by Jim Kelly
The drops of kidney juice on the table were drying in the sun. Dryden’s mobile buzzed, indicating an incoming text. It was from Vee at The Crow. Will Brinks does runner from hosp. Manhunt.
THIRTY-FOUR
There were three people and a dog in the Capri but none of them had made a noise for an hour. Humph was asleep, despite the large fluffy earphones clamped to his head. Dryden, in the back seat, had spent the time following a zigzag chain of thought which worried away at a single question: why was Will Brinks on the run – again? If the lethal bullet was the result of a gang war, why was the lowly security man afraid for his life? Had he, perhaps, seen the gunman just before the fatal blast? In the front passenger seat sat John Brinks, Will’s stepfather. What he was thinking was hidden behind those remarkable blue, raptor-like eyes. The cab was parked in a clump of trees on the edge of a field so large that its distant edge was lost in a buckling mirage of midday heat.
They’d found John Brinks at his stepson’s caravan at Third Drove. The police had run him out there from the hospital. Mary Brinks was due to make an emotional appeal for her son to turn himself in on TV news later that evening. John Brinks, taciturn at best, did tell Dryden what had happened at the hospital. He’d been maintaining a bedside vigil but had slipped away to the canteen to get a cup of tea. The uniformed PC on duty had chosen the same moment to test the fire exit, and have a swift cigarette, in the process. When Brinks got back there’d been a warm, empty bed. His stepson had been on medication, and was in no condition to be on his feet, let alone on the road. He had to be found quickly, for his own health if nothing else.
The police manhunt was in top gear. A description of Brinks’ car had gone to all units and a watch was being kept on all arterial roads out of the Fens. The ports were on alert, as were regional airports at Cambridge, Norwich and Peterborough. The police had dropped John Brinks at Third Drove with instructions to sit tight in case his stepson appeared. There was still no sign of Will’s car, his dog, or most of his personal belongings – clothes, books, passport, driving licence, and field glasses. He hadn’t had any of these at the hospital, so unless he picked them up from somewhere he couldn’t run far.
Dryden had told Humph to drive straight to Third Drove so that he could get pictures of the caravan and the site for The Crow. He’d phoned Vee and told her he’d update the story for the paper overnight. John Brinks had needed little persuading to abandon his vigil at Third Drove. His stepson might have learning difficulties but he wasn’t stupid. He was unlikely to turn up at the site where the police knew he lived, which was why they were parked in a clump of blackthorn trees at the entrance to a field of leeks. Across that field was a wood, scattered birch mostly, sparse enough to let light pick out each tree trunk. Inside the thicket was a bird hide, young Brinks’ private hideaway since childhood. He’d taken his stepfather there once, a few years back, to show him a cygnet he was raising by hand. It had been no more than a shed built of branches, a plastic-sheeting roof, and some rough bedding, but young Will had treated it like a teenager’s bedroom. Bird-spotting books and a journal of sightings were kept in a waterproof tin, a collection of feathers and hatched eggshells arranged on a shelf built of bricks.
The sun was high above the trees, Tizer-red, so that the black peat of the field was tinged orange. They’d decided to give it an hour and then investigate the hide, see if Brinks had used it to stash his valuables.
Dryden could see John Brinks’ eyes in the rear-view mirror, fixed unblinkingly on the distant wood. ‘He’s scared, isn’t he?’ said Dryden, finally breaking the spell of the silence. He thought the chances of Will Brinks turning up here were 1 in a 1000. The chances of him turning up at the caravan site had been 1 in a million, so they were still playing the odds.
‘He is now,’ said John. He had a fuzzy voice and Dryden guessed he’d not long ago given up smoking. ‘Problem with the kid is he’s half stupid, half genius. If I said I understood him I’d be lying. He’s my son just as much as the other two, but how he thinks? Forget it.’
Humph shifted in the driver’s seat and the suspension gave out a resonant twang.
‘How did he get the job at Barrowby Oilseed?’ It was a question that had been worrying Dryden. He couldn’t see the shy, awkward, Will Brinks just doorstepping potential employers.
