Nightrise

by Jim Kelly

  This, he could see, had been his uncle’s refuge. Rather than sleeping on the boat above the eel traps he’d slunk away here. A packing crate table held a china mug; there was a sleeping bag on one of the four pews set against the walls, and a primus stove. On a shelf stood a line of Sunday school primers. On the next his uncle’s books – surely; slightly arcane texts on soil science and farm management.

  And a volume of Beowulf. Dryden picked it up, struck by the coincidence, and by the fact that he’d always felt an empathy with his uncle – one that seemed to go deeper than their blood link.

  The chamber had a single window which looked north. From this height you could see the far shore – a low hill with a spire, and to the north the whale’s back of the Isle of Ely and the cathedral. The liquid mercury surface of the water was disturbed in the mid-distance by wind, which created a wide oval print of dark grey wavelets and white horses. He couldn’t see below the water because the sun was on the horizon now, in the east, and the light just bounced off the surface so that it became a mirror. To the east it was nightrise, the sky darkening like a bruise, the first stars flickering into life. The gathering darkness made him cold at heart.

  Nearer at hand stood the lone chimney of the sunken Fenlandia. He leant out of the window and looked down into the old graveyard. The spot where his mother’s grave must lie, below the silvered surface, was marked by water lilies, yellow and open.

  Beside the window stood a single chair. Kneeling on it he put his head out through the arrow-slit arch and shouted Roger’s name into the air. This time there was no echo.

  At that moment the setting sun was eclipsed by a single cloud and the surface of the mere dissolved to reveal what lay beneath. And what he saw then he saw completely – not just an object, a story, a tragedy; he saw all of it encompassed in the one image.

  The eel boat hung submerged in the green water, keel up, on the bottom of the mere, a rope rising not to the surface, but to the foot of Roger Stutton, who was motionless, a hand reaching for the surface just a few feet above his head. His mouth was open, in mid-gulp, and his eyes – dead and fishlike – caught the light.

  The sun slid out from behind its cloud and wiped the image away – but not before he’d noticed a single detail: a series of three neat holes punched in the keel of the boat.

  NINETEEN

  Saturday

  A police diving unit recovered Roger Stutton’s body from the waters at River Bank a few minutes after midnight. He’d been dead – according to the pathologist who attended from Cambridge – between twenty-four and thirty-six hours. Body gases had begun to fill the principal organs, causing the corpse to rise, its ascent restricted by the rope tied to the right foot. Cause of death would have to await the coroner’s examination but a working hypothesis was that he drowned: his lungs had discharged fresh water and traces of weed. There were no signs of any external trauma except bruising and cuts to the ankle where the rope had bitten in – and that looked post-mortem. The boat had been lifted clear of the lake by a dredger and crane. The three holes in the starboard keel appeared to have been made with a hammer or blunt instrument – they were in a perfect line. Recovered from the lake bed were Roger’s eel traps and gear, a torch and a boat hook.

  The policeman who briefed Con on the flood bank had been circumspect. They were treating the death as suspicious. Clearly – a bizarre accident aside – someone had tied Roger Stutton to his boat and then sunk it. He was a plain-clothed DS, from Ely, and unknown to Dryden. He was very clean, as if he’d taken a shower before coming out to monitor the diving unit. He gave Con his card and said they’d talk in the morning, but now – right now – she should tell him if she could think of anyone who might do this. Any enemies, any arguments or violent clashes?

  ‘He was a quiet man,’ she said, and they left it at that. It was the perfect description and Dryden considered how often he was drawn to the silent, and the insular. Roger’s particular charm had been to combine that silent character with the enthusiasms of a boy. But he must have had an enemy, and that enemy had killed him in the coldest blood. A business partner? A creditor? Because that’s what Roger had in his past – a long line of failed enterprises, half-baked attempts to keep the farm afloat.

  The body had been taken to the morgue at Peterborough and an appointment made for an official identification at noon. Dryden had offered to make the ID but his aunt had insisted that she was able to do it, in fact, wanted to do it; to see him again. In shock, but unaware she was in shock, she had asked Dryden to take her to Flightpath Cottages; she didn’t think she could sleep, or rest at Buskeybay. Then they’d made the call she was dreading – to Laurie in Manchester. He’d wanted to drive back immediately but she’d told him to wait. They needed to fix the funeral, get a date. She hadn’t cried until she put the phone down.

