by Jim Kelly
I enclose a printout of the message.
Yours sincerely,
Dr Digby Ryder
Her Majesty’s Coroner
Dryden had no right to read on. He had the printout in his hand but he deliberately made his eyes focus on a point short of the paper so that he couldn’t read the words.
A set of TV lights thudded on, then off, and caught his attention. When he looked back at the words they were in focus and he couldn’t stop himself seeing the first sentence, which was like taking the bait on the hook, because it led to the second sentence, and so onwards to the end.
Grace,
Just a note. I’m sorry that other people will read this. I just didn’t want you to think that what you’d said had upset me. I know it did, you saw that, but I would have just asked again, probably. It was just a trip to the cinema and I don’t even like 3D films. It was Chris’s idea. He said you’d like it. And he said it was what normal people did. So I needed help. That’s one thing they’ll say about me – that he did his homework.
I like you. I’m sorry you didn’t like me, but it was cool that you said it straight. It is weird I got it wrong because I’m supposed to be good at chemistry. I really got upset because I’m not coping with the work, and the exams coming. I sit and look at pages in text books and I blink and then an hour’s gone on the little clock in the top right of the computer screen and I don’t remember anything. I can’t link thoughts together any more, not like in a series. They’re circular, and so they don’t go anywhere, like they’re trapped. Chemical symbols are a bit like that sometimes, but equations balance out. But this doesn’t feel like that. It doesn’t feel right. I should see someone, a doctor maybe, but the effort puts me off. Either way you might get this. It’s just to say not to worry, that it’s nobody’s fault, and certainly not yours.
Jx
Dryden had an insight into the boy’s mind. He saw him sitting in front of a computer screen, the letter finished, then adding that final x.
When did Grace know he was missing? That evening she fled from home, perhaps. Maybe she did blame herself, maybe that explained everything. Humph said she’d been listening to the local radio so she’d know he was dead by now, but that was hardly a surprise, given he’d been missing for days. But the fact of it might be devastating.
Dryden wanted to go quickly and take the letter to her, but he needed to avoid the lights and his colleagues in the press. So he set out around Christ Church, going anti-clockwise. There was a splash of light beyond the apse, not from the pencil-thin stained-glass windows, but from the coffin-like apse door DI Friday had mentioned. A forensic officer in a white suit emerged with a camera and tripod and walked away towards a parked police van.
The door stood open, the light flooding out.
Dryden got within ten feet before a scene-of-crime tape stopped him in his tracks. He could see the handprint on the white paintwork, blue little finger, blue for the next and for the middle finger, but smudged with red, then the index finger – sharpest of all – in a kind of brown-black. It wasn’t an ordinary hand that had left this mark. Either the index finger was shorter than the rest, an abnormality in itself, or the fingertip was missing.
FORTY-ONE
Grace’s bedroom was at the back of the double bay-windowed bungalow. Humph’s mother was watching TV as they came through the front door. Football, Europa League, although she had to admit she had no idea who was playing, but she liked men in shorts. There was a pot of tea beside her armchair and she was holding a catering-sized pack of cheese and onion crisps.
‘Grace is in bed,’ she said. ‘Something’s upset her. She was reading your paper, Philip. The Ely Express. Then we had more tears. But she wouldn’t say why.’
She looked out the front door where the helicopter still held its position low over Christ Church.
‘The radio said … The neighbours called, too. A policeman? Did they really kill a policeman?’
Humph walked straight past her towards the bedroom door.
‘Don’t, Humph love, she’s asleep. Leave her.’
Humph stood for a heartbeat on the threshold and knew it was too late, but he knocked once anyway, then threw the door back. They saw the window open, the net curtain turning in the breeze. The bed was empty but the sheets were swirled into a nest. A copy of the Ely Express lay half-under the pillow.
Humph went to check which coat Grace was wearing.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Dryden, helping Meg take a seat on the sofa. ‘We know what’s wrong now – we just have to find her. Ring the police …’ He took the woman’s hands. Like Humph’s they were surprisingly small and nimble. ‘Tell them she might harm herself. That we know why, that she might do this tonight. Then ring the neighbours, all of them. Tell them to put lights on everywhere and check outbuildings, and unlocked cars, and the nearest bus stops. We’ll get out on the road.’
