Nightrise

by Jim Kelly

  ‘It’s one of those hidden worlds, isn’t it?’ asked Dryden, not expecting an answer. ‘You probably don’t realize. You’re part of it. A cog. When someone dies it’s like a secret society takes over. You’re told not to worry, to let the system take over. It’s like magic – once you contact the undertaker it all works. There’s a grave allocated, a day allotted, the documents filed, the hearse on time, the body . . .’

  Dryden leant forward into the heat of the fire.

  ‘The body is the weirdest thing. When my mum died it wasn’t till the ambulance took her away I thought – where’s she going? Who’ll look after her? Where will she be? The undertakers bury her – but when do they pick her up? It’s because it’s all about death. We don’t want to ask, we don’t even want to use the word. So we let other people take over. It’s painless that way – but maybe, when you look back years later, there’s more pain in the end, not less.’

  They heard a car beep its horn, then the sound of a door opening on rusty hinges, a single bark.

  ‘My cab,’ said Dryden.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Humph was in a good mood because he’d picked up a return fare at Stansted. One of his regulars, an academic – a biotech engineer from MIT – so his passenger knew the ropes and so there was the thirty-five-pound standard fare, plus a five-pound tip, plus eight of those miniature bottles of hooch from the first-class trolley. Four malt whisky – a brand Dryden didn’t recognize – and four white rum.

  The cabbie’s mobile rang twice on the journey but he didn’t answer.

  ‘It’s that copper – from Eau Fen.’

  ‘Detective Inspector Friday?’

  ‘Right. Wants to know where you are. Keeps ringing. Why does he keep doing that?’

  Dryden told him about Trelaw and the gunshot in the pillow. Had someone seen him going into Trelaw’s house? Maybe. But more likely they’d simply talked to the CCTV department and been told the reporter had been asking after Trelaw. And Dryden hadn’t been wearing gloves, so they’d get his prints eventually.

  They drove to the minor injuries unit at Ely in silence. When they got there all the little miniatures were empty. Dryden’s mobile had started to ring too. He ignored the phone and told the nurse on duty he’d had an accident. She asked how it had happened, sniffing the alcohol.

  ‘I fell down the stairs,’ said Dryden, which was at least only a lie by omission. Two of his fingers were bound together and he declined to show the nurse his hip, which was stiff, so that he hobbled.

  ‘I’d have a very hot bath and go to bed for a week,’ said the nurse, which was when she noticed the blood soaking through the sleeve of Dryden’s shirt. It took them half an hour to bandage the lacerations.

  ‘Anything else I should see before we set you free?’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Dryden, standing up too quickly, so that the room went round.

  Back in the Capri Dryden scrabbled through the glove compartment to find a fresh miniature: a Martini this time. They drove to The Red, White and Blue. The effect of the alcohol was magical. A sublime warmth this time, suffusing. That was the word – suffusing. The pain, especially the pain in his hip, was a long way away now, almost in another country.

  ‘You realize that you’re the witness to a murder?’ said the cabbie. ‘Maybe you should call Friday?’ He took the Capri out of gear and swung it into the car park of The Red, White and Blue.

  The car park was empty but the pub was open. It was nearly closing time. They could see two teenagers playing pool through the main window.

  ‘Can I kip at yours?’

  Humph nodded. ‘Car can stay here.’

  They walked into the bar together and Humph saw Lionel Wraight, convener of the Ely Singles Club, sitting down, alone, nursing a pint.

  Dryden bought Humph one, himself a tequila, and offered Wraight a refill – he took a double Bells – as Humph introduced them. The name: Dryden, made Wraight’s eyes widen.

  ‘I wanted a word,’ said Dryden. ‘Just give me a sec.’ He took out his mobile and sent Laura a text saying all was well. It crossed his mind DI Friday might try to find her. And that was the last thing he wanted. So he should ring Friday – stop the search, end it soon.

  They took a seat under the TV which was showing rugby highlights.

  ‘You were a friend of Jack’s?’

  ‘You related?’ asked Wraight.

  ‘Kind of. He stole my Dad’s name. Well – after 1977 he stole his life. I don’t have any bones to pick with him – or his mates. I’ve just got a couple of questions.’

