‘Don’t be long. The food’s ready,’ said the first.
They walked to the paupers’ graveyard without talking. Dryden used the flash on the ancient camera in the failing dusk. It looked like a good shot in the view-finder, but then they always did. He took twenty – one might work.
He let Tavanter get back to his meal. No questions. He found Humph asleep again. Dryden retrieved another miniature, Campari again, and turned the cab’s interior lights off. He sat watching the mist creep towards the house, perfectly lit by the vicarage’s security light. A fox trotted across the snow leaving a double line of ink-black tracks. From the house he heard the just-discernible strains of music and a burst of laughter. The lights looked warm, and they danced with shadows.
When he saw the figure on the river bank he knew it immediately. The walk betrayed him: Joe Smith, the gypsy from the camp at The Pools. The man with the giant wrench and the Bronx accent. The missing arm unbalanced his posture giving him a distinctive lilt as he paced up and down. The right arm rose occasionally in the mist to check the face of a wristwatch.
Smith turned south on the river bank, breaking into a long easy lope of a run. Dryden cursed, grabbed the mobile, and followed him into the thick white light. To the east the sickly orange rim of the sun appeared at its death above the spirit-level horizon. In the ridged snowfields swans sat in the furrows, their necks raised like question marks. They too were listening, and they too heard nothing.
Ahead Smith stopped his run and slid down the bank. Dryden also dropped to the water’s edge. They were half a mile short of the point where the Lark finally meets the Great Ouse. Smith had gone, swallowed by the river mist. It clung to the swirling water in miniature stormclouds. In the midst of one he saw Smith’s head, to his left a single oar rose in a circular motion, the boat below obscured. Clear of the bank, Smith’s head clipped, an arm rose out of the mist, and the sound of an outboard motor chainsawed the air. He was heading east. Dryden knew now where he was going. If he turned downriver he would pass Ely in the dark and reach the village of Aldreth within an hour. Here a short drove leads out across the fen to the ancient site of a pre-Christian encampment – a low circular dyke being all that remained of this ancient place of worship. This was the misnamed Belsar’s Hill, a travellers’ camp for centuries, and the place where Tommy Shepherd had lived his short, but eventful, life. Tommy, and his brother, Billy.
Dryden strolled back to Humph’s cab. The cabbie was awake. Dryden was in need of a good meal and a drink. ‘Let’s eat. The Peking I think – all expenses spared.’
16
The Jubilee Estate stood on the edge of town and most of its streets petered out into the fen. Built by the Victorians it had been abandoned by the New Elizabethans in the 1950s. Now it was a sink estate – a concrete cesspit for the people society couldn’t flush away. In bad weather wild ponies wandered in off the fields to nuzzle the warm air vents at the council waste disposal unit. It was the kind of place that the statistics said didn’t exist.
The Peking House Chinese restaurant stood in a shopping parade alongside a newsagent, washeteria, ladies’ hairdressers, pet shop, a corner minimarket, with its windows obscured by Day-Glo posters advertising cut-price everything, and a pub called the Merry Monk, which enjoyed a reputation for civil disorder of Wild West proportions.
Humph parked outside – right outside, with Dryden’s passenger door aligned exactly with the restaurant’s plate glass entrance. Humph was a symphony in time and motion – other people’s.
Dryden didn’t even ask if Humph was coming in. He turned to his friend. ‘It’s rude you know – sitting outside. He’s a friend of yours too.’
Humph pressed the tape-deck button and the silky voice asked him what the weather was like in Barcelona. Humph told the silky voice.
Sia Yew, proprietor of the Peking, was a one-time Hong Kong short-order chef. He’d spent the last five years of colonial rule in the kitchens of the officers’ mess – Royal Artillery. He emigrated to the UK equipped with a letter of recommendation from the governor general and a perfectly modulated upper-middle-class English accent. He had adapted this into pidgin English to meet the prejudices of his new clientele.
Dryden took his usual table by the window – an honour he had never been denied largely due to lack of demand. He folded his legs beneath the plastic bucket seat and began to fiddle with the toothpicks. Gary, summoned to the free meal by mobile, fingered his spots and the plastic menu card.
‘Yο, people,’ said Sia. He had two teenage sons and enjoyed picking up the latest slang. He swung a blood-stained cleaver with one hand while the other held a cordless white telephone. The high-pitched tin voice of a hungry customer could just be heard.