by Jim Kelly
‘Congratulations,’ said Kross. ‘Your son has a name?’
‘Eden,’ said Dryden. He thought it sounded better every time he said it.
Some of Kross’ calm arrogance had gone to be replaced by a kind of nervous hyperactivity.
‘Sit,’ he said. ‘Drink.’ He spilt sugar sachets and milk cartons from his pockets.
‘So – found your man yet?’ asked Dryden. ‘Chatteris – the register office. An inside job?’
‘He – or she – will be there, yes. Or, perhaps, was there. If we knew some of the names of those in the package it would be easier for us.’
‘I said. I didn’t open the individual wallets.’
‘You did.’
‘How about Trelaw – you ruled him out? He seemed to think the paperwork would put him in the clear.’
Kross smiled. ‘Just a few ends are loose,’ he said.
Across the over-polished table Kross spread some pictures. ‘We take these at the funeral of this man who used your father’s name.’
‘Funeral? He’s been buried – already?’
‘Cremated.’
The fresh anger Dryden felt was strangely inappropriate. He wanted to know – wanted to demand to know – why he hadn’t been told that they’d released the body. That he hadn’t been notified. But he knew the answers: Kross and Friday would have leaned on the coroner to let the funeral take place because they wanted the case forgotten. Submerged, without a trace, beneath the DA-Notice. And they hadn’t notified him because he wasn’t family, wasn’t even related. A man had stolen his father’s name. That was it.
‘That was quick,’ was all he said.
‘We thought perhaps the funeral would bring people, people from his past. We need to know who this man was – before he was Jack Dryden. These people attend – you recognize any at all?’
The pictures had been taken out at Manea at the cemetery. The crematorium chimney was in the background, and the small ugly chapel which looked like an electricity booster station.
Six people. He knew none of them. They stood in a small group waiting for the doors of the chapel to open.
‘Who are they?’ Dryden asked.
‘We take names. His friends. Some people from his pub, I think – two pupils, these . . .’ Kross dabbed a finger tip on two middle-aged women. ‘They do exams.’ Dryden studied the faces, which were all looking directly at the camera. Not one of them was disfigured by a birthmark. Where was Jack Dryden’s friend Lionel Wraight?
‘And this . . .’ he added. A big black-and-white portrait picture. ‘This is the Jack Dryden they bury – this from his library ticket.’
The picture was much clearer than any he’d seen. This man could never have been his father. The bone structure was too wide at the cheeks, the forehead too shallow, although there was still that unsettling resemblance – a ghost of a likeness, as if he’d been a cousin, long lost.
‘If the car accident was just that why are you bothered?’ asked Dryden, although he didn’t even hear the answer. He was studying the picture taken at Manea again. It wasn’t the faces that interested him; it was the cars parked on the tarmac by the Garden of Remembrance.
One was an old Rover, the paintwork almost mirror-like, an AA badge on the front grille. A classic model from the 1960s – the P4. One of Philip Trelaw’s beloved P4s. Dryden doubted that the former registrar of the East Fens attended funerals as a hobby. Why had he felt the need to see Jack Dryden turned to ashes?
THIRTY-THREE
When he kissed Laura on the pavement outside The Crow he tried not to make it feel like goodbye. Humph studiously ran a chamois leather over the cab’s windscreen. He’d told Laura what DI Friday had let slip – the fifty missing IDs, the reason why the Estonians were still on the trail. They both knew what that meant. They had to go through with their plan, and they had to do it now.
‘Ring when you get to the coast,’ said Dryden. Then he thought about that: the papers were full of stories of mobile phones being hacked into, answerphone messages downloaded. ‘Ring on the landline from the B and B – OK? From a call box. The Crow, or home. Not the mobile. Humph will text when you’re on the train.’
‘Families should stay together,’ said Laura, the diction particularly syrupy, so Dryden guessed she was close to tears.
‘We are together. We’re staying together. It’s just distance – space on a map – and for a few days.’ He’d been close to giving in during the last twenty-four hours – agreeing with her that he was being dramatic, even melodramatic. But now they both knew this had to happen.
