Nightrise

by Jim Kelly

  ‘You must come with us,’ said Kross, his voice calm, almost bored. ‘There will be a trial. We have your brother too – today, at Maardu. Already he is talking to us.’

  Saar squinted into the lights. ‘Kross?’

  ‘We have Geron.’ Then a long sentence in Estonian.

  ‘That’s a lie,’ said Saar. The voice surprised Dryden because there was no hint of an accent and it was quite high – not feminine, just sharp and brittle.

  Dryden felt Kross stiffen beside him.

  ‘There is no way other than this,’ said the detective. ‘We cannot undo these things.’

  With easy movements Miiko threw his dog-end into the water and produced a packet of cigarettes and a lighter – vivid plastic yellow. From the darkness the sound of a rifle being cocked was pin-sharp. Miiko froze, holding up the cigarette.

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Kross into the radio.

  Saar lit the cigarette, looking around, taking in the three police launches, the searchlights – and then, faintly at first, the thudding rotars of a police helicopter approaching.

  ‘I am not surprised by this,’ he said, drawing in the nicotine deeply.

  ‘Then why come?’ asked Kross.

  ‘No choice. Our masters demand their money’s worth. I cannot go home empty-handed. I must risk everything. I have.’ Dryden watched him lick a shred of tobacco from his lip.

  They all heard another gun being cocked on board one of the police launches.

  ‘The trial – in Tallinn?’ asked Saar. It was a teasing question, almost light-hearted, as if the answer didn’t matter. As if no answers mattered any more – let alone questions.

  ‘No. Here,’ said Kross. ‘There have been murders. There must be justice for those left. Maybe – afterwards – prison will be in Tallinn. One day. But there are no promises.’

  The Estonian spat in the water.

  Dryden could hear in the tone of this conversation other conversations. He wondered just how close the Estonian CID had got to the Saar brothers. Too close, perhaps, to tell the difference between good and evil.

  They were twenty feet apart now. Dryden could see Saar’s hands – the hands that had tied a rope round Roger’s foot, knotted it to the edge of the eel boat then wielded the hammer, breaking through the clinker-hull. They were smudged with oil and brown grease from the wheelhouse. Dryden thought of Rory Setchey’s body hanging on the irrigator on Eau Fen – his hands had been clean, reeking of marine fuel.

  ‘Please,’ said Kross again. ‘Now – my officers come. Three are armed, Miiko. Remember this.’

  They heard the other boats moving forward from the shadows of the great oak tree. A series of three blue lights began to strobe on one of the cabin roofs and the colour took Dryden’s attention so that when he looked back he saw that Saar had moved – just a few feet, to a small flip-down wooden seat beside the engine housing.

  ‘A minute?’ asked the Estonian, sitting, smoking.

  Kross said something into the mobile. The sound of the launch engines died to a murmur.

  ‘Please, Miiko, it’s over.’

  Saar shrugged, smiling, and pulled up his sleeve so that Dryden saw his father’s compass watch, the watch he’d taken from Roger Stutton before he’d killed him. Saar laid it on the edge of the bulwark as if to time his minute. ‘Do you have the missing twenty-five packages? No? I wonder where he put them, this man, Setchey. Because we think it was him.’ He shrugged. ‘An accident. We will never know.’

  Saar shook his head, the weight of his skull seeming to overbalance his head so that it fell forward. Then his neck muscles flipped the chin up, and he leaned forward over the metallic casing of the engine, unscrewed the fuel cap in an easy motion, drew on the cigarette, and dropped the butt into the dark hole.

  The sound – before any flame – was of steel tearing. The explosion seemed to punch through the darkness of the night, the dense heart of it burning into Dryden’s eyes. The sound of the blast was compressed into a single note, trapped in his ears. Ringing. He held an image of Kross, his face contorted into a shout, but no sound of the words.

  Then came the fire. A ball of red, with violent edges of amber and blue. All this Dryden saw through tightly closed eyes.

