Nightrise (33 page)

Even at Cambridge, where they'd met, Arthur had lived for the land that was his. He'd taken natural sciences, specializing in soil science. She'd read English and they shared a passion for Hardy, for Gaskell, the Brontës. Great sagas of the English landscape. He'd brought her home at Easter in their second year. His father – Gerald – had shown her the estate, from the Sixteen Foot Drain to Petit Hill and back to Northern Belt – the line of poplars which marked the land last drained by the Victorians using the new steam engine at Middle Pump. Even then she'd felt that her love of the place, then just a flickering emotion, was dangerous nonetheless.

Arthur had been fatally injured in an accident on a tractor which had tumbled into a roadside ditch. He shouldn't have been doing the work himself but one of the hired hands was off sick and he enjoyed operating the machine. The impact had severed internal arteries and dislodged organs. Eighteen hours of surgery and three months in hospital had failed to rectify the damage. He'd been sent home to die. Their son, Martyn, came home from university at Edinburgh. He wasn't close to his father, or his mother, or to their knowledge, to any other human being. A solitary child who'd lived in his head, at home with facts, and abstractions, and symbols. He hadn't even been close to the land.

The weather had broken the day the boy arrived, snow patches on the fen, and she'd watched him walking from the bus, along the drove, as if it was his own personal
via dolorosa –
his head down, shoulders slumped.

They'd have bought him a car if he'd been able to drive but it was beyond him – almost everything seemed beyond him, except understanding numbers and the patterns they made in his head. At the kitchen table he'd spread out white sheets of paper and spend hours – days – writing in maths. Telling himself stories about numbers.

On the day Arthur died he asked Martyn to open the sash windows and he'd lain there breathing deeply the ice-crystal air off the fen, snowflakes blowing in and lying frozen on the bare boards. Arthur had asked Martyn to hold his hand and Sheila had watched her son's eyes, locked on the grip of the two hands, trying to understand, trying desperately to feel an emotion. A minute, maybe less, then he'd asked them to shut the window and he'd closed his eyes.

The crisis had come at midnight. She'd slept on a divan and woke to hear Arthur calling her name, the precise sound of which she could now recall: not a note of pleading at all, a note of summons. It had been a businesslike hour, the last hour of his life, and she'd always despised him for it, for the cold premeditation of what he'd made her do. After she'd read the will, and a note on dispositions for the farm in the coming year, he'd made her make a simple promise: that she'd never leave Petit Hall, that she'd always farm Petit Fen, and that their son would follow her. Their son, and his sons.

Arthur had slept then but never woken, and so by dawn she was left with the promise, and his cold body, still propped on the pillow so that he could see his land.

Footsteps, suddenly, on the dry leaves beneath the trees.

She tore her eyes away from Arthur's gravestone and looked up and the first light was in the sky, the stars in the East finally gone. Philip Dryden, the reporter, was walking towards her out of the shadows of the trees, and beside him a man with white hair, and pale skin, who looked bloodless. Both were in white overalls, spotless, but their faces were wet and smudged with oil and what looked like ash.

‘I wanted to talk about your son, Martyn,' said Dryden, as he reached the grave. ‘He stole my father's life.'

T
he silence beside Arthur Petit's grave was briefly undermined by the crackle of a police radio. Two uniformed policemen emerged from the trees and Kross directed them to search the house and to assist the forensic team down at the boathouse. The detective's thin hands, both in SOCO white gloves, hung at his sides. Dryden stood still because he was unsure of his knees, which kept buckling, his nervous system shorting-out. They'd given him SOCO overalls to wear but he didn't seem able to retain his body heat, so that his jaw shivered with cold.

He was going to tell Sheila Petit about Kross and Interpol, and the death of Miiko Saar, but she began to talk: rhythmically, as if imagining herself already on the witness stand.

‘The Estonian came three days ago at night. He has guns – not farm guns, military weapons. He said he needed to use the boathouse, and the boat, and that he would stay with me. I was to tell nobody. If I did he'd kill me. I believed him. His name was Miiko. I have no idea why he was here. He left a few hours ago. That's all I know. He slept in the boathouse but he ate in the house.' She turned to Kross. ‘Is he dead?'

