by Jim Kelly
He turned away, beginning the long trek back to the car.
FOUR
Dryden 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.
He was going to flee up the narrow, uncarpeted stairs to the newsroom but Jean pointed towards the small office set aside for interviews with members of the public who called in with news stories – or what they thought were news stories. One woman, in Dryden’s first week on The Crow, had called to inform them that her husband had grown a potato in the shape of a newborn baby. They’d eaten it, but taken a photo. Dryden had humoured her, taken the picture up to the news desk, and been quietly appalled to see it on the front of the paper that week. It had prompted an avalanche of readers’ letters and a series of lookalike vegetable pictures which had been wildly popular. It was the first time in his career that Dryden had doubted his news sense.
A young couple sat behind the single desk in the interview room. He was black, West African by descent, perhaps thirty years old, with hands that were pale on the palm-side. He said his name was Yoruba, David Yoruba. He introduced the woman beside him as his wife, Gill. She was white – fen-white – with the kind of skin that light seems to shine through, and she was crying, two steady trickles from both eyes, into a damp ball of tissue she pressed to her face. Could tears smell? Dryden thought he could smell salt on the air. She moved the tissue around her mouth and to both eyes. Extravagant grief, thought Dryden, African grief: certainly the mannerism was un-English, and he wondered if she’d learnt it from her husband or his family.
Yoruba gave him a letter on headed notepaper: West Fen District Council. His hands were very large and muscular but they shook – or rather, juddered – as if mechanically flawed. The text was brutally short. ‘You should read this first, perhaps,’ he said, the diction clear and sonorous, with an educated edge.
Dear Mr Yoruba,
We regret to inform you that we are unable to comply with your request for the return of the body of child XXY/678 – 13. You will be aware that on 18 June at the Princess of Wales Hospital in Ely, Mrs Gillian May Yoruba signed form B34 – a copy of which is attached. The burial of the child was therefore undertaken, at her request, on 20 June at Manea Cemetery. Exhumation is not possible in this case. However, I have been instructed by the legal department to examine whether, on this occasion, there are grounds for compensation. You will receive a letter, in due course, from the council clerk.
May I take this opportunity to express our condolences at your loss.
Yours, etc.
The letter had a reference number and was dated three days previously.
‘I was so ill,’ said Gill Yoruba, ‘I just signed. David wasn’t there. I don’t blame him. I couldn’t think.’ Her jaw shuddered as she took a breath and dabbed at the corners of her mouth and eyes, then swabbed her forehead. Her husband looked down at his hands as if he blamed himself nonetheless.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Dryden. ‘I’m sorry.’ He wasn’t comfortable in this room, with its compressed emotion. The urge to walk out was almost overwhelming.
‘I was in Yarl’s Wood. The government detention centre.’
‘For illegal immigrants?’
‘Asylum seekers,’ said Yoruba, smiling. ‘I left my home – Niger – because I upset the government.’ He spread his hands wide. ‘This is a very easy thing to do.’ He smiled again, and Dryden detected a sense of resilience in this young man. ‘I cannot go back. Well, let’s say I do not want to go back. I met Gill. We were married – in March, at St Withburga’s.’
Despite the weight of sadness in the room he constructed another smile and Dryden knew it was for the memory of the church and its great wooden roof adorned with angels. The first time he’d seen it Dryden had thought, for a moment, that a flock of birds had got into the building and were trapped beneath the beams.
‘They do not accept our marriage as a legal one,’ added Yoruba, sliding an arm around his wife’s shoulders. ‘They believe we have faked our emotions, so to speak, and that the marriage is a sham. They doubt – in short – our love. I have twenty-one days to gather statements from friends to prove our case.’ His eyes widened at the thought of such a nonsense. ‘They let me out of custody for this, but not for the birth of my daughter. She arrived early. Too early. She was born but lived only for a few minutes. Then they let me out.’
The tragedy in that simple statement seemed, finally, to suck all the air out of the room. It had no windows, just plasterboard walls, but it was open at the top, like a public toilet.
‘But the c
hild . . .’ suggested Dryden. ‘Wasn’t she proof?’
‘No. The birth was only days after the marriage. The lawyer – their lawyer – explained to me. And he spoke very slowly so that I would understand. The child is immaterial.’