  In the water. Without knowing how, he was in the water. He could taste moss, fresh water and marine fuel. A hand grabbed his collar and hauled him back aboard the police launch. The Hereward was still afloat too – but only as a pool of debris, the flames already dying, almost domestic, warming, an open hearth on water.

  Dryden was aware that things were falling out of the sky – pieces of wood, rope, and material – linen scraps, tarpaulin. He breathed in and found some shreds of burnt paper in his mouth, sticking to his lips. He held out both hands as if taking communion and caught a piece of cardboard zigzagging down. The breeze blew it away, but another scrap settled on his damp hand. Then more scraps, like two-dimensional snow. The largest piece looked like a banknote, with very subtle blues and reds in complex mathematical designs. Picking it up, he held it in the flickering light and saw the watermark. It was limp with soaked fuel but he knew it for what it was – the first right-hand page of a British passport.

  FORTY-TWO

  Sheila Petit heard the explosion on Adventurers’ Mere from her bed. She’d been lying in the dark thinking, quite systematically, if there was anything else in the flat she should burn in case the police came with a warrant. Miiko Saar had watched her incinerate the master list of the original fifty IDs that she’d supplied. His brother Geron, they knew, was back in Estonia with the twenty-five IDs they’d found on Dryden’s desk, the twenty-five IDs Roger Stutton had found lodged in the nets tangled with his own at River Bank. Who had the missing twenty-five IDs? If it had been Rory Setchey, he’d taken the secret of their hiding place to an early grave. They had to hope it hadn’t been Rory. It was their only hope. The Russians wanted half their money back, but Sheila Petit didn’t have the money because she’d used all of it to buy the parcel of land that would save Petit Fen. So they had to get the missing IDs back, whatever it cost.

  Geron had gone back to Tallinn to buy them time with the Russians. Miiko had laid low in the boathouse, waiting, hoping that if someone had the missing package they’d calculate eventually that he was their only buyer – only he could channel the IDs back to the customers whose names and pictures made a match. It had been an agonizing wait. Miiko had hardly spoken since the moment she’d found him sitting arrogantly at her own kitchen table: he was a brutal man, uncivilized, with what she would characterize as base emotions. He ate, she’d noted, like an animal, his fingers sifting through the food on his plate. He’d only hit her once, that first morning after they’d killed Rory. A casual slap which had dislodged a tooth in the back of her mouth. Geron had laughed, picking something from his own teeth.

  And then, the evening before, the call had finally come on Miiko’s mobile. Someone they trusted relayed the message: the twenty-five IDs were for sale at 50,000. Rory Setchey’s regular midnight voyages to River Bank had, apparently, been noticed. Their intermediary hinted at migrant workers, organized crime, and a Polish connection. It mattered little, as they had no choice but to keep to the deal they had been offered: midnight – at River Bank. She’d helped Miiko get Setchey’s boat ready and hauled up the doors for him to slip out into the Lark: the journey ahead sketched on a map, two miles to the sluice at Upware, then out on to Adventurers’ Mere, three miles south to River Bank.

  She’d gone to her bed, waited, and for the first time in many years, prayed. And then she’d heard the explosion. A dull percussion, but she knew it for what it was. The bedside clock numbers glowed 12.09 a.m. She’d run out on the lawn expecting to see the sky gashed, wounded by fire. But there was just a pale glow, and then a little later a distant siren, then others, zigzagging from the main road out towards Upware. And the helicopter above circling out over the unseen water, a single beam seeming to anchor it to the earth like a gyre.

  The e
xplosion meant it was all going to unravel, and that the trail might lead back to her, so she had to be ready: armed, as it were, with a story. She got one of the heavy wooden chairs from the kitchen and took it out to Arthur’s graveside where she always went to think. The night sky was still perfect, turning overhead like a planetarium. She sat listening to the whisper in the heavens, as if there was a wind which blew the stars round. After an hour she went back to the house, made tea, brewing it in the mug, and then returned to the graveside.

  It would be dawn in an hour but already the sky was lightening, the stars in the east flickering out.

  The gravestone only caught the light in the early and dying minutes of the day – and the face, with its inscription, only at dawn. She wouldn’t have been able to read the inscription if she hadn’t known it by heart.