Dryden offered to drive but Humph took the wheel of the Capri. ‘Where?’ he asked, as if Dryden had an answer.
Dryden did have a picture in his head of the roads of Brimstone Hill. Grace had been ‘asleep’ an hour, so she could have got no further than five miles without a lift. There were no buses, and the road back into the township was blocked by the police. They drove first to the roadblock on the Ely Road and explained to the officers on duty that they were looking for a missing girl. Fifteen, fair, round face, in a red coat. They took a note but Dryden could see that they were still mesmerised by the emotional punch of those two words: officer down.
In an hour they were back at Euximoor Drove at the house. Across the fen neighbours had lit up everything they could. The darkness pulsated with electric light.
Humph stood outside with a mug of tea, staring into those lights, as if one of them would give up his daughter, as if she’d emerge from the black velvet night carrying a star.
Dryden stood in Grace’s bedroom. He felt that if he immersed himself in the room, in its random items, he’d somehow see her, and know where she was. But all he could recall was that last time he’d set eyes on her, in Dacey’s auction room, moving between the stalls, in a trance. He ran the memory like a YouTube clip, back and forth, until a new set of images appeared on the end. He’d forgotten that last glimpse of her, walking to one of the fine art stalls, studying a lithograph on the wall, a view of Denver Sluice, the croquet-hoop superstructure against an evening sky, the high lock gates closed, holding back the water. She’d seemed to fall under some kind of spell as she studied the image.
‘The car,’ he said, making the decision to trust in intuition, and walking out the front door. ‘I’ve got an idea.’
Denver was six miles north, then four south on the far side of the Bedford Levels. They drove at a steady thirty mph, the windows down, checking the fields under the moonlight, the bus shelters, the pumping stations. Meg rang to say there was no news and Dryden could see Humph struggling with his anger, and with the guilt, trying not to blame anyone but himself.
The sluice was a complex of floodgates spanning both the Ouse, and several of the artificial rivers built in the seventeenth century to drain the Fens. Beyond it, downstream, the river magically became two, each channel running the last twenty miles to the sea side-by-side. But on the upriver side the landscape was criss-crossed with ditches, drains, meres and rivers. The sluice was the landscape’s watery heart, regulating the flow of water off the land, and keeping back tidal seawater coming up from the coast.
Dryden had never liked it; there was something mechanical – steely – about its clockwork power. The old wooden sluices had long been replaced by two industrial steel sets of gates. Perhaps, secretly, it wasn’t the aesthetics of the gates which unsettled him, more that he yearned for the water to come back and flood the land, to turn the landscape back into a waterscape.
There was a pub by the sluice and the car park was emptying. Lights played on a lawn which ran down to the towpath. A tinny loudspeaker played a Bee Gees track. They left the Capri on the verge a
nd ran along the lane which climbed, then turned, crossing the sluice itself high above the water. Floodlights lit the whole structure, but the water below was in shadows, although the churning of white foam showed where the gates stood open a few inches, letting the water out to sea.
‘Gracey.’ He heard Humph shout the word but when he turned he found the roadway behind him deserted. It hadn’t been a pleading call, but one of soft recognition. But where had Humph gone?
Black tarmac, a white line, nothing else. Everything was wet because the churning water had created a mist. A miniature rain forest micro-climate. It was a surreal scene in that tinder-dry summer, and it was heightened by a sudden movement: a bright green frog on the road, jumping once, then freezing.
The thunderous vibration of the water below came up though Dryden’s legs.
He ran to the parapet and looked down on to the top of one of the three sluice gates in the set. Grace’s head was there, no body visible, except her legs and feet, hanging down. Looking along the narrow steel edge of the gate he saw Humph, moving out from a metal stairwell at the side, small, nimble feet shuffling sideways.
Humph stopped, held up the brown envelope, and said, ‘Grace. You have to read this, OK? Do this for me, sweetheart. Read it.’
