by Jim Kelly
She shrugged, her eyes watching the road outside for signs of her husband’s return. ‘Gentler, smarter. They might have been identical to look at but in here…’ She tapped a finger to her temple. ‘Chalk and cheese.’
‘And your son saw them fight?’
She shook her head. ‘No, that was later. He got home about eleven, I was still up in case we got any calls.’
‘Right. So Paul got home and then what?’
‘We broke open a bottle of whisky. His dad was already in bed. Took it out in the garden and toasted the old place. By midnight we were all in bed. Dead to the world.’
Dryden said goodbye, knowing that wasn’t the only lie she’d told.
23
By the time they reached Ten Mile Bank the moon was up, reflected in the broad sweep of the river as it turned north towards the sea. A swan flew upstream, black against the silver of the water. Humph parked up beneath the high bank next to the church, killing the lights. A cypress tree obscured the church clock but Dryden’s watch read 9.30pm. A flood bank ran across the fen from beside the graveyard carrying the village’s only street, two lines of houses clinging to the high ground. Three street lights out of a dozen were working, and somewhere a dog barked as the first stars appeared low to the east.
Dryden got out quickly before fear paralysed his legs as well as his brain. He cursed Shaw and the deal he’d struck, but knew now there was no way of going back which didn’t brand him a coward. Standing by the Capri in the gloom he knew he was being watched, but by whom? The DI and his team should be in place, a surveillance boat on the river, and the helicopter standing by upstream. But who else was lost in the night? Would they meet him on the bridge or did they suspect a trap and have other plans?
In the dyke below, the mist was beginning to form, a weaving white sheet of vapour spilling out to claw at the cab’s tyres. Dryden walloped the car roof. ‘Right. If I’m not back in twenty minutes ring Shaw on the number I gave you. If you feel like it you can come looking for me as well…’
He set off up the bank and stopped at the top to look upriver. Two pleasure boats were moored on the far side, smoke snaking up from the stovepipe of one. Downriver, half a mile into the growing dusk, he could see the ugly iron girders of the bridge. Again, he started walking briskly before he could lose his nerve, trying not to imagine the face, edged in the balaclava, waiting in the shadows.
Thieves Bridge had been built by the army in the Second World War to help get food out of the fen fields and down to London quickly. It was a giant piece of Meccano, crossing the Ouse in a single span, held together with rivets and rust. Traffic was single track, with priority to the east, but most nights nothing crossed it, for now the route was faster using bridges to the north.
When he reached it Dryden climbed up to the road and looked east, then west. Nothing moved on the arrow-straight tarmac, which stretched out of sight like a runway. Dryden saw a holdall lying on the raised footpath which took pedestrians over the water, so he walked towards it, painfully aware of the sharp tap of his footsteps in the night.
The voice, when it came, was above him. ‘You don’t need to check it.’
He’d climbed up one of the girders and was sitting in the superstructure, ten feet off the ground, his back against the studded steel. His body was crooked, bent to blend with the metalwork, and Dryden wondered if Shaw’s team had spotted him at all. No balaclava, just a black woollen hat pulled down low and something rubbed into his skin so that it was dark and blotched.
‘We didn’t think you’d come – alone.’ Dryden didn’t speak, and in the silence heard the knocking of a light boat against the bridge support below.
‘Got a tongue?’ He thought he recognized the voice from the phone but couldn’t be certain.
‘Sure. What d’you want me to say?’
Dryden leant against the steelwork looking upstream where, across the moonlit water, he could see one of the pleasure boats edging out, letting the current take it downriver.
He was down quickly, and Dryden didn’t have the nerve to back off as he came forward and grabbed him by the shirt front. Up close he could see the eyes now, and where they caught the moonlight Dryden could see how scared he was. He stuffed a piece of paper into one of Dryden’s pockets. ‘That’s a statement. We want that in the story too – along with something from Peyton saying he’s packing the business up. We’ll watch developments and keep the dogs, just for insurance. When Sealodes closes down he gets ’em back.’
