Nightrise

by Jim Kelly

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Trelaw’s house was a prime example of suburban squalor – if Ely could be said to have a suburb at all. The town tended to just peter out. But there was a thin band of fifties semis on the edge of West Fen, pebble-dashed and bay-windowed. Some had port holes, some didn’t, some had stained glass over the front door, some didn’t. But all the houses in York Crescent were well painted, with new plastic double-glazed windows, the roofs bristling with Sky dishes. All except Trelaw’s. It still had wooden window frames, paint peeling, and the net curtains were grey and torn. The front garden had gone to seed, and the pebble-dashing was disfigured by damp.

  Dryden checked his mobile for a message from Humph. Nothing.

  The cabbie’s instructions were simple. Head north from Ely, make sure he wasn’t being followed, then swing around towards the Norwich line, drop Laura and Eden at one of the smaller stations. Then, from Norwich, a local train up to Cromer. Kross might think Dryden was safe, that his family were safe, but Kross didn’t know what he knew: that only half the consignment of fake IDs were back in the hands of the Saar brothers.

  The mobile trilled: it was a text from Humph and said simply, ON TRAIN. TRAIN ON TIME.

  Dryden began to whistle tunelessly. It was late afternoon on York Crescent and nothing moved. He hated suburbia – and if he was honest it was easy to see why. After his father’s death he’d been taken away from Burnt Fen, from a world he loved, to the grey streets of North London. It wasn’t the uniformity, or the similarity of the houses and the people in them, it was this brittle, dull, silence that really got to him.

  A cat crossed the road, leaving that silence unbroken.

  At the gate of Trelaw’s house Dryden stopped and saw the net curtain twitch in the bedroom. The window was just open and he could hear Bach with adverts: Classic FM. The Rover P4 was parked in front of a wooden garage.

  The front door was open too, just an inch, and it swung into the hall when Dryden touched it. There was no carpet. Newspapers covered the boards and in several places oily engine parts were set in drip trays. The hat stand was hung with so many coats and umbrellas it blocked out the light which came from the kitchen – the door to which was open. Dryden saw a wooden table, on which was a carburettor. And two bottles of wine, red, both empty. Food aromas hung in the air: bacon and maybe burnt toast. Definitely something burnt. But the background smell was of oil and petrol. He called out Trelaw’s name. Out loud he said he was coming up the stairs. Wallpaper hung down in loops in one corner of the landing but there was a carpet up here which looked new, although it didn’t seem to have been fitted, so that there were gaps at the edges where he could see the floorboards. And a mirror – the only decoration he’d seen in the whole house – one of those fifties oval gilt mirrors that distorts the image like a fish-eye lens.

  The net curtains had twitched in the front room as he’d approached the house so he knocked on that door, then pushed it open. He stood looking at the bed, the headboard, the pillows. One of the pillows had a bright red circle in the middle of it, and in the middle of that a black circle. Dryden knew instantly that this was where the burnt smell came from. A wisp of smoke rose from the burnt hole. Shock pumped adrenalin into his system and he could hear his heart beat – once, twice, three times. He knew it was a bullet hole in the pillow but he didn’t let the words form in his brain.

  Time had slowed down. The door was still swinging open to reveal Trelaw’s lower body on top of the duvet. He was in a dressing gown – baby blue and clean. His head was missing, but then Dryden realized it was under the pillow. Dryden saw it then – the moment of death – the pillow pressed down, the gun to the linen case, the dull percussion of the bullet fired through the wadding inside the pillow case.

  In his right eye he saw movement, reflected sunlight in an old mirror. An arm crooked round his neck and closed across his throat with a mechanical strength, totally irresistible. A knee blow killed the muscle in his left thigh, so that his nervous system seemed to short out like a fuse. He was on his knees in a half-breath, and didn’t know how he’d got there.