Laura’s face was a mask, features stiff and pinched. That was the big difference between the worlds they lived in. His was inside his head, so it didn’t matter if they were 1,000 miles away. Hers was intensely physical. If she couldn’t touch him, he wasn’t there.
She checked her bag then threw it in the boot of the Capri. She’d thought he was overreacting, indulging most journalists’ tendency to live in a made-up reality where the dangers were darker, the excitement headier. Even now she tried desperately to think of another way.
‘Just enjoy the beach,’ said Dryden, putting a finger over her lips.
‘It’ll rain. It’s Norfolk. Not Via Reggio.’
Humph was in the cab, and the engine coughed like a smoker. They put the child on the back seat with the belt through the cradle. She wound down the window and manufactured a smile. ‘Please, be careful.’
Then a wave and they were gone in a drifting cloud of blue exhaust, joining the queue of traffic trying to get out of Market Street. He watched until the Capri turned the corner.
He felt a slight uplift in his mood, the almost physical sensation that the weight of responsibility had lessened. He imagined the journey to Norwich, then the little train up the line to Cromer. There was a B&B they’d used the summer before with a view of the sea. It had a sunrise in glass over the door. They’d be safe there, lost in the kiss-me-quick crowds. As long as they weren’t followed. That was Humph’s job – to zigzag his way to the Norwich line, with an eye on the rear-view mirror.
Dryden took a place in the line of shoppers waiting for the East Fens’ bus. When it lurched to a halt he grabbed a seat on the top deck at the front, like a kid, and fished in his pocket for a bag of mushrooms he’d bought on the market. They were out of town in less than two minutes, rocking across the chessboard fens. The bus smelt of cabbage even in summer. Everyone over thirty stayed on the bottom deck, leaving upstairs for holiday kids and moody teenagers.
The bus flew east. On his lap Dryden unfurled the OS map. The price of Sheila Petit’s strip of land remained a mystery as neither party to the transaction had registered the transaction: unusual, but not unheard of, according to the official who’d rung him to save him a trip to the town hall annexe. He’d already had two texts from the Guardian: the deadline for the inside page slot was three o’clock.
The bus was soon running along the banktop beside Adventurers’ Mere. Dryden checked his signal on the mobile and rang the council asking to be put through to CCTV. The man who answered the phone said Philip Trelaw was off sick – off sick ‘again’. Dryden rang the office and got Jean on reception to flick through the telephone book. Surprisingly P. F. Trelaw was not ex-directory and he answered at the second ring. Could he answer one or two more questions? Dryden wanted to know why Trelaw had felt the need to attend the funeral of the man who had posed as Jack Dryden, but it was a question he wanted to ask to his face. Trelaw, who sounded like he was lying down, the voice slightly groggy, was reluctant to see him in person. Dryden said it could wait – he was happy to drop in at the CCTV offices the next day. That wasn’t what Trelaw had in mind. So he offered to meet Dryden at three at his house: the address, a suburban street on the edge of Ely.
The bus driver shouted ‘Middle Pump’ as the gears grated and the bus braked. A four-storey Victorian steam pump house, converted to flats by trendy architects who’d gone out of their way to make it uglier, stood at t
he junction of three roads, a spot celebrated by a post box, three brick cottages, a phone box, a parish notice board and a bench. In fen terms this constituted a ‘place’ – which is why it had a name at all. Sometimes it was the most memorable thing these places ever had.
Petit Hall stood back from the road a mile south. It was a long mile, like all the rest on the Fens, and walking it was like hiking the wrong way along one of those moving pavements at the airport. At one point Dryden was pretty certain he was getting further away from the stand of trees which stood to the west of the hall’s garden. Halfway along he passed Home Farm. Someone was out in the giant field, pacing the boundary, but Dryden’s eyesight wasn’t keen enough to see if it was Petit’s nephew, Edward. There was a small house with the farm itself – no more than a tied cottage, and a child’s dress hung from a washing line, cracking in the wind. Finally, he turned into the drive, which was freshly tarmacked and marked with a sign which said:
Petit Hall
Nos. 1–6
The house stood alone, as stark as a standing stone, two storeys plus a row of windows in the attic, a slightly fussy porchere, but otherwise straightforward Victorian solidity. Dryden knew it hid a secret. Sheila Petit told the story to anyone who’d listen, and quite a few more. The Petits had arrived with the Normans at Hastings and been rewarded with estates in Kent. One of them, a Merchant Adventurer of London, had risked everything on the draining of the Fens. A wager that had been handsomely rewarded. The house behind the facade was late-seventeenth century. As a landscape the Fens was only three hundred and fifty years old. This house was one of the few that had seen it all. Fen aristocracy set in bricks and mortar.