  Wraight nodded, drinking the whisky.

  ‘Jack was a friend then?’ Dryden prompted.

  ‘Yeah. Good mate, actually. Saved my life when I was inside – I told your man here.’

  ‘Why didn’t you make his funeral then? Not very nice. All he did for you.’

  Wraight’s eyes narrowed and Humph looked up from his crisps.

  ‘What’s this about?’ asked Wraight.

  ‘Humph tells me you did the odd job for him. I’m perfectly happy to let the DI on the case know that. There’s a lot of interest in Jack Dryden’s life after 1977. Any information would be gratefully received. But I don’t have to do that if you can tell me a little bit about the jobs you did.’

  Wraight’s eyes flicked to the door. Classic reaction, thought Dryden. Fear and flight.

  ‘Jack worked for someone. I don’t know who – he never said. But I got the impression that if they were unhappy with what he did they’d do something about it – something permanent. So I thought, maybe, maybe he didn’t die in an accident. And if they were pissed at him they might know about me and come looking for me too. I’m keeping a low profile. I don’t want to talk to anyone.’

  Dryden let the tequila hit the back of his throat. The door opened, Wraight jumped, and a man in a white coat came in selling sea food. A bloke at the bar asked him if he had crabs and got a laugh.

  ‘Smart plan,’ said Dryden, catching the barman’s eye for refills. ‘Tell me what I want to know and you won’t see us again – or DI Friday of Ely CID. No one knows we’re here. You’re safe.’

  Wraight thought about that. You could virtually hear the cogs turning. ‘Nah. I’ll take my chances with the local plods. But thanks for thinking of me.’

  ‘OK. Only if I don’t get what I want here I’ll have to ask the same questions elsewhere and then your name might come up. And it’s not like the people Jack worked for have gone away. They’re still very much about the place. Pretty determined too, from what I’m told.’

  Wraight downed the whisky in one, then pushed the empty glass forward.

  ‘There’s not much to tell.’

  ‘So tell it,’ said Dryden.

  ‘It was random,’ he said at last. ‘Like, you know, just odd bits and pieces of jobs.’ He’d switched back to a pint. ‘I took a couple of driving tests.’

  ‘False names?’

  He nodded.

  Dryden could see it now, the methodical reinvention of a life through the documents you need to live it.

  ‘Pass every time?’

  ‘I’ve got a HGV licence – advanced driving. I ain’t gonna fail.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Jack would get a flat – Peterborough, Leicester, Newark. I’d go and doss there for a month or two and use the address to apply for stuff.’

  ‘Stuff?’

  ‘Passports. Passports, mainly. Library tickets. Travel cards. Bank accounts.’

  Wraight pulled a face, or maybe the face pulled him – because it looked like stress, a sort of twitch which made his mouth curve down at one end. ‘Just stuff – stuff we’ve all got. Get a doctor too, dentist, register with the NHS. Sometimes I had to get a job – just something standard like the local council bins. Then we could use that on the forms with the name. I’d be these people – just for a bit.’

  ‘Did he just use you for this?’

  He shook his head but only by a quarter inch.

&
nbsp; ‘I think he had others – others he’d met in Lincoln. Round the country.’

  ‘False names again?’

  Dryden could see Wraight struggling with the answer and suddenly realized how bright he was – under the mockney and the bluff. He’d seen a subtlety in Dryden’s question. ‘Sorry – not false. That’s the point, isn’t it – real names. Not made up at all. The names of the dead.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Where’d he get them? The names?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Not off Billy Johns?’

  ‘Who’s he?’ He said it just a bit too quickly, but Dryden let him get away with it. Maybe Johns wasn’t involved. Or maybe he was, and it wasn’t Wraight’s job to keep in touch. Maybe it was Jack Dryden’s job, and that’s why he’d been on the road to Manea the day he died.

  Wraight left then. So they had another drink and waited to get thrown out. Walking back through the dark streets Dryden felt his bruised legs beginning to stiffen.