  Dryden had slept but only after an hour of lying awake. Roger’s death, so soon after that of the man who called himself Jack Dryden, was profoundly unsettling. It made him anxious, and he considered getting his baby son from the child’s room and setting the cot at the end of the bed where he could see it. The warmth of Laura’s body was a comfort and he thought for the first time that was why warmth was so settling, so sleep-inducing. It was a token of life. A reassurance.

  He found Con in the baby’s room at six that morning, watching the wind generator turn its vanes. The child was asleep, so still it awakened familiar anxieties in Dryden that made him want to touch his skin, make him move.

  ‘Your father taught science at a big secondary modern – in Haringey,’ she said, her voice a whisper but very clear. ‘That was a matter of principle, of course. He could have got a job in a private school. But he believed in the state system. That was his contribution.’

  Dryden’s arms seemed too heavy to hold up, so he let them drop by his sides. He hadn’t been prepared for this and he didn’t think he wanted to hear it here, in his son’s room.

  ‘Look – not now. You’re upset. You should rest.’

  ‘Now,’ she said. He took her to the kitchen and made coffee and they took the cups outside and sat at a picnic table. Summer had become a constant that year and he was not surprised to see the blue sky and the freshness of the light at that early hour. There had been no rain overnight so for once the humid oppression had lifted.

  ‘It’s called Kettlebury. He didn’t talk about it much. It wasn’t for long – two full academic years. Well, nearly two. It wasn’t his choice to leave, Philip, but he felt he had to. Maybe – if it hadn’t happened – they’d have taken the farm anyway, one day. But I doubt it. They went to Burnt Fen to get away from London – from the school. But he never really got away.’

  ‘Why?’ Dryden’s throat was dry. The coffee was lukewarm already because the air was cool, the sun only just clear of the horizon.

  ‘It was dropped – eventually. The whole thing. I don’t know the details. It was a mess. The police were involved. Your father resigned.’ She looked trapped, boxed in despite the fact they were under this huge sky.

  ‘Just tell me.’

  ‘Your father ran field trips. He organized one to the Scottish Highlands. A boy died. A young boy. Jack was blamed by the parents. The school suspended him. I think – talking to your mother – he blamed himself. Always.’

  ‘The police were involved?’

  ‘Yes. There was a chance there’d be charges – criminal negligence. As I say, I never knew the details. It was something your parents kept to themselves.’

  There were, she insisted, no other details. All she knew she’d learned from Roger, who’d been told by Dryden’s mother. How had the police been involved? Had his father been arrested? Held? How had the boy died?

  ‘You said he never managed to get away from it – what did you mean?’

  ‘It was nothing.’ Con looked at him. It was just a fleeting moment but Dryden suddenly knew that if they weren’t linked by family they had the capacity – between them – to really dislike each other.


  ‘It’s not nothing, is it. It’s my father’s life.’

  ‘The boy drowned.’

  As soon as she said it he knew he’d known, on some level where fears are made, inherited, perhaps.

  ‘Your father was haunted by water. Attracted – then repelled. He couldn’t shake the memory of it. After he died your mother talked about it – once, at Buskeybay. You were playing with Laurie in the yard. The first Christmas after Jack died.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said she’d been afraid sometimes that he’d take his own life – to stop the memory. It was a thing he had to live with, Philip. But sometimes it was too much and she felt she couldn’t help.’

  Dryden thought then that he hadn’t inherited this fear; he’d somehow taken it in in some form of emotional osmosis. Soaked it up: the lethal attraction of water. And then he knew exactly what his mother had thought the day his father had been swept away. ‘She thought he’d given up? Let himself be taken away by the water?’

  ‘She wondered. We’ll not know, will we? Ever.’

  ‘Maybe he just wanted to get away – away from the farm, surrounded by water. Maybe he took the chance to leave us before he hurt us. He took the chance to be alone.’

