by Jim Kelly
‘Have they told you how he died?’ he asked. He knew it was cruel, and he knew it was controlling, but she had a right to know. ‘His heart.’
‘Yes.’ She flipped the rope, creating a wave which ran to the sluice. ‘That’s all they said – and that I couldn’t identify the body. Why?’
Dryden sat on the bank. She waited, anchoring stray blonde hair behind on ear. She’d looked fifty, but that was almost certainly the effect of the grief and stress of the last few days. There was an unaffected beauty in her face, a fine brittle jaw, and flying cheekbones.
‘Two men took Rory away,’ he said. ‘They’re called Miiko and Geron Saar. Did they tell you that?’
She shook her head.
‘They’re from Estonia. They work for other – criminals – who specialize in the sale of false identities. They call it ghosting – they steal the identities of the dead. It’s a very lucrative business. I’m sorry – Rory was involved in this. But not with these men. They were customers. He worked for the suppliers. There’s a place out on the mere they used. The documents would be left there. Rory did this for them.’
She sat in the boat.
‘He may have done this before, perhaps many times. Some of these documents have photo-ID, details. So they needed a line of communication between the suppliers and the customers – two-way. He was part of this.
‘But this time someone stole the IDs. The Saar brothers thought it was Rory. They took him to a car park in their car, the night before he was found, and tried to make him talk.’
He thought about editing the truth but then he saw a look in her eye and realized she’d already imagined worse. Much worse.
‘They shot him once, probably by accident; there was a fight in the car. Then his heart failed.’
‘It was weak,’ she said. ‘His heart. His father died young, and an uncle.’ Something about the way she said it made it sound as if this fault in the mechanism of the heart was something vindictive in itself, almost a curse.
‘When they took Hythe House apart I was there,’ said Dryden. ‘There was a child’s room.’
‘The boys.’
‘No – they’re teenagers, right?’ asked Dryden, recalling the police statement. ‘This was a child’s room.’
She shook her head as if to dislodge a memory.
‘Can you tell me about Samuel?’
‘No.’ She covered her mouth. Her eyes seemed to lose focus and for a second Dryden thought she might faint. He took a step towards the boat and helped her out on to the bank where she sat down quickly in the grass. She wore felt boots and they touched Dryden’s leg but she didn’t pull them back.
‘You OK?’
‘Yes. Samuel’s heart failed. Like Rory’s. He was crying in the night. We tried to ignore the screaming because they say you should otherwise they never sleep through. I left him – ten minutes, no more.’ She couldn’t help looking at him then, trying to convince him, even after all the years, that it wasn’t her fault.
‘Then he was quiet but I knew. I ran to the room. He was already cold. We buried him and came back to Hythe House and I locked the bedroom and threw the key in the river. I’ve never wanted to talk about it, and I don’t want to talk about it now. He was six months old. We never got over it. Rory did, I did, but together – somehow together we couldn’t get past it. Even when the boys came.’
For a moment Dryden didn’t understand, and then he did, and for the first time he felt a shiver of real fear about uncovering the truth. He’d made the fatal error of presumption. He’d thought of them all like his father – their lives lost as adults, the rest stolen. How much better, how much more lucrative, to steal a life before it’s lived.
Were they all children? All the envelopes containing the lives of people who didn’t really exist, people who’d never lived a full life. Like Samuel: dead within a year. And this idea introduced, without warning, a note of genuine evil. Because if you stole the lives of children you’d have to wait, and plan, build their make-believe lives and let them grow up in the world.
He hoped she didn’t ask now, why he’d been interested in Samuel, because he didn’t want to say any of that out loud. And it would destroy her image of Rory – a father who’d stolen, perhaps, the life of his own child. Did he tell himself it was a victimless crime? You only had to look at this woman’s face in profile to realize what an empty phrase that was.
‘Was there a death certificate, Mrs Setchey – for Samuel?’
‘Yes. We have that – we were very interested in it because it lists the cause of death and we were angry then. It was natural. We wanted someone to blame. But there was no one to blame. It just happened.’