‘Yes. Quite dead,' he said.

‘Good.'

Dryden walked forward to the gravestone and ran his fingers over the inscription. He knew he could destroy her version of events because he knew the man who'd been transferred from Lincoln Jail to the Lincolnshire coast and had walked into the sea that day in 1977 was her son, Martyn Petit. And he knew that if they took the DNA sample they'd extracted from the man calling himself Jack Dryden they'd be able to show that it
was
Martyn Petit, aged nearly sixty, and that he'd died in the charred van on the road to Manea.

He chose a place to start telling the truth, and he started with a question.

‘Did you plan, one day, to bury Martyn here? With his father? And yet you didn't even go to the funeral.'

She looked up at Dryden and the look in her eyes was close to despairing, which was a relief, because given what this woman had done he'd expected to find only madness or obsession. But the idea that she was sane, that she had made calculations, only seemed to deepen Dryden's sense of the evil which was here, on the Petit land.

‘Martyn killed the girl at Oxford – and left the family to hope for eight long days,' he said.

She licked her lips, aching to defend him, perhaps, trying to work out if the story she'd constructed could possibly hold.

Dryden swung round to face Kross. ‘Martyn Petit was convicted of murder in 1971. Life – with a minimum tariff of twenty-eight years. Lincoln Jail. Model prisoner, spent most of his time playing chess. Moved to a Category-B facility in 1977 on the coast. Walked into the sea one day – never seen again.'

He turned quickly back to Petit and caught the look of loss in her eyes.

‘He came here, didn't he? You gave him my father's identity so that he could live a life – here, near you. There was even a son for him too – so a full life, although he didn't get to bring the child up, did he? Peterborough at the start – then back, nearer home.

‘And why steal my father's identity? Did you know him? There were similarities – the build, the face, the degree.'

She seemed to struggle to speak.

Dryden held up a hand. ‘Please. It hardly matters. You'd know of his death. Everyone knew. It must have been chaos that winter – the Fens flooded, the Army, the press. All you had to do was stop Trelaw passing on the death certificate. I think that time – just that once – he helped. And you got him a job close to the hospital as a reward. He paid for the kidney transplant himself – that's why he died in debt. You told Miiko that Trelaw had been involved back then, when it all started. The police had asked him questions, I'd asked him questions. Miiko shot him, a pillow pressed over his face to deaden the noise and the blood. Just to make sure he never answered those questions with the truth.'

Dawn was approaching and crows clattered into the trees above them.

‘So that was the first time,' said Dryden. ‘The first time you stole someone's identity. A victimless crime? Perhaps. Certainly not for money. And I guess it was Martyn who built himself that new life – the new driver's licence, the medical card, all the documents he needed. He was good at that; meticulous, methodical, dispassionate. It wasn't quite perfect, was it – because he had to fit in with Dad's life, and he couldn't really chance anything which needed a picture. But if he was careful he could have a life – a half-life, perhaps.

‘And then Rory Setchey's little boy died. I presume he knew your husband – the family. It was the fishing – right? The champion pike. I know Arthur was keen . . .' He touched the gravestone. ‘And that's when the thought occurred – which is a dark thought, and not at all obvious – that if you stole the life of someone who hadn't yet lived, then you could build it, construct it, design it, even – for sale.'

‘The real question is whose idea was it? And what was the purpose? It's such a cold thing to do.
Mathematical?
'

She looked away then to the house, then up to the sky.

‘I thought it was probably Martyn's idea. But then I thought he was
your
son. That there had to be something in you of him – a coldness. But most of all, I think it was your idea because you had the motive. You were struggling here – death duties, taxes, agricultural wages, competition. You had to sell land. Rent land. Then the government announced the plan to re-flood the fen and you needed a lot of money to stop that. So I think you conceived of the plan and Martyn did the work – stealing the lives of the dead. It would take years. But he didn't mind, and neither did you. Years, to let the stolen lives grow and blossom.'

