by Jim Kelly
‘What’s your name?’ asked Dryden.
‘Cathy Symms,’ said Humph when she didn’t answer. She gave him a lethal look.
‘There’s some bad news,’ said Dryden quickly. ‘There was an accident and Jack was involved – out on the fen. I’m sorry, but Jack was killed.’
‘Oh, God,’ she said, betraying more interest than grief. She looked at the books in her hand. She’s thinking, thought Dryden, if they’ll be able to find another tutor. That’s the thing about the young, they move on, survive.
‘How often did you see him?’
‘Twice a week. All this year. He was all right – really good at maths. Like it was a language – right – and he could speak it. Crap at talking, otherwise. Shy. Bit weird.’ She shifted her feet. ‘There’s people like him at school.’ She made a little rainbow shape with her index fingers. ‘Like on the spectrum.’
‘Autistic?’
She shrugged. ‘Not bad. Just a bit. Like I said.’
‘See any other students?’
‘One before me on Tuesday – a boy called O’Brien, from my school. He’s A-Level – pure maths. We talked.’ She smiled. ‘He’s cute. There were others – he’d talk about others. Doing science mainly, but he said his special students did maths. So I was special.’
A cat came in from the kitchen calling for food.
‘That’s Jack’s. It’s called Lincoln. He wouldn’t say why. But it made him laugh – like every time he said it. That’s like a private joke, right? ’Coz it isn’t funny.’
The cat walked out of the front door having made a figure of eight around Dryden’s feet. What was Lincoln famous for? he thought. Never telling a lie? Or was that Washington? His father wouldn’t have animals in the house at Burnt Fen because in the end you had to kill animals: quickly, deftly, in the barn, with the tools hung from the wall.
‘Anyone else ever here with Jack? A woman, friends?’
‘No. He drank at The Red, White and Blue,’ she said, nodding outside. The Jubilee’s other estate pub was two streets away set on a corner. It made the average estate pub look like Café Rouge. ‘That’s where Dad met him – he wasn’t CRB cleared or anything, said he couldn’t be bothered with the paperwork. Dad said that was why he was cheap.’ She flushed, suddenly and deeply. ‘He didn’t touch me or nothing.’
‘That’s a plus,’ said Dryden.
‘He had a son.’
‘Really? He said that, did he?’
‘Not straight out. He said his son was crap at maths but that that didn’t mean he was stupid. He said he was bright – just not academic. That’s what people always say when they mean you’re thick.’
Dryden was good at maths, good with the abstract, so this mysterious ‘son’ couldn’t be him. His father had gone missing at the age of thirty-five, so there was no reason why he couldn’t have had another son. He’d be Dryden’s half-brother. The thought made him feel dizzy so that he had to put out a hand and lean on the wall.
The girl’s chin came up. ‘I liked him.’ She’d got her shoe back on and was backing out the door. ‘You police?’
‘No. Like I said, we were related,’ said Dryden.
‘No, you didn’t. You said you had the same name. That’s different.’
‘Do you want to look at the picture again – make sure?’
But she’d gone.
FOURTEEN
The town clung to them for half a mile – a market-garden, a single row of old council houses, a water tower; and then they were down to the fen. This was when he felt most at sea, the first mile, because the landscape was so flat the horizon was very close – a mile, maybe two. It was one of the things people got wrong about the Fens – all that space, you can see for miles. You can’t. It just feels like you can – the earth you can see is a small circle a few miles across with you at the centre. But if he wanted to see for miles he could – by looking up.
‘Nice clouds,’ said Dryden. ‘Wonder what they’re called.’
Humph pretended to ignore him.
Dryden put his head out of the passenger-side window, letting the wind created by the cab’s speed cool his face. They were on their way to Buskeybay to see his aunt and uncle. Work was over for the week. He had some time now to delve back, find out more about his father, and the last year of his life, which meant that once Humph had dropped him at the farm the cabbie had nowhere to go until the clubs turned out at midnight.
‘Want to know what I think?’ asked Dryden.
Humph just about managed to tilt his chin to indicate interest.
