by Jim Kelly
He noticed the dead man’s hands then – orange paint under the fingernails, the skin torn but clean. And a smell – quite distinct, which might have come from the hands – of petrol. But not quite petrol; something more refined, lighter.
‘Overkill,’ said Friday, using his mobile to ring the paramedics. They could relax – it was recovery only, and he’d need to let forensics look at the field first. ‘Looks like they strung him up and then had a bit of shooting practice.’
Dryden hadn’t thought of that. The lynching first, then the desecration of the victim. He looked back to the edge of the field and the figures of the migrant workers. The silence was complete and intense. They, he thought, were the killer’s audience.
The Crow’s photographer, Mitch MacIntosh, emerged from the shadows on the far side of the field, loaded down with enough equipment for a Paris catwalk. He’d avoided the police cordon by negotiating a drove road that wasn’t on the map. Having been born in the Fens sixty years ago he was a living atlas of dead ends and tracks.
‘Who the fuck’s that?’ asked Friday.
‘Our photographer. Sorry. He’s unstoppable.’
Friday shrugged. ‘Tell him to stop there.’
Dryden held up both hands and bellowed Mitch’s name.
Mitch, a humourless Scot with a penchant for fake tam o’shanters, was a techno nerd and never knowingly without the latest gadget. He set up a tripod and began to fumble with a telephoto lens.
‘Who found the victim?’ asked Dryden, thinking he’d keep Friday talking because then Mitch would be able to give the picture scale by including some human figures. They couldn’t print a shot of the corpse but they could show the gantry, the reel, the cloud of mist drifting.
So he repeated the question because Friday was pretending he hadn’t heard.
‘Gangmaster spotted him just after six when he got here. He’s local – Commercial End.’
‘And he couldn’t stop the reel?’
‘Nope. Said his job was to get that lot working – picking, packing. He’d never touched the irrigation gear.’ Friday’s eyes narrowed. ‘It’s clever. Brutal and clever. The gantry’s moved on from the spot where he was hung up so it’ll have sprayed water all over the forensics, betcha. Over the footprints. No fingerprints – it’s like we’re underwater. Tidy. So – like I said – gangs. And there’s that stench of fuel you’ve so far pretended not to notice.’
‘Petrol,’ said Dryden.
‘More like marine fuel,’ said Friday. ‘Which is why I’m not smoking. And that’s not an official confirmation either, by the way. I’m not stupid. Nothing’s on the record.’ He let his eyes linger on the dead man’s face. ‘Maybe they did plan to torch it, then figured the gun shots were good enough.’
It wouldn’t be the first gang killing in the Fens. Two years earlier a Portuguese migrant worker had been tied up and shot out at Wisbech – his body dumped in the tidal mud. He’d have stayed in the mud if someone hadn’t spotted a hand sticking up at low tide. Six months earlier a bunch of Lithuanian workers at Lynn had fallen out over gambling debts. A frank exchange of views had ended in two dead – one of them fed into a hay baler. But Dryden wasn’t alone in suspecting that the death rate was much higher than that. The Fens offered many advantages to organized crime – not just migrant workers but gangs operating out of the East Midlands and London. You could hide anything on this wide open landscape. Tucking a body away where no one would find it was like hiding an acorn in a forest.
The difference this time was that they’d wanted this body found. This body was a message: don’t mess with us.
Friday tore his eyes away from the shattered face. ‘Thanks for your help, but I need you off now.’
‘Can I talk to that lot?’ asked Dryden, noting the corpse’s clothing before he was too far away to see: a badge on the overalls that looked like the local water authority – FRWA: Fen Rivers Water Authority. A gold link neck chain, a small key on the chain, a gold ring, the hair cut short but stylish, a tattoo on the neck – something in High German Gothic script. Teeth – good, white – maybe whitened. Shoes – leather, with expensive multicoloured laces.
‘If you’d asked me I’d have said no,’ said Friday. ‘But as you didn’t I won’t notice till the bus gets here – I’ve got one out from Ely, we’ll take ’em all back and get statements. And they’re all pretending they don’t speak English – how’s your Polish?’