  Then he was standing up because someone had an arm round his neck and had lifted him up. It was extraordinary how helpless he was. It wasn’t a matter of panic, or cowardice, or weakness; he was just overcome by what was happening, so he’d become loose, puppet-like. The sound in his ears was distorted, as if he’d been plunged under water. The constriction of his windpipe was complete. He’d lost two seconds of air supply but his body was already anticipating death: his eyes burnt, and his knees had gone, so that all the weight was taken by the arm round his neck.

  Two minutes earlier he’d been standing in the street outside looking at a suburban semi-detached house. In another minute he’d be dead. He was swung out into the hallway and dragged to the top of the stairs.

  When he considered these few seconds, looking back, he remembered two things: that the man wore gloves – plastic surgical gloves – and that he reeked of marine fuel which has quite a distinct aroma compared to petrol or car oil.

  A voice which was so close as to be inside his head said: ‘The boy was a warning. Your last warning.’

  His feet dragged on the floor as he was edged towards the top step. His eyes were full of water but he caught a glimpse of his face in the fish-eye mirror: the whites of his eyes, bulging, and – at the moment he was thrown – he saw another face revealed behind him. It was Miiko Saar and, despite the mirage-like distortion of the glass, he could see that he was smiling. And see his wrist watch with its wide classic Roman face, and the little compass at the centre.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  When Dryden opened his eyes he closed them again, immediately – not a conscious act but, he thought later, a defensive one. It gave him time to examine the image he’d seen, and match it to what he could feel. But even then, at that moment, and it could have been no longer than a handful of seconds, he knew he was already trying not to panic, forcing himself to analyse with his mind, rather than react with his emotions, his instincts. If he’d let a primeval response override everything else he’d have screamed. And that would have been the beginning of the spiral, a downward journey, even though he could go no lower.

  He’d seen stars. Early evening stars on a light blue canvas. Perhaps the handle of the Plough, but otherwise he could discern no patterns, no pleasing dotted-line Greek heroes or myths: no Orion, or Pegasus. Stars, but not the whole sky, just a rectangle above, surrounded by blackness. What he felt was water. He was lying in water but not floating. An inch, maybe two inches of water. His back, ice cold, on the ground, with – he thought – a pebble or two cutting into his shoulder blade. But that was difficult to isolate because of the other pains.

  Pain: at first a dull pulse like a heartbeat, but soon – sickeningly quickly – sharper. Then he remembered the house on York Crescent, the blood on the pillow, the gunshot hole and Saar’s face, relishing the moment when he threw Dryden from the top of the stairs. His left hip hurt most and he wondered if it was broken, and his left arm – at the elbow, and most of all – stupidly – the fingers of his left hand, which individually seemed to radiate more pain than the rest of his body: a torch of pain, like a searchlight. He was lying on his arms, which were behind him, and he felt sure that they were tied at the wrists. And possibly his legs as well, at the ankles: his right leg sent him no sensation at all.

  Finally – noise. Night noise at first. The single call of an owl, and dogs barking a long way off, and then trees rustling – so pines, shuffling like they do, giving the wind a voice. Then the rhythmic rumble of a goods train, quite clear, and surprisingly close. But otherwise he felt he could hear the open fen – as if he had bat ears, sending out pinging sonar which faded before finding a surface on which to rebound. A great expanse – above – enclosed by a night sky. It made him feel very afraid, so he shut down that emotion, because he could feel a scream rising like a choke.

  Then he heard the slightest of sounds: a feathering. If y
ou could hear silence in motion this was it. So he opened his eyes and saw it cross the rectangle above. An owl, a luminous owl, as white as a ghost, its wings motionless, gone in a half-second. So beautiful he was able to keep his eyes open, to let in the image which he’d now constructed through his other senses: the black outer frame of the sky made of four walls of black, damp earth.

  He was lying in a grave.

  An open grave – not a six by two plot, but one of the public open graves. Admitting it to himself helped quell the next rising scream. One of Manea’s open public graves. Unless it was full they wouldn’t be filling it in for months. So that helped reverse the spiral of panic because the one thing he feared was a shovel full of earth, thrown against the stars, blotting out his view of the sky.