‘I think someone has cleaned that house from top to bottom and taken away anything which would allow us to see the man’s face: pictures, documents. Question is why: did they want to hide the fact it was Jack Dryden, or hide the fact it wasn’t? Second question: who took it all away? I’ll check with Cherry but I’m pretty certain it’s not forensics. He’s happy for the DNA to decide it. But if it’s not the police, who is it?’
‘Was it your Dad’s house?’
It was so rare for Humph to ask a straightforward question Dryden took time out to structure his answer.
‘The house itself tells two stories: the books could be his, but not the kitchen, not the flat-screen TV, but maybe the garden, the food. The stuff about maths is odd – he loved maths, but not as much as the science. It didn’t feel right. But then nothing does.’
‘Wait for the DNA then,’ said Humph.
The cabbie searched his memory banks for some facts about DNA.
‘Which Cambridge pub did Crick and Watson celebrate in after their discovery of the double helix structure of DNA?’ he asked.
‘The Eagle.’
Humph narrowed his eyes and began to whistle as if he hadn’t asked the question.
‘Aunt Con might know something, or Roger,’ said Dryden. ‘They knew Dad as well as anyone but Mum. Come in for tea if you like . . .’
Humph’s head twitched by way of saying no.
‘Maybe there’s something in the past,’ said Dryden. He looked at Humph in profile. ‘Family secrets and all that. Don’t they say every family has one?’
Humph shifted in his seat, happier with DNA trivia. ‘If you unwrap all the DNA in all your body cells it would stretch to the moon 6,000 times.’
‘Useful,’ said Dryden.
Humph swung the cab out to overtake a tractor hauling a trailer of sugar beet. The Capri hit a sinuous dip in the road and momentarily took flight, landing with a clatter and a boom from the partly disengaged exhaust pipe. The fluffy dice which hung from the cabbie’s rear-view mirror spiralled together like South American bolus, then unspun slowly, as Humph coaxed the engine up to fifty-five mph, employing an urgent posture.
By the last set of level crossing gates a goat had been tethered to trim the grass. As they passed Dryden noted the strange, Lucifer-like, horizontal pupils to the animal’s eyes.
The shortwave radio fixed to the cab’s dashboard with a speaker phone blared into life. ‘Humph – this is Jules, over. Humph – this is Jules, over.’
Dryden knew all the cabs on the Ely rank now. Jules was a woman – at least, he thought she was. Like Humph she appeared to have been welded into her cab. She had forearms like a truck driver and an unruly frizz of red hair. Unlike Humph she had a car with four doors – a Volvo estate. She knew, as did the entire rank, that Humph would either have Dryden on board or be in touch on the mobile, so any news items they spotted en route were relayed into the cruising Capri. It was like being on the news desk at CNN.
‘On the back road to Clayhythe,’ said Jules, effortlessly bellowing through a burst of static. ‘A mile short of the village. There’s a house – river authority or summat. Weird place. Round windows. Like Bilbo Baggins’ house. God knows what they’re up to – coppers, traffic squad cars, the lot. Go see. Go quick. Over.’
‘It’s on the way,’ said Humph, drumming delicate fingers. ‘Sort of.’
‘Water authority,’ said Dryden. He thought of th
e Eau Fen victim and the withheld address.
At the next junction Humph swung the cab east. Dryden kicked his legs out, frustrated by the cab’s limited leg room, as if it should have been designed for the comfort of passengers over six feet tall. The heat seemed suddenly to intensify. Not for the first time he wondered if he had some kind of thermostatic dysfunction. He seemed to spend most of his life cold except for odd, fleeting moments of flaming heat. The Capri didn’t help: it was a four-wheel oven, with an air-conditioning unit which redirected engine fumes back into the cab. The air seemed dense, like a steam bath. Despite the open windows the plastic seats were too hot to touch.
