Nightrise

by Jim Kelly

  Dryden put the file aside and picked up the next marked ROGER in red capitals. The birth certificate was on the top – all the papers held by a bull-clip. Born April 3, 1951. Hammersmith Hospital. Father’s profession listed as school teacher, mother’s as office worker. The bull clip slipped and the papers spilt on the floor so he picked them up at random: an HGV licence, an old passport with one corner snipped off, a degree certificate: a 2:1 in natural sciences from Cambridge.

  Then he saw his mother’s writing, a schoolteacher’s hand, clear and unfussy, on a single brown padded envelope which had been sealed but opened. Inside were her own documents and his father’s. He held their marriage certificate – the original. And his mother’s birth certificate, but not his father’s. Had it been in the envelope when sealed? His mother’s death certificate was there too: original – the cause of death oblique, lost in Latin.

  And then something he didn’t expect: his father’s death certificate. The original.

  ‘That’s not right,’ he said, out loud, the noise startling a bird on the roof, which clattered away. If there had been a death certificate there’d have been no life after 1977: no state pension, no medical card, no dental records, no bank account, no driving licence. How could someone have pretended to be Jack Dryden – or indeed – been Jack Dryden – after 1977, if there had been a death certificate? The certificate meant he was officially dead.

  Dryden smelled the paper: it reeked of the pre-digital age and had been issued at Swaffham Prior Register Office six months after his father had been swept away off Welch’s Dam. Five months after he’d first gone with his mother to see the registrar, Philip Trelaw, and been told they had to wait for the body to be found. But the body had never been found. So how could there be a certificate?

  And then he thought he remembered something else. That as he’d shook Trelaw’s hand that day as a seven-year-old he’d thought: I shall meet this man again.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The Crow’s library was called the ‘morgue’ like all newspaper libraries. The centrepiece was a wooden cabinet with little drawers marked with a single letter of the alphabet. Inside was an index of small brown envelopes, each one a person, each one containing clippings from The Crow – or its sister paper the Ely Express – or from other local or national newspapers. There was one item for Trelaw. A story taken from The Crow for 1979 – two years after Jack Dryden’s ‘death’. The registrar had complained about the conduct of two families from Littleport who’d turned up for a register office wedding in Swaffham.

  In the quiet of the morgue Dryden read out the key paragraph: ‘Clearly one gets used to the groom and best man being – possibly – slightly jolly,’ said Mr Trelaw. ‘I don’t suppose a glass of champagne before the event does too much harm. But these people were partying – several brought cans into the ceremony and someone was sick in the civic suite. I like dancing but I think it is inappropriate before the ceremony, let alone during it. We cannot condone this kind of behaviour so I refused to complete the ceremony.’

  ‘Good for you,’ said Dryden. Attached to the clipping was a paragraph from The Sun based on the same item.

  The Crow couldn’t afford a librarian – even part-time – to keep things up to date, a problem which undermined its reliability. They had past copies on microfiche and both the papers were now held digitally on a database. But the three systems not only overlapped, they missed each other out, creating blind spots in the record.

  He went back to his own desk and flipped open the diary. His only appointment for the weekend was that evening out on Petit Fen to meet Sheila Petit and he could do that on the way home. So he had time – time to dig. He fired up his iMac laptop. He hadn’t been in the office for several days so a pile of post stood two-feet high in his tray, roughly mimicking the tilt of the Tower of Pisa. It didn’t bother him. News arrived by email these days, or text, or flashed up on to a website. The post was largely irrelevant except for fat official surveys or government reports.

  The blinds were down on the bay window into Market Street so he had his desk light on. The office was always locked up on Saturday but the front counter stayed open and he could hear voices down below through the floorboards. Outside, close by, he could hear a busker singing ‘Yesterday’.

