Russell had met this setback to his career as a criminal mastermind with typical aplomb by attempting to mar his juvenile looks with a dragon tattoo emblazoned on his neck, rising from a basket of flames which matched his hair. Bright was what Russell wasn’t, but he was skint, and Dryden’s occasional fiver for information received was much sought after.
Dryden bought Russell a double Southern Comfort and lemonade, thankful again that he didn’t need The Crow’s pitiful wages to rent a flat. His boat, PK129, stood on the edge of town at Barham’s Dock, a floating bolthole with a mooring fee of £25 a year. It left enough to live on, in a kind of desultory way, while Humph bolstered Dryden’s fares with a series of lucrative late-night bookings, mainly ferrying bar staff home from the clubs in Newmarket and Cambridge. They were a small-scale black-market economy.
Russell sat tinkering with an already empty glass. ‘Nighthawks,’ said Dryden. ‘Heard anything?’
The first of Dryden’s selection came over the speakers. ‘Jesus,’ said Russell. ‘Who put that crap on?’ All eyes turned to a teenager in immaculate trendy T-shirt and jeans making a selection at the juke box.
Dryden shook his head at the inability of some people to stay abreast of modern cultural developments.
‘They lift stuff off these digs, yeah?’ said Russell finally. ‘R. K. Logicial, innit?’
‘Heard anything local? How do they shift the stuff?’
Russell shrugged. ‘It’s a London crowd what do it. I s’pose they have people local too – but I ain’t ’eard. It’s well organized, like hare coursing. If they need to shift the stuff they have fences – like for burglary. For that kind of stuff you’d need to get it to auctions, or sell it private. I’ve heard some goes abroad.’
Dryden wondered how much Russell would know about crime when he was old enough to vote.
‘And where would I look for a fence like that, Russell?’ said Dryden, putting a fiver under the 16-year-old’s glass.
‘You can forget the Jubilee – it’s all cheap stuff. TVs, DVDs, CD players, anything ’lectric. This is totally different.’
There was a silence as they watched Garry slicing a pool shot so badly he left a deep scuff mark in the green baize.
‘Well?’ said Dryden, suddenly tired of the week.
Russell ran a finger around the sticky top of his glass. ‘You could try Alder’s.’
‘The undertakers?’
‘Sure. Old Man Alder’s been in the game for years – my dad used to use him.’ Russell’s father was currently holidaying on the Isle of Wight, postcards care of HMP Parkhurst.
‘They used to do house clearances, when they had a stiff. Body out the front door, heirlooms out the back. They’re always selling stuff – most of it legit. Alder used to run auctions as well. Now it’s more – discreet.’ Russell liked that word, so he grinned, revealing some green vegetable matter clinging to one incisor.
Dryden heard the cathedral bell toll the hour and he thought of Laura in her hospital bed at The Tower. Later, he would visit, as he always did. The tiredness increased, fuelled by the cocktail.
‘I guess I should have a look round Alder’s yard then,’ he said.
Russell stood, conversation over. Clearly he charged by the minute.
Dryden considered his miniature umbrella. It was too early, he argued, to visit Laura. He feared long visits, the possibility that he might say what he sometimes thought: that he’d rather they’d both died that night in Harrimere Drain, rather than having to endure this carapace of a life, a shell in which he lived on one side of consciousness while she existed on the other. He was half-alive, tied to a woman who was half-dead.
He bought himself another drink and sat in the shadows watching Garry lose at pool. He thought about himself, about his nightmare self, dying in the tunnel on the beach, and about the PoW, lying in his tunnel for maybe sixty years.
‘Someone should care,’ he said out loud, so that Garry nodded in agreement to cover up his own embarrassment.
The archaeologists clearly saw the discovery as an inconvenience, a temporary setback in their attempts to uncover the Anglo-Saxon chariot burial. The police were little better, convinced a man who had lain unmourned for more than half a century could go quietly to a fresh grave. Dryden sank his cocktail and rang Humph on the mobile. Five minutes later he was outside in the smog, a wraithlike figure on the pavement edge, waiting for the Capri’s sickly orange headlights to emerge from the gloom.
6
Humph brought the Capri to a halt by a lone poplar, its black trunk reflecting the cold white light of the moon. Out on the fen, beyond the city, the evening was clear and brittle, the sky a planetarium turning slowly overhead, the vanished sun an amber smudge to the west. Dryden considered their destination gloomily, a line of buildings broke the horizon like an Atlantic convoy. The road sign, pointing drunkenly down into the black earth, read simply ‘Ten Mile Bank’. It looked like the kind of place that couldn’t afford a village idiot.