the scene: a queue waiting for the Littleport bus, loaded down like refugees with market-day shopping; one of the waiters at the Indian restaurant cleaning a plate-glass window; a parrot in a cage hung outside one of the barber shops. From Market Square came the sound of a busker and the gentle hum of the cooling unit on top of the mobile fish stall.

He watched Humph positioning earphones on his small, neat round head. The Capri was the tenth cab in the line so – even on market day – he had a half-hour wait. In his copious spare time Humph learnt obscure European languages from tapes. This year it was Estonian. Any language would do, as long as there was very little chance of him actually having to use it. Every Christmas he'd fly out to the chosen country to try out what he'd learnt. Then he'd bin the books, the tapes, and pick a new language. Dryden suspected the routine was designed to ensure he avoided the long shadow cast by other people's happy festive holidays.

There was a scrum of women round the fresh flower stand on Market Square. Dryden got a cup of tea in a plastic cup from the mobile café emblazoned with its name: Big Business. He stood sipping the tannic liquid, looking down Fore Hill, and over the riverside willows. The image of the burnt-out white van on the Manea Road, the driver reduced to carbon, refused to fade. He gulped the tea, convinced he could taste something like ashes on his tongue.

The Crow
's offices were next to a jewellers'. All the watches and clocks showed exactly the same time – 10.14 – and Dryden was pretty sure that hadn't always been the case – that they'd been recalibrated for market day. Which was an oddly touching affectation because he always felt that one of the things he loved about Ely and the Black Fens which surrounded the little city was that time didn't seem to matter that much. You could go and sit right now in one of the steamy cafés around the market stalls and listen to conversations which were set in 1950, or 1970, or 1930 – as if the intervening decades had never happened. Dialogue peppered with the lazy East Country accent, complaints about bus routes which ran once a week, cess pits and reservoirs, irrigators and flash floods, peat so dry it was covering the kitchen table with red powder, and the wind – always the wind: turning the new wind generators, shaking windows in frames, drying washing cracking on the line.

So what was the point in resetting the minute hands on clocks?

As he pushed open the door to
The Crow
's reception he heard the cathedral strike the quarter hour. Jean, the paper's deaf receptionist, beamed at him from behind the counter where she was serving a gaggle of women, clearly in off the fen for market day. Jean's face was constantly in a state of tension – the intelligence and empathy in her eyes saving her from the brittle, irritable lines of the skin, which she'd strained for a lifetime to hear the words of others.

She adjusted both her hearing aids and fiddled with a control at her belt as all the women talked at once. They'd come to put an advert in the paper to sell three children's prams but they hadn't agreed the wording and so they were doing it now – by committee. Dryden loved market day for these people. Dressed in clothes that were out of date – always – and never coordinated, so a ten-year-old shell suit, thirty-year-old leather brogues, a sixties shopping bag, a Victorian umbrella. And they always seemed to smell of fresh air. There were only six women but they took up most of the space. Fen people were of many shapes but generally only one size.