Nightrise (6 page)

Taking silence for affirmation Friday nodded his head at the distant trundling gantry. ‘We can't turn that bloody thing off. Any ideas?'

Dryden followed him back down the track and through the poplars. They came within fifty yards of the migrant workers. The faces turned their way, with not a smile in sight.

‘Happy bunch,' said Dryden.

‘Piecework. They're not earning. You and me, we've got salaries, pensions. They get cash at sundown. It's medieval. We could be hours yet. It's costing them a living. Poor sods have mouths to feed like you and me.'

Amongst the trees they passed the ambulance crew, one on a mobile, one on a radio, the other checking through the paramedic kits.

‘You gonna tell me what's up?' asked Dryden.

‘Nope. You turn the water off, I'll let you see. Fail – you can join the Glee Club back there for a cup of tea while we get someone out. This is one of Doggard's fields – could take hours.'

Doggard's was one of the big fen agricultural companies. They farmed thousands of acres. But the salad crop ‘factory' was thirty-five miles away towards Peterborough.

The irrigation reel hummed, the hydraulic mechanism within clicking as it tugged in the hose and line on the distant gantry. Here, even on the edge of the field, they were in the droplet cloud, so that Dryden's skin was instantly moist and he could taste the slightly metallic water on his lips. The coolness was all-encompassing, like a blanket in reverse.

An articulated plastic water pipe ran away from the reel and Dryden followed it to a stopcock in the ditch: a hi-tech affair of dials and switches but the basic mechanics were simple. He cut the water supply. The reel fell instantly silent; the cloud of water spraying from the gantry seemed to implode, leaving behind dripping sprinklers. The gantry came to a shuddering halt fifty yards away. As the mist cleared they could see the distant mere beyond more clearly – a single boat in the mid-distance, no sail, flat in the water, like a miniature dredger. Even now, five years after the lake had been created, the sudden sight of it was a shock to Dryden, as if he'd glimpsed a distant make-believe mountain in a bank of clouds.

‘Hoo-fucking-ray,' said Friday, stalking off, walking down a furrow between lettuces, his wet shoes picking up peat like sticky-toffee pudding.

It was still difficult to see the gantry in its lingering cloud. Water dripped from every nozzle on the 100-foot steel frame; a mathematical grid against the sky, perched on the six giant wheels, each square empty, each a picture frame without a picture: all except one. Out on the far end of one wing of the gantry there was a hanging object.

Dryden stopped dead. His heartbeat picked up and the sudden double-coldness of his skin made him feel like someone else's blood was flowing in his veins. He'd seen the gently swinging shape for a nanosecond before looking away, but some objects are so deeply buried in the human psyche as to need only that fleeting glimpse for instant recognition: the angular dart of the rat, the strange heft of an arm carrying a knife in the hand, the cold quartz-like stare of the dead eye. And this: the hanging man, hung from the neck, until dead.

He looked again. A corpse, the neck broken to give that tell-tale zigzag in the spine, water dripping from the legs, which had been tied together, the arms behind. It swung still, maintaining the momentum of the moving gantry. The creaking noise it made didn't come from the wet rope but from the shattered vertebrae of the neck.

Dryden watched his boots in the peat as he followed Friday's tracks. He didn't look again until he was standing beside the DI, the shadow of the hanging body moving over the furrows, the only sound the dripping water around them and that calcium creak of the broken bone.

As soon as he did look he was aware that this was a victim whose death had been designed to shock. In its own obscene way it was as much an advert as a billboard flogging the latest Hollywood blockbuster. The broken neck appeared cosmetic; the face was disfigured by a gunshot wound to the right of the right eye. Dryden counted six more wounds in the torso, each ripping through a pair of blue overalls and a white shirt. There was one other wound visible – in the knee of the left leg. The water that dripped from the bare feet was tinged red. It was like looking at meat hung in a butcher's fridge. Or roadkill. He thought then, as he often had, that he'd been lucky not to see his father's corpse – washed up, decayed, ugly. It was a shock, a fresh jolt, to realize that he might see it now. Burnt up, wasted and as ugly as this, possibly worse.