  DI Friday was sat on Humph’s doorstep. Smoking methodically, a little shower of stub ends around his feet. Humph went to bed and left them talking in the garden: Friday said Trelaw was dead, that a man close to the description of Miiko Saar had been seen in the next street to Trelaw’s getting into a four-by-four. The murder weapon – a Russian-made pistol – was found at the scene, free of prints, minus serial number. Six police authorities were now hunting for the Estonian. All ports and airports were on alert. That aside – had Dryden been in the house?

  Dryden said he hadn’t. He did want to speak to Trelaw – he’d been the registrar who’d signed his father’s death certificate – a certificate which had never been registered with the GRO. Now it was too late to ask him any questions.

  Friday said forensics were all over the scene of crime like a rash and if it turned out Dryden was lying he’d bang him up just for the fun of it.

  Then they wished each other good night: God bless.

  The clock beside Humph’s spare bed said 10.36 p.m. When he woke up it said 10.41 p.m. He’d lied to DI Friday because he couldn’t face a formal interview, a trip to the station, a night in the cells. Tomorrow, maybe, he’d tell him all he knew. But it meant he couldn’t sleep. Something told him he was close to something now, something like the truth. So he lay there thinking about what they’d done, men like Lionel Wraight, working for Jack Dryden for years and years, salting away the new IDs, waiting for the ghosts to come of age. Jack Dryden, the spider in the centre of the web. And that left him with the only true puzzle which remained: who was the man who became Jack Dryden, the man who’d stolen the lives of children?

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Wednesday

  The main entrance hall of the magistrates court was marble – grey-blue pillars, a vaulted roof, mahogany doors. It was cool, a haven from the hot pavements of the town centre. The WRVS had a tea stall and a few of the lawyers stood around talking to their clients. Young men modelled cheap suits, trying to look at ease. On a wooden bench a woman sat with a teenager beside her, holding his hand in a grip which was turning her knuckles white. The doors to the court swung open and Dryden caught a glimpse of the drama within: the magistrates sitting as a tribune beneath the triple-arched window, the accused lounging in the dock, and Vee – alone on the press bench – snapping the pages of her notebook back and forth.

  Dryden slipped through a door marked AUTHORISED STAFF ONLY; a cold stone corridor led to a stairwell down to the cells. A uniformed PC at the bottom asked for his name but Senior Prison Officer Gerry Talbot had already seen him and beckoned him through. There were eight cells, four on either side of a wide corridor with benches on both sides.

  Talbot checked the spyhole on one of the cells, explaining he’d been detailed to bring in a prisoner from Whitemoor for an appearance before the magistrates. ‘Just routine – he’ll be for the Crown Court. Still, it’s a day out.’ He took out a breast pocket notebook: black, flip-back and neat. ‘I’ve got something for you – by way of thanks. The canteen story was a dream.’

  Dryden had sold the tale to the Daily Telegraph which had run it on the front under the headline: PRISONERS RIOT TO SAVE SALAD DAYS. From there it had gone to The Today Programme, which had got the head of the POA in to talk about the union’s campaign for better food. The Home Secretary came on live to announce that the new menus had been halted in order to cost a roll-out to all the country’s prisons. This would begin in three months, but Whitemoor would get its new menu back immediately. Mr Talbot could have done no better with his press contacts. A fact which will have done his career in the union no harm at all.

  In the black notebook Talbot had a prison snapshot: PRISONER 5-FG6. Cell 45. Category A. It was the man who’d lived his life as Jack Dryden, and died in the burnt-out van at Manea. Dryden read the prisoner’s name beneath the picture twice – checking he hadn’t just conjured the image of the words up out of nothing. It was an oddity of his imagination that he could do that, as if words were objects you could realize in 3D.

  Just a name, but it changed everything. His mind raced: building motives, scenarios. And to think, only the night before, he’d lain there unsleeping thinking he’d worked it all out. How the man called Jack Dryden had been the first to steal an ID, then – with Setchey and Johns’ help – he’d built a business, a trade, in the lives of others. Now, suddenly, that was only half the story. Jack Dryden hadn’t been the spider in the centre of the web at all. ‘Tell me about him,’ he said, trying to keep his voice flat.

  ‘Chummy? Not much to tell. In for murder – Oxford, 1971. Clever kid – one of those genius types you get in maths. University – Edinburgh. But that summer – ’seventy-one – he was at a summer school in Oxford for high-flyers like him. Prodigies. They’d all got together to talk about something or other . . .’ He checked his notebook: ‘Latin Squares – whatever they are.’