  And then a phone rang. He felt its warm throb in the pocket on his chest. It rang and rang – emitting the clanking sound of an old Bakelite phone. Then it cut off and he imagined the message being left: Laura, perhaps, from Cromer. He imagined her on the little promenade where you could get a signal. The sea white under the pier where the waves had to thread their way through the iron stanchions. The image was so immediate he felt his consciousness slipping, as if he would faint into the dream.

  He kicked out instead and the pain made him shout – a thin noise which seemed to get swallowed by the earth walls. His left leg was useless, not broken, but the joint was so painful he wouldn’t be able to move it again, knowing it would trigger that electric pulse to his brain.

  His eyes were beginning to adapt to the starlight above, which is when he saw the other coffins. The pit was ten feet by ten and he could see four of them, arranged like little jigsaw pieces to save space in one corner. The cardboard coffins were already rotten, sagging. He thought he caught a glimpse of a bone and looked away.

  He should shout out. But he felt that if he started to shout he wouldn’t be able to stop, that the shout would shift to a scream, that he’d lose control, and that if no one came he’d scream and shout until he’d shredded his vocal cords. But what if he didn’t shout? Would he live until morning? Yes. He would live until he was found. His only enemy was himself. If he couldn’t control his fears: of the dark, of the grave, of the rats, perhaps, and the insects.

  But if he lost his courage his heart might fail. He could feel it now, lurching out of kilter. He’d shout. Once. Then wait. Keeping control.

  Filling his lungs he made his ears pop, ready to shout, when he heard a new noise: not so much heard, as felt. A rumble, in the earth under his sore shoulders. And a beam of light, cutting across the stars, then swinging away. A machine, moving in the graveyard, moving closer. He thought about the little digger truck, how it could trundle up to the side of the grave and tip in the spoil, and how that would silence him, how it would be in his eyes and his mouth, and then he’d never see the stars again.

  He didn’t shout anything coherent, he just started to scream. It started as the word HELP, but then became blurred and wailing. No one came and he tasted blood in his mouth so he stopped, his chest heaving, and realized the mechanical sound was louder, closer; not just the base notes now but the clanging of the machinery, the screeching of a rusty suspension bar.

  Then silence, so he shouted again, straining so that he felt a muscle in his throat convulse.

  A flashlight stabbed his eyes with pain, which seemed to set off a chain reaction in his body that led to his brain and closed his nervous system down. Just before he lost his sight he saw a figure against the stars, the head lost in a trailing cloud of cigarette smoke.

  THIRTY-SIX

  He was able to think about what had happened only when Billy Johns lit the fire: coke and a lump of bog oak from the fen. Watching the flames he realized how close fire and life were – how you couldn’t have one without the other. Up to that moment his mind was hopelessly entangled with the opposite of fire and life, the coldness of the grave, and the broken rotting coffin boxes which had surrounded him. Standing in the shower block – an institutional addition to the caretaker’s Victorian house – the heat had warmed his skin but not his bones. The flesh on those bones seemed oddly bloodless as if – and the thought made him retch – he had in some way been partly dead in the grave, that he’d started to rot, and been brought back in this damaged form. His hip was bruised – blackening – but he didn’t think anything was broken, except one of his fingers, crooked from the second joint up. And his arm was lacerated. When he thought about falling down the stairs in Trelaw’s house his legs buckled at the knees. He could remember the pain, not the sensation of falling. He didn’t think about coming to in the grave: his brain wouldn’t let the image form.

  Overalls and a jumper added warmth but the shivering – which had begun when he’d come round beside the grave – would not abate. It was a summer’s evening, the temperature in the sixties, but the quaking shivers made his jaw ache. So Johns had made the fire. Then he’d gone to the kitchen to make soup, leaving Dryden to stare into the flames. Questions continued to rise in his mind: was it a coincidence that he’d been found by Johns – cemetery keeper, son of an undertaker? Why had he been dumped at Manea? Why had Johns been out after dark working by the open graves?

