Nightrise Read online

  ‘There you go, my man,’ said Cherry, passing Dryden a plastic cup. ‘Get yourself on the outside of that.’

  Dryden watched the swimmer turn, her body an agile corkscrew. He was in no hurry to find out what Cherry wanted. He was very rarely in a hurry for anything, nurturing his natural inclination to be an observer, letting it deepen and flourish. When he watched ticking clocks he made a conscious effort to try and slow down the second hand.

  Cherry’s mobile rang but he killed it without looking at the screen. The little tactic made Dryden uneasy, creating a small frisson of anxiety. What was so important about what he had to say to Dryden? Then Cherry smiled inappropriately. He’d built a career on being jovial and he clearly wasn’t going to let being a coroner’s officer stop him now.

  ‘I’ve got some bad news, Philip.’ Dryden had covered many inquests in the last five years and Cherry was a good contact, a helpful officer. They were on first-name terms. It was the kind of mannered friendship which can mean nothing. ‘Well – startling more than bad,’ Cherry went on. He took a breath: ‘Look.’ He leaned forward and fixed his watery eyes on Dryden’s. ‘It’s about your father.’

  Consulting a notebook he gave Dryden the full name. ‘John Philip Vincent.’ Cherry looked for some sign of recognition but Dryden didn’t flinch. ‘I’ve got a body in the morgue, Philip. Male – roughly between sixty and seventy years of age. It might be his.’

  His father had been swept from sight in an accident on the fen during the floods of 1977. They’d searched for the body but it had never been found. He’d always pictured white bones uncovered in some fenland ditch, or emerging in a fisherman’s net. ‘Bones?’ he said.

  Cherry shook his head impatiently. ‘It’s not that simple. There was an accident out on the road to Manea last week. You carried a paragraph in the paper: the car hit a dip, lost control, ended up in the ditch. There was a fire so we couldn’t ID the driver. Well, we’ve got a name now. The name’s John Philip Vincent Dryden. Born April 8, 1942.’

  ‘There’s been a mistake,’ said Dryden, although the skin on his scalp had begun to crawl. ‘Last week? This happened last week. You’re saying Jack – my father, Jack Dryden – was alive this time last week?’ Dryden shook his head, laughing. ‘It’s a common name,’ he said. ‘He’s been dead thirty-five years.’

  ‘We started with the vehicle, of course,’ said Cherry. ‘But there was some sort of problem at Swansea with the computer. We got the vehicle licence this week – and an address. He lived in town, Jubilee Estate, a rented house. Neighbours didn’t know a thing – kept himself to himself. Old bloke – retired, solitary. A loner. Like I said – name of Jack Dryden. He didn’t tell many people his surname, by the way – so just plain “Jack” to most. Local GP had his file, which went right back to London. Born in Hampstead – right? It’s your Dad’s records all right. We got his dental file too – a rough match, but nothing cut and dried. And fillings are post-1977, after your Dad went missing. So that doesn’t prove owt.’

  Dental records. It was one of those euphemisms that didn’t work, because it just conjured up its own horrors.

  ‘The fire was bad?’ asked Dryden.

  ‘If you want to know what I think,’ said Cherry, ‘I think this is ID theft. I think someone took the chance when your Dad went missing. There was no death certificate. So, officially, he’s still alive unless your mum applied to have him certified dead?’

  Dryden shrugged, then shook his head.

  ‘See – that’s got to be it. Somehow they got hold of his documents. If they got the birth certificate they could build a whole new ID. Like I say – got to be.’

  But Dryden could see in Cherry’s eyes that it hadn’t got to be. That there was another solution.

  Cherry leant forward and produced a passport in his hand like a magician.

  Dryden flicked the stiff old-fashioned black wallet open. It was his father’s – dated 1974. So, again, it didn’t prove anything. It was thirty-eight years out of date. The corner wasn’t clipped, so it had never been sent in for a replacement. ‘This is crazy,’ said Dryden. ‘There must have been pictures in the house – up-to-date ones?’

  ‘Nothing. There’s nothing on the walls ’cept wallpaper. I think we’re going to have to take a DNA swab – if you’re OK with that. Can’t see any other way forward. We can hardly ask his neighbours to identify any of your family snaps. They’re a lifetime out of date.’