  He fed ‘Trelaw’ into the digital database for The Crow and got a lot of articles on a local bowls player who’d got through to the world championships in Preston. A picture appeared across two columns: a thin man, with weak arms and an old face. Certainly not the Trelaw he was looking for. The search put up nearly fifty items and he was on the ninth page when he saw a one par filler on the appointment of a new registrar at Burwell to replace Philip Trelaw – who was looking forward to taking up another appointment with West Fen District Council – the exact nature of which wasn’t specified, which made him think Trelaw’s enthusiasm might be manufactured.

  The next item mentioned the same Trelaw – now described as the ‘former registrar of the East Fens’. He stood beside a gleaming classic Rover – grey, polished like a diamond, with an AA insignia in the front grille. The story said Trelaw had set up a club for Rover owners with the P4 model living in the Fens, and already had 100 members. This was the man Dryden had seen that day at Swaffham Prior – big, bony, with sloping shoulders. The article referred to Trelaw as a security officer for the district council.

  The council site had a list of staff and Trelaw was listed under CCTV unit. There was a direct line so he had a desk job, and the address was the town hall in Ely. He put CCTV into the council search engine and got a page which outlined the service. In Ely there were thirty-six high-definition public cameras: black globes of glass on posts sprouting spikes to stop offenders snapping up the ultimate souvenir of a drunken night out – a security camera. The screens were ‘live’ 24/7 – although the site didn’t claim they were filming 24/7. The pictures were monitored by staff, one of whom was present at all times. Dryden had an eye for this kind of equivocation – note present, so not necessarily viewing the CCTV.

  The page stated under ‘history’ that the unit had opened on January 1, 2008 – just in time to miss any trouble over New Year’s Eve. He wound up the microfiche machine and got the The Crow for the first week of that year. There was an article on page three showing the unit in operation, a staff of eight, Trelaw in the background.

  Dryden went back to his desk to take a note of the number for CCTV. As he did so he saw that the parcel holding up his tower of post had the name and address of the sender on the side in capital letters:

  ROGER STUTTON

  BUSKEYBAY FARM

  NEAR ISLEHAM

  ELY

  CB6 6GY

  It was dated the day before he’d found Roger’s body. Posted at Ely.

  He couldn’t stop himself looking round the room. The window’s blinds were shut, the door closed, but he stood to make double sure by locking it from the inside.

  Had two people been murdered for this parcel? For what lay inside?

  The idea of just taking it to the incident room, to Kross and Mahon, never entered his mind. The extent to which he’d been excluded from the investigation was an insult he found it difficult to forget. After all, it had been his uncle who died out at River Bank, and it might be his father whose death had, according to Kross, triggered the whole series of events. Why shouldn’t he look first, then report to Kross? The package was addressed to him. And sometimes curiosity is a force of nature.

  It was eighteen inches long and otherwise nine-inch square in cross-section, like a CD box set but bigger. Dryden tore the paper off but when he saw the next layer of material – that greasy waterproof pouching fishermen use for wallets – he knew his uncle had probably found it out on Adventurers’ Mere when he was laying his traps.

  The busker outside had been through his repertoire and was back with ‘Yesterday’.

  There was a single piece of loose paper in the package with the words FOR SAFE KEEPING written in hurried capitals.
And the note triggered a sound – his uncle’s voice on the telephone that last time: ‘Come to think of it – I have a mystery for you.’ He’d tell him when he saw him. But he never saw him.

  With a pair of scissors Dryden cut open the oiled plastic package to reveal within a whole series of smaller packages – like the individual DVDs in the box set, but fatter, and supple. He counted them out – twenty-five. Each envelope could be opened like a CD wallet. Each had a name on the front in capital letters in a Gothic black script.

  PAUL ROBYNS, JAMES EWART, PETER RADCLIFFE. He flicked on, somehow sensing that this was important, this small act of thoroughness.

  Then he saw a name that stopped his fingers moving: SAMUEL SETCHEY.

  He thought of Rory Setchey hanging from the irrigator. A rare name, even in the Fens.

  He flipped up the envelope lip and slid out the contents on the desk top:

  One British passport.

  One UK driving licence with no points.