‘He had an eye for picking up bits of work. We all do. It’s how you make a living without a full-time job. Without a house to live in. Contacts are important, a personal link. He’d have got a tip from Dan.’
‘Daniel Fangor?’
‘Yup.’
The Pole who died in the explosion, alongside the two Chinese.
‘How’d he know him?’
Brinks’ eyes flicked from the view across the field to Dryden’s reflection in the rear-view. Being a Capri it was a back seat without a door. Dryden didn’t like that look, and he found himself wondering if he could get his bony frame out of the open window in a hurry. His question had clearly crossed an unseen line.
He tried another. ‘It’s not full time then, a job like that?’
Brinks was very still. ‘No. It’s called pluralism. The holding of many jobs at the same time. It used to be standard practice in the church, the state. It was one of the reasons everyone hated the church so much before the Reformation. It’s one of the ways the rich stay rich. They get paid for doing two things at the same time. If you’re poor it’s seen as a swindle, moonlighting. Will had other jobs. Most were casual, paid in cash, no paperwork.’
It was such a surprising answer Dryden just nodded. He wondered then if they had time to find out John Brinks’ life story. Dryden had thought of him as a born tinker. But perhaps he’d married into the family. Where had the education come from – teachers or study? He sensed the almost manic focus of the autodidact, and recalled the bookcase in the caravan at Third Drove, with its volumes on history and natural history.
Brinks took a deep breath. He had a barrel chest, almost a deformity, as if his spine was curved. ‘He met Fangor in Wisbech. There was a crowd of them, mainly Poles. If they’d been middle-class kids you’d say they were friends; these kids, on the other hand, were a gang. He was out of his depth so he chucked them in, kept to his bird-watching. With being the caretaker at the site in the summer, it meant he was on his own a lot, but he liked that. That was his role, his position. It’s important, and he took it seriously. When Fangor turned up on the old airfield he offered Will the job at Barrowby Oilseed. He couldn’t afford to turn it down.’
Across the field of leeks Dryden could see the hide in the trees, but so well camouflaged it looked like a dense thicket of branches and dead wood. When they’d parked the Capri they’d all agreed they’d keep watch for an hour. Dryden’s watch said fifty-seven minutes. He thought again about finding Brinks at Barrowby Airfield, the fifty-pound notes scattered on the grass around him. He was sure Brinks had been about to disappear. If so, he’d have packed a bag. And the car? Where was that? Parked in Ely or Wisbech perhaps, on a backstreet, with a full tank.
‘Where will he go?’ asked Dryden.
‘It’s going to be tough. He might be the son of travellers but he doesn’t travel well. Maybe Ireland. He could find the village. But the coppers here’ll have contacted the Garda. So perhaps he’ll just watch and wait. That’s the smart thing to do. He can sleep rough – he’s done it before. If he does that we might lose him for good. That’s Mary’s nightmare, so it’s my nightmare too.’
On his lap John Brinks had a cardboard box with a decorated top which said RAINBOW PHOTOGRAPHIC STUDIOS. The police had taken it from the caravan to try and find a picture of his stepson, but had returned it now, having drawn a blank. Each snap had a caption in capitals on the back. Brinks had explained that Will was shy, almost manic in his desire to avoid being captured on film, but he’d always been keen to get behind the camera. He’d taken many of the pictures, but was shown in none.
Brinks took the top off the box now and shuffled through the sna
ps. He passed one over his shoulder to Dryden. A teenager, perhaps nineteen. Very dark hair, sallow skin, dark eyes, something cynical in the look to camera.
‘That’s Dan Fangor,’ said Brinks. ‘He had wheels.’
It was a Ford, blue. The rear window held a round sticker, white, with a black dragon, breathing red flames. The legend read: The Wavel Dragon. Krakow. Krakow, ancient capital of Poland. A Black Dragon.