  ‘Trade, profession – any work?’

  ‘We’re on to that, but it looks like he was some kind of tutor – you know, GCSEs, A-Levels, that kind of lark. Somewhere he’ll have picture ID – bound to have. Then we might know. But it could take time and I’d rather, you know, rule out the real Jack Dryden.’

  ‘What subjects did he teach?’

  Cherry blinked, his good humour strained by Dryden’s peremptory tone. ‘Looks like biology, chemistry, maths. All the paperwork’s in the house.’

  His father had read natural sciences at Cambridge. They were his subjects. If someone had stolen his ID that was a hell of a coincidence. Dryden’s heart was racing and he was glad he was sitting down. His father’s death had always felt unfinished, insubstantial – not just because they’d never found the body. He’d always felt that his mother – the family – had kept something from him. The whole episode had the aura of a myth about it. It was that uncertainty that made him think of the other solution to the conundrum. ‘Maybe it was Dad. Maybe he just didn’t want to come back that day. Maybe he didn’t want to come back to me and Mum. There was no body. Why’s that impossible?’ The coffee cup Dryden was holding had begun to vibrate. He held it in both hands. He pressed on: ‘And he lived – here. In Ely?’

  ‘Right. But not for long – just the last three years. And the bloke next door says he hardly ever went out – chip shop, that pub with the shutters – The Red, White and Blue. But before Ely the medical records say Peterborough until we get back to ’seventy-seven – then it’s Ely again.’

  Dryden felt dizzy, his mouth dry. He was thinking about that year – 1977. After his father’s death, after the floods, after the inquest, they’d fled back to London. His mother had got a job teaching in a suburban comprehensive, swapping the farm at Burnt Fen for a faceless, nameless semi. He’d never understood why. Then he thought of one of those questions which make your heart freeze. ‘Seven days ago, Stan – this accident. So it was a Thursday. Time?’

  Cherry checked a notebook. ‘Late rush hour – what passes for a rush hour in Manea. Call to nine-nine-nine timed at 9.08 a.m.’

  An hour after Dryden’s son was born. If it was his father then they’d been alive together on the same earth for those fleeting sixty minutes, unaware of each other. Grandson and grandfather.

  Cherry produced a DNA swab kit. ‘This way we’ll know.’

  ‘And the body?’ asked Dryden.

  ‘You don’t want to see the body.’

  THREE

  The steep bank of the Old Bedford River ran like a slide rule across country: twenty-five feet of earth, holding the flowing water above the land, crossing a world turned upside down: rivers above the land, land below the distant sea. On the bank top cows grazed – the only living things likely to break the fen horizon. Dryden got Humph to park just below the electric pumping station at Welch’s Dam – one of the many along the length of the artificial river. Beyond it, a mile distant over the marshland was the New Bedford – its twin. In the winter they’d open the sluices and flood the land between, creating a huge lake. But in summer rough pasture lay where only a few months before the winter storms had whipped up white horses.

  Humph didn’t move from the driver’s chair, merely eyeing the bank top balefully.

  ‘I need to show you something,’ said Dryden, getting out and squatting down to eye-level, his angular frame folding like a deck chair.

  ‘I thought you didn’t like water.’

  Which was half true. Dryden was drawn to water with the power of an emoti
onal magnet, but he also lived in fear of it, as one might live in fear of the dark. It was a dramatic tension he knew might kill him one day. He always said it went back to an incident in his childhood when he’d been trapped under the winter ice on the river. But it felt deeper than that: something atavistic, like his eye colour.

  ‘Can’t I see it from ’ere?’ asked Humph. ‘The dog’s tired.’ He did want to know what it was that DS Stan Cherry had told Dryden but he didn’t see why he had to get out of the cab to hear it.

  Boudicca, the greyhound, barked in response, scrabbling at the back of the passenger-side seat.

  ‘I’ll take the dog,’ said Dryden, flipping the seat forward, losing patience with Humph’s laziness.

