empty from the sound of a hollow echo was one of them. He might as well have been tapping on a coffin lid. He peered in through the letterbox. Hatstand, Axminster (threadbare), hall table with a pile of unopened letters, and stairs leading up into gloom. He stood back and gave the frontage one more look. He thought a net curtain twitched, but then he always thought a net curtain twitched. They had a life of their own, net curtains.
The crow returned to the corrugated roof and after a brief scramble of birds’ feet on rusty iron it reconquered the apex. It looked at him with one eye. Much of a reporter’s life was pointless. Dryden rather enjoyed it. It was like having a licence for being idle. He dug his hands deeper into the greatcoat pockets and fished for some food. Then he heard the voices – recognizing with a dim sense of irritation the monotone of Andy Stubbs.
He walked round Camm House past a freshly repainted sign: OFFICE – HOLIDAY BOOKINGS, and crossed a yard strewn with discarded maritime flotsam to a grubby Porta-kabin. His knees, ever-sensitive to the damp, cracked with each step.
Not surprisingly they heard him coming. Stubbs was interviewing Paul Camm, the owner’s son, and Dryden’s eyewitness to the sinking of the pleasure boat
Five days ago. Already it seemed like a long winter.
The Portakabin served as the boatyard’s office. Stubbs was making small neat notes in a small neat notebook. He clipped it shut and slipped an elastic band around it to hold it closed when he saw Dryden.
‘Keep in touch, Mr Camm. As soon as you hear anything. In the meantime we’ll start a search, along the banks by the boats, just a precaution. Anywhere else your father might have gone?’
Camm glanced briefly at Dryden but seemed to disregard him, or failed to recognize him. Dryden recalled now his distraction on the night of the sinking of the
‘He liked his own company. Anywhere out on the Fen you can get by boat. Anywhere. What spare time he had he spent fowling.’
‘We’ll find him,’ said Stubbs, already looking at Dryden and seeing the bandaged ear for the first time: ‘Can I help?’
Dryden ignored the detective’s question and shook Camm by the hand. ‘Lost any more boats?’
Camm registered recognition. ‘Oh, hi. Nope. Just the one. We only lost that coz Dad, well, coz he’d gone missing. He did the narrow boats.’
Past tense, thought Dryden. Even he knows it’s beyond hope.
Camm looked at Stubbs and seemed to know then, finally, that his father had indeed gone. Five days. Freezing temperatures.
Dryden took his chance. ‘Did your father receive any messages before he disappeared, an unusual letter perhaps, a telephone call…?’
Dryden took Stubbs’s silence as an indication that the detective had not yet asked the same question.
‘Mum thinks he got a note – that night.’
‘That night?’
‘Yes, last Wednesday.’
The Portakabin had two offices – one beyond a thin partition through which came the sound of a single, stifled sob. They all pretended not to hear it. A dog barked and scratched at the door.
Stubbs reopened his notebook. ‘Could we?’
Camm slipped through the door. After a brief muffled conversation his mother appeared, dabbing at blurred mascara.
‘Detective Sergeant?’ She was in her early sixties. A patina of the respectable middle-class housewife she had been after her marriage to Reg Camm had survived decades of hard work and genteel poverty. She wore a cameo brooch pinned to a scarf held tight at the neck.
Dryden knew her then, despite the passage of twenty years. The day his own father had gone missing she had come to comfort his mother. She had been a teacher too, she’d been a friend, but not a good enough friend to make comfort a reality. He recalled sharply the confusion he’d felt as she had taken him, aged eleven, to play in the garden at Burnt Fen while his mother had talked to the police. It was an odd coincidence that they should meet again like this, the kind that convinced him that there was no great plan to life, just the aimless collision of scattered snooker balls.
Stubbs tried to regain control of the interview. ‘I’m sorry, your son mentioned that your husband may have received a note on the night he disappeared. Is that true?’
She clutched at the brooch. ‘Yes. Yes it is. I, I didn’t think…’ She looked helplessly to her son and clutched his arm.
‘It may be nothing. Did you see it?’
‘No. Well, yes, but only as a folded note on the mat. A white envelope, with his name on the front in capitals. REG, that was all. I took it to him down by the dock, he was working on one of the for-hire launches.’
‘Did he tell you what it said?’
She clutched again at the brooch: ‘He said it was a letter from an old friend.’
‘Did he seem upset at all?’
‘Surprised, Detective Sergeant. Surprised – and a bit relieved? Perhaps… it’s difficult.’
‘What did he do with the note?’
