Nightrise (28 page)

There was half an acre of lawn leading down to a ditch, then beyond that a field. The sense of free space was almost hypnotic. Dryden couldn't keep his eyes off the horizon, as if he was at sea, on the lookout. In the distance was the bank of the Little Ouse, one of the main river's tributaries, and crouched in its lee what looked like a boat house.

He'd thought about how to play this interview. Originally he'd opted for direct and honest, but now he was at Petit Hall something told him to be more circumspect, even devious. ‘I've had some feedback on this land sale. I'm told  20,000 is way off the mark – by a factor of ten, or twenty, or more. Anyone who knows anything about the market would see it was wrong. Sorry, but it makes me look like an idiot.'

‘The owner sold at below the market price – he's a member of the campaign. And I said the price was only ball park.'

‘Sorry – you didn't mention that the seller was taking a loss when we talked. I think it would have been honest to have said that, even if it was off the record.'

Petit's eyes hardened, the irises seeming to flatten so that they no longer reflected the light. She always presented herself as of that generation that had risen above dishonesty. ‘Did you really think that strips of prime peatland go under the hammer at  20,000?'

Dryden relaxed. He was always constrained by politeness as a reporter, but now the gloves were off he felt at liberty to say what he thought. ‘Have you read
Macbeth
?' It was a calculated insult, as he knew Petit had read English at Cambridge.

‘That's how the witches operate, isn't it? They tell people things they want to hear but hide the truth by omission. In everyday life we call this lying. Why bother giving me the  20,000 price when the transaction is not based on a market price at all?'

She went to answer but he cut her off.

‘I'm angry because I should have checked. I didn't because I trusted you. This appears to have been my mistake.' When he got angry, which was rare and lasted only for a handful of seconds, his voice took on a buzz. It was very effective, and even out here in the garden he thought he heard Petit's mug vibrate on the picnic table.

He was honest enough – with himself – to admit that most of his anger was fuelled by the knowledge that the story was a shoddy piece of work. He believed her because she'd given him what he wanted: the splash.

And he still didn't understand. ‘Why sell at all?' he asked. ‘If he's on your side to the tune of what – half a million or more – why not just let him sit on the land and refuse to sell to the government?'

She had her hands on the wooden table, the knuckles knotted. ‘I said – I think – that we wanted to put the land in trust.' The fact that she hadn't tried to throw him out after being accused of being a liar spoke volumes. ‘There has to be a price – it could have been fifty pence. That way we have a legal sale. We needed to transfer the ownership to the trust. Otherwise I could have used this house to stop them – as I said, the last time we spoke. We're anxious about compulsory purchase and we want to make sure that we have a long-term solution. Simply letting him sit on the land was no good at all. What if future heirs to the estate decide they would quite like the purchase price – or even part of it?'

She was on her feet now, pacing, every inch a member of the landed gentry. Turning, she set her jaw. ‘I do not intend to see this house – my family's house – under six feet of water. Or the land, for that matter.'

Dryden stood, tired of the lecture. ‘And you can't give me the names of either of these two people – the one who is selling below the market price, and the one who is donating the sale money? It's not listed at the Land Registry. I could find out – there must be a way, but I don't have the time. Other people – other papers – want the story.'

‘No, I can't. The fact is the deal has been done. Perhaps we should just say the details are private. Which is true. Now – it is a day off for me – but I'm afraid that doesn't mean I have nothing to do. What do you intend to do? Take the nice fat fee for selling the story to Fleet Street or not?'

‘Well, as we've descended to the level of plain abuse I think I'll keep that decision to myself.'

He turned to go.

She hadn't finished. ‘You can walk back round the house through the trees,' she said. It was a petty, calculated insult; as if she'd demanded he exit by the tradesmen's door even if he'd got in at the front. But when he looked at her face he saw she'd regretted what she'd said.

‘I'll amend the story,' he said. He judged she was telling the truth. He had the facts – or at least enough of the facts. He could rewrite for the
Guardian
. ‘Land sold by one supporter of your campaign to another for an agreed price, I think – we'll leave out the figure itself.'