  Raymond Arthur Petit

  Born 1930. Died 1970.

  Remembered and respected by his wife and son.

  He loved this place which was his own.

  She smiled, sipping her tea, then bit her lip as the tears came. Being here, at this time, always made her recall the day he’d died, a month short of his fortieth birthday.

  When they’d sent Arthur home from hospital she’d put him in the bedroom at the top of the house, in the roof, because it had the best window. It was only later, at the funeral that his sister told her it was the room he’d been born in.

  Lying in bed he’d only been able to see the sky, and in clear weather the vanes of the wind farm beyond Wicken, so they’d raised him up and tilted the frame forward so that he could – from the pillow – open his eyes and see his land. It had been September 1970, the harvest, and the crop was good. They still had their own farm hands then, and the tied cottages were all full, so the landscape had been alive with people, not just machines.

  Even at Cambridge, where they’d met, Arthur had lived for the land that was his. He’d taken natural sciences, specializing in soil science. She’d read English and they shared a passion for Hardy, for Gaskell, the Brontës. Great sagas of the English landscape. He’d brought her home at Easter in their second year. His father – Gerald – had shown her the estate, from the Sixteen Foot Drain to Petit Hill and back to Northern Belt – the line of poplars which marked the land last drained by the Victorians using the new steam engine at Middle Pump. Even then she’d felt that her love of the place, then just a flickering emotion, was dangerous nonetheless.

  Arthur had been fatally injured in an accident on a tractor which had tumbled into a roadside ditch. He shouldn’t have been doing the work himself but one of the hired hands was off sick and he enjoyed operating the machine. The impact had severed internal arteries and dislodged organs. Eighteen hours of surgery and three months in hospital had failed to rectify the damage. He’d been sent home to die. Their son, Martyn, came home from university at Edinburgh. He wasn’t close to his father, or his mother, or to their knowledge, to any other human being. A solitary child who’d lived in his head, at home with facts, and abstractions, and symbols. He hadn’t even been close to the land.

  The weather had broken the day the boy arrived, snow patches on the fen, and she’d watched him walking from the bus, along the drove, as if it was his own personal via dolorosa – his head down, shoulders slumped.

  They’d have bought him a car if he’d been able to drive but it was beyond him – almost everything seemed beyond him, except understanding numbers and the patterns they made in his head. At the kitchen table he’d spread out white sheets of paper and spend hours – days – writing in maths. Telling himself stories about numbers.

  On the day Arthur died he asked Martyn to open the sash windows and he’d lain there breathing deeply the ice-crystal air off the fen, snowflakes blowing in and lying frozen on the bare boards. Arthur had asked Martyn to hold his hand and Sheila had watched her son’s eyes, locked on the grip of the two hands, trying to understand, trying desperately to feel an emotion. A minute, maybe less, then he’d asked them to shut the window and he’d closed his eyes.

  The crisis had come at midnight. She’d slept on a divan and woke to hear Arthur calling her name, the precise sound of which she could now recall: not a note of pleading at all, a note of summons. It had been a businesslike hour, the last hour of his life, and she’d always despised him for it, for the cold premeditation of what he’d made her do. After she’d read the will, and a note on dispositions for the farm in the coming year, he’d made her make a simple promise: that she’d never leave Petit Hall, that she’d always farm Petit Fen, and that their son would follow her. Their son, and his sons.

  Arthur had slept then but never woken, and so by dawn she was left with the promise, and his cold body, still propped on the pillow so that he could see his land.

  Footsteps, suddenly, on the dry leaves beneath the trees.

  She tore her eyes away from Arthur’s gravestone and looked up and the first light was in the sky, the stars in the East finally gone. Philip Dryden, the reporter, was walking towards her out of the shadows of the trees, and beside him a man with white hair, and pale skin, who looked bloodless. Both were in white overalls, spotless, but their faces were wet and smudged with oil and what looked like ash.

  ‘I wanted to talk about your son, Martyn,’ said Dryden, as he reached the grave. ‘He stole my father’s life.’