  One medical card complete with full National Insurance number.

  A debit card issued by NatWest Bank.

  A cheque book for the same account.

  A Barclaycard.

  A birth certificate. September 8, 1986.

  All were in the same name: Samuel James Setchey. The picture in the passport showed a middle-aged man with very dark hair and a stubbly beard. Age – working forward from the birth – was twenty-five. Rory Setchey had died aged forty-four.

  He put the documents back in the envelope and neatly returned it to the package. There was a life here, a life in paper. An identity. He knew it was part of the reason Rory Setchey had ended up as roadkill.

  Holding the package he tried to work out what it might be worth. What did a new identity cost? Kross had said 50,000. But this was much more than a new identity; it was everything that went with it. How much would that be worth – times twenty-five?

  He recalled the Estonian word for million. Milte.

  But how? Who were these people? Why didn’t they need their lives any more? Were they, had they been real people? Real people like his father. This made him think that he wasn’t going to get what he’d always secretly wanted – another thirty years of his father’s life. Surely Jack Dryden’s life had been stolen too. Did he really need a DNA test to prove it?

  There were heavy footsteps on the stairs, the doorknob rattled. Humph’s outline was clear through the misted glass panel. Dryden had left the cabbie with his wife and child at a coffee shop off Fore Hill.

  He unlocked the door and was shocked by the cabbie’s face, which seemed to have succumbed to a greater force of gravity so that his chin and fleshy neck appeared to fall to his chest. Humph was good on his feet, nimble even, but as he stood there he staggered to one side as if the floor had tilted.

  ‘Someone’s taken the baby,’ he said.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The baby had been in his pushchair on Three Cups Alley while Laura and Humph had coffee in the open-air seating area of the little café. Only a low wall and a set of railings stood between them. They could see him, or at least the pushchair, from where they sat. They could almost – Humph had said – touch him; already, Dryden thought, subconsciously starting to prepare a defence. It was a Saturday market day and the path had been crowded with shoppers, strolling between them and the child, breaking the line of vision. They didn’t discover he was gone until they’d paid and left: not only the baby was gone, but also the cradle inside the pushchair, the shawl, and a soft toy – a black cat.

  ‘How long?’ he asked, standing on the pavement outside The Crow.

  Humph made a huge effort not to shrug. ‘We were there twenty minutes – so that’s the worst case. But it might have been seconds. Laura’s checking the car parks and the riverside.’

  ‘OK. Go to the taxi rank,’ said Dryden, stepping close to Humph. ‘Tell them what’s happened. See if you can get it out on the radio. Then try the market. I’ll do the cathedral grounds – the park. And ring the police – give them my mobile.’ They looked at each other and Humph went to speak. ‘Go,’ said Dryden.

  Dryden crossed the road to the Oxfam shop, slipping past the rows of freshly laundered second-hand clothes and up a stair to an office: The Hypothermia Trust. Vee Hilgay was at her desk filling in forms. He told her what had happened and even he could tell his voice was cold, unstressed, almost brutally matter-of-fact.

  ‘Sit down, Philip,’ she said.

  He didn’t even hear her. Vee got up and put on her jacket and said she’d check the bus stops, the bigger shops – Tesco, Waitrose, Wilkinsons, Iceland.

  She took Dryden’s hands. ‘It’ll be OK. You’re in shock.’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ he said, turning away and walking down the carpet-less stairs. But there was something wrong with his hearing because it was a bit like being underwater. Everything was just slightly further away, as if behind glass.

  He felt a profound urge to find Laura, as if touching her would close the circle and they’d be all right again. But that wasn’t right.

  He walked out into the cathedral close and felt his knees give so that he had to sit down on a bench. Tears filled his eyes until he blinked them away. It wasn’t grief, or anger – it was frustration. They had a chance, still had a chance, if his son was still in the town, not bundled into a car and gone.

  He sent a text to Humph, his fingers vibrating.

  RAILWAY STATION RANK. TELL THEM.

