by Jim Kelly
The one window looked down on High Street and the cathedral buildings along its southern side. The street was thick with a summer’s mist, that particular species which seems to sparkle with the promise of the sun that will burn it away. A scarab street-cleaner edged along the kerb, its light flashing silently. Someone was slumped in the doorway of Asda – legs out on the pavement, a brace of beer cans lying in the crotch. She tried to memorize the boots and trousers in case she saw him later in Oxfam. Somewhere she could hear the mist, condensed, running in a drainpipe.
She turned the radio on to BBC Radio Cambridgeshire. Watching the minute hand creep to the vertical she thought about the day ahead: press day. She needed to pick up the post from the Royal Mail depot, open the office, do a round of calls. Anything from police, fire or ambulance that she judged important she’d text to Dryden. She listened to the news looking out of the window. The mist was making a last effort to cling on: thickening, gathering itself, so that the Octagon Tower of the cathedral which had floated free had gone now, leaving just a hint of its great bulk hanging in the white sky. A flashing amber light crossed the street – one of the early waste disposal lorries taking away bins.
The news bulletin was made up with what, she knew, Dryden would have called ‘twists’ – running news stories kept alive by the latest, often minor developments. Top of the schedule was the Eau Fen killing: a police appeal for any information. No name for the victim but relatives now informed. Murder inquiry under way. But no details from the scene of crime. Second item: Environment Agency announce plan to purchase and flood Petit Fen – Phase 2 of the programme which had begun with Adventurers’ Mere. Details contained in an application to the planning authority to include a visitor centre for water birds, but also three entry locks allowing pleasure boats on to the new lake. A spokesman for the National Trust was already condemning the scheme and calling for a return to the original vision for the region of a managed nature reserve of marsh, reed and water. Third item: vehicle shunt on the A10 at Streatham likely to cause major delays for commuter traffic heading for Cambridge. Then national news: a bomb in Damascus, a merger on Wall Street, Whitehall rows over cuts to the NHS. One thing new – a police appeal for information on a missing car, no registration: a black four-by-four last seen in the Lisle Lane multi-storey. Easy enough to spot as all its windows were shattered.
Then the weather. Sunny, hot, maybe a thunder storm. High humidity.
Vee took a camouflage jacket and let herself down the stairs into her office and out the door. She walked this way every morning and was always quietly thrilled when it offered up something different: the thick, untouched snow of February, a hoar frost in November making the willows look like the old Crystal Palace, a dazzling sunrise in May – right into her eyes, as if the sun wasn’t rising at all, but hurtling towards her. This morning the first persistent mist of summer, thicker down by the river, dripping off the bankside trees.
She walked north on the tow path for exactly one mile, leaving the town. Beside her, arrowing in at a tangent to the river was the railway line from Lynn, set on the flood bank. The first train went by – three carriages packed, commuters reading newspapers by orange light. The rumble of the wheels spooked the wild horses – she heard the thudding hooves but saw nothing amongst the half-lit scrubland. The train disappeared into the mist as if plunging into a tunnel.
Crossing under the railway down a dripping pedestrian passageway she emerged in a meadow and climbed the bank. The sky was lighter here and she thought there’d be blue sky by six. Ahead she could see the gibbet by the railway. Vee had always thought it took a dark imagination to call it that, but not this morning. She could imagine a body dangling from the single arm. This gibbet had been put up for the post bag, to be ripped from its hook by the speeding mail train. She’d seen a picture in the sorting office from the fifties with a post bag swinging, waiting for the train. It stood now only because no one could be bothered to take it down.
A hundred yards further on the path joined the road and a sign said:
HIGHFLYER DEPOT
The sorting office was brick-built with a playful tower, mullioned windows and an arch leading into a hidden yard. The mainline ran down one side of the sorting shed, the branch line, which allowed for deliveries to the depot’s own platform, encircled the site in a huge loop the shape of a noose. North, unseen, Vee heard the clanging alarm signals from a level crossing. The Fens was the land of level crossings – hundreds of them, operated remotely, beside abandoned signalmen’s cottages. She always thought it made the place seem more secretive, as if you could only enter through a series of checkpoints.