Up close Dryden could actually smell the fear, laced with nicotine. He was just a few feet away now and Dryden tried to memorize the face: an oversized jaw, and small, flattened nose which looked broken.
‘Let’s go,’ a second voice, this time from below, where an outboard motor suddenly burst into life. ‘There’s a boat coming.’
The grip tightened at Dryden’s neck and the face came closer. ‘I hope that’s nothing we should be worried about, Dryden. Betrayal is a very ugly word – disfiguring.’
The engine below screamed and at the same moment a searchlight thudded into life from the deck of the pleasure boat upstream, blinding Dryden, so that he didn’t see the punch coming, the knuckles cracking against the orbital bone above his eye. He went down on the tarmac, his cheekbone hitting the ground with a thud which made him lose consciousness. But as he drifted into an internal silence he heard a loud hailer, although the words made no sense, each unrelated, evading meaning.
When he came to he didn’t know how long he’d been down, but the side of his skull was numb and pitted with grit. In the distance he could see headlights approaching along the drove, a blue flashing light above. Overhead the thwup-thwup of helicopter blades was close enough to move the night air, while a spotlight burned down, illuminating the bridge around him. In the silvery light he saw a rat panic, zigzagging over the tarmac.
They’d left the holdall, just a few feet away. So he crept towards it, the pain in his head oddly distant. He was kneeling when he got the zip down and the helicopter was making a second run, the blazing halogen-white light suddenly electrifying the scene like a flashbulb. Inside there was some heavy mater ial, like rotted carpet, which he prised apart to reveal bones and a skull. He took the head out and held it level with his own, and looking into that lifeless face he could see the glitter of a single metal filling, so that he knew one thing only as he heard footsteps running towards him – that these were not old bones.
So now I know. I have a life, complete of itself. A name, a wife, a gift – apparently – to write. She came with the policeman this morning while I worked in the gym. Elizabeth. I call her Liz, that’s what she told me. I always have. She’s beautiful, and I can see why I might have loved her. But she’s a stranger to me now, and I wonder if I’ll ever remember what it was we had together.
Because I don’t have to remember. That’s how it works. The doctors have set the same prognosis, that the past will return but from the earliest memories first, rolling forward to the present. Flashes out of sync perhaps, no more. But there are no guarantees the process will ever be complete. It’s started already, my childhood unfurling. But it might just stop: stop short – so that I’ll never know about Kathryn, and I’ll never know why I was on that bridge. And who did I meet? And will they come for me again?
I know more about you, Laura, than I know about my wife. At least you and I have a past, however brief it’s been.
Liz told me what my life was like. I think she knew I couldn’t remember, and she wants me to remember, so that we can have something to share. But it’s like sharing ashes, and there’s not even a memory of the fire.
And then there’s what I do remember, the past revealing itself. It’s an odd feeling, not so much remembering as uncovering. I don’t recall the past with any sense of triumph or discovery, it just appears, fully made, already stale somehow, tarnished by a thousand other rememberings I’ve forgotten.
The present is the only reality in which I feel alive.
My life so far
then, in a few paragraphs, as I’ve actually remembered it. Yes, I was born in Jude’s Ferry. In Orchard House, where the garden ran down to the river. I only have the one memory before we started moving – hiding amongst the box hedges and watching a car crackle past on the gravel drive. Why that memory? I doubt I’ll ever know. My father, a diplomat, took us away. The house, mothballed, we said was home. And we did come back for the summers, and a single Christmas.
But my life was somewhere else. To Singapore – where the wonderful gardens ran down to the harbour – to Belize, to Washington. A life oddly untroubled by all that movement. English schools in exotic climates, and the poor glimpsed through the windows of the polished cars that always whisked us from the airport. And then mother died – while I was at Coniston. I was ten and a boarder and father was in Saudi Arabia where we couldn’t go. I can remember being told. I was out on the rugby pitches, the snow on the hills. I was called to a cold room, lined with books, and there was a slab of sunshine on the floor which edged away from me as the headmaster talked. University. English at Oxford. Keble, the rain running down those depressing red bricks.
