The landscape of the Fens is, of course, real but details of geography and history have been altered for the sake of the plot. All characters are, however, entirely fictitious.
Thursday, 8th November
The Great West Fen
Out on the Middle Level midnight sees the rising flood nudge open the doors of the Baptist chapel at Black Bank. Earlier the villagers had gathered for a final service loaded down like Balkan refugees with suitcases and bundles. Now the water spreads across the Victorian red-brick floor; a creeping congregation, lifting the pews which shuffle forward to press against the altar rail. Finally the wooden lectern lifts and tips its painted golden eagle into the chocolate-coloured flood. But no one hears the sound, all are gone. Outside, below the flood banks, fenceposts sucked from the sodden peat pop to the surface. On what is left of the high ground hares scream a chorus from an operatic nightmare.
The flood spreads under a clear November moon. Cattle, necks breaking for air, swim wall-eyed with the twisting current. At Pollard’s Eau, just after dusk, the Old West River bursts its bank, spilling out over the fields of kale and cabbage. A dozen miles away the lookouts in the lantern tower of Sutton church take the noise for that of a train on the line to King’s Lynn. They wait, fatally, for the fields to reflect the stars, before raising the alarm.
Burnt Fen Farm, now a ruin, stands on its own shrinking island.
Philip Dryden climbs the stairs of the farmhouse in which he was born.
His knees crack, the damp air encouraging the rheumatism which waits in the joints of his six- foot-three-inch frame. He stops on the landing and the moonlight, falling through the rafters, catches a face as expressionless as a stone head on a cathedral wall.
He leans on the twisted banisters and feels again the anxieties of hischildhood – welcome by comparison with the present and approaching fear.
Will the killer come?
Outside the ice creaks on the Old West River. Unheard, small voices of perfect terror rise with the approach of death. Rats dash in synchronized flight to beat the flood, crowding into the steep pyramids of winter beet.
Shivering, he walks through the hallway and pushes open the slatted door to the attic stairs. He climbs again to the old schoolroom where he was the only pupil. The view from the dormer window frames a snapshot of memory; his father, sat in a pool of midsummer sunlight in a blue-striped deckchair, dozing under a wide-brimmed cherry picker’s hat.
Outside the wind brings the slow crash of a tree subsiding into the flood. A dying cow bellows and briefly, with a gust of heavenly sound, church bells ring the alarm too late from Littleport. The lightning cuts a gash across the night and Dryden sees the serried rows of waves marching south.
Waiting for a killer on Burnt Fen. A single, double, killer, coming.
On the horizon occasional car lights thread to Quanea. Locals, quitting at the nicely judged last moment, speed to the high ground. One stops, the headlights swing round, and the car idles beside the Eighteen Foot Drain. A false alarm: it executes a three-point turn, a dance of light from yellow to red, leaving Dry den’s heartbeat rattling. He shivers now in judders which make it difficult to hold the torch.
Another car on the fen. So quickly is it there his eyes struggle to focus on the headlights as they snake nearer. He’s come from the south, along the drove. He’s almost here and Dryden’s underestimated him. Threading through the fields along the narrow banks of the lodes.
Half a mile away the car stops. The headlights die.
They sit and wait. A trickling minute passes. Then five. Sitting, watching, water rising. He’s answered a message from a dead man. Dryden examines the roar of the flood for other, lethal, noises.
The moon finds a cloud, the wind drops, and in the sudden suffocating silence a car door closes without a slam.
He’s coming.
Thursday, 1st November
seven days earlier
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 cortege – 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