So: an identical case to Jack Dryden. Death, a certificate, but still they stole his life.
‘You don’t recall the registrar’s name?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t remember very much – not afterwards. I’m sorry.’
‘But it was in Ely?’
‘No. Clayhythe fell under Burwell, I think – or Swaffham Prior?’
Dryden nodded. ‘I’m sorry to ask so many questions. If I find out more I’ll let you know – can I ring? If you’ve got a mobile.’
He fished out a scrap of paper and a pen. But when she handed it back her movements had slowed down, as if what she was thinking – what she was daring to let herself think – was sucking the energy out of her limbs.
‘And Rory was involved with these men – the men who stole identities?’ she asked.
‘Yes. Certainly – but we don’t know when, or what he did. It looks like he was just the messenger, the postman if you like. Just a cog in the wheel.’
‘There’s always been something hidden – since after Samuel died,’ she said. ‘I thought it was grief that he couldn’t share. But it was this, wasn’t it – this . . .’ Her face had taken on a hardness so that she could use the word: ‘trade.
‘I asked once. I knew he went out alone at night, in the boat. And he wouldn’t talk about it – just fobbed me off. I didn’t think it could be bad – because he wasn’t a bad person. And I knew where the money went; it went into the website and the business, and it’s a good business – that’s why I’m keeping the site running because I can sell it then. That’s the words they use, isn’t it – the money men. A going concern.
‘So I said to him: what do you do at night? No one else who worked for the FRWA went out after dark. He said that I wasn’t to worry, that it didn’t hurt anyone. He said I could sleep nights.’
Her face seemed to sag, as if someone had just snipped the tendons that held her features in place. ‘I think that’s a lie. That’s what he’s left me with – us – a lie.’ And then, inevitably, the final question. ‘Did they steal Samuel’s life – the rest of his life?’
He didn’t have the right to deny it. ‘Yes. I think they did.’
‘I hope they rot in hell.’ She covered her mouth but couldn’t stop herself finishing the thought: ‘All of them.’
TWENTY-EIGHT
Monday
Dobbs Café (no apostrophe), Chequer Lane, just off the High Street, 8.55 a.m. It served coffee in glass cups on glass saucers and had a lino embellished with musical clefs. Starbucks, Costa Coffee and Café Nero were all within 100 yards but Dobbs survived, offering all-day breakfasts and a roast lunch accompanied by the one advertising cliché guaranteed to succeed in the Fens: All You Can Eat. Dobbs had a single table outside. Dryden always took it if he could – if thwarted he’d sit on the low wall by the back of the ironmongers. This morning he’d got the table. A small victory which lifted his mood.
Dryden and Laura had separate appointments to view the body of Roger Stutton at the funeral directors just along Chequer Lane. She’d gone first, and taken their son. Dryden had touched base at The Crow, using his own key. Two developments: The Cambridge News was reporting that detectives hunting for the killer of Rory Setchey now believed he’d died in a multi-storey car park in Ely the night before his body was found
at Eau Fen. They’d asked for information on a black four-by-four seen in the area with shattered windows that night, or in the early hours of the following morning. The report matched Kapten Kross’ version of events.
Dryden also had an email from Kross. Interpol had monitored the freighter which had brought the Saar brothers to England as it left Felixstowe for the return journey to Tallinn. Dockside CCTV revealed only one brother on the dockside prior to sailing. Miiko, it appeared, had stayed behind. Kross said he felt there was no cause for concern but confirmed the local police unit would stay with Dryden’s family 24/7. Dryden had already decided that wasn’t enough. He was no longer prepared to outsource his family’s safety to the police.