There were five cars parked on raked gravel. All of them freshly polished, including Petit’s Morris Minor. The door buzzed when he rang the bell for S Petit – Flat One, so he pushed it open to reveal a hall with a black-and-white chequered floor. Doors to either side, a staircase with polished floorboards. Glass cases held fish – pinioned against hand-painted backgrounds of reed and weed. The gold frames held citations to weight and date. A giant pike showed off its snaggle teeth.
A little sign pointed to Flat One where Dryden would have guessed the kitchen had once been – ground floor, at the back.
Sheila Petit answered the door, large glasses on a necklace, a mug of coffee in one hand, Ely Express in the other. She blinked several times. ‘Dryden.’
‘Sorry. I tried the sorting office. They said it was a day off; I had a question . . .’ He nodded at the paper. It might be her day off but the helmet of carefully arranged grey hair was as brittle as ever.
‘Of course.’ She stood aside but Dryden sensed a reluctance to let him in.
A short corridor led past a galley kitchen and a bathroom to the large room that had indeed been the original kitchen: quarry tiled, with a range, the back wall opened up into a half-brick conservatory which gave an uninterrupted view of the fen beyond looking east. Light poured in and seemed to lift the ceiling which was, Dryden noted, decorated with plaster reeds, ducks and eel.
‘Wow,’ he said.
‘Yes. Best room in the house,’ she said, her voice suddenly warmer, the usual precise diction softened. ‘The rest are flats. It pays the bills. Needs must. Posh bedsits really. But I couldn’t face a complete rebuild – all those horrible plaster walls. It makes the place so spooky – so altered. At least this way I can dream . . .’
Dryden tilted his head by way of a question.
‘Of having it all back. The house. And just me. Bliss.’ She drew herself up, arms crossed. ‘Still – you had a question.’ The voice was louder now and Dryden had the distinct impression there was someone else in the flat.
There was a portrait on one wall, in a swagger gold frame. A couple and a young boy in an informal group by a fireplace.
She followed his gaze. ‘That was painted in the drawing room. Flat two now.’
‘And that’s you?’
She’d be in her twenties, perhaps, a hand on the child’s shoulder. A boy, who resembled the man who must have been thirty, with short mousy hair and a heavy agricultural face. She didn’t offer an answer but sipped from a mug of tea.
If she was going to decline small chat he’d get down to business. ‘I have a problem with the story – just a detail.’
He’d walked to a large oak sideboard crowded with family pictures – mostly the boy again, growing up. There was one with him at the wheel of a tractor, then a university shot – Dryden didn’t recognize the buildings – but not Cambridge or Oxford. St Andrew’s?
‘Fire away – let’s take some air,’ she said, throwing open French doors in the conservatory and walking out into the sunshine. Dryden thought then that she said it solely to get him out of the house. He took a last look back and noticed that on the kitchen table there were two coffee cups: one a mug with the crest of Cambridge University, the other an espresso cup, unmarked, porcelain.
There was half an acre of lawn leading down to a ditch, then beyond that a field. The sense of free space was almost hypnotic. Dryden couldn’t keep his eyes off the horizon, as if he was at sea, on the lookout. In the distance was the bank of the Little Ouse, one of the main river’s tributaries, and crouched in its lee what looked like a boat house.
He’d thought about how to play this interview. Originally he’d opted for direct and honest, but now he was at Petit Hall something told him to be more circumspect, even devious. ‘I’ve had some feedback on this land sale. I’m told 20,000 is way off the mark – by a factor of ten, or twenty, or more. Anyone who knows anything about the market would see it was wrong. Sorry, but it makes me look like an idiot.’