  Wooden steps had been set into the bank up to the brink and a metal footbridge over the Old Bedford. The water was streaked with green algae and weed and a flotilla of swans headed towards the sea. There were no boats in sight but the wreck of one – fibreglass and covered in slime – lay just beneath the surface. Across the bridge a staggered gate led through a bird hide to a path with a view over the marshland, and of Ely cathedral in the far distance.

  The dog ran south along the bank, taking the very slight bend in the great artificial river, leaning into the curve to pick up speed. As it ran it kicked up a miniature red sandstorm. To the north the bank ran straight until the eye lost it in a blue horizon. It was like standing on the lip of the world, thought Dryden: as if he’d reached the edge of the map.

  He heard Humph’s rasping breath before the cabbie appeared above the bank. There was a bench and the cabbie sat on it, his chest heaving, avoiding Dryden’s eyes, looking along the bank at the receding form of Boudicca.

  Dryden pointed at a stone cairn. Humph hauled himself up on to his feet and stood before it. There was a slate plaque which read:

  IN MEMORY OF JOHN ‘JACK’ DRYDEN

  LAST SEEN HERE ON JANUARY 22, 1977.

  HE GAVE HIS LIFE IN THE BATTLE OF THE BANKS.

  Humph would have looked at his feet if he could have seen them. He knew about the floods of ’seventy-seven. He’d been ten, and the school house at Black Horse Drove had been closed so he’d played on the edge of the village, watching the water level inch up the side of Tyler’s Barn. The nationals had called it the ‘battle of the banks’ after the Army had been called in. Millions of sandbags, amphibious vehicles, trains loaded with rubble and sand. None of it had stopped the water.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ he said. ‘I thought . . .’

  ‘No,’ said Dryden, guessing the missing sentence. ‘They never found the body. Mum had this put up.’ He looked around. ‘I’ve seen press cuttings, pictures taken that day, right here. It’s like another world.’

  One picture had shown the far bank, the one they’d parked beneath, water pouring through a gap the floodwaters had breached. White water blew over the bank tops, thundered through the breach – a noise people said could be heard in Ely, six miles east. On either side of the gap men stood, everyone in caps, the rain grey, the water grey, the sky low and lightless. No two-thirds sky to lift the spirits. Military lorries were parked along the bank, loaded with sandbags. In the river barges packed with cement were ready to push into the breach. It was the day after the accident and some of the men held their caps to their chests as if already at the funeral.

  ‘They held an inquest at Reach – the old school house,’ said Dryden. He’d been there, in the front row, more curious than moved. ‘There was a witness over here, where we’re standing, and he said he was watching Dad – Dad and his mate, a bloke called Boyle. They were checking the bank. A kind of night watch, although there was still a little dusk left. Then they heard this wrenching noise – you can’t imagine it, can you? What a thousand tonnes of earth just sliding away sounds like. I always remember what he said – that witness: And then they just sort of went away from us. I guess they did. They were lit on the bank by an arc lamp and then they were gone, but for a second they saw them moving away, out of the light.’

  The dog was back, hurtling straight past them, heading north.

  ‘Nobody ever saw him again,’ said Dryden.

  Humph pursed his baby-lips, aware that saying anything was likely to be inappropriate, but impelled to say something. ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Just his watch. He’d taken it off and left it with one of the overseers – for safe keeping while he filled sandbags.’ The thought opened up an emotion in Dryden. ‘I loved that watch as a kid. Roman face – classic – but with a compass set in the middle. I’ve never seen another. My uncle’s got it.’

  ‘What happened to the other bloke – Boyle?’

  ‘Survived. I couldn’t think it at the time, but that made it worse. He was at the inquest, although he didn’t have much to say. He left – left the Fens, tried to find a new life. That’s the problem with surviving, I guess. You end up being this constant reminder to everyone of the dead.’ Dryden pointed to the distant smudge of a village in the mid-distance. ‘Boyle was washed up over there, near the bridge. He couldn’t remember anything. Came round looking up at the sky with a stomach full of sea water.’

  ‘But there was a search?’ prompted Humph. ‘For . . .’ He looked at the memorial stone, not wanting to use the word ‘father’. ‘For Jack?’