Dryden sent a text message to DI Friday asking if any progress had been made in identifying the man who had posed as Jack Dryden – successfully – for the best part of thirty-five years. Dryden was perplexed by the details of the case. Someone had stolen the identity of his father: end of story. But not quite. How had they done it? And while he accepted the man who’d died at Manea wasn’t his father there were those worrying echoes of his father’s life in the house on the Jubilee Estate. This man had become a tutor in natural sciences – his father’s degree. Why live in Ely where there would always, surely, be a chance the name would be recognized, if not the face? He’d considered giving Friday the intelligence Humph had gathered on the fake Jack Dryden at The Red, White and Blue – the link to Lincoln Jail – but decided he had a better idea. He had contacts in the prison service; he’d try to trace the link himself.
The cathedral clock struck nine thirty. A crocodile of schoolchildren crossed Back Alley. He saw Laura emerge from the funeral directors on the corner carrying the baby, walking towards him: head down, her face in shadow. He’d bought her a fresh mug of tea which he edged towards her once she’d sat down.
‘You all right?’ he asked.
She nodded, looking at him for the first time. Her brown eyes were liquid, the whites pink.
‘Sure. He looks peaceful. If you can face it go.’
Dryden took the baby.
‘In Italy the children see the dead. It is not a big thing,’ she said, answering a question he hadn’t asked.
‘But I had to insist. I said it was his great uncle. That maybe he takes his name.’
‘Really?’
‘Not Roger – the second name. I saw it on the casket. Eden.’
It was a good name. Dryden had once asked his uncle where it had come from. Not the family, not some notable ancestor, just the prime minister in Downing Street when he was born. But still – it spoke of something grander: paradise, peace.
‘Maybe,’ said Dryden, giving her the child. ‘I’ll see.’ And that was precisely what he meant – that he’d see his uncle and then decide. ‘I won’t be long,’ he said, standing and walking quickly away, his footsteps clattering on cobbles.
Two minutes later he was sitting in a plastic bucket chair in the morgue, by his uncle’s body, as if he was visiting him in hospital. Roger’s hands had been placed across his chest and the wrists were exposed. There was no watch on the left hand. His aunt had told him his father’s compass watch was missing from his body when they’d hauled it out of the water at River Bank. Dryden caught sight of the pale band of skin where it had been, and looked away.
He placed his hand on the edge of the casket and tried to feel some kind of connection with the soul which had inhabited the body. He forced himself to imagine the last minutes of his life: the questions, the lack of answers, the Estonian brothers growing coldly frustrated. And then, for the first time, he thought he knew what had happened to the watch. He saw in his mind’s eye one of the brothers slipping it from his uncle’s wrist, admiring, joking, setting the needle to north. Then, perhaps, he’d held it up – taunting, using it to count off the last minute of his uncle’s life. One minute in which he could have saved himself.
Kross had not spelled out the brothers’ precise criminal pedigree but he had said they were dangerous men. Given Kross’ own icy authority that counted for a lot. They’d tied Roger’s leg by a rope to the rudder of the eel boat, then staved in the hull. How long had it taken for the water to flood in? Maybe a minute was too long. Thirty seconds? However long it had taken he’d had a chance to tell them what they wanted to hear. That he’d taken their precious parcel, posted it to Dryden for safe-keeping.
But the boat had sunk, dragging him down, and when the water had settled they’d have seen his outstretched arm, his fingers vibrating with the effort of trying to touch the surface – the lethal boundary between water and air.
He thought he should touch him now. Fate had robbed him of the chance to touch his father. And, strangely, his nerve had failed him when his mother had died: he’d hovered, wanting to make physical contact, but disturbed by the fact that in death she’d looked nothing like his own flesh and blood. Roger, on the other hand, had seemed to grow more like Dryden’s mother now his heart didn’t beat: the lean, bony, face; the long, pale fingers, which was a thought he found comforting – that in death the family would grow closer.
He touched his hand and was relieved not to be revolted by the coldness. Taking the fingers almost roughly in his he asked himself if he wanted to name his son after this man: Eden. He liked the name but wondered whether, if his son carried it for ever, would he always think of this – a cold room, a casket, and skin like candle wax.
Prayers didn’t come so he left him then.