  He got out his mobile and sent a text. Humph replied within thirty seconds: GIVE ME TWENTY MINS.

  Dryden had an almost overpowering urge to run from the house. To put miles between his warm body and the cold grave. But he knew running was a bad idea – his hip was still numb, the joint swelling. He wouldn’t get a hundred yards. The bog oak cracked, sending sparks showering on to the wooden floorboards where they glowed and died.

  Johns brought in a mug of soup and took the other seat – a beaten armchair like the one in which Dryden was curled. They both heard a floorboard creak above their heads, someone stirring in a bed.

  ‘I should ring the police,’ said Johns. The clock on the mantelpiece said it was nine o’clock. He picked a shred of tobacco from his lip even though he wasn’t smoking. The hand that held his mug seemed to envelop it so that it was lost to sight. An institutional phone stood on the floor by the armchair, the landline snaking to the old skirting board. Johns didn’t look that keen to use it.

  ‘No – please. I’ll talk to them, but not now.’ He thought of Trelaw’s bedroom. There was nothing he could do for the man now. Had the body been found?

  ‘I probably deserve a bit more information than that,’ said Johns, but his voice lacked confidence.

  ‘It’s about a boy called Samuel Setchey,’ he said.

  Johns stiffened.

  ‘The child died four months after he was born in 1986. He’s buried here – a private grave, I think. The death certificate was issued within twenty-four hours. But there’s almost certainly no central registration of the death – nothing at all on a national database.’

  Johns shrugged. ‘You think that’s unheard of? Someone’s slipped up – it’s a bureaucracy. A badly paid bureaucracy. They fuck up all the time, Dryden. Believe me. Dad used to despair of the paperwork. I was down there the other day and they’re getting ready for computers – digitizing the service. Imagine – it’ll get worse, not better.’

  ‘It wasn’t the first time, or the last – there’s a pattern. Someone has been consistently not reporting deaths. Particular kinds of death, I think – the very young. Children.’

  ‘Why?’

  Dryden didn’t like the tone of the question. Curious, perhaps, but it sounded like a challenge. He decided to ignore it.

  ‘I heard a machine – when I was out there.’

  Johns blinked and Dryden thought: he’s trying to decide if he should repeat that question or let it go.

  ‘Tipper truck. I was just moving stuff.’

  ‘By starlight?’

  ‘The council’s decided to change the layout – because of the Yoruba baby. We’ll use the iron covers for a while – six months, then it’s all change. They think when you’ve written the story people will be shocked. They will – I know they will. Ope
n graves, multiple open graves. I’d be shocked. So they’re going to open up the far end – let some private burials in, landscape it.

  ‘The coroner’s office is going to store bodies in future – we’ll wait; when the time is right we’ll dig a grave, complete the burials, all on one day.’

  Even Johns was struggling with the euphemisms. ‘Brass is coming out from Chatteris tomorrow to look at the site. I had to tidy up – it’s supposed to be neat down there. So I was out on the tipper. It’s got a searchlight.’

  Dryden recalled the light in the sky.

  ‘The engine cut out – it does that if I overdo the clutch. I heard you scream,’ said Johns.

  Dryden felt sick then at the thought that his life had hung on that narrow thread, and that if the tipper hadn’t stalled he’d be out there now, in the grave, under the earth. Which meant that if Johns was telling the truth Miiko Saar had meant to kill him, and had devised a neat way to dispose of the body. But how did the Estonian know Johns would be working by searchlight on the paupers’ graves? Again, Dryden felt the urge to run.

  ‘I still think you should ring the police,’ said Johns. ‘Mind you – police are busy.’ He sipped his tea. ‘The radio says there’s been another murder. No name – a house on the edge of Ely. They’re not saying if it’s linked to that one on Eau Fen.’

  Johns looked at him over the top of his mug.