by Jim Kelly
The enemy of routine was change.
He had decent contacts in the Prison Officers’ Association so he’d make a call, see if he could flesh out the story. It might even make the nationals if the menu changes were actually interesting. He could see it now: Prisoners Riot Over Cauliflower Cheese.
Second item on the police press list was an unspecified ‘incident’ on Feltwell Anchor – a large, inaccessible area of farming land now on the far north coast of the new mere. The unspecified incident was at a place known only as Eau Fen. Most of the area was farmed by one of the big agri-businesses which grew salad crops for the supermarkets. Acres – thousands of acres – of black soil crocheted with seedlings.
‘What kind of incident?’ asked Dryden, watching the news editor wake up like a baby, out-of-focus eyes fixing finally on the office cat. It was a few minutes to eleven and the Fenman Bar opposite would be opening its doors at any moment. Bracken called it his ‘city office’ – and that’s where he’d be until three. He began to struggle into his jacket, whistling tunelessly through fat lips.
There was no answer from the police control room to Dryden’s question. ‘I said, what kind . . .’
‘The kind of incident where we can’t tell the press any details. Ring later.’ The line went dead.
Dryden loved it when officials – any kind of official – tried to be obstructive. Firstly, it made him more interested in what was happening. But mostly it meant that they almost always gave away more information than they ever imagined. That one line told Dryden something was up – and twenty-four hours before The Crow’s weekly deadline it made his blood course just that little bit faster.
He was on the line for the local police at Ely when Vee Hilgay came in. According to the National Union of Journalists Vee was the oldest trainee journalist under indenture in England – she was seventy-four. When The Crow’s last trainee had left for Fleet Street the paper’s owners had decided to cut costs. They’d take on a part-time replacement, no qualifications necessary. Dryden knew Vee – she ran a local charity that helped the elderly get through the winter, which she’d founded with family money. She was tough, smart, political (Old Left), and streetwise. Dryden’s mother had described her as ‘effortlessly top drawer’ – in other words old money, with manners to match. He knew she was bored running her charity so he offered her the job. She was a natural – not because of the qualities Dryden had recognized: the intellect, the dispassionate stance, the sheer bloody-mindedness; but because of the quality he hadn’t known about – curiosity, both obsessive and boundless.
Vee produced a flask the size of one of the shells fired at the Somme and poured tea into a mug emblazoned with the face of Tony Benn. She waved a notebook at Dryden. Vee had taught herself Pitman and got to eighty words a minute – more than good enough for the local magistrates court, which is where she’d spent the morning.
Dryden cupped a hand over the phone. ‘Something’s up – out on Feltwell Anchor. No one’s talking . . .’
Dryden’s call to Ely’s police control room switched to an answerphone.
Both fire brigade and ambulance confirmed they were at Feltwell Anchor but could release no details. Dryden poured himself a coffee from the communal stewing pot and went over to the newsroom’s wall map – fifteen feet by six, installed a decade earlier, it was like having a picture of his entire world as seen from space, with the pubs marked with little blue beer barrels. The only major alteration to the real world in the last decade had been the new mere which Dryden had – expertly – added to the map with a set of sky-blue marker pens.
Vee appeared beside him cradling her thermos cup. She ran on tea. Dryden had never seen her drink anything else except malt whisky.
‘You can’t get anything at all?’ she asked, studying the map.
‘Nothing. I might go out. Courts?’
‘Good,’ said Vee. She’d never pick up the hallmark cynicism of most journalists, but she’d developed an eye for a good story with ease. ‘A flasher up on High Barns. Broad daylight mostly. Used to stand on the corner and shout “Look at me, I’m a teapot”. Poor man.’
Vee put a finger on a lonely farmhouse on the map of Feltwell Anchor, very close to the edge of the mere Dryden had drawn, at the spot marked Eau Fen. ‘One of my charity volunteers – a Mrs Dee – lives there. I’ve got a number.’