Summers at Jude’s Ferry. Always an outsider however hard I tried. Dad didn’t tell me he’d sold up to the MoD. I found a letter, about the rent. He said it was a nest egg for me, but he’d sold the only home we’d ever had. And then a heart attack at Sunningdale lecturing to a room full of bored civil servants on a pale afternoon. I scattered his ashes on the beach at Holkham, trying to recall even then what he looked like.
I was alone, so I came back for that last summer to Orchard House. There was nothing else, just a bank account, blinking black on the screen. I was owed it – a year of my own, at home, at last, even if the family had gone.
And I felt a sense of liberation too. So I thought I’d teach. Whittlesea. A new scheme, for graduates, learning on the job. A windswept comprehensive built of concrete and glass with a playground like a supermarket car park. But I loved it; so different from my life until then, chaotic, raw, on the edge. And that’s where I met her, Laura. Something’s stopping me crossing that line, to what happened next, because there’s something there I don’t want to remember. But I know the emotions that match the missing pictures: passion first, then guilt. And then anger at last. I’m clinging to these because all I feel today is fear. Which is why it’s so important that I know you’re there.
Thursday, 19 July
24
‘Imber,’ said Garry, covering the mouthpiece. ‘Jason Imber. He writes scripts for TV – comedy, radio, he’s sort of half-famous really. Won a Bafta in ’99. Wife turned up this morning – saw his face on the TV. She’d been away, seeing friends, and he’d said he might go to London, so she hadn’t missed him till yesterday. House out at Upwell by the Old Course.’
‘Imber?’ repeated Dryden, knowing instantly where he’d seen the name. But he double-checked the notes he’d made from the TA records Broderick had let him see and there it was: Jason Imber, Orchard House, Jude’s Ferry. He wrestled with the chances of a coincidence, but only briefly. Jason Imber had been fished out of the river less than forty-eight hours after the accidental shelling of St Swithun’s and the outbuildings by the New Ferry Inn. There had to be a link.
Dryden checked the clock: 10.30am.
DI Shaw was due to ring on the hour with the latest on the animal rights activists. Dryden stood at the coffee machine studying his face in the chrome as the mechanical innards churned. He’d cracked a cheekbone and severely bruised his skull in the scuffle on Thieves Bridge – a set of injuries which had kept him in A&E overnight while they X-rayed his head. Shaw had come to see him in hospital during the night, but would say only that they’d caught one of the men who had met him at the bridge – the one in the boat.
‘One?’ Dryden had said. ‘Oh great. Well, that’s a result. So now the other one is out there telling his mates I doubled-crossed them. Well done, well done. I can look forward to some mindless act of cruelty, can I?’
And there was more bad news. Shaw would now be certain to want him to hold the story for at least a week while they tracked down the second suspect. Dryden closed his eyes as a wave of sleepless nausea swept over him. His skull was numb but a single source of pain hovered behind his left eye. He’d only been home briefly to check Laura was OK and help her into the cab for her session at the unit; he hadn’t trusted himself to lie down for half an hour in case sleep engulfed him, and he’d brushed aside her questions about his wound. He’d told Charlie, the news editor, that he’d fallen on the boat, cracking his head on a beam. Garry, predictably, had sneered at this version of events, suspecting alcohol had led to a fight, or at the very least an undignified fall down the wooden gangway of PK 129.
Dryden opened his eyes, refocused on the PC screen and began checking the newslist for that week’s edition of The Crow, rereading the stories on the schedule that had his name on them. He was laboriously running through a 500-word screed about local planning decisions when the phone rang. It was Shaw, on the handsfree, his breathing matching a fast walking pace.
‘Hi. Hi. I promised, sorry I’m early. We camped out here at Jude’s Ferry overnight to get through the rest of the forensics, we’ve been up since dawn. Is this OK for you?’
‘Yup. Bad news, right? I’m guessing I have to hold?’