‘I held her,’ said the woman. ‘I didn’t want to give her a name until David came.’ She seemed to implode at the thought of the nameless child, sinking back in her chair, but she carried on talking, her chin down. ‘When they came the next day I said I had no money, that David was in the jail. That our families would not help – would not know, because I would not tell them.’ A flash of anger made her look ten years younger. ‘I have no family now. So I signed the form.’
‘The council buried our daughter, Mr Dryden,’ said Yoruba.
‘And now they won’t give her body back?’ prompted Dryden.
‘That is correct. I have some part-time work and access to some funds that I placed overseas before leaving Niger. We can afford to give her a grave where we can visit. I think that is important. And we have a name – at last, we have a name.’
They exchanged a glance and Dryden felt his skin prickle with anxiety.
‘I have been there – to this cemetery at Manea – but they say the . . .’ He couldn’t go on, his jaw set murderously straight. He filled a barrel-chest with air. ‘They say the public graves are unmarked. There is only an area, beyond some trees, where they keep rubbish. I left flowers there.’
‘And they won’t explain why you can’t have your daughter’s body?’
‘They won’t,’ he said. ‘I’ve asked many times. They are not bad people, Mr Dryden – I can see that. But they won’t say, or can’t say. Something is very wrong.’
Dryden took the letter. The touch of the paper gave him a thrill because writing this had been a mistake. It posed more questions than it provided answers, but most clearly it betrayed weakness – in the offer of condolence and the hint that compensation might be paid. The implication of the letter was clear – in this case, this sole case, the body could not be exhumed. Why? He felt a surge of pride in his trade because he knew he could get the answer.
‘I’ll make some calls,’ said Dryden, taking the letter. ‘Can I make a copy?’
‘Do you have children?’ she asked, nodding.
‘Yes. A son – newborn.’ They all smiled. Which was when he realized he couldn’t tell them his name. He wondered what he would feel if his son had died.
‘Aque,’ she said, and for a moment Dryden didn’t understand and it must have shown in his eyes. ‘That was the name we gave her.’
FIVE
The south-facing room was flooded with light through The Crow’s second-floor bay window, frosted with a design of the paper’s crest: a bird in heraldic form with the motto: Bene agendo numquam deffessus. Never weary of doing good. The news editor, Bill Bracken, may have been weary but it was hard to tell as he was asleep, head back in his captain’s chair. Where an air of excitement and feverish activity should have hung in the air there was instead the stale aroma of Bracken’s sweaty shirt. There was still twenty-four hours until the deadline for the main weekly paper, The Crow, and the news editor had never taken personal responsibility for the quality of the news coverage. If the paper read like a not very interesting section of the telephone directory he didn’t lose sleep; Dryden did.
It didn’t look like it, it didn’t feel like it, but The Crow was a newspaper in transition. The editor – Septimus Henry Kew – had decided to step down. In theory he was still in the post but for the last six months he had done nothing but read the final proofs before letting it go to press. The paper’s owners, a group of local businessmen, were struggling to find a replacement. Interviews were being held – sporadically – in a room at The Lamb Hotel. Rumours were circulating that the outcome of this process might not be the appointment of a new editor, but the closure of the paper. The Crow’s modest circulation had been on the decline for fifteen years. The local population had been on the increase for precisely the same period. It was as if there were two worlds in one town: in one the readers were faithful to The Crow but dying off; in the other they were happily multiplying but didn’t know The Crow existed.
Dryden sat at his desk and switched on his new laptop iMac. It was time for calls: the ritual round-robin of regular checks with police, fire, ambulance, coastguard, county police. Then he’d surf the BBC websites and local radio. But first he took out the address the police had given him for Jack Dryden – an old council house, half a mile from where he was sitting. He’d see the body tomorrow. Telling Humph what had happened had helped relieve the tension but it hadn’t been the catharsis he’d hoped for. It was like shouting down a well, except there was no echo. He’d tell Laura later, but he felt he should let her have the joy of going home unsullied.
He wanted to speak to someone now. It was as if he had some emotional GPS in his head that needed to make contact with satellites before he knew where he was. Or who he was. The first time he’d flown abroad, as a teenager – a trip to Spain from university, pre-mobile phones, pre-text messages – he’d stood in the departure hall at Gatwick asking himself the key question: he was leaving the country, who should he tell? He’d rung his mother – at the new farm, back in the Fens after twenty years in London – just to let her know, as if she was some unpaid official at passport control. And when he’d returned he’d rung her again to say he was back. Reconnecting his emotional GPS.
Beyond his immediate family, Laura and the baby, there were only two people left – two lonely satellites – and they lived together, circled each other.
