1
Humphrey H. Holt’s licensed minicab crept across the fen like the model motorcar on a giant Monopoly board. The Ford Capri was an icon – from the fluffy toy dice hanging from the rear-view mirror to the beaded seat covers. The back window was stacked with dog-eared children’s books hoarded by his daughter – who had fitted the red plastic nose to the radiator and the Jolly Roger to the aerial. Emblazoned with a triple H motif the cab was, not surprisingly, rarely in great demand for weddings. It had once made up the numbers in a funeral cortège – and the family had had the presence of mind amidst their grief to ask for their money back.
Philip Dryden shifted in the passenger seat as they cleared the railway crossings at Queen Adelaide, and turning up the collar of his giant black greatcoat he eyed the cab’s meter. He coughed, drawing in the damp which was already creeping out of the fields. The meter read £2.95. It always read £2.95. He could see the frayed wires hanging loose below the dashboard. The cab hit a bump and the exhaust struck the tarmac with a clang like a cow bell.
Humph wriggled in his seat, setting off concentric rings of wave-like motion in his seventeen-stone torso which he had snugly slipped into his nylon Ipswich Town tracksuit top. Somewhere, deep inside, a large length of gut cavorted.
Another bump on the drove road put the car briefly into flight before it returned to earth with a bone-shaking thud. The suspension, a matrix of rusted steel, was not so much shot as dead and buried.
The jolt dislodged the passenger side vanity mirror which dropped neatly in front of Dryden’s face. He stared at himself in irritation: his imagination was romantic and he found his own face a dramatic disappointment, which was odd, as most people, and almost all women, found it striking if not handsome. But self-knowledge was not one of his virtues. The bone structure was medieval, the face apparently the result of several blows of a Norman mason’s chisel into a single limestone block. Jet black hair followed the architectural design – cropped and severe. It was the kind of face that should have been illuminating an Anglo-Saxon chronicle.
He flipped up the vanity mirror and smudged a porthole in the condensation of the window. 4.10 p.m. A lead expanse of chill cloud over the fen, occasionally lit by the red and green of half-hearted fireworks. The temperature had not risen above freezing all day and now, as the light bled away, a mist crept out of the roadside ditches to claw at the cab’s passing tyres.
Dryden checked his watch. ‘We could do with being there,’ he said. Like most reporters he’d learnt the hard way that patience is a vice.
Humph adopted an urgent posture which produced no discernible increase in speed. The cab swept on while beside them a flock of Canada geese, just airborne, began its long slow ascent into the sky.
Two miles ahead a blue emergency light blinked – a lighthouse in the dusk. A mile away to the east the fairy lights of a pub twinkled in the gloom.
‘Tesco trolleys,’ said Dryden, searching his coat pockets for a pen. Instead he produced a miniature pork pie, the remnants of a quarter-pound of button mushrooms, and an untouched half-pound of wine gums.
Humph adjusted the rear-view mirror by way of answer. He’d known Dryden for two years now, since the accident which had put Dryden’s wife, Laura, in a coma. Humph had ferried him to the hospital through those first critical weeks. In that time he’d learnt to let Dryden finish his own sentences. If you can have a conversation entirely based on rhetoric then they did.
Dryden kicked his feet out, irritated that the cab afforded no more leg room than the average car. Had Humph answered? He was unsure.
‘I bet you. Three sodding Tesco trolleys and a hubcap. If we’re lucky. Brace yourself: another Pulitzer Prize.’ Dryden stretched scepticism to breaking point: it was often, wrongly, seen as cynicism.
They came to the sudden T-junction. They were common in the Fens, abrupt full-stops in the usually uninterrupted arrow-flight of the drove roads. Death traps. Over-confident drivers, lulled by seven miles of tarmac runway, suddenly found themselves confronted by a bank, and then a ditch with ten feet of iced water in the bottom.
A signpost stood at an angle beside the road: FIVE MILES FROM ANYWHERE CORNER. Dryden laughed, mainly because it wasn’t a joke.
Across their path lay the bank of the River Lark, a tributary of the Great Ouse – the Fens’ central artery. They parked up, short of a yellow and black scene-of-crime tape.
As Dryden reached the top of the bank an industrial arc lamp thudded into life, picking out a circular spotlight on the ice. Cue Torvill and Dean, he thought.
In the dusk the bright circle of light hurt his eyes. The Canada geese, having caught them up, flew startled through the arc lamp’s beam like bombers picked out in the searchlights of the Blitz. They attempted a landing on ice downriver – a disaster of flailing webbed feet shrouded in gloom.