  ‘He went into the water holding some loops of heavy rope they’d used to snare cattle. The coroner said he might have got caught up, dragged down. When he said that the men all nodded, as if they knew the truth. I thought it sounded right too, as if he’d been tangled with a serpent, a fen eel.

  ‘When the water finally fell away there was mud, of course – mud everywhere. So we thought he’d be in the mud and he’d stay there. Buried. But if he’d got free of the rope he’d have been swept north – the current was running with the tide then, and the body might have got round the sluices at Denver. Then there’s the sea. That’s what I always hoped – that he’d just got taken out to sea. Like he’d been diluted. I used to think that on the beach sometimes, and when I swim. That I can sort of feel him around me. I’d sink my head under and listen. He had a voice like that – a rumble, bit like mine, gravelly, like stones being turned over by the tide.’

  Humph nodded, appalled at the thought.

  Dryden looked up, letting the sky lift his mood. A single wisp of cumulus sliding past at speed, changing shape. That was Humph’s problem, of course – that clouds weren’t fixed even if you could name them.

  The cabbie flexed his hands, wondering if they could go now. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. He didn’t really like making emotional contact with anyone, and had always understood Dryden to be the same. He strongly suspected that this rare breach of their unspoken etiquette was going to get worse, not better. The warm plastic interior of the Capri beckoned.

  Dryden looked at him, puzzled, then disappointed. ‘I didn’t bring you here to tell you that,’ he said. Humph looked away, embarrassed to see that his friend’s eyes were flooded with tears.

  ‘Stan Cherry – the coroner’s officer. He said there was an accident out on the Manea Road. A car crashed, caught fire. They didn’t give the name out because they couldn’t trace the vehicle licence to start with. In fact, we ran a paragraph in the paper – I wrote it. Asking for someone to come forward. He must be missing: missed. Someone’s father, someone’s son. That kind of thing. The body was destroyed, charred. They’ve got a name now. John Philip Vincent Dryden.’ Dryden took out the piece of paper. ‘This is his address. It’s 500 yards away from yours, on the Jubilee.’

  He walked to the memorial and put a hand on the smooth slate.

  Humph’s head moved from side to side like one of the nodding dogs he had on the back sill of the Capri. ‘Yeah, but it’s not him, is it? It can’t be him. Is that what Cherry said – that they think it’s him?’

  ‘No. He thinks it’s ID theft. But I wonder. It might be Dad. There was no body. I don’t know what he had on him when he was swept away – driving licence, I guess. Wallet – some c
ash. I don’t know . . .’ Dryden threw his hands out wide as his voice rose almost to a shout. ‘No death certificate. Mum and I went to see the registrar after the inquest but he wouldn’t issue one without a body. So he could have just picked up his life again. The farm was in Mum’s name, and the bank account. So it could be him, Humph. Maybe it is him.’

  Humph took a step back and almost fell over, his hand searching for the bench again.

  ‘Question is, why?’ said Dryden. ‘Why leave us? Mum and me. Why didn’t he come back? How didn’t he come back? What did he do – just walk out of the water into another life?’ An image had been haunting Dryden since he’d talked to Cherry. A scene from Beowulf, perhaps – a man, only half-human, walking out of the mere, dripping mud.

  Humph’s shoulders sagged, unequal to the task of finding an answer. Then he had it. ‘Amnesia,’ he said.

  There was just a trace of something lighter in Dryden’s voice when he answered. ‘But how does that work? He gets washed up – he can’t remember who he is. But every copper in the Fens, every medic, every doctor, everyone knew we were looking for him. His mate was alive, so maybe he was too. There was hope. It’s not like we weren’t looking.’

  Humph was speechless. This was the problem with getting involved in conversations. You made a perfectly reasonable suggestion and then got pilloried for it.

  ‘Cherry said there was no point in a visual ID because of the condition of the body,’ said Dryden.

  Humph nodded, agreeing.

  ‘I said I didn’t care. I want to be sure, so I’m going to see him – tomorrow. I’d like you to come with me.’

  Humph felt oddly elated at the request. It included him but he didn’t have to do anything. Above all, say anything. Then he remembered something and he couldn’t stop himself articulating the thought. ‘I was going to suggest Jack – for the boy. It’s a good name. Solid, honest.’