His aunt picked up the phone.
‘It’s Philip.’ His uncle, Roger Stutton, was his mother’s only brother. Con, Roger’s wife, had always been there in Dryden’s life. The couple lived on a remote farm at Buskeybay, out on the fen. The farm, which they’d bought soon after getting married, had never been a success. Over the years they’d sold off land, leased plots, started a car-breaking business, tried to keep ahead of the remortgage payments. None of these disappointments had been grave enough to rob Con of a kind of frontier optimism.
‘How’s Laura – and the baby?’ His aunt’s voice contained a sustained power.
‘Fine. Can I pop by – tomorrow, perhaps?’ Dryden heard dogs in the background and the farmhouse door grating on the tiled floor of the entrance hall. ‘I’ve got some news – nothing awful. It’s about Dad. Just a bit of the past that’s come back to haunt us.’ He’d realized, too late, that he couldn’t just say it on the phone.
‘Jack? What on earth could have happened?’ asked Con. ‘Philip, he’s been dead more than thirty years.’ Dryden often sensed an undercurrent of irritation when he spoke to his aunt.
‘I’ll tell you when I see you.’ Face-to-face he’d ask them questions. Had Jack been happy? Was there any reason he’d want to walk away from his life? Why had his mother taken him away, to London, a world away from the farm at Burnt Fen?
There was a silence.
‘OK,’ she said finally. ‘Do you want to talk to Roger? He’s just back from the post office and now he’s going fishing on the lake.’ A door slammed.
Suddenly Roger was there on the other end of the phone. ‘Philip. I was just thinking about you.’ He laughed to himself, unhurried, happy to let Dryden fill in the silence.
‘I was just saying to Con – I’ll be over, tomorrow. We can talk then.’ Dryden imagined them at the other end of the line, exchanging glances, his aunt shrugging.
‘OK. I see. Very mysterious.’ It was odd how satisfying a conversation so banal could be. Perhaps it was some deep-rooted connection he was making between similar gene pools. ‘Come to think of it I have a mystery for you – but it can wait till tomorrow too.’
‘Fine. You’re going out in the eel boat? Be careful on the water,’ said Dryden.
‘Right. Yes. I am,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow then?’
‘Tomorrow.’
Dryden rang off. He could see his uncle now, s
tanding by the phone, the same slightly Edwardian straight back as his mother, the pepper-and-salt hair, but most of all the scientist’s mind – always collecting detail, building hypotheses.
The lake, Adventurers’ Mere, had been created two years ago by the deliberate re-flooding of part of the Fens. Not so much a lake at all, a true mere – an inland sea: more than fifty square miles, the far side only just visible in fine light. The original plan had been for marsh and fen, and a little open water. But then a toxic partnership of global recession and global warming had resulted in something quite different. To save money the government decided to simply re-flood the fen, creating a brackish inland mere. It was stocked with eel and zander, tench and pike; open to fishermen by licence. Roger had one of the few commercial licences given – another attempt to bring in cash.
But it was the eel that had been the big success. Dryden had been out with Roger laying the wicker traps and nets. Lifting them – usually at night by torch light – was an oddly Gothic experience. The traps coming up out of the oily water, the eel glistening, shivering with movement, coiling and lunging. Roger ran the catch out to the Cambridge restaurants, and the coastal ‘Chelsea-set’ pubs of the north Norfolk coast.
The thought made Dryden hungry so he fished in his coat pocket and found a pork pie he’d stowed away a few days earlier and a packet of Hula Hoops. He survived largely on such snacks – a bad habit picked up during Laura’s long illness. The new house promised hot meals around a table. He’d miss the al fresco pies.
He started calls. First up was county police headquarters at Milton – a faceless MFI block on the outskirts of Cambridge. They had two items on the press list. First, a sit-in at Whitemoor Prison. More than fifty prisoners were refusing to leave the canteen building due to changes in the menu. Dryden sympathized. He’d been in several prisons to interview inmates and they all said the same thing: that the way to survive a long sentence, and nobody at Whitemoor was in for less than four years, was to make each day predictable. Routine was the prisoners’ salvation. Routine days flew by. The same food, the same view, the same people, the same TV programmes, the football results. Routine. Anything which cut into that made time slow down. The menu was a key milestone en route to the day they walked out of prison. Every Monday’s shepherd’s pie, every Tuesday’s curry, was mentally ticked off as one less they’d have to eat before going home.