She started to speak but stopped. They stood together locked in a confusion of insult and reconciliation.

‘You
can
go through the house . . .' she said.

‘No. It's fine.'

He walked away at last. Trees were rare out on the open fen and showed that the house must be built on a clay islet in the peat: a vast cedar, a fig, a Douglas pine. He was in the shadows when he saw flowers in the half-light. Walking under the canopy of the cedar he saw a gravestone. Grand in a classy way: a stone edge to the plot, a granite headstone five feet high, with engraved lettering in memory of Sheila Petit's husband. The words and dates were crowded into the top half of the stone, leaving more than enough space, when the time came, for an inscription for his wife.

T
relaw's house was a prime example of suburban squalor – if Ely could be said to have a suburb at all. The town tended to just peter out. But there was a thin band of fifties semis on the edge of West Fen, pebble-dashed and bay-windowed. Some had port holes, some didn't, some had stained glass over the front door, some didn't. But all the houses in York Crescent were well painted, with new plastic double-glazed windows, the roofs bristling with Sky dishes. All except Trelaw's. It still had wooden window frames, paint peeling, and the net curtains were grey and torn. The front garden had gone to seed, and the pebble-dashing was disfigured by damp.

Dryden checked his mobile for a message from Humph. Nothing.

The cabbie's instructions were simple. Head north from Ely, make sure he wasn't being followed, then swing around towards the Norwich line, drop Laura and Eden at one of the smaller stations. Then, from Norwich, a local train up to Cromer. Kross might think Dryden was safe, that his family were safe, but Kross didn't know what he knew: that only half the consignment of fake IDs were back in the hands of the Saar brothers.

The mobile trilled: it was a text from Humph and said simply, ON TRAIN. TRAIN ON TIME.

Dryden began to whistle tunelessly. It was late afternoon on York Crescent and nothing moved. He hated suburbia – and if he was honest it was easy to see why. After his father's death he'd been taken away from Burnt Fen, from a world he loved, to the grey streets of North London. It wasn't the uniformity, or the similarity of the houses and the people in them, it was this brittle, dull, silence that really got to him.

A cat crossed the road, leaving that silence unbroken.

At the gate of Trelaw's house Dryden stopped and saw the net curtain twitch in the bedroom. The window was just open and he could hear Bach with adverts: Classic FM. The Rover P4 was parked in front of a wooden garage.

The front door was open too, just an inch, and it swung into the hall when Dryden touched it. There was no carpet. Newspapers covered the boards and in several places oily engine parts were set in drip trays. The hat stand was hung with so many coats and umbrellas it blocked out the light which came from the kitchen – the door to which was open. Dryden saw a wooden table, on which was a carburettor. And two bottles of wine, red, both empty. Food aromas hung in the air: bacon and maybe burnt toast. Definitely something burnt. But the background smell was of oil and petrol. He called out Trelaw's name. Out loud he said he was coming up the stairs. Wallpaper hung down in loops in one corner of the landing but there was a carpet up here which looked new, although it didn't seem to have been fitted, so that there were gaps at the edges where he could see the floorboards. And a mirror – the only decoration he'd seen in the whole house – one of those fifties oval gilt mirrors that distorts the image like a fish-eye lens.

The net curtains had twitched in the front room as he'd approached the house so he knocked on that door, then pushed it open. He stood looking at the bed, the headboard, the pillows. One of the pillows had a bright red circle in the middle of it, and in the middle of that a black circle. Dryden knew instantly that this was where the burnt smell came from. A wisp of smoke rose from the burnt hole. Shock pumped adrenalin into his system and he could hear his heart beat – once, twice, three times. He knew it was a bullet hole in the pillow but he didn't let the words form in his brain.

Time had slowed down. The door was still swinging open to reveal Trelaw's lower body on top of the duvet. He was in a dressing gown – baby blue and clean. His head was missing, but then Dryden realized it was under the pillow. Dryden saw it then – the moment of death – the pillow pressed down, the gun to the linen case, the dull percussion of the bullet fired through the wadding inside the pillow case.