  FORTY-THREE

  The silence beside Arthur Petit’s grave was briefly undermined by the crackle of a police radio. Two uniformed policemen emerged from the trees and Kross directed them to search the house and to assist the forensic team down at the boathouse. The detective’s thin hands, both in SOCO white gloves, hung at his sides. Dryden stood still because he was unsure of his knees, which kept buckling, his nervous system shorting-out. They’d given him SOCO overalls to wear but he didn’t seem able to retain his body heat, so that his jaw shivered with cold.

  He was going to tell Sheila Petit about Kross and Interpol, and the death of Miiko Saar, but she began to talk: rhythmically, as if imagining herself already on the witness stand.

  ‘The Estonian came three days ago at night. He has guns – not farm guns, military weapons. He said he needed to use the boathouse, and the boat, and that he would stay with me. I was to tell nobody. If I did he’d kill me. I believed him. His name was Miiko. I have no idea why he was here. He left a few hours ago. That’s all I know. He slept in the boathouse but he ate in the house.’ She turned to Kross. ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘Yes. Quite dead,’ he said.

  ‘Good.’

  Dryden walked forward to the gravestone and ran his fingers over the inscription. He knew he could destroy her version of events because he knew the man who’d been transferred from Lincoln Jail to the Lincolnshire coast and had walked into the sea that day in 1977 was her son, Martyn Petit. And he knew that if they took the DNA sample they’d extracted from the man calling himself Jack Dryden they’d be able to show that it was Martyn Petit, aged nearly sixty, and that he’d died in the charred van on the road to Manea.

  He chose a place to start telling the truth, and he started with a question.

  ‘Did you plan, one day, to bury Martyn here? With his father? And yet you didn’t even go to the funeral.’

  She looked up at Dryden and the look in her eyes was close to despairing, which was a relief, because given what this woman had done he’d expected to find only madness or obsession. But the idea that she was sane, that she had made calculations, only seemed to deepen Dryden’s sense of the evil which was here, on the Petit land.

  ‘Martyn killed the girl at Oxford – and left the family to hope for eight long days,’ he said.

  She licked her lips, aching to defend him, perhaps, trying to work out if the story she’d constructed could possibly hold.

  Dryden swung round to face Kross. ‘Martyn Petit was convicted of murder in 1971. Life – with a minimum tariff of twenty-eight years. Lincoln Jail. Model prisoner, spent most of his time playing chess. Moved to a Category-B facility in 1977 on th
e coast. Walked into the sea one day – never seen again.’

  He turned quickly back to Petit and caught the look of loss in her eyes.

  ‘He came here, didn’t he? You gave him my father’s identity so that he could live a life – here, near you. There was even a son for him too – so a full life, although he didn’t get to bring the child up, did he? Peterborough at the start – then back, nearer home.

  ‘And why steal my father’s identity? Did you know him? There were similarities – the build, the face, the degree.’

  She seemed to struggle to speak.

  Dryden held up a hand. ‘Please. It hardly matters. You’d know of his death. Everyone knew. It must have been chaos that winter – the Fens flooded, the Army, the press. All you had to do was stop Trelaw passing on the death certificate. I think that time – just that once – he helped. And you got him a job close to the hospital as a reward. He paid for the kidney transplant himself – that’s why he died in debt. You told Miiko that Trelaw had been involved back then, when it all started. The police had asked him questions, I’d asked him questions. Miiko shot him, a pillow pressed over his face to deaden the noise and the blood. Just to make sure he never answered those questions with the truth.’

  Dawn was approaching and crows clattered into the trees above them.

  ‘So that was the first time,’ said Dryden. ‘The first time you stole someone’s identity. A victimless crime? Perhaps. Certainly not for money. And I guess it was Martyn who built himself that new life – the new driver’s licence, the medical card, all the documents he needed. He was good at that; meticulous, methodical, dispassionate. It wasn’t quite perfect, was it – because he had to fit in with Dad’s life, and he couldn’t really chance anything which needed a picture. But if he was careful he could have a life – a half-life, perhaps.