Mrs Dee was in her seventies but busy and sharp, a full-time carer for her husband who’d had a stroke. They’d sold most of the acreage to the agri-business but still had thirty acres for kale. She told Dryden she’d been out just after dawn when the overnight rain was still on the dark green leaves. She’d seen nothing then – just the automatic irrigator trundling over a distant field. Dryden asked her to go to the window and tell him what she saw now.
Dryden heard footsteps on a cool tiled floor. ‘I’m looking south,’ she said. ‘Over the fen – there’s a drove road there and the pickers are out. I can see the Portaloos.’
‘Anything unusual?’
‘There’s a bunch of policemen taking a shower.’
‘In the sense that . . .’
‘In the sense that the irrigation gantry I mentioned is still shooting water over the fen, and these coppers – in uniform – are all over it, like blackbirds, getting wet.’
SIX
The Fens ran ahead of the cab like a chessboard landscape. The sun was well up so that the shadows were beginning to shrink back, the temperature already in the mid-seventies. Humidity, after the storm the night before, was high. They had all the windows open in the Capri but it didn’t help. Boudicca hung her jaws open trying to catch some breeze in the back seat.
They came to a T-junction and the SatNav said right, but Humph turned left. Contradicting the talking routemaster was one of Humph’s hobbies. ‘What do you know,’ said the cabbie under his breath, shaking his small, neat head. The voice of the SatNav was a woman’s, modulated, Blue Peter English, no aspect of which had endeared it to Humph. ‘So,’ said Humph. ‘Where,’ and at this the cabbie waved a finger in the air, ‘do we get the common phrase “on cloud nine”?’
Humph’s attempts at conversation were maladroit at best. He’d sensed Dryden’s darkening mood, perhaps also the dread he was feeling at the prospect of trying to identify his father’s body at the morgue the following morning. This was Humph’s way of trying to relieve the tension.
‘You mean as in euphoric happiness?’ asked Dryden.
Humph, dimly sensing he’d put a foot wrong, edged a finger between his Ipswich Town top and his chin.
‘Give up,’ said Dryden.
‘International Cloud Atlas 1896,’ said the cabbie. ‘Introduced cloud classification. Number nine was cumulonimbus – the highest of all.’ He gripped the steering wheel. ‘Simple.’
Silence again, only deeper and heavier.
‘There,’ said Dryden, pointing an arm out of the open window across the fen where a line of police cars stood parked in a chain. They were four miles out of Ely, past the last hamlet, on a stretch of road which flew like an arrow towards Adventurers’ Mere, the direction marked by a line of poplars which seemed to dip away towards the horizon with the curvature of the earth – an illusion, Dryden knew, but a powerful one.
Humph swung the cab on to the drove road and switched off the SatNav as it announced that it was re-computing its location. Three hundred yards ahead of them was a police checkpoint, at which stood an armed policeman in a flak jacket.
‘Guns,’ said Dryden, as Humph pulled up, kicking open the passenger-side door. ‘Great.’
Leaning on the top of the cab he rang Jean at The Crow and told her to go round to the photographers on the High Street and get the paper’s part-time picture editor, Mitch MacIntosh, out on the road. Mitch’s business was wedding photos, but they paid him a retainer to take pictures of local news events – mostly ‘smash-and-grab’ cheque presentations or school Ofsted line-ups. Real news photography wasn’t his forte: he had to battle an almost irrepressible ur
ge to ask anyone in a picture to smile, even if they had just witnessed a fatal road crash. He also refused, point blank, to take any pictures if the subject, or object, was in motion. But even he could snap a stationary armed copper.
Dryden walked away from the cab, fields running out of sight on both sides, the road itself made of concrete sections, so that he altered his stride to miss the cracks.
The field to the east was dotted with salad crops and blue Portaloos and the two stationary mobile picking gantries. The workers, about sixty or seventy of them, cradled plastic cups, smoking, but not talking. Some peered into mobiles.