But the raising of one arm unbalanced the cabbie, and one of his feet slipped away from the steel edge. Dryden saw him begin to fall, so he turned away from the sight and ran, along the road, to the far end of the parapet to see if he could get down to the water.
He found the handrail of the steel staircase, and dropped down three corkscrew turns, to a small maintenance platform beside the sluice. Looking down he could see nothing of Humph. Then he looked back at the ledge and realized the cabbie was still there; somehow he’d avoided a fall, and sat down instead, winded. Grace had backed off, into the shadows at the edge of the gate, where the metal cogs dovetailed with iron runners, smeared with glinting grease. It was as if she was sinking back into the machine itself, a human cog.
Dryden stepped out on to the ledge and reached his friend in three sideways strides.
‘Sit tight,’ he said, and took the envelope, stuffing it inside his shirt.
‘I’ll get help,’ said Humph, and looked back at the bank, but didn’t move.
Dryden looked down. The magnetic pull of the wavelike, boiling pool below was as real as if he’d felt the tug of ropes. But the paralysing fear he usually felt was absent. He felt afraid, but in a way which seemed proportional to the real world. He was – after all – on a narrow sluice gate above several thousand tonnes of churning water. He might fall. He might drown. What he had to do was reach Grace.
Breaking eye contact with the water, he looked at Grace’s face, just visible in the shadows, and edged towards her.
The oily dark corner in which she hid was dry. Once out of the floodlights’ glare, Dryden had to stand still, letting his eyes switch to night-time vision. Grace was crying, her knees drawn up to her chin. ‘Your dad’s upset,’ he said. She couldn’t have heard him because she didn’t react, so he shouted it out.
He didn’t think she’d jump but when he took an extra step she tried to stand, her legs scrabbling on the oily ledge.
He knelt quickly. ‘It’s OK. I just wanted you to have this.’
He gave her the envelope. The floodlight above cast a single rectangle of bright light into the dark corner. She held the A4 sheet within it, very close to her face, scanning the words.
She read it twice, then folded it all up without putting it back in the envelope and gave it back. In taking it, Dryden edged closer.
‘I’m glad he wrote that,’ she said. ‘He asked me out. I said no – he was a nerd really. So I don’t know why I said no because I’m not a stranger to being a nerd, am I? He liked draughts, just like Dad. He said the strategy involved was much more complex than chess. That’s what Dad says too. So we could have played draughts. But he wanted to go to the cinema so I thought I’d just say no. Not interested. It was a bit cruel.
‘When I heard he’d gone missing, that he’d tried to kill himself, I did feel guilty. A bit. But like, I didn’t know him. I think, like, he was one of those people who think that a relationship can be just by thinking it is. Like it’s not about two people. That it can exist in just one head. It can’t.’
She looked at her father, who had now reached the end of the floodgate and was winching himself over an iron railing on to the spiral stairs.
Dryden was breathing in ozone, and negative ions, from the water below, and it was making him light-headed, and almost euphoric. ‘This isn’t about the boy, is it?’ he said. ‘But the letter helps?’
‘Yes. Thanks.’ She looked down at the water.
‘It’s about you,’ said Dryden.
‘It’s about Dad. And Mum. And now I’m fifteen it’s going to be about me because I can’t choose between them, and they want me to.’ Grace laughed, which undid whatever emotional locks she’d put in place, so that she started to cry again, pushing her face into her knees.
‘You live with your mum, that’s OK. He understands,’ said Dryden.
‘I live with Mum because I have to. Because the court said I had to. That’s why he’s OK with it. But when I’m sixteen I get to choose, and he won’t understand it if I stay. And Mum wouldn’t understand if I went. And I don’t want to live in the back of a smelly cab with a dog. And I don’t want to live with Barrie and his stepsons with their webbed feet. And I’m only fifteen, and I want to go to sixth form college, not get a job, so I can’t live on my own. So there’s no way out.’
The water thundered.
‘And they won’t say what they want. If I told them it was up to them they’d think I didn’t care, about either of them.’
Dryden thought the more she talked the better she’d be so he didn’t answer.