  They sat in silence and the pine trees shimmered in the thinnest of breezes.

  ‘Thank you for telling me. It explains a lot.’

  ‘They weren’t unhappy.’

  ‘I know. I don’t remember any unhappiness. But there was a tension there – and now I know what it was. And that it’s in me.’

  He looked at the distant bank of the new mere, a mile away, hiding with its glib green facade the mass of water beyond. And another thought insinuated itself into the scheme of how things might have been. What if there was another son, what if he’d been born before his father went missing? Had he left one family to be with another?

  ‘I want to bury Roger at Manea – the cemetery there,’ she said, not apologizing for distracting him from his memories.

  ‘It’s all clay. I just couldn’t bear a fen burial. Would you find a plot for me? I don’t like to ask – while there’s this . . .’ She searched for a way forward. ‘This uncertainty about Jack – whether this man is him. I know it must be filling your mind – but could you find time for this?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And the view’s good and I’ll have to visit and it’s got a station,’ she said. ‘The place is desolate but he’s not going to be worried – is he? Although it’s true he never loved the Fens – not like Jack.’

  Dryden thought about telling her to let it be. That she had plenty of time to think about burials. But perhaps it was her way of grieving. Or her way of avoiding more questions about Jack.

  The air rumbled across the fen as if there was thunder under a clear sky. They watched a heavy fuel-tanker taking off from Mildenhall – ten miles distant, rising up like a whale surfacing.

  She sighed. Dryden remembered then what day it was – the day after this woman’s husband had died. He’d already pushed her too far. He got her fresh coffee. Put his arm round her.

  She shook her head. ‘Roger liked trees too much to love the Fens,’ she said. ‘Oaks, sycamores, birch, walnut. Trees you don’t see here.’

  They looked around. Apart from the windbreak of pines the nearest copse was spruce. A lone, shapeless, blackthorn. ‘If you can find a nice tree at Manea that would be the spot. Although they’re regimented now, cemeteries. Like caravan sites. But we can try. Would you do this for me? He’d have been grateful too.’

  She seemed to force herself to look at Dryden. ‘He was very fond of you, Philip. You’ll know that. I’d like you to have his watch – the compass watch, your father’s watch. It was a gift – but now I think it should go back to you.’

  Never a materialistic person he considered the watch, the memory of it, and was shocked how much he wanted it on his wrist. He had a craving to touch it as vivid as thirst, or hunger. And to hold it, watching the compass needle swing to the north. But now he recalled that fleeting image of Roger’s body, reaching for the surface of the mere, and felt sure the wrist was watch-free.

  TWENTY

  The railway station which bore the town’s name – Manea – was two miles beyond its last house, out on the black soil, a halt marked by a single wooden building. It looked like the set from a western. Tumbleweed Town. Dryden watched the Peterborough train set off west until it slipped from sight. There was silence but for the wind rattling the level-crossing gates. A mile away a goods train trundled towards the station on a spur-line: then stopped, carriages screeching with rusted couplings.

  Walking to town he decided he should have rung Humph, despite it being Saturday morning. The cabbie always marked the beginning of the weekend with a lie-in, usually in the cab, parked down by the river in a shady spot, followed by a slap-up Full English. Instead Dryden had let Con run him into town on her way back to Buskeybay. Then he’d got the train. But he should have called Humph because this was going to take half an hour just to walk into the town. And in the Fens half an hour was an eternity of straight lines.

  A car swept past at seventy, picking up speed towards the thirty mph sign. A single roadside house flew the Confederate flag. Then he saw it and realized why – subconsciously – he’d chosen to walk. A single bunch of cheap flowers in cellophane tied to a lamp post, the verge still scarred where Jack Dryden’s van had slewed off the road and into the ditch, and the grass black, burnt back to the black earth. It was a thought that he’d avoided but now carried its own comfort – it was the ditch that would have killed him, not the fire. That was the point about fen roads. You were belting along at seventy mph, or eighty, and then the road started to buckle under you, a sinuous dip sending the wheels off the ground. Then you lost the road and flew into the ditch – ten feet wide, full of water. And it didn’t matter what you hit: the far bank of the ditch or the water itself. The end result was the same. Your body went from seventy mph to zero in less than two seconds, and the forces involved in that tore you apart, not on the outside, but on the inside. He wouldn’t even have felt the flames.