There was a postman behind the glass in reception who heaved up a small sack before she could say good morning. ‘Sheila wants a word,’ he said. ‘You can go up.’
He flipped up the counter. Vee took the sack which seemed unusually heavy and pushed her way through plastic-sheet double doors into the sorting office. The interior of the building was a Victorian throwback to match the facade. About twenty men stood at a series of wooden frames, each divided into pigeon holes. In a wooden chute letters piled up as they sorted them into the different ‘walks’ – the postmen’s rounds, marked on the pigeon holes with their own tag: High Street West, Dunkirk, Bishops, Riverside, Caudle Fen. Another sorter took the letters from the pigeon holes and added them to mail bags hanging in a metal frame. A radio played the local commercial station.
Vee liked the room, which exuded the almost hypnotic aroma of authentic industry: machine oil, rubber and wood. The floor was worn parquet, the frames oak, the wooden chutes in old pine. The pigeon holes were marked in an exquisite gold copperplate. Vee knew that the post office had installed the latest technology – Optical Character Recognition – down at Cambridge, but that the low volumes they took through Ely meant it was pretty much better to do it by hand like they’d always done. There’d been a plan to mechanize back in the 1990s but that had been shelved in one of the perennial rounds of cuts. As Vee worked her way down the back of the sorting booths she passed an office, cut off by wire grilles, two men inside at desks, sorting registered mail.
An open metal staircase took her up to a mezzanine floor – a series of offices opening off an overseer’s balcony. Sheila Petit’s was the last in the row. She was one of several managers who shifted paper and monitored performance.
The sign on the door said: District Inspector – Eastern Fens.
The room was brutally functional except for a large framed aerial photograph of a set of farm buildings around a house on an open fen and a page of the Cambridge Evening News showing Petit toasting victory after the last district council elections. Councillor Petit was nominally an Independent, accepting the Tory Party whip. Unlike most independents she wasn’t just a Tory in sheep’s clothing. Vee had sat on the reporter’s bench at enough meetings to know she was her own woman: liberal, broad-minded, tough.
The desk and chairs were MFI, a kettle and coffee-making kit on a table by a socket. But once the room had held some grandeur – the ceiling was plastered and decorated, and a dado-rail ran around the walls. Sheila Petit was, like Vee, class with no cash. Vee, of course, was aristocracy – the daughter of a penniless knight. Sheila had humbler origins – a fact she liked to point out on her election leaflets. The daughter of a shopkeeper from Clacton, she’d seen her father’s business fail and the family home repossessed. She’d escaped poverty by winning a scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge. There she’d met, then married, Arthur Petit. An only son of a long-established fen family, he came complete with a landed fortune. Vee had seen him once at a harvest festival out on the fen. He’d given out trophies for fishing – catching pike on the Little Ouse. He’d been as plump and self-satisfied as the first-prize fish, that rarity in the Fens, a gentleman farmer.
Petit stood by the open window, smoking, her arm bent up at the elbow, the hand flopped back. She had grey hair fashioned like a cycling helmet and robust teeth, and those peculiar good look
s which in England are called ‘handsome’.
‘Vee. Sorry – bad morning. Needed this and I can’t leave the office.’ Vee guessed she was in her late sixties, early seventies but she’d embraced new technology – there was an iPhone on the desk top and a laptop beside the PC. ‘Could you tell Dryden I’d like to see him,’ Petit said, stubbing out the cigarette in an ash tray on the window ledge, which she then hid under the desk.
Vee didn’t like being used as a messenger.
‘He’s not answering his phone,’ said Petit.
‘Reception’s dodgy at the new house,’ said Vee. ‘He’ll get it when he sets off.’
‘I thought I saw him on that boat of his the other day. They’ve moved, have they?’
‘A child.’
‘Did you hear the radio?’ asked Petit, switching tack. ‘They’ve officially announced their intention to go-ahead.’