A big fat moth hit the windscreen with a crackling of its carapace. Humph despatched it with the wipers, leaving an orange arc. For the cabbie this was back-of-the-hand country, so he switched off the SatNav and expertly tracked a zigzag route to Clayhythe: a cluster of buildings and a pub on the Cam which had once been a wharf for barges serving the main village of Waterbeach up the road. Humph stopped the cab on an old stone bridge. Below them was the river, ink-green here, in the lee of a line of willows. On the far side stood the old water authority building. Jules, Humph’s informer, had used the word ‘weird’ – it was an understatement.
The house was taller than it was wide, like a dovecote with three stories. The facade on each side came to an elegant Dutch gable pierced by a single oculus window. The pinnacles of the brickwork and leaded roof were decorated with stone figures – Dryden guessed the four winds of Greek mythology. What he could see of the interior was more mundane – a poster in an upstairs room of a Dalek, a kid’s mobile, a modern fitted kitchen, a wall-mounted flat-screen TV.
But it wasn’t the house that was so unusual. It was what they were doing to it, and what they were doing to it was taking it apart: brick by London brick. Scaffolding covered the facade facing the river. Three building skips were on the riverbank – plastic chutes leading down from the roof and upper storey. Dryden watched as a worker in a Day-Glo green bib carefully dislodged a brick, turned it over, turned it back, then dropped it down the chute. Beside him a uniformed police officer was working his way along the guttering, checking inside and out. The interior of the house crawled with coppers: paper being peeled off walls, carpets being rolled and pushed out of windows, while in the garden individual pieces of furniture were being carefully dismantled. Parts of the roof had been removed, along with several courses of the top bricks, so that the structural beams were left against the sky.
‘Skeleton house,’ said Dryden.
Humph wasn’t listening. He’d got the glove compartment open and was examining an empty miniature bottle of Triple Sec. Dryden got the impression it hadn’t been empty very long. Humph’s natural curiosity was a fragile, fleeting creature. The police were taking a house apart. Big deal. He slipped on his earphones and pressed the PLAY button on his Estonian language tape.
One of the white-suited coppers in the garden was pointing at Dryden so he got out of the cab and took a quick 360-degree survey of the scene prior to being moved on. Downriver: nothing, just the channel turning gently away in the willows beside a footpath. East: fen, a line of pylons which seemed to diminish with the curvature of the earth. West: fen. Upriver: a boat yard beyond the water authority house, a few river boats, a dredger and a water authority launch, then the lawn in front of the pub with a few drinkers out at the picnic tables. The launch and the dredger were in the water authority livery: orange – that precise shade Dryden had seen the previous day under the fingernails of the man hung from the irrigator.
‘Can I help?’
Dryden swung round to find a uniformed PC approaching. His lapel radio crackled. The words buried in the static never sounded like English, but this time Dryden was pretty certain that was because it wasn’t English.
‘We’re closing the road. You’ll have to move that.’ The PC gestured back at the car. Dryden was certain he hadn’t woken up in a police state. Had something happened since breakfast?
‘I’d like a word with Detective Inspector Friday.’ It was a shot in the dark, but a decent one. Was this Rory Setchey’s home? The police had said he worked for the water authority, and the top-level search would explain the lack of home address. For the first time Dryden noticed the house had a name – black stencilled letters on whitewash over the door: Hythe House.
The PC didn’t reply but stood back and talked into his radio.
A car came the other way on to the bridge and stopped, almost bumper-to-bumper with the Capri. It was a black BMW and the four men who got out didn’t even look at Dryden. They walked away until one of them stopped and produced a packet of cigarettes. A red, chequered packet Dryden had never seen before. Expensive suits, two of them on iPhones, no ties, lots of facial hair shaved for effect: moustaches as thin as eyebrows. The PC appeared to be waiting for a reply on the radio while sweating steadily into his blue collar.
‘What about them?’ asked Dryden, nodding at the new arrivals.
The PC’s eyes narrowed. Behind him, striding up the road, came DI Friday.
‘Now we can sort things out,’ said Dryden. There was a burst of laughter from the BMW suits and some words on the breeze – again, not English. Humph had slipped off his earphones and wound down the side window to listen.
Friday arrived, lit a cigarette. ‘Fuck off,’ he said. He took a step closer. ‘Now.’