‘This is crazy,' she said, moving to stand, but Kross held up his hand.

‘It's called ghosting, by the way,' added Dryden. ‘Kapten Kross here, and his colleagues in Interpol, can tell you all about it. But maybe you already know. And Rory helped – didn't he? And later, when it was time to start selling the lives, he'd be the ferryman.'

Dryden rearranged his feet, hit by a wave of nausea, the taste of marine fuel in his mouth again. ‘Patience, of course, it needed patience. And you had to sell the idea – and I think Martyn knew the people – the right people – from Lincoln, who could find you the customers, or at least the kind of people who'd be able to reach the market. And it was easy for you to intercept the death certificates because you were at the post office. The registrars use registered post. You had access to the ‘cage' – all you had to do was request to see certain items at certain times. A package – a dozen forms, who'd miss the odd one that never got to the General Register Office?

‘And very soon everyone thought what a good idea this was. An almost
beautiful
idea. Even noble – that's what you told yourself. Because the money was being saved – a fortune building, ready for the day when you'd be able to save Petit Fen. To make the system perfect you needed one more person. Someone to alert you when a child had died – preferably one buried by the council, in the open graves, where no one goes because they just want to forget, not remember. And that's why Billy Johns was recruited. That baffled me for a while – but then, of course, there's the chapel on Petit Fen where the bikers meet. Did you find him there? Seek him out? And he needs money – he grows cannabis, out the back at the cemetery in that shed of his. It's not all for customers, is it? He has his own habit to supply. And then there's the Harleys. So he couldn't have been too hard to tempt. Especially as you no doubt told him, told everyone, it's a victimless crime.'

She actually flinched at that, which gave Dryden some kind of satisfaction.

He spread his arms. ‘And so it went on until the unexpected happened. We never think our loved ones will leave us – do we? Until it is too late. Martyn died in that burnt-out van at Manea and suddenly it looked as if you might lose everything. You knew there'd be questions about the true identity of Jack Dryden. One day they'd track him back to Lincoln, to Martyn's cell, and then the truth would be out – or at least part of it. So the assets that you'd been nurturing all those years – the lives of the dead – had to be sold, sold quickly. Everything. A fire sale.'

‘This is completely ludicrous,' said Petit, trying to smile, but her lips formed an ugly jagged line.

‘In the meantime a parcel of land came up for a quick sale on Petit Fen. So what did you do – borrow the money on short loan rates? High interest. You knew you'd have the Saars' brothers money in your hands within days. So you bought the land with the bank's money. And now you've paid off the banks with the Saar's money. But it's not their money at all – it's the Russians'. So very soon the real trouble will begin.'

‘Why?' She'd meant it to sound like a challenge but the word caught in her throat.

Kross stepped forward with a plastic evidence bag and emptied the contents on to the flat stone set in the grave. It was paper, burnt, charred, wet. The air filled with the stench of ash.

‘That's what's left of the twenty-five IDs,' said Dryden. ‘Setchey hid them in the fuel tank of the boat.'

Dryden caught the sudden electricity in Petit's grey eyes.

‘Yes. So near,' he said, realizing that inflicting cruelty was dangerously satisfying. ‘Rory kept a spare ignition key in the fuel tank – an old trick – and another in your boathouse. That's where the Saar brothers got theirs. The IDs came in watertight wallets so he popped them in the tank. He thought they were safe – until he found a buyer. I guess they were.

‘He would have told them soon enough where they were if his heart hadn't given out. The one shot was a warning? An accident? It hardly matters.'

Dryden knelt on the grass, leaning back to relieve the pain in his back. ‘So think on this. The Russians have paid all their money to the Saar brothers who gave it to you – no doubt minus their own cut. But these twenty-five IDs – half your consignment – are gone forever. They're scattered on the surface of Adventurers' Mere. And once we've looked through the records of children buried at Manea over the years – especially the ones in the public graves – we'll know the names of the rest, or most of them. In which case, the batch of twenty-five that they already have will be useless. Especially after Kapten Kross has made it clear through the appropriate channels that we have the names.