Petit headed up a campaign to stop the second phase of the fen re-flooding, a phase which would include her home and what had been the family estate – most of it remortgaged or sold off. The government planned to use compulsory purchase orders to brush aside objectors, or offer over-the-market prices to buy up parcels of land from others.
‘Well, we knew it was coming. But we can stop it. There’s some money – a donation. We can buy a piece of land which runs right across the fen. Put the ownership in a trust, tie it up legally. It’ll take them years to mop it up.’ She beamed. ‘It’s a form of sabotage. Totally legal, totally brilliant.’
There was something predatory about Petit’s need to win the fight for Petit Fen – it wasn’t just the family name, her husband’s family, after all. It was personal – Vee understood that – but there was something else. She wondered if she was haunted by her own childhood – the moment her own home had been taken from her. Perhaps she was simply determined not to let it happen twice.
Vee still found it unseemly, this bitter tussle to own something, not for itself, but to keep it from others. Vee’s childhood home, a rambling fortified house, had long gone in a deal with the National Trust. She’d been back once as a paying punter and found the experience oddly cold. It was the same place in which she’d spent her childhood but it wasn’t in the same time – change the date and you alter the place. It was as simple as that for her.
‘We can write this?’ asked Vee.
‘I’d prefer you to wait. Dryden and I usually have an arrangement.’ She pressed a hand to her forehead as if she’d been suddenly struck down with a headache. Vee noticed that her finger fluttered slightly, a rare sign of frailty. She’d never seen this woman betray any indication of stress or anxiety. Suddenly she seemed overwhelmed by events.
‘Next week’s paper would be fine.’ She took a breath, regaining herself. ‘I can give him the detail – the amount, where it’s come from, and what we can do with it. Well, maybe not the amount, as the donor’s a bit shy. Anyway, we’re initialling the sale tomorrow. So for now – entre nous.’
‘All right.’
‘Tell him to meet me Saturday evening, about six. A bunch of us are meeting, totally informal. Petit Fen – the old chapel. I can give him enough for a story. He knows the place.’
The phone went and Petit grabbed it, immediately engrossed in the call, her hand holding the packet of cigarettes as if she could suck the nicotine into her bloodstream through the cardboard.
Vee left. She knew the chapel on Petit Fen and it seemed like another world compared to this: the ringing phones, the blinking computer screens, the serried ranks of post office vans and lorries in the car park. Petit Fen was primeval, as if the earth had just been made. A brick chapel stood on a flood bank in the heart of the peat fields. The building always reminded her of the living quarters on Noah’s Ark – just four walls and a pitched roof, as if the biblical boat had come to ground after the flood, sunk to its gunwales into the black earth.
NINE
Stefano’s was one of Ely’s best kept secrets, an authentic Italian restaurant hidden in an alleyway off the High Street. Laura had discovered it one evening waiting for Dryden to finish covering a council meeting. Starving, she’d ducked in out of the rain expecting cardboard pizza or floppy farfalle, only to discover a menu limited to home-made pasta dishes, each one made to order. And Dryden had discovered Stefano’s other secrets – imported village wine from Liguria and a small roof terrace used by the staff for smoking, plus coffee that could accelerate your heartbeat after one minuscule cup. They knew Stefano now, and his English wife, and were allowed to take their morning coffees up on to the roof.
Laura ascended the spiral staircase into the open air, her son in a papoose on her back, hitched high on her shoulders so that his head lolled in the crook of her neck. Dryden sat on one of the aluminium seats, his feet up on the low balustrade, taking in the view over St Cross’ Green to the long wall of the cathedral nave just fifty yards away. He often played echoes here, in this great bowl of stone created by the cathedral and the curving embrace of the old monastic buildings which formed one side of the High Street.
He always felt it held the magic of a theatre, as if the sound of applause had just died away.
Laura pulled up a chair and sat, swinging the papoose round so that the child was held to her chest, keeping level her small china cup of black coffee.