Dryden saw the scene: the level crossing at Brimstone Hill. Muriel Calder locking eyes with one of her husband’s killers. The brief communion, then the barriers rising, the klaxon sounding, and the Ford disappearing in a mirage of speed. Fangor at the wheel. The killer in the back. A white face, black hair, European features. Had it been Will Brinks? Was that why he was on the run now?
Humph woke at that moment and the sudden jolt of his limbs made them all look up, and out, across the field.
They saw a pheasant clattering up into the trees from the field, and then a figure running, breaking cover for a second on a bank top by the ditch, then down almost below the leeks, the head bobbing. John Brinks slipped out of the car and pulled the seat forward for Dryden. They knelt on a grass bank next to the car with some brush at their backs to blur their silhouettes.
They could see the figure now, moving against the background of the tree boles. The sprint had winded him so that he stopped, doubled over, shoulders heaving.
‘It’s Will,’ said Brinks. ‘He’s in pain.’
And then they heard a dog bark.
‘That’s Lolly,’ said Brinks.
The sun had gone, so that the red light was diffused and soft. Will Brinks disappeared into the muddle of wood and branches which obscured the hide. When he came out they could see the shape of a rucksack on his back, and the lead stiff in his hand, the dog jumping up, overjoyed.
Brinks fought his way through the criss-cross mesh of trees and branches towards the western end of the copse, which was denser, but without trees, just hawthorn, and yellow-dotted whin. A car door creaked, then an engine came to life.
They were back in the Capri when they saw him pull out on the drove road behind them, creeping out from the edge of the wood on a track: a silver Ford Fiesta, Will Brinks at the wheel.
Humph waited till the car was almost out of sight, then followed, while John Brinks rang a number DI Friday had given him for emergencies. He gave someone details: a description of the vehicle and the direction and speed of travel: forty-five mph, east along Siberia Belt, a long drove road that led out into the zigzag maze of dead-end fields and farms towards the unbridgeable barrier of the New Bedford River: a wide fen waterway sunk in a trench. Beyond it stretched the fresh-water marshes of the Welney Bird Reserve.
The Capri stayed half a mile back but the long straights would have given Brinks time to spot the cab in the rear-view mirror. After the second right-hand turn they regained the straight to find Brinks nearly a mile distant, a cloud of dust rising from the rear wheels.
‘He’s seen us,’ said John Brinks. ‘Don’t push him.’
Humph’s foot was down on the accelerator but the Capri couldn’t break sixty mph. Ahead, they’d lost him, the car turning away to the left, directly towards the New Bedford River.
Despite the tinder-dry fields Dryden could smell fresh water through the open windows of the cab. The idea of the river-filled ditch that lay ahead filled him with an immediate unease. He took in a lungful of the weedy, stagnant smell; trying to quell his anxiety by meeting it head on. But the scent of water was on his tongue now, and the fear almost fully formed: the fear of water that had haunted him since childhood.
Ahead, without warning, Brinks’ car appeared again as they took a left turn. Humph had closed the gap to 200 yards but as they came in line they saw the Ford jump, a zigzag skid almost putting Brinks in the roadside ditch, as the car leapt forwards.
‘Steady, kid,’ said Dryden.
‘Back off,’ said Brinks. ‘Give him more room.’
Dryden wondered what shape Brinks was in. Had he, somehow, managed to avoid taking the sedatives and drugs the nursing staff would have given him in hospital? If he hadn’t he was taking his life in his hands driving at more than ten mph, let alone seventy on back roads. At least now Dryden understood why he might take such a risk. If he was one of the burglars who had watched Ronald Calder bleed to death that day in 1999, pinioned with knives, he faced a life sentence if caught.
The horizon for which they were now heading was absolutely straight, and slightly elevated, and Dryden realized it was the distant bank of the New Bedford River, twenty feet above the level of the surrounding fields. At its western extremity, he saw a yellow school bus, double-decked, cracking eastwards at what looked like a steady fifty mph. Such buses were common in the Fens, where distances were large, population small, and schools distant. One of the slit windows on the upper deck was open and a blue and white Ipswich Town scarf flapped in the wind.