In his right eye he saw movement, reflected sunlight in an old mirror. An arm crooked round his neck and closed across his throat with a mechanical strength, totally irresistible. A knee blow killed the muscle in his left thigh, so that his nervous system seemed to short out like a fuse. He was on his knees in a half-breath, and didn't know how he'd got there.

Then he was standing up because someone had an arm round his neck and had lifted him up. It was extraordinary how helpless he was. It wasn't a matter of panic, or cowardice, or weakness; he was just overcome by what was happening, so he'd become loose, puppet-like. The sound in his ears was distorted, as if he'd been plunged under water. The constriction of his windpipe was complete. He'd lost two seconds of air supply but his body was already anticipating death: his eyes burnt, and his knees had gone, so that all the weight was taken by the arm round his neck.

Two minutes earlier he'd been standing in the street outside looking at a suburban semi-detached house. In another minute he'd be dead. He was swung out into the hallway and dragged to the top of the stairs.

When he considered these few seconds, looking back, he remembered two things: that the man wore gloves – plastic surgical gloves – and that he reeked of marine fuel which has quite a distinct aroma compared to petrol or car oil.

A voice which was so close as to be inside his head said: ‘The boy was a warning. Your last warning.'

His feet dragged on the floor as he was edged towards the top step. His eyes were full of water but he caught a glimpse of his face in the fish-eye mirror: the whites of his eyes, bulging, and – at the moment he was thrown – he saw another face revealed behind him. It was Miiko Saar and, despite the mirage-like distortion of the glass, he could see that he was smiling. And see his wrist watch with its wide classic Roman face, and the little compass at the centre.

W
hen Dryden opened his eyes he closed them again, immediately – not a conscious act but, he thought later, a defensive one. It gave him time to examine the image he'd seen, and match it to what he could feel. But even then, at that moment, and it could have been no longer than a handful of seconds, he knew he was already trying not to panic, forcing himself to analyse with his mind, rather than react with his emotions, his instincts. If he'd let a primeval response override everything else he'd have screamed. And that would have been the beginning of the spiral, a downward journey, even though he could go no lower.

He'd seen stars. Early evening stars on a light blue canvas. Perhaps the handle of the Plough, but otherwise he could discern no patterns, no pleasing dotted-line Greek heroes or myths: no Orion, or Pegasus. Stars, but not the whole sky, just a rectangle above, surrounded by blackness. What he felt was water. He was lying in water but not floating. An inch, maybe two inches of water. His back, ice cold, on the ground, with – he thought – a pebble or two cutting into his shoulder blade. But that was difficult to isolate because of the other pains.

Pain: at first a dull pulse like a heartbeat, but soon – sickeningly quickly – sharper. Then he remembered the house on York Crescent, the blood on the pillow, the gunshot hole and Saar's face, relishing the moment when he threw Dryden from the top of the stairs. His left hip hurt most and he wondered if it was broken, and his left arm – at the elbow, and most of all – stupidly – the fingers of his left hand, which individually seemed to radiate more pain than the rest of his body: a torch of pain, like a searchlight. He was lying on his arms, which were behind him, and he felt sure that they were tied at the wrists. And possibly his legs as well, at the ankles: his right leg sent him no sensation at all.

Finally – noise. Night noise at first. The single call of an owl, and dogs barking a long way off, and then trees rustling – so pines, shuffling like they do, giving the wind a voice. Then the rhythmic rumble of a goods train, quite clear, and surprisingly close. But otherwise he felt he could hear the open fen – as if he had bat ears, sending out pinging sonar which faded before finding a surface on which to rebound. A great expanse – above – enclosed by a night sky. It made him feel very afraid, so he shut down that emotion, because he could feel a scream rising like a choke.

Then he heard the slightest of sounds: a feathering. If you could hear silence in motion this was it. So he opened his eyes and saw it cross the rectangle above. An owl, a luminous owl, as white as a ghost, its wings motionless, gone in a half-second. So beautiful he was able to keep his eyes open, to let in the image which he'd now constructed through his other senses: the black outer frame of the sky made of four walls of black, damp earth.