‘Mrs Cobley,’ Dryden looked down, reluctant to turn the knife, guessing that Sam Cobley had never been reconciled to his son’s sexuality. ‘I don’t believe the police took your word for the fact Paul’s still alive. Perhaps your husband knows where he is… I could wait?’ He turned his back and looked out over the sunlit fen.
She took her time making a cup of tea without offering him one. Dryden took a seat opposite the counter and watched her setting down her cup and then opening the office’s one battered filing cabinet. She retrieved a cheap plastic wallet and put the picture within, a coloured snapshot, on the counter. Dryden stood and touched it, setting it straight; a man leaning on a gate with a pair of cottages in the background – the kind of isolated semis they built all over the fens in the fifties for tenant workers. It was Paul Cobley, mid-thirties perhaps, a red setter at his heels, the hair still extravagant.
‘Sam doesn’t know. He stayed local for me, you see, so I can pop over when Sam’s fishing or on a long trip. That’s helped me forgive him.’ Her eyes moved to the window where the sugar beet factory was belching white smoke into the evening sky. ‘But Sam doesn’t know and I’d ask you to keep it that way,’ she said, lighting up another Silk Cut.
‘Sure,’ said Dryden, studying the picture. ‘I only want a word.’
‘I’ll ask, but there’s no promises. Leave your number. I’d like you to go now, I don’t want this opened up again. So go. Please.’
Dryden nodded, studying the picture one last time. The house had been modernized with PVC windows and a conservatory latched on the side, but its twin next door was dilapidated and a For Sale sign had been nailed across the front door. Dryden noted the name of the estate agent: Foster & Co., Land Agents.
‘Did he have much to tell the police?’ asked Dryden, pushing the snapshot over the counter.
‘He was there that last night – in the New Ferry Inn.’
The radio crackled and Sam said he was on his way home.
Dryden took his last chance. ‘This was a lynching – they turned on someone, didn’t they, Mrs Cobley. Why would they do that?’
She looked at him then, the small dark eyes set deeply in the flesh. ‘Paul wouldn’t do that. He knows what it’s like to be a victim.’
Dryden noted the present tense. ‘The landlord, Ken Woodruffe, says there was a brawl, about money apparently. The Smith twins?’
She laughed. ‘Mark was a nasty bit of work.’
‘And Matthew?’
She shrugged, her eyes watching the road outside for signs of her husband’s return. ‘Gentler, smarter. They might have been identical to look at but in here…’ She tapped a finger to her temple. ‘Chalk and cheese.’
‘And your son saw them fight?’
She shook her head. ‘No, that was later. He got home about eleven, I was still up in case we got any calls.’
‘Right. So Paul got home and then what?’
‘We broke open a bottle of whisky. His dad was already in bed. Took it out in the garden and toasted the old place. By midnight we were all in bed. Dead to the world.’
Dryden said goodbye, knowing that wasn’t the only lie she’d told.
23
By the time they reached Ten Mile Bank the moon was up, reflected in the broad sweep of the river as it turned north towards the sea. A swan flew upstream, black against the silver of the water. Humph parked up beneath the high bank next to the church, killing the lights. A cypress tree obscured the church clock but Dryden’s watch read 9.30pm. A flood bank ran across the fen from beside the graveyard carrying the village’s only street, two lines of houses clinging to the high ground. Three street lights out of a dozen were working, and somewhere a dog barked as the first stars appeared low to the east.
Dryden got out quickly before fear paralysed his legs as well as his brain. He cursed Shaw and the deal he’d struck, but knew now there was no way of going back which didn’t brand him a coward. Standing by the Capri in the gloom he knew he was being watched, but by whom? The DI and his team should be in place, a surveillance boat on the river, and the helicopter standing by upstream. But who else was lost in the night? Would they meet him on the bridge or did they suspect a trap and have other plans?
In the dyke below, the mist was beginning to form, a weaving white sheet of vapour spilling out to claw at the cab’s tyres. Dryden walloped the car roof. ‘Right. If I’m not back in twenty minutes ring Shaw on the number I gave you. If you feel like it you can come looking for me as well…’
He set off up the bank and stopped at the top to look upriver. Two pleasure boats were moored on the far side, smoke snaking up from the stovepipe of one. Downriver, half a mile into the growing dusk, he could see the ugly iron girders of the bridge. Again, he started walking briskly before he could lose his nerve, trying not to imagine the face, edged in the balaclava, waiting in the shadows.
Thieves Bridge had been built by the army in the Second World War to help get food out of the fen fields and down to London quickly. It was a giant piece of Meccano, crossing the Ouse in a single span, held together with rivets and rust. Traffic was single track, with priority to the east, but most nights nothing crossed it, for now the route was faster using bridges to the north.
When he reached it Dryden climbed up to the road and looked east, then west. Nothing moved on the arrow- straight tarmac, which stretched out of sight like a runway. Dryden saw a holdall lying on the raised footpath which took pedestrians over the water, so he walked towards it, painfully aware of the sharp tap of his footsteps in the night.
The voice, when it came, was above him. ‘You don’t need to check it.’
He’d climbed up one of the girders and was sitting in the superstructure, ten feet off the ground, his back
