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.
‘Y?, 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.
He finished taking down the takeaway order. ‘Ya. 14. 27. Two 58s. Fangyou – yes. Chop chop. Express. Burrbye.’
Tucking the cordless into his smock pocket he stuck the order on a metal spike on the hob. He made no attempt to start cooking but took ostentatious care in extricating three beers from the cold cabinet and bringing them to Dryden’s table.
He opened his own, took an impressive draught and burped. ‘Wicked,’ he said, making a mental note to ask his eldest what it meant. ‘Humph well?’ he asked, as if the cab driver wasn’t sitting ten feet away, double-glazed against the world of personal contact. They watched him holding a long conversation with his cousin Manuel who didn’t exist.
Dryden sniffed. They sat in easy silence. Gary shook his beer and directed the plume of spray when he pulled the tab into the back of his mouth. Dryden idly pictured Sia’s customer expecting the feverish activity normally associated with the expression ‘Chop, chop, express’.
He scanned the dark street outside and watched a yellow plastic child’s football roll past in the east wind followed by a few pages from last week’s edition of
Without turning his head he asked the usual question: ‘Any luck?’
Sia was a regular gambler, a pastime he had picked up from the officers’ mess rather than from his forebears, a fact he was sensitive about. For Gary’s sake he made the point. ‘There is a difference between being born with a genetic disposition to gambling and enjoying the intellectual challenge of betting on horses.’
‘What’s the difference?’ asked Dryden.
‘About ten thousand a year.’
Gary wasn’t listening. His jaw, normally slack, had become dislocated in a spectacular slump. He raised a single hesitant finger of alarm.
Cherry Street, a cul-de-sac, was directly opposite the facade of the Peking. It ran out towards the fen where bollards stood preventing incursions by marauding gypsies who had been on the land several generations longer than the residents. Despite this, the locals delighted in telling them to ‘fuck off home where they came from’.
The local council mirrored the sentiment if not the precise wording.
But there was no gypsy in sight. What was in sight, advancing steadily up Cherry Street towards the Peking, was a platoon of riot police. The street lighting glinted on their black perspex helmets.
Dryden stood and squinted through the Peking’s steamy windows.
The police, in full public disorder gear, held their plastic shields expertly in an unbroken wall at the front while those behind held them aloft to form what any Roman general would have recognized as a perfect illustration of the