‘Strange place,’ said Dryden, nodding at the building.
‘Water authority-tied cottage. That’s it. Now, fuck off.’
‘When did he go missing – our man?’
Friday turned to the PC. ‘Give him a minute. If he’s still here caution him and arrest him for obstruction. The fat bloke too.’ He tried to put some venom in the remark but failed. His attention was almost entirely focused on the sharp suits from the BMW.
Humph swung the Capri in a half circle, then a three-point turn, then another three-point turn. It was like watching a merry-go-round.
Dryden climbed aboard. As they pulled away he looked in the rear-view mirror. ‘That wasn’t English,’ he said. ‘The characters out of the BMW – foreign language, right?’
‘I know.’ Humph looked mildly shocked. ‘It was Estonian.’
FIFTEEN
It was an odd illusion but a persistent one: whenever Dryden looked out over the newly created Adventurers’ Mere the clouds always appeared as if over a sea. He couldn’t see the far shore of the lake, and the sky created the sense that there wasn’t a far side, just an ocean.
The Capri tracked the shoreline east creating its own weather, a streak of red peat dust which hung behind the cab. The mere seemed to make its own weather too: a sudden squally wind, so that gusts buffeted the side of the car, and there were a few white horses out on the water. White horses forty miles inland.
‘Estonian?’ asked Dryden. ‘You sure?’
‘Yup. I’ve been studying it for eight months. How sure do you want me to be?’
‘And they said?’
‘I only caught words. Migrant – certainly, several times, because it was like German – guest-worker. And hotel, and breakfast, and cigarettes. And coffee – they liked the coffee.’ Humph’s grip on the vocabulary of the Estonian menu appeared first class. Beyond that he was treading water.
‘Nothing else?’
‘One of them said milte and the others whistled.’
‘And milte means?’
‘Million.’
Dryden thought about that but came to no conclusion. ‘So – a million. Not millions . . .’
‘Singular. The plural sounds different. At least it does on the tape.’
Dryden called The Crow and told the news editor to get Mitch out for some pictures of Hythe House. If he brought his telephoto toys he could get some long shots – the house was disappearing, brick by brick. If he made a couple of trips and took the snaps from the same spot they could run a series: the disappearing house.
He killed the signal. ‘Why, that’s the qu
estion,’ he said to the windscreen. ‘Why take a house apart?’
‘They’re looking for something,’ said Humph.
‘Brilliant.’
Humph shrugged. ‘Drugs?’
‘Nah. Drugs squad would rip the place apart – sure. And they’d use dogs – no dogs there. And they wouldn’t demolish it. They were taking the roof off – like – off.’
‘Jewels?’
‘It’s a bit Famous Five.’
Humph ran a pointed tongue along his plump lips. ‘Espionage?’
Dryden shifted in his seat. ‘Eh?’
‘A microchip? A memory stick? A mobile phone? An iPhone?
‘OK, OK . . .’
‘Stuff – you know. Secrets. Not family secrets. State secrets. Corporate secrets. Information. That’s power, right? And they don’t take up a lot of space.’ Humph eased his T-shirt away from his neck. ‘Sometimes, no space at all.’
They came to a T-junction on the bank-top – a drove leading away on the brink of a dyke, a signpost reading Nornea, two miles; the way ahead marked Buskeybay, one mile, running by the new mere.
Dryden had been there the day they’d created Adventurers’ Mere – opening the sluice gates at Upware, flooding 2,000 acres in a single day.
It had been the biggest story in the Fens since the floods of 1947. The original plan – put forward by the National Trust – was for a 100-year creeping programme of jigsaw re-flooding – creating marsh, and wildlife habitat, and pasture, with small amounts of open water. But by the mid-1990s global warming had taken sea levels much higher than anticipated while cuts in public expenditure had led to a full halt on drainage work, and on the rebuilding of flood defences. The decision was taken to go instead for an all-out flooding, creating a giant lake. The year-on-year saving for the government was put at 1bn – and a little of the cash was put aside to promote the new water lands as a tourist attraction and a boating area. The National Trust fought the plans, and lost.