‘Christ,' he said, his voice cracking, unsure what shocked him most: the corpse he could see, or the one he feared to see.

He noticed the dead man's hands then – orange paint under the fingernails, the skin torn but clean. And a smell – quite distinct, which might have come from the hands – of petrol. But not quite petrol; something more refined, lighter.

‘Overkill,' said Friday, using his mobile to ring the paramedics. They could relax – it was recovery only, and he'd need to let forensics look at the field first. ‘Looks like they strung him up and then had a bit of shooting practice.'

Dryden hadn't thought of that. The lynching first, then the desecration of the victim. He looked back to the edge of the field and the figures of the migrant workers. The silence was complete and intense. They, he thought, were the killer's audience.

The Crow
's photographer, Mitch MacIntosh, emerged from the shadows on the far side of the field, loaded down with enough equipment for a Paris catwalk. He'd avoided the police cordon by negotiating a drove road that wasn't on the map. Having been born in the Fens sixty years ago he was a living atlas of dead ends and tracks.

‘Who the fuck's that?' asked Friday.

‘Our photographer. Sorry. He's unstoppable.'

Friday shrugged. ‘Tell him to stop there.'

Dryden held up both hands and bellowed Mitch's name.

Mitch, a humourless Scot with a penchant for fake tam o'shanters, was a techno nerd and never knowingly without the latest gadget. He set up a tripod and began to fumble with a telephoto lens.

‘Who found the victim?' asked Dryden, thinking he'd keep Friday talking because then Mitch would be able to give the picture scale by including some human figures. They couldn't print a shot of the corpse but they could show the gantry, the reel, the cloud of mist drifting.

So he repeated the question because Friday was pretending he hadn't heard.

‘Gangmaster spotted him just after six when he got here. He's local – Commercial End.'

‘And he couldn't stop the reel?'

‘Nope. Said his job was to get that lot working – picking, packing. He'd never touched the irrigation gear.' Friday's eyes narrowed. ‘It's clever. Brutal and clever. The gantry's moved on from the spot where he was hung up so it'll have sprayed water all over the forensics, betcha. Over the footprints. No fingerprints – it's like we're underwater. Tidy. So – like I said – gangs. And there's that stench of fuel you've so far pretended not to notice.'

‘Petrol,' said Dryden.

‘More like marine fuel,' said Friday. ‘Which is why I'm not smoking. And that's not an official confirmation either, by the way. I'm not stupid. Nothing's on the record.' He let his eyes linger on the dead man's face. ‘Maybe they did plan to torch it, then figured the gun shots were good enough.'

It wouldn't be the first gang killing in the Fens. Two years earlier a Portuguese migrant worker had been tied up and shot out at Wisbech – his body dumped in the tidal mud. He'd have stayed in the mud if someone hadn't spotted a hand sticking up at low tide. Six months earlier a bunch of Lithuanian workers at Lynn had fallen out over gambling debts. A frank exchange of views had ended in two dead – one of them fed into a hay baler. But Dryden wasn't alone in suspecting that the death rate was much higher than that. The Fens offered many advantages to organized crime – not just migrant workers but gangs operating out of the East Midlands and London. You could hide anything on this wide open landscape. Tucking a body away where no one would find it was like hiding an acorn in a forest.

The difference this time was that they'd wanted this body found. This body was a message:
don't mess with us
.

Friday tore his eyes away from the shattered face. ‘Thanks for your help, but I need you off now.'

‘Can I talk to that lot?' asked Dryden, noting the corpse's clothing before he was too far away to see: a badge on the overalls that looked like the local water authority – FRWA: Fen Rivers Water Authority. A gold link neck chain, a small key on the chain, a gold ring, the hair cut short but stylish, a tattoo on the neck – something in High German Gothic script. Teeth – good, white – maybe whitened. Shoes – leather, with expensive multicoloured laces.

‘If you'd asked me I'd have said no,' said Friday. ‘But as you didn't I won't notice till the bus gets here – I've got one out from Ely, we'll take 'em all back and get statements. And they're all pretending they don't speak English – how's your Polish?'

‘
Nie mowie po polsku
.'

‘Meaning?'

‘I can't speak Polish.'