The undertaker who’d ushered him through was working at an iMac laptop in the front office. For the first time he thought of undertakers as part of the system – along with coroner’s officers, registrars, gravediggers. The bureaucracy of dying.
‘Computers – I guess we’re all slaves to them now,’ said Dryden.
‘Part of the job,’ he said. His name was Carney, Matthew Carney, and he was sorry for Dryden’s loss.
‘But we can’t quite do without paper, can we? I once worked in a so-called paperless office in London. There were piles of the stuff.’
Carney smiled. He clearly didn’t do laughter. Perhaps it was unprofessional.
‘Talking of which,’ said Dryden, ‘the death certificate. Where do I collect it? My aunt wants me to do that – is that OK?’
‘The coroner’s office has issued the forms. Then the registrar’s your next stop.’ The inquest into Roger’s death had been adjourned to allow the police investigation to proceed, but Dryden had been told that the police had made no objection to the release of the body.
‘You know where the register office is?’ asked Carney.
Dryden couldn’t help but know it after endless visits to cover local weddings. The driveway was always scattered with confetti.
‘And then it’s the cemetery at Manea, I think?’ asked Carney.
‘That’s right. I’ve picked a spot.’
‘Funeral service?’
‘I’ll talk to my aunt.’
He was going to leave; it was sunny outside, and the cool interior was beginning to get to his bones. ‘One thing. So I get the death certificate but who tells everyone he’s dead – like pensions, Swansea for the licence, that kind of thing. Passport office too. It’s registered somewhere central?’
‘The GRO – General Register Office. Then they tell everyone else, just about.’
‘Where’s that then – the GRO? Somerset House. Or Kew?’
‘No, no. It’s Southport. Lancashire coast. Then I guess they pass info to the National Archives – that’s Kew.’
‘Southport?’ Dryden conjured up an image of Blackpool – the closest he’d ever been. He knew Southport was upmarket. But still – the bleak open sands, the grey Irish Sea, and maybe the Lake District in the distance, blue hills and rain clouds. ‘Why Southport?’
‘They moved out of London in the early nineties. Before that it was Somerset House. It’s a weird place in Southport,’ said Carney, brightening up for the first time. ‘Smedley Hydro – this huge old school they
turned into a spa, like a Victorian health farm.
‘In fact, Barnardo worked there – you know, like in the orphans.’
Dryden thought about that – the man who’d saved the lives of children.
‘Couple of years ago we had a weekend at Blackpool and I went and had a look. Professional interest. Still looks like a Spa – mind you the security’s pretty eye-watering. Cameras everywhere – even on the edge of the beach.’
‘Who sends them the certificate? The local registrar?’
‘That’s it. Then someone in the Smedley Hydro puts it on the database. Then it’s official. You used to have to tell everyone individually but now it’s mostly centralized. Thirty seconds of inputting the details at Southport and then it’s there for ever. You’re only dead if they say you are.’
TWENTY-NINE
Room 159 was in the sub-basement of the town hall. Dryden had been issued with a security pass on a lanyard and told to go down using the lift to B2. The area was officially restricted to the public but they were short of staff and he’d have to go alone. When the lift doors opened the corridor revealed was in darkness, the only light the soft green of the upward pointing arrow. Then neon tubes flickered on, buzzing like trapped summer flies.
There was a security entry pad on the door marked 159 and when he pressed the red button a voice crackled: ‘Mr Dryden?’ A man, educated, with a light, tuneful voice.
The door buzzed and pushing it he found himself in a windowless office, a desk lit by a single down-spot, so that an array of computer screens glowed, dominating everything, like mission control.
Philip Trelaw sat at a kidney-shaped desk. The room was hot and the odour sour and earthy. Trelaw didn’t get up, an echo of their first meeting nearly thirty-five years ago, but he offered his hand, which was surprisingly small and cold. Even sitting down Dryden could see what a large man he was – what his own father would have described as an ‘agricultural’ build. His physical shape was such a contrast to the voice he’d heard Dryden looked around the room for someone else, but it was empty.