Brinks and the bus approached the distant T-junction on what looked like a collision course. At the last moment the Ford seemed to swerve, as if Brinks had only just seen the bus, but he couldn’t brake in time to let it pass across the junction; instead he seemed to accelerate, trying to get ahead of it, swinging out, cutting sharply to the left. They heard the distant thunder of the bus horn, the tearing of rubber on tarmac of the skid.
Dryden had his head out of the Capri because the windscreen was smeared with dead insects. He thought Brinks had made it, but the swerve had started a lethal chain-reaction of adjustment and over-adjustment, so that although he was now travelling in front of the bus, the car was out of control.
It clipped one verge, then the opposite one, finally climbing the bank.
It flipped once as the wheels locked and then, for a single second, they saw it against the sky, free of the bank, spinning out over the unseen river. The sound of the car hitting the water beyond was unexpected: a collision of solids, like the slamming of a door.
Humph slowed the cab and swung it easily left at the T-junction to come to rest behind the bus, which had backed down the road. The driver was out, already up the bank, but he’d left the doors closed so that the kids were trapped, but they’d all crowded upstairs, their faces filling the windows, fingers thrust through the slits that opened for air.
Dryden ran to the top of the bank. The river, in its culvert, was as blue as the sky, carrying in its mirror-like surface the reflection of a single storm cloud. Concentric circles marked the spot where Brinks’ car had punched a hole through the surface.
The bus driver joined him, keying numbers into a mobile phone.
Dryden was untying his own shoelaces, sitting on the bank, but he wasn’t sure why.
John Brinks stood beside him. ‘I can’t swim,’ he said. ‘None of us can.’
Dryden unhitched his belt. In another dimension of time and space he was a child of ten, trapped beneath the ice on the river by his parents’ farm. It had been the beginning of his fear, although he’d always suspected that he’d inherited it in part as well. He’d never seen his father swim, or paddle at the sea, or take to a boat. It was only after his death that he’d found out the truth: that he’d taken a group of boys to the Scottish mountains from the comprehensive where he taught in London, and one of them had died in an icy tarn. Jack Dryden, a poor swimmer, had been unable to stay afloat long enough to reach the body.
But Dryden’s own fear had begun as a child that Christmas Day on Burnt Fen. He’d been trying out his best new present, skates. He hadn’t seen the thin patch where the ducks had slept. Once he was in the water, looking up, he’d found a glassy ceiling of ice above his head. He could recall no panic, only a sense of loss, for the warm kitchen at home, his presents, a fire of bog oak. His life. A minute, or three, he lay beneath the surface. His father had found him and cracked the ice with his boot, hauling him back into the world, kicking, screaming, as if newborn. New born with this fear. His birthmark.
He stood up on the grass and began to throw
off his jacket and trousers. He looked at the water and back at the top of the bus: the faces pressed to the glass, the fingers reaching for air. John Brinks was holding his clothes. Each of his feet seemed to be pinned to the grass. He was no better a swimmer than his father had ever been. But if he didn’t move, if he didn’t take a step, he’d be doomed to wait until they hauled the car out of the water, the limp body at the wheel.
For the first time in his life, looking at the surface of the water, he thought that his life might be a failure. He could feel his heartbeat in his skin. His brain felt disengaged, floating.
Beside him he was aware of John Brinks speaking: ‘It’s OK. I’d wait, there’s an ambulance on its way. What can you do?’
He jumped.
THIRTY-FIVE
Panic would have engulfed him once his head was below the surface but for the shock of the image before him: clear water, so that he could see the opposite bank, and the car on its roof in the silt of the river bed. His subconscious had been ready for a green, reedy slime; for white bubbles trailing slow-motion arms. But this was surreal: a kind of calm, green-tinted edition of the world above. Time had slowed down so he was able to wonder if he’d actually passed out when he’d jumped and missed the splash as he hit the water. He didn’t appear to need air. His lungs didn’t scream, there was no pain. In fact he didn’t think he could remember what it felt like to draw in oxygen. One explanation, that he was dead, or dying, seemed frivolous, so he pushed it aside.