‘Nie mowie po polsku.’
‘Meaning?’
‘I can’t speak Polish.’
Typically, Humph’s backlog of European languages did not include anything as useful as Polish.
Dryden took one last look at the shattered face. ‘But it’s a murder inquiry – right.’ It was a statement, not a question.
Friday laughed. ‘Well, he didn’t trip over his fucking laces, did he?’
SEVEN
The glass room was the only one Dryden really liked at Flightpath Cottages. The two original farm workers’ houses had been knocked into one, so there were two of everything: two front doors, two outdoor loos, two staircases. To create the glass room they’d knocked out the attic divide to make a single office, half of which was covered with an unbroken set of solar panels, the other half just reflective glass set in a wooden frame. Blinds controlled the heat and light, and flip-up Velux panels allowed air to pass through. He had them open now so that a breeze blew in. It was still in the mid-eighties and the humidity was high; storm clouds were appearing like ack-ack bursts on the horizon.
The dark side of the room held his filing system and a bunk, a printer for the laptop and a set of the big red cuttings books from his time on The News, the Fleet Street national he’d left after Laura’s accident. On top of the books stood a framed picture of his father at Burnt Fen: 1976, the year before the flood that swept him away. Dryden walked to it now and turned it face down. He wasn’t going to think about Jack Dryden again that day – he’d promised himself that. Tomorrow he’d touch the body: he’d know then. One single revealing touch of flesh on flesh.
The house stood on a very slight rise – he’d used a GPS to measure it at eight feet. Not much, but in the Black Fen, a lofty peak, which added several miles to the view from the glass room. He could just see the conning tower on the horizon at the US air base at Mildenhall, nearly thirteen miles away, and beyond that, in the sky, a heavily laden fuel tanker dropping down from the stratosphere, twin contrails looped behind like giant washing lines. Before the US airforce had arrived after the Second World War the area – on the edge of Thetford Forest – had been a testing range for military aircraft, originally in the years leading up to the First World War. The house had been on one flight path or another for nearly a century. It was pretty much a miracle it had never been blown up.
They’d expected aircraft noise, of course. The clue was in the name. But they’d been quietly appalled by the frequency of the military flights which seemed to shake the house several times an hour during daylight. Nightfall brought silence, but that wasn’t going to be a big help trying to get a two-week-old child to sleep. They told each other at regular intervals that they’d get used to it, that the rumble would become background noise, white noise, that they’d simply blank out.
Dryden touched the space bar on the iMac laptop screen and brought the story he’d written on the Eau Fen murder back to life, picking up his mobile to hit the speed-dial for the news editor. Bracken was in the Fenman Bar, where he’d long been awarded the ultimate accolade – his own pint pot and a bar stool. He picked up Dryden’s call on the second ring. The background noise was dominated by a fruit machine chugging out coins.
‘Philip,’ said Bracken. ‘What ya got?’
Bracken’s attitude to Dryden had altered over the years they’d worked together. Dryden’s Fleet Street pedigree had put the news editor’s back up in the early months, but he’d come to realize that the paper’s success depended on its chief reporter’s skills, and that made his own life easier
. And it was clear Dryden’s own ambitions were strictly limited – if he wanted a glittering career he could leave anytime and one of the nationals would have him back. If he’d wanted Bracken’s job he’d have gone for it – and got it – long before now. The fact that the editor’s job was up for grabs hadn’t upset their relationship. Both of them thought the other one would never apply.
Dryden filled him in on what he had from the corpse found in the lettuce field.
‘Corker,’ said Bracken. Dryden heard a door clatter and then the unmistakable buzz of the outside world followed by the swift intake of a smoker’s breath.
The next day was press day. Dryden would be in early to write up the splash and then attend a police press conference at Cambridge. Anything new he’d update by mobile or laptop. He didn’t tell Bracken that he’d written the story already – that way he’d engineered himself time, which was the reporter’s ultimate commodity. He’d need time tomorrow; time for the short journey over the fen to the morgue.