Typically, Humph's backlog of European languages did not include anything as useful as Polish.

Dryden took one last look at the shattered face. ‘But it's a murder inquiry – right.' It was a statement, not a question.

Friday laughed. ‘Well, he didn't trip over his fucking laces, did he?'

T
he glass room was the only one Dryden really liked at Flightpath Cottages. The two original farm workers' houses had been knocked into one, so there were two of everything: two front doors, two outdoor loos, two staircases. To create the glass room they'd knocked out the attic divide to make a single office, half of which was covered with an unbroken set of solar panels, the other half just reflective glass set in a wooden frame. Blinds controlled the heat and light, and flip-up Velux panels allowed air to pass through. He had them open now so that a breeze blew in. It was still in the mid-eighties and the humidity was high; storm clouds were appearing like ack-ack bursts on the horizon.

The dark side of the room held his filing system and a bunk, a printer for the laptop and a set of the big red cuttings books from his time on
The News
, the Fleet Street national he'd left after Laura's accident. On top of the books stood a framed picture of his father at Burnt Fen: 1976, the year before the flood that swept him away. Dryden walked to it now and turned it face down. He wasn't going to think about Jack Dryden again that day – he'd promised himself that. Tomorrow he'd touch the body: he'd know then. One single revealing touch of flesh on flesh.

The house stood on a very slight rise – he'd used a GPS to measure it at eight feet. Not much, but in the Black Fen, a lofty peak, which added several miles to the view from the glass room. He could just see the conning tower on the horizon at the US air base at Mildenhall, nearly thirteen miles away, and beyond that, in the sky, a heavily laden fuel tanker dropping down from the stratosphere, twin contrails looped behind like giant washing lines. Before the US airforce had arrived after the Second World War the area – on the edge of Thetford Forest – had been a testing range for military aircraft, originally in the years leading up to the First World War. The house had been on one flight path or another for nearly a century. It was pretty much a miracle it had never been blown up.

They'd expected aircraft noise, of course. The clue was in the name. But they'd been quietly appalled by the frequency of the military flights which seemed to shake the house several times an hour during daylight. Nightfall brought silence, but that wasn't going to be a big help trying to get a two-week-old child to sleep. They told each other at regular intervals that they'd get used to it, that the rumble would become background noise, white noise, that they'd simply blank out.

Dryden touched the space bar on the iMac laptop screen and brought the story he'd written on the Eau Fen murder back to life, picking up his mobile to hit the speed-dial for the news editor. Bracken was in the Fenman Bar, where he'd long been awarded the ultimate accolade – his own pint pot and a bar stool. He picked up Dryden's call on the second ring. The background noise was dominated by a fruit machine chugging out coins.

‘Philip,' said Bracken. ‘What ya got?'

Bracken's attitude to Dryden had altered over the years they'd worked together. Dryden's Fleet Street pedigree had put the news editor's back up in the early months, but he'd come to realize that the paper's success depended on its chief reporter's skills, and that made his own life easier. And it was clear Dryden's own ambitions were strictly limited – if he wanted a glittering career he could leave anytime and one of the nationals would have him back. If he'd wanted Bracken's job he'd have gone for it – and got it – long before now. The fact that the editor's job was up for grabs hadn't upset their relationship. Both of them thought the other one would never apply.

Dryden filled him in on what he had from the corpse found in the lettuce field.

‘Corker,' said Bracken. Dryden heard a door clatter and then the unmistakable buzz of the outside world followed by the swift intake of a smoker's breath.

The next day was press day. Dryden would be in early to write up the splash and then attend a police press conference at Cambridge. Anything new he'd update by mobile or laptop. He didn't tell Bracken that he'd written the story already – that way he'd engineered himself time, which was the reporter's ultimate commodity. He'd need time tomorrow; time for the short journey over the fen to the morgue.

‘What's exclusive?' asked Bracken. The news editor might be lazy, a borderline alcoholic and a poor operator under stress, but his instincts were sound. He'd spent twenty-five years on an evening paper in West Yorkshire and it had taught him the basics. Dryden had long ago decided that he'd treat Bracken as he was treated – with professional detachment.