The factory had replaced an older one on the same site, the only remnant of which was a pair of two-up, two- down brick cottages to one side of the new plate-glass reception and security building. Across the facade of both was a neon sign which read TAXIS.
Humph adjusted his headphones and flicked on his language tape. ‘This is it. You did ask – the Cobley family? Used to run the cab firm in Jude’s Ferry. This is them.’ He closed his eyes, job done.
Dryden got out and considered the inappropriate extravagance of the neon, which flickered slightly, emitting a trembling buzz. One door was bricked up, the other was half glass, reinforced with wire, and had been slammed shut a million times by people who didn’t care. Inside was a waiting room, with three armchairs of tattered leather and a wall map of the Black Fen.
Behind the glass sat a woman smoking a cigarette, her flesh piled on itself to produce a torso the shape of a Walnut Whip. Beside her was an old TV showing a video of
‘Mrs Cobley?’ asked Dryden, inadvertently drawing in a lungful of smoke.
‘If you want a car it’s a wait. The shift’s just finished and we’re ferrying the regulars home.’
Dryden nodded: ‘Sure. How many work here now?’ The sugar works was the biggest employer within thirty miles.
She killed the sound on the video. ‘Two hundred, in the season it’s nearly three. A lot of ’em live out nowhere. Shall I book you one? It’ll be an hour now.’ As she said it she looked in a mirror up by a security camera and saw Humph’s Capri idling at the kerb.
‘Oh. What is it then?’
‘My name’s Dryden – from
She flicked off the microphone in front of her. ‘Sure. That skeleton they found. The police have been anyway. You’ve wasted a trip.’ Dryden thought that must be the ultimate crime in the taxi trade.
Behind her on the wall was a notice board with snapshots pinned up over a rota. Several showed a teenager with thick black hair and adolescent lips, plus a fringe which had been out of fashion for more than a decade.
Dryden looked at her face, a study in neutrality. ‘It’s your son,’ he said. ‘I know it sounds daft but I’m just tracking down all the lads from the village whose age would fit the body they found. Sorry. I know it sounds ghoulish – but I guess he’s OK, yeah? Police probably asked the same question.’
But he knew then, because all the snapshots were of the same age.
She took her time lighting a fresh Silk Cut, half of which she appeared to inhale in one draw, the ash falling unnoticed on her bare arm.
A light flickered on her console. She flipped the button on the microphone. ‘OK, Sam. Sam. Picked up?’ He recognized her voice now from the tape they’d listened to on the riverbank. The intervening years had simply shredded it some more, nicotine smoking the vocal cords.
Static filled the room, a burst of sound as raw as whale song. She listened and seemed to get the sense. ‘Number, 134. That’s one, three, four, Sam. Customer still waiting.’ She killed the noise and began to fiddle with an electric kettle on a table beside her.
‘Paul was the name, wasn’t it?’ asked Dryden carefully.
‘It’s not him,’ she said, dropping her chin into the folds of fat around her throat. ‘I told the police the same. Told them not to bother. They thought it might be but I’d know. I know I’d know.’ She held her hand to her chest where Dryden guessed the pain was sharpest.
He studied the snapshots. ‘But you haven’t seen him since – when?’
They watched the video in silence as Shrek talked to a giant gingerbread man. ‘He had an argument with his father, it’s a long time ago now. He hated the cabs, the late nights. Computers was his thing, design and that. We didn’t know what he was talking about. So he left.’
‘Right. But when?’
‘When we left the Ferry. We stuck around – there was loads of business, carting everyone about, taking the soldiers around too. Then we’d moved in ’ere. He had a room and everything but he had this friend, he said, a boy.’ She blew a smoke ring with exaggerated finesse. ‘That was the final straw really. They were more than friends – you know,’ she laughed bitterly. ‘We didn’t understand. And Sam wouldn’t have it. He was angry, really angry.’ She caught Dryden’s eye and remembered to add something. ‘We both were.’
Dryden could see why the police were interested in the whereabouts of Paul Cobley, and he didn’t believe they’d taken mother’s intuition as evidence he was still alive.
She looked at him then, unable to sustain the lack of emotion in her face, and Dryden could see what the years between had done to her. ‘We didn’t bring him up like that,’ she said, but it sounded like a formula she’d used before.
‘You must wonder, you know – how he is, where he is? It’s seventeen years – more.’
‘Thanks. I can count.’ She nodded, looking at the winking lights on her console. ‘If you don’t want a cab…’
‘Sorry.’ But he held his ground, remembering his motto – there’s always time for one more question.
‘There was a death in the village in those last months, a baby. I don’t expect you remember?’
She dealt with the winking lights, confirming children dropped off at home, directing cabs to pick up those coming off the afternoon shift, and those coming in.
‘Of course I remember. Do you think there’s anything else to talk about in a place like Jude’s Ferry? But then it was our business in a way, our community. And it’s not your business, is it, Mr Dryden?’
The room was silent then and Dryden thought that there was nothing that caught a sense of not going anywhere more precisely than a taxi office. Everything moved, but nothing changed.