‘What’s exclusive?’ asked Bracken. The news editor might be lazy, a borderline alcoholic and a poor operator under stress, but his instincts were sound. He’d spent twenty-five years on an evening paper in West Yorkshire and it had taught him the basics. Dryden had long ago decided that he’d treat Bracken as he was treated – with professional detachment.
‘Gunshot wounds to the head and body. I think we can say “riddled”, if you like. I asked Friday and he said any statement would be minus detail from the scene. So far there’s been nothing in the official press statements. We’ll see if that still holds tomorrow – if it does it’s enough. Suggests gangland revenge – a touch of mystery. That do you?’
‘ID?’
‘None yet. Unlikely to be official before we go to press either way.’
‘Perfect. We like brutal. Callous. Good words. Use ’em, or I’ll use ’em for you.’ Bracken laughed. ‘Still – you know what’s what.’
Dryden saw the dead man’s face again – the right eye obscured by the gunshot wound. ‘Pix?’ he asked, trying to dislodge the image.
‘Yeah – Mitch did OK,’ said Bracken. ‘Can’t use the body but they covered it with a sheet and he got that. I love these fen coppers. Up north they’d have left it hanging there and we’d have been scuppered. He’s sold a couple to PA for us – but we’ve got the best. Alf?’
Alf Walker was the local press association reporter. Dryden had rung him from the fen to give him two pars on the murder which he could put out to the nationals, regional dailies, and radio and TV. Alf had been out in his garden sketching a corncrake – an obsessive hobby, witnessed by the exquisite line drawings that peppered his shorthand notebook. The lineage fee would be paid to The Crow and divvied up at the end of the month. If the nationals wanted more they’d have to send their own staff out – which was unlikely, although the local evenings would be all over the story like a horse blanket by tomorrow’s press conference.
Dryden rang off and immediately heard his son cry out from the bedroom below. He went to the stairs and called down to Laura in the kitchen that he’d see to it. One day soon, he sensed, the various chores associated with the child would become an issue. Child care, feeding, washing. But today, at least, they were competing for the jobs.
The child’s room was a bedroom, not a nursery. For Dryden and Laura the Victorian nursery cast too long a shadow of malevolent sadness. So they’d gone for white walls, a chest of drawers, and the wooden cot. From the ceiling Dryden had hung an array of mobiles. But the biggest was outside 200 yards to the west – a wind-powered generator owned by the farm next door. At sunset it cast a shadow which came and went across the wall. The swish he could live with, but not the high-pitched mechanical squeak with each revolution.
The baby had fallen silent, his eyes switching from the left wall to the right wall, apparently mesmerized by the moving shadow. Dryden didn’t break the line of sight, but moved backwards out of the door and climbed the stairs again to his desk.
He sat rereading the story on the Eau Fen murder, but not taking in the meaning, just checking the spelling, the syntax, the sound. Oddly, of all the stories he’d dealt with that day, the violent murder wasn’t the one that had stayed with him.
He found the photocopy he’d made of the letter the council had sent the Yorubas about their daughter’s burial. Reading it again he felt the familiar excitement of the chase: authority with its back to the wall, bluffing, trying to wriggle free. He had the council’s head of media on his list of mobile contacts. The phone rang and he thought it was going to transfer to answerphone when it picked up: his name was David Dudley-Rice, public school, decent, about twice as smart as he let on. The voice would have been perfectly at home on the BBC World Service.
‘Philip?’
Dryden outlined the Yorubas’ case then read out the letter. He said he’d ring officially the next morning for a statement but he thought Dudley-Rice would appreciate the heads-up.
‘I’ll have something for you, but you should know this case isn’t as straightforward as the Yorubas – poor people – may have implied.’
Classic first response, thought Dryden, implying that the family was not telling him the whole truth. A ploy designed to sow anxiety and mistrust. Dudley-Rice clearly knew the case well – a sure sign they’d been expecting trouble and felt exposed to the risk of trial by media.
‘Right. But you’ve offered compensation – or at least the possibility of it – and that’s taxpayers’ money. So I’d like an explanation.’
‘It is a personal matter, of course. We’d be very constrained in what we can say publicly.’