Dryden had often wondered what life as a migrant worker was like. Not the outdoor back-breaking part, the visitor-in-a-foreign-land part. As he walked towards them every single one of those distant faces turned towards him, watching, watchful, like a field of sunflowers following the sun.
The armed copper was on a mobile too. He held up a hand to stop Dryden in his tracks ten feet short of the squad car.
‘Can I help, sir?’ The tone of the voice was so divorced from the meaning of the sentence Dryden didn’t understand what he’d said.
‘Sorry?’
‘You can’t go any further, sir. Crime scene.’
Dryden flashed his library card. ‘Press. The Crow. Philip Dryden – any chance of a word?’
A radio crackled and the officer turned away to talk.
Dryden peered ahead. A screen of willow trees blocked a view of the field beyond, and the blue surface of Adventurers’ Mere. It was a big field, even bigger than the one in which the migrant pickers stood. Dryden, who’d been brought up on a farm less than ten miles away from this spot, estimated it was a hundred acres. He’d worked it out once – the size of an acre. A decent football field was ninety per cent of an acre so that’s how he tried to see it – imagining football fields stretching out, like a picture he’d once seen of Hackney Marshes in the 1950s, crammed with Sunday-morning matches.
Through the close-planted trees he could see – and hear – an irrigation gantry: a metal frame 100 feet wide, set on six large wire-wheels. A hose connected it to a metal reel at the end of the field, roped up to one of the poplars which was pulling in the gantry, powered by water pressure, so that the whole operation was automatic. They’d had a much smaller version at Burnt Fen. He’d go out with his father before dawn and switch on the water supply, which would set the gantry in motion. They’d stand by for a few minutes, scanning the field with torches, then walk home to breakfast. By the time the sun was high enough to start burning off moisture the gantry would have crossed the field. They’d run the reel to the far end by tractor and then repeat the operation after sun set. The Burnt Fen gantry had been fifteen feet across – a toy compared with this monster, which emitted a swishing noise and a mechanical ticking from the reel, audible at half a mile.
Despite their witness’ earlier report the gantry was devoid of policemen. But it was moving, and it was spraying water, creating a vast cloud of droplets like a mist. Inside the cloud there was an artificial rainbow, a broad, broken spectrum, a fragment of a great arc. In the hot mid-morning air Dryden could even feel the slightly cool, damp breeze blowing his way. And now he could see an ambulance crew, in Day-Glo jackets, by the field gate with a stretcher and paramedic gear. A group of uniformed police stood to one side smoking.
Out of the trees walked someone Dryden recognized: Detective Inspector Tom Friday, one slightly lame foot dragging in the peat. DI Friday was the Ely division’s senior detective, a man with a reputation for uninspired labour and patent honesty. Like most policemen he had a habit of acting older than he was: Dryden guessed he was mid-thirties, but his world weariness made him sound much older, as did the defeated shoulders and the skewed foot. Dryden had seen him on countless wet Saturdays watching one of his four sons playing local football. Up close Dryden saw that he was soaking wet.
‘Don’t say a sodding word,’ he said.
The water ran out of his mousy hair into his eyes, and water brimmed over his shoes from inside.
‘You grew up on a farm?’ He readjusted his weight and one of his shoes made an obscene sucking sound.
Dryden nodded. He’d once been out on a job at one of the big agricultural processors with DI Friday. A worker had fallen in a machine and been killed. They’d had to wait while the sheds were evacuated and the plant shut down, so they’d swapped life stories: Dryden – organic farmer’s son, Friday – copper’s son. Dryden – brought up in the country and educated at home until moving to the city after his father’s early death. Friday – brought up in King’s Lynn and educated at the local grammar school. Both married. Now they both had kids. It wasn’t the time or place to share the good news.
Taking silence for affirmation Friday nodded his head at the distant trundling gantry. ‘We can’t turn that bloody thing off. Any ideas?’
Dryden followed him back down the track and through the poplars. They came within fifty yards of the migrant workers. The faces turned their way, with not a smile in sight.