‘The owner sold at below the market price – he’s a member of the campaign. And I said the price was only ball park.’
‘Sorry – you didn’t mention that the seller was taking a loss when we talked. I think it would have been honest to have said that, even if it was off the record.’
Petit’s eyes hardened, the irises seeming to flatten so that they no longer reflected the light. She always presented herself as of that generation that had risen above dishonesty. ‘Did you really think that strips of prime peatland go under the hammer at 20,000?’
Dryden relaxed. He was always constrained by politeness as a reporter, but now the gloves were off he felt at liberty to say what he thought. ‘Have you read Macbeth?’ It was a calculated insult, as he knew Petit had read English at Cambridge.
‘That’s how the witches operate, isn’t it? They tell people things they want to hear but hide the truth by omission. In everyday life we call this lying. Why bother giving me the 20,000 price when the transaction is not based on a market price at all?’
She went to answer but he cut her off.
‘I’m angry because I should have checked. I didn’t because I trusted you. This appears to have been my mistake.’ When he got angry, which was rare and lasted only for a handful of seconds, his voice took on a buzz. It was very effective, and even out here in the garden he thought he heard Petit’s mug vibrate on the picnic table.
He was honest enough – with himself – to admit that most of his anger was fuelled by the knowledge that the story was a shoddy piece of work. He believed her because she’d given him what he wanted: the splash.
And he still didn’t understand. ‘Why sell at all?’ he asked. ‘If he’s on your side to the tune of what – half a million or more – why not just let him sit on the land and refuse to sell to the government?’
She had her hands on the wooden table, the knuckles knotted. ‘I said – I think – that we wanted to put the land in trust.’ The fact that she hadn’t tried to throw him out after being accused of being a liar spoke volumes. ‘There has to be a price – it could have been fifty pence. That way we have a legal sale. We needed to transfer the ownership to the trust. Otherwise I could have used this house to stop them – as I said, the last time we spoke. We’re anxious about compulsory purchase and we want to make sure that we have a long-t
erm solution. Simply letting him sit on the land was no good at all. What if future heirs to the estate decide they would quite like the purchase price – or even part of it?’
She was on her feet now, pacing, every inch a member of the landed gentry. Turning, she set her jaw. ‘I do not intend to see this house – my family’s house – under six feet of water. Or the land, for that matter.’
Dryden stood, tired of the lecture. ‘And you can’t give me the names of either of these two people – the one who is selling below the market price, and the one who is donating the sale money? It’s not listed at the Land Registry. I could find out – there must be a way, but I don’t have the time. Other people – other papers – want the story.’
‘No, I can’t. The fact is the deal has been done. Perhaps we should just say the details are private. Which is true. Now – it is a day off for me – but I’m afraid that doesn’t mean I have nothing to do. What do you intend to do? Take the nice fat fee for selling the story to Fleet Street or not?’
‘Well, as we’ve descended to the level of plain abuse I think I’ll keep that decision to myself.’
He turned to go.
She hadn’t finished. ‘You can walk back round the house through the trees,’ she said. It was a petty, calculated insult; as if she’d demanded he exit by the tradesmen’s door even if he’d got in at the front. But when he looked at her face he saw she’d regretted what she’d said.
‘I’ll amend the story,’ he said. He judged she was telling the truth. He had the facts – or at least enough of the facts. He could rewrite for the Guardian. ‘Land sold by one supporter of your campaign to another for an agreed price, I think – we’ll leave out the figure itself.’
She started to speak but stopped. They stood together locked in a confusion of insult and reconciliation.
‘You can go through the house . . .’ she said.
‘No. It’s fine.’
He walked away at last. Trees were rare out on the open fen and showed that the house must be built on a clay islet in the peat: a vast cedar, a fig, a Douglas pine. He was in the shadows when he saw flowers in the half-light. Walking under the canopy of the cedar he saw a gravestone. Grand in a classy way: a stone edge to the plot, a granite headstone five feet high, with engraved lettering in memory of Sheila Petit’s husband. The words and dates were crowded into the top half of the stone, leaving more than enough space, when the time came, for an inscription for his wife.