‘Just reply in private to the Yorubas – they’re happy for me to see any correspondence.’
There was a pause at the other end of the line and the sound of a car engine starting. Dryden leant back in his seat and caught the smell of cooking rising from the kitchen. A pungent garlic sauce, tomatoes, and something else disturbingly earthy and almost gravid: Jerusalem artichoke – gnarled and marbled, dug from the ground.
‘Of course, our legal department is involved in this, Philip – just so you know. It all takes time. You know what lawyers are like. But perhaps we can say a bit. I’ll try and get you an interview out at the cemetery – how does that sound?’
‘Who with?’
‘Cemetery warden knows the story – odd bloke. Mad on motorbikes. But he could help you if we give him the green light. Leave it with me.’
‘I’ll ring at nine, David. I’m going to run the letter, plus a story, so if you want anything to balance that out let me have it then. If not, we’ll come back to you next week.’
‘It would be nice to get a balanced story. Like I said, there are legal issues.’
‘We’re a newspaper, not a Christmas annual. Deadline’s noon tomorrow.’
‘Right. It’s just there are issues of taste. Decency. It’s not a . . .’ He pretended to search for the word. ‘Not a pretty story.’
‘So you’re up to speed on it. Why not tell me now.’
‘Like I said – lawyers. And they go home at four thirty sharp. They charge treble rate after that. We’ll talk tomorrow.’
Dryden cut the line and felt drained, as if the mouthpiece had sucked out what energy he had left for the day. Hadn’t the Yorubas told him the name they’d chosen for the girl? How had he forgotten it?
A ship’s bell rang from downstairs – one strike, barely audible. He’d taken it with him from the house boat. It was the signal for food.
Laura had laid a red-and-white checked tablecloth out for two plates of spaghetti vongole. Red wine, decanted into a jug. His wife’s family had run a small café and restaurant in north London. She’d been brought up with the idea that food was part of family life.
Dryden sat and pushed a piece of paper across the table.
Laura had her first forkful poised. She scanned it. ‘So. Well done, Philip.’ It was Dryden’s application for the post of editor of The Crow. ‘I wondered,’ s
he said.
‘But you didn’t say.’
Laura’s own career as an actress had spluttered back into life after her recovery but had now ended. The speech disability refused to improve and she refused to accept bit parts which played to her condition. What she’d do next was something they hadn’t talked about. For all her enthusiasm for the new house, and for being a mother, Dryden was sure she couldn’t face life without a career.
‘Your decision,’ she said. ‘The right decision. I thought – maybe – you’d want to go back to Fleet Street. We could all go. North London, maybe – not a suburb, the city. Hoxton. Hackney. I’m OK with that. I liked cities once.’
‘It’s not just my decision,’ he said, putting his fork down. ‘I like it out here. In the Fens. I want him to grow up here,’ he said. ‘In all this space, all this freedom.’
‘All this sky,’ she said. ‘Me too. I like to see so far. There is a magic here – very good for childhood. For im-ag-in-a-tion.’ She pronounced all five syllables to make it clear which word she meant, then picked up her plate. ‘Let’s eat outside.’
EIGHT
Friday
Vee Hilgay woke up with her head turned to the clock as she always did. It was two minutes to five, and the alarm was set for the hour. She was seventy-four years old and had never yet been woken by an alarm clock. Her life had so far contained more than its fair share of grief. She preferred not to lie awake and stew in the past. And she was aware that she’d had more than her fair share of privilege too. A wealthy childhood, university, health. So before the rhythmic electronic buzz had completed its cycle of six she was on her feet.
Her bedsit was large and modern: a German galley kitchen in steel, a Habitat desk, a bookcase handmade for the space and neatly filled – each volume drawn out to match the edge of the shelf; wooden chairs, no cushions, no soft furnishings – a linguistic couplet that made her physically sick. She wasn’t a snob; in fact, she’d spent most of her life proving to herself that she wasn’t – but she’d always been clear that taste wasn’t the preserve of the rich or educated. In fact, alarmingly, the relationship seemed to be an inverse one.