‘Happy bunch,’ said Dryden.
‘Piecework. They’re not earning. You and me, we’ve got salaries, pensions. They get cash at sundown. It’s medieval. We could be hours yet. It’s costing them a living. Poor sods have mouths to feed like you and me.’
Amongst the trees they passed the ambulance crew, one on a mobile, one on a radio, the other checking through the paramedic kits.
‘You gonna tell me what’s up?’ asked Dryden.
‘Nope. You turn the water off, I’ll let you see. Fail – you can join the Glee Club back there for a cup of tea while we get someone out. This is one of Doggard’s fields – could take hours.’
Doggard’s was one of the big fen agricultural companies. They farmed thousands of acres. But the salad crop ‘factory’ was thirty-five miles away towards Peterborough.
The irrigation reel hummed, the hydraulic mechanism within clicking as it tugged in the hose and line on the distant gantry. Here, even on the edge of the field, they were in the droplet cloud, so that Dryden’s skin was instantly moist and he could taste the slightly metallic water on his lips. The coolness was all-encompassing, like a blanket in reverse.
An articulated plastic water pipe ran away from the reel and Dryden followed it to a stopcock in the ditch: a hi-tech affair of dials and switches but the basic mechanics were simple. He cut the water supply. The reel fell instantly silent; the cloud of water spraying from the gantry seemed to implode, leaving behind dripping sprinklers. The gantry came to a shuddering halt fifty yards away. As the mist cleared they could see the distant mere beyond more clearly – a single boat in the mid-distance, no sail, flat in the water, like a miniature dredger. Even now, five years after the lake had been created, the sudden sight of it was a shock to Dryden, as if he’d glimpsed a distant make-believe mountain in a bank of clouds.
‘Hoo-fucking-ray,’ said Friday, stalking off, walking down a furrow between lettuces, his wet shoes picking up peat like sticky-toffee pudding.
It was still difficult to see the gantry in its lingering cloud. Water dripped from every nozzle on the 100-foot steel frame; a mathematical grid against the sky, perched on the six giant wheels, each square empty, each a picture frame without a picture: all except one. Out on the far end of one wing of the gantry there was a hanging object.
Dryden stopped dead. His heartbeat picked up and the sudden double-coldness of his skin made him feel like someone else’s blood was flowing in his veins. He’d seen the gently swinging shape for a nanosecond before looking away, but some objects are so deeply buried in the human psyche as to need only that fleeting glimpse for instant recognition: the angular dart of the rat, the strange heft of an arm carrying a knife in the hand, the cold quartz-like stare of the dead eye. And this: the hanging man, hung from the neck, until dead.
He looked again. A corpse, the neck broken to give that tell-tale zigzag in the spine, water dripping from the legs, which had been tied together, the arms
behind. It swung still, maintaining the momentum of the moving gantry. The creaking noise it made didn’t come from the wet rope but from the shattered vertebrae of the neck.
Dryden watched his boots in the peat as he followed Friday’s tracks. He didn’t look again until he was standing beside the DI, the shadow of the hanging body moving over the furrows, the only sound the dripping water around them and that calcium creak of the broken bone.
As soon as he did look he was aware that this was a victim whose death had been designed to shock. In its own obscene way it was as much an advert as a billboard flogging the latest Hollywood blockbuster. The broken neck appeared cosmetic; the face was disfigured by a gunshot wound to the right of the right eye. Dryden counted six more wounds in the torso, each ripping through a pair of blue overalls and a white shirt. There was one other wound visible – in the knee of the left leg. The water that dripped from the bare feet was tinged red. It was like looking at meat hung in a butcher’s fridge. Or roadkill. He thought then, as he often had, that he’d been lucky not to see his father’s corpse – washed up, decayed, ugly. It was a shock, a fresh jolt, to realize that he might see it now. Burnt up, wasted and as ugly as this, possibly worse.
‘Christ,’ he said, his voice cracking, unsure what shocked him most: the corpse he could see, or the one he feared to see.