  If he could find him everything would be all right. Not just today, but forever. It was as if his life, all their lives, hung on these few seconds he was living through. He forced himself to move before the effort became too much.

  There was a family on a picnic rug by the Lady chapel, in the pinnacle-shadow. Trying not to sound desperate he asked them if they’d seen a baby in a cradle – one of those modern ones from a pushchair – in green plastic. He’d have been carried by a man, he guessed, but just possibly a woman.

  Saying it all out loud made it more real.

  The woman looked shocked and covered her mouth but the man was smiling and couldn’t stop. ‘You’re kidding,’ he said.

  Dryden walked away. He tried everyone on the benches. A group of teenage girls, two pensioners, a young boy struggling with two dogs. Nothing. He followed the path round the apse and found a man examining the gargoyles above with binoculars: a scaly fish, a dragon, and the modern additions – a skinhead, a builder picking his nose. Dryden was about to ask him if he’d seen anything when the mobile buzzed and his body began to celebrate – adrenalin flooded out, making his vision blur.

  NOTHING YET. It was from Laura. He sent back a single X. Then Humph: STATION RANK UP TO SPEED. POLICE ON IT.

  He turned to go.

  ‘Did you want to ask a question?’ said the man with the binoculars.

  Another text. POLICE AT THE CAFÉ. From Vee.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Dryden, feeling trapped. He thought he had spoken, but clearly not. ‘Time’s important,’ he added. And it was: he knew the statistics even though he was trying to blot them out. Every minute that passed made it less likely they’d find him alive. Less likely they’d find him ever. ‘I’m looking for a child in a cradle – someone’s taken him.’

  ‘I saw a bloke with a car seat cradle,’ he said. ‘He went in there.’ The man pointed at the South Door of the cathedral.

  ‘You saw him go in?’ asked Dryden, distracted by the thought that it didn’t sound likely, that you’d watch someone for that long, until they disappeared.

  ‘I was coming out – it’s a newborn, right? I’ve got one too, so I looked.’

  Ten seconds later Dryden pushed open the oak portal set in the great door. Inside was part of the old cloister – cool and silent. He walked slowly because he thought quite consciously that this was it – he’d have one chance, one opportunity to avoid a tragedy that would ruin his life. Laura’s life.

  He wrote a text as he walked: CATHEDRAL, QUICK, then sent it to Humph and Laura.
/>   The second door stood beneath a series of Norman arches, richly decorated, and lit by a spotlight. He pushed it open and stepped over a wooden and iron threshold into the body of the church. He was struck by the contrast: he was searching for a small child in a vast space, echoing and full of light. A group of visitors stood at the West Door by the candles waiting for a tour to begin. But the nave was empty – even the chairs were gone. Under the lantern a stage had been built for a concert. He listened very carefully to the silence, examining it for a cry. Despair washed over him so that he couldn’t move his legs.

  Then a child’s voice, and a toddler suddenly appearing under the lantern and pointing up at the Octagon above. That seemed to unlock Dryden’s legs. He walked towards the high altar and the choir. Tombs here, gaudy, Tudor and Georgian, with painted figures of the deceased reclining in stone. A skull, memento mori.

  Running now he rounded the end of the chancel, past the chapels to the dead, checking each, searching amongst the stonework. Then on to the altar itself, the tomb of St Etheldreda roped off, between four lit candles. The choir stalls reeking of polish. They were empty too, the misericords up, the wooden animals and demons catching the light.

  A woman with a mop and bucket was working on the marble floor. She’d seen nothing. Defeated, he stood still and saw Humph coming down the nave.

  Dryden held out both hands, each empty, so the cabbie turned away beneath the Octagon along the transept which led to the Lady Chapel – the only public place left they hadn’t searched. Dryden cut through a corridor and got there first; the great cold space was empty, white light glaring, the glass all clear, the walls scarred by iconoclasts. It was like a swimming pool without water.

  Humph burst in, almost falling over the threshold.