  The card said: ‘In Heaven Now’, and was signed ‘From No. 135’. There were two houses opposite the crash site – and he could see 134 in big numbers on the off-pink stucco. He thought it was a good thing to do even if they were God-squad. Perhaps he’d leave a tribute too, although he couldn’t begin to think what he’d say. In a strange and disturbing way he had come to care less about the identity of this man who had died on a lonely road and more about the identity of his own father before the day he’d been washed from the flood bank. What kind of man had he been? The idol that Dryden had made of him as a boy – or an idol with a fatal flaw? How had he failed in his duties as a teacher on that field trip? Dryden had already used his iMac to try to Google up a newspaper report of the story from the time but there had been nothing online. It was nearly forty years ago. He’d have to go back to the borough records, track down dates and times. He’d go to London when this was over, go alone.

  Walking, he used the mobile to call Sgt Cherry in the coroner’s office. There was still no news on an official cause of death for Roger Stutton or from the lab on the DNA match with the man who’d died right here, on the road to Manea. Dryden said his visit to the victim’s house had been inconclusive. Cherry promised he’d text the results when he had them.

  Dryden reached the town sign. ‘Welcome to Manea,’ he said out loud. ‘Twinned with Chernobyl.’ He’d made the second bit up, but he enjoyed his own jokes, and he took care to pronounce the town name correctly in fen-fashion, so that it rhymed with Ely, the long ee a relic of Roman occupation, signifying the town stood on an island.

  Manea wasn’t ugly just odd, haunted by its own dead-endedness. Not a bad place, Dryden thought, to be buried. There was a strange mound in the centre, man-made, egg-shaped, and he recalled a story of some crackpot seventeenth-century plan by the king to turn the place into a port – thirty m
iles inland, close to the new artificial rivers built by the Dutch. A project, like the town itself, that came to nothing.

  There was a Spa shop by the church, partly obscured by a tractor with giant wheels caked with dry peat. There was a video-hire shop that appeared to be closed and a pet parlour which seemed to be open. There was a hairdressers’ called Curl Up And Dye. There was a pub whose windows were crowded with DIY signs advertising Happy Hour, vodka chasers and As-Much-As-You-Can-Eat suppers on Mondays. It was one of those buildings which even now, on a blazing hot fen day when you could taste dust on your lips, seemed to radiate the damp of winter.

  He walked quickly through the little square and was struck by the idea that if anyone spoke he’d be unable to understand the language. The Fens had that quality of being not here, not now, of providing that small jolt you always get when you wake up in a country that isn’t your own.

  The cemetery was on the edge of the town, beyond a cluster of farm buildings and a brace of ugly MFI-style warehouses which seemed to be for storing grain. The whole town rested on a spit of clay – the remnants of a fossil river-bed – and the cemetery had taken up the last half-mile. Beyond a neat brick wall he could see neater gravestones, gravel drives, and a backdrop of poplars. Flowers filled a low bank, an arrangement of blooms picking out the word GRANDMA.

  The crematorium was fifties built, of a utility design with all the grace of a toilet block on a camp site. But beyond it was what looked like a caretaker’s house: stately, late Victorian, but rendered stark by a lack of curtains and an ugly information board showing a plan of the cemetery like a Tube map for the dead. A metal sign stuck in the flower border pointed to the house and said: Office.

  Dryden walked in through an open door. There were no carpets and the floor boards were unpolished. The hallway smelt of tomato plants and oil – the source of the latter being obvious: a motorbike stood on the lino blocking the way forward to the kitchen. Dryden knew it was not any old bike but a Harley Davidson, the model spelt out in a fluid gold script: Electra Glide. It was probably second hand but still must have cost a cool 20,000. The bikes were a local fad. William Harley, one of the founders, was the son of a fenman who’d emigrated to the Mid-west in the 1900s. Dryden had covered several of the annual Harley Davidson conventions held in late summer. Strings of bikes roared across the flatlands, the riders trailing greying ponytails.