‘Indeed.’ Dryden heard a door shut and the sound of the wind disappeared. He imagined him standing in front of the trestle table in the makeshift office at the New Ferry Inn, mapping out exactly what he was going to say. ‘We haven’t charged the man we arrested at Thieves Bridge – we’re still playing him out for information. He’s talking. He’s not saying a lot, but he’s talking. The other one’s on the run, but we know the route – he may even take us where we want to go – a safe house in the Midlands. The unit here has located some activists who meet on an airfield, renting one of the old sheds. If we can catch our runaway suspect trying to make contact at the airfield we’ve hit the jackpot. The unit’s guess is they’re using the sheds to store the stuff they use for raids – spray cans, wire cutters, shotguns. They may even have some “liberated” animals on the site. So yes, we’d all appreciate a bit more time. We don’t know if the leadership knows the drop-off was a set-up last night. We don’t know if they know we’ve got someone in custody. Just a few days, Dryden.’
‘An airfield?’ said Dryden, ignoring the question, recognizing its inherently rhetorical nature. Instead he remembered the background sounds to the call he’d taken on the mobile from the local activists, a plane wheeling in the sky, then returning.
Before Shaw could answer Dryden told him his plans for the Skeleton Man story in that week’s Crow, plans he did not intend to alter. ‘You know what I’ve got on the body in the cellar. I’m using the lot today. Plus I’ve been working on the ID. According to my calculations there were eight possible victims – given that our man is not from out of town. I’ve talked to one – Jimmy Neate. You’ve talked to Mark Smith – what about the other brother?’
‘No go. Part of the problem is that there are, naturally, a lot of Matthew Smiths in the world. And the one we’re looking for might be in the morgue. So there’s no point throwing manpower at it until we’ve got the DNA results.’
‘Sure. So he’s still your best guess for our friend in the cellar then?’
‘Yes. But don’t quote me, please. You’re going to be a mile ahead of the rest of the pack on this story and I’d like them to think you got at least some of it from your other sources.’
‘Right – but I can use the fight in the pub, the argument over money?’ Dryden took silence for assent. ‘Then today…’
‘Indeed. Ely’s been in touch, an ID on the man fished out of the river. Someone smart spotted the name on the list of possible victims we’d circulated to local stations. Plus he’d mentioned Jude’s Ferry, of course; apparently he thinks he was born there.’
It was Dryden’s turn to take refuge in silence.
‘So we can take
Jason Imber off the list as well,’ said Shaw.
‘How about putting him on another list instead – the list of suspects?’
Shaw hesitated, but Dryden knew the detective owed him a brace of favours after the failure to secure his safety on the previous night’s exercise. Not only had he played a key part in getting the police operation an arrest, he’d taken a beating on their behalf.
‘Possibly,’ said Shaw. ‘We’re interviewing him now. My DS has gone out to the unit. There might be a link – it could have pushed him over the edge, literally. If he was involved he must have thought the crime was long forgotten. So perhaps it was a suicide attempt. But like I said, this isn’t down to one man. There’s got to be a conspiracy, and he can only be part of that. But we’re interviewing him, you can report that.’
‘Perhaps he met someone out at the bridge.’
Dryden heard pages turning. ‘Maybe. A woman did come forward, a birdwatcher. She’d been up by the bridge the day before and said there was a car parked up off the road with a man in the passenger seat.’
‘Passenger seat?’ said Dryden.
‘That’s what she said. Said he gave her a filthy look so she didn’t hang about. Description roughly fits Imber, but then it would fit half the population of East Anglia. But the car was a 4x4, black. Imber drives a red Audi.’
‘Passenger seat,’ said Dryden, thinking about it. ‘What about the bones from Peyton’s tomb? Tell us anything?’
‘A woman. Pathologist says death occurred less than thirty years ago, but at the moment we can’t say how old she was when she died. Teeth aren’t great but that could just be poor dental care. The lot was wrapped up in a piece of carpet, pretty much rotten but design and threads point to 1950s. Cause of death is conjecture at this point, and possibly all points in the future too. There’s not a lot left to examine. But we can get some DNA from the bones. And there are two chips to consecutive ribs on the left side, a sharp metal object had been thrust between them causing small fractures in both.’