Head down, rearranging the baby’s clothes, she said something Dryden couldn’t understand because he hadn’t seen her lips move. And they were outside so the sound was lost to the sky.
He tugged his ear.
‘Do Not Ask,’ she said pointedly, each word distinct.
One of the reasons she’d been keen to get out of hospital had been a long-arranged driving test. She’d left the child with friends in one of the High Street charity shops for the test – the first of the day, timed for eight. Dryden understood that Do Not Ask was Italian for Failed. Which was bad news: if they were going to live out at Flightpath Cottages she was trapped on the fen unless she could use the car. Either that or she did what they’d done that morning and Humph brought her into town with Dryden. She found that both humiliating and irritating. She valued little above her independence, a view only strengthened by the two long years in a hospital bed after her accident.
‘What went wrong?’
‘He didn’t like Italian cars,’ she said, making an effort to pronounce the sharp ‘i’ at the start of ‘Italian’.
She had a Fiat 500, a stylish icon of her homeland she’d bought from an importer near Felixstowe. It was racing red with white-walled wheels.
‘Or Italian driving?’
Laura had been taught how to drive by her uncle on the mountain roads of the Lunigiana. ‘He said I drove too close to the . . .’ She used her hand like a cleaver.
Dryden knocked back his coffee like vodka. ‘The white line?’
She dismissed the truth of it. ‘And my three-point turn is not up to standard.’
‘Why?’
‘I did it in one point.’
She watched his laugh, and Dryden felt she was gauging it, assessing his mood.
He checked his watch. They’d talked briefly the night before about his plan to visit the morgue and see the body of the man called Jack Dryden. Humph was due to pick him up at nine by the cathedral’s West Door.
Taking both his hands over the table, she said, ‘Please do not do this. We know what this means, Philip – dental records. Why . . .’ She held both hands up, indicating the sides of a box, perhaps. ‘Why have this memory?’
He checked the watch again. She took that as an answer.
‘It will not be him,’ she said. ‘You will feel nothing.’ She knew she was being cruel but she couldn’t stop herself.
Out on St Cross’ Green a group of school children were trying to put together what looked like a long, thin Chinese dragon, the head complete with fangs. There was a child inside each segment, while others held steel drums and Scout and Guide banners. The gathering looked like a dress rehearsal, lacking the buzz of the
real event itself.
‘The eel, for Eel Day,’ said Laura, smiling. ‘This Sunday.’ It was one of the town’s best celebrations – a parade, from the green down to the riverside, a crowd behind the giant eel, a band in front, then a fair and music. Like the fiesta in her home village in the mountains above Pontremoli, it was a celebration of community. ‘We must take him,’ she added, picking a flake of dried skin from the baby’s scalp. In the past she’d complained about the lack of a community life in the Fens, in England. On bad days she wondered out loud if they could live in Italy.
‘I have something to say.’ She unpacked a notebook and a wad of A4 printed sheets curled into a tube. Laura had grown up as part of a large, loud, bickering family. Direct statements came naturally to her. Dryden loved her for it, but like most only-children found it difficult to confront issues. ‘I talked to Katie.’ Katie was her agent. ‘I said I won’t act. Not again. I said I have to write – scripts. The BBC’s doing a new soap – Sky Farm, a kind of Emmerdale in the south, set near Norwich. They need storyliners?’
Dryden nodded. She’d acted in an ITV soap for years – Clyde Circus, a kind of suburban EastEnders. So she knew the ropes. Storyliners were like shop stewards for scriptwriters. Looking after the big picture, setting the parameters within which the writers worked, making sure characters stayed consistent, drawing all the threads together.
‘She’s got me a three-month trial. First episode is in January.’
‘You’ll be brilliant,’ he said. He meant it, and she knew it, so her face relaxed with the smile.
‘Thanks.’
She took a deep breath. ‘It’s three days a week in Norwich. Starting in December. Two days at home. Once we start filming it’ll be four in Norwich, one at home. Sorry, it screws things up. I know.’