  He stood, checked the cell again, which was silent, and continued: ‘Anyway – he may have been a whizz with numbers but he was crap with human beings. There was a girl on the summer school. They got close. They went for a walk by the river. She didn’t come back. He said she’d just walked off after they’d had some argument – about sums. Sums with brackets . . .’ He flicked through the notebook. ‘Factors – that was it. Anyway, her family was distraught. They organized a search. Eight days later they found her in a creek off the main river near Iffley – face down in the mud. She’d been pushed down with enough force to break her neck.

  ‘He changed his story – said she’d gone off to meet a man. She was local, see. At Keble. Said he’d warned her not to go. That’s what did for him – if he’d stuck to his first story he might have had a chance, although not much of one. There was plenty of forensics so the jury only took twenty minutes. He got the maximum tariff because he’d put the family through those eight days of waiting.’

  ‘Straight to Lincoln?’ asked Dryden. He was asking questions, listening to answers, but on another level he was putting the pieces of the jigsaw together. The name was a key which neatly opened the well-oiled lock of the mystery of his father’s death, the murder on Eau Fen, and his uncle’s death at River Bank. In the end it was all in a name.

  ‘Yup. Straight to Lincoln. Do not pass go. Model prisoner – didn’t do him any good at first. Spent three years in his cell playing with numbers and running the chess club. Applied for parole on the due dates but never got a sniff. Last time he was up – late ’seventy-six – they told him he wasn’t going anywhere. He never coughed to the murder – so that was always going to make it tricky.

  ‘But they did decide to transfer him – to a Category-B prison on the Lincolnshire coast. Six weeks later they let him out on a trip with half a dozen others on good behaviour. A minibus to the beach, Cleethorpes. One of the three guards on the detail said he saw him at the water’s edge, paddling, just in shorts. This was August – blue sky, low tide. Then he was gone. Report concluded he’d just walked into the water. They tried to track him down, watched th
e family, friends. Nothing. Body never turned up. There was never a sniff in the press. Nasty stink at the prison, mind you. Let’s just say they didn’t run any trips to the beach again.’

  Talbot turned stiffly on the bench to look at Dryden. ‘Presumably you’ve found him?’

  Dryden nodded. ‘I’ll be blowing the whistle pretty much today – but I wouldn’t worry. He’s dead. Cremated. Your name won’t come up.’

  They shook hands and Talbot went to get his prisoner ready for his brief court appearance.

  Dryden went up into the court and took a seat on a bench at the back. The ceiling of the court was eggshell blue, with gold decorations of the Royal Standard and the Royal Crest. The glorious roof stretched over the sordid business of the court below like a heavenly sky. He thought about the sky that day off the Lincolnshire coast. The figure on the water’s edge walking into the water, out of one life and into another.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Dryden went back to his desk at The Crow. The rest of the morning’s routine passed in a trance. He sat tapping out wedding reports, one-paragraph RTAs, and a caption on a flower show at one of the outlying villages. He did a round of calls and got the latest from Ely police on the violent murder of Philip Trelaw at his house in a quiet Ely suburban street. A spokesman refused to deny that detectives were investigating links between the shooting and the death of Rory Setchey on Eau Fen. CID were confident forensic evidence at the scene of crime would lead to a swift arrest. A picture of Miiko Saar was also released, with a warning to the general public not to approach the man if spotted.

  At lunch Dryden walked over to The Lamb Hotel. The Morton Suite was booked in the name of Fenland Newspapers. His interview for the post of editor of The Crow lasted ninety minutes. A feeling of profound detachment held Dryden in its grip – as if he was watching himself answer questions, watching himself sketch out a strategy for saving The Crow from its interminable decline: a new lifestyle magazine on Friday, a website to carry village notes, lots more local News In Briefs – NIBS – dotted through the paper, and a revamp of editorial policy to make the paper a campaigning voice for the Fens, FOR a new Cambridge airport, AGAINST more new towns, FOR a redevelopment of Ely’s dilapidated Market Square, AGAINST another supermarket.