‘I do care. I wouldn’t have jumped because I know they’d never get over that. Dad’s never got over the divorce. I thought he was going in just then …’ She tried a smile. ‘Big splash.’
Dryden leaned over and took her hand.
‘I thought it would take him longer to find me anyway, that nobody would see me till it was light. I don’t know why I did it. I thought I could tell Grandma, but I couldn’t. It’s cold, isn’t it?’
They both stood, on the edge, and Dryden gave her a kind of stiff hug. ‘I’ll sort it out,’ he said.
FORTY-TWO
Wednesday
Thunder rolled round Euximoor Fen like a bowling ball. Dryden had slept on the sofa at Meg Humphries’ bungalow and the sound of a storm brewing only added to his sense of disorientation. The day threatened rain at last. The thunder ushered in lightning which crackled in the air. Dryden saw a single forked bolt through his closed eyes. He had the window open and the wind was steady and warm; a fenland sirocco. It blew under the door of the house and hit a note: woodwind section, a bassoon maybe, unwavering. Dryden tuned the radio on the mantelpiece to KLFM at Lynn and picked up the forecast for the day: soil and dust storms across the region, with the NFU warning farmers to pin down plastic fleece where they had it on the fields, and to postpone harvesting. Finally, by nightfall, rain. Real rain, a harbinger of autumn.
Dryden found Meg in the kitchen, and took Humph a cup of tea in the Capri. The cabbie was asleep, despite the thunder, wrapped in a full-length Ipswich Town picnic blanket. He got out of the cab to take his mug of tea. They’d talked the night before until nearly dawn about Grace, so the subject was exhausted. Neither of them had the energy to rerun the arguments in the light of day.
‘Radio says there’s a press conference on PC Powell’s death at Wisbech mid-morning,’ said Dryden. ‘It’ll be on the gang wars. That’s Friday’s big idea. Big city crime hits the Fens. And they’ll have the forensics.’
‘No problem,’ said Humph, nodding. He patted the roof of the Capri as if the cab was a dog. The real dog was in the house on Grace’s bed. The cabbie sipped his tea. He missed Boudicca, but he wasn’t going to say
so.
Dryden’s mobile rang. ‘Talk of the devil,’ he said, as the phone displayed the caller’s name.
It was DI Friday. Outdoors, because Dryden could hear traffic.
‘Just so you know,’ said Friday, ‘we found your sodding gun. At Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, due to be melted down next week in the incinerator. It’s engraved with the name of the kid who won it, so that helped. Hasn’t been fired for twenty years, probably longer. So that’s Muriel Calder out of the frame. Not that she was ever really in it, in my book. According to the paperwork, the gun was handed in at Brimstone Hill on the date she specified. So Powell played it by the book too, took it to Wisbech that night.’
‘So who killed Powell?’ asked Dryden.
‘Presser later,’ said Friday and rang off.
Dryden walked away from the cab and Humph followed. They could see Christ Church in the far distance.
‘It’s always felt as if the roots of this were here, in the soil, even,’ said Dryden. ‘Right here. I don’t trust the police when they’re involved with these gangs. They spend months, years, not being able to lay a hand on them, but knowing they’re responsible for a lot of crime. Then they get their chance and they jump in feet first. Nothing is going to stop DI Friday charging some of the gang members – one of the soldiers – with murder, or murders. But has he got the evidence? He’s not telling me if he has.’
There was a double thunderclap and sheet lightning overhead and the wind, for the first time, gusted, rocking the car on its springs. On the bare field a miniature tornado sprang into life and whirled for a few seconds before blowing itself out.
Dryden felt tired, dried out. He searched for the right word: desiccated. ‘Maybe Friday’s right – maybe it is a gang killing,’ he said. ‘But there’re so many loose ends. I’m still not convinced about Powell. He’s got an ex-wife and two kids to keep, plus a fast car. Whatever Friday says, he could have been playing the easiest game of all. He was an expert in river crime. Why did he fail to track the barges full of stolen metal back to the source – along the Twenty Foot Drain to Barrowby Airfield? Was he really a gamekeeper, not a poacher?’