She laughed, her eyes dancing around the room, and Dryden tried not to think what it took to keep a sense of humour alive for a decade in a place like the Esplanade. He could hear the printer still clattering in the back office. ‘Did you meet Kenneth too – her son?’ asked Dryden
‘He more or less ran the pub, didn’t he?’ Dryden nodded. ‘Never. She didn’t want to see him. She always said that he’d let her down very badly. That he’d promised she’d never come to a place like this, that she’d never leave her home, that she could die in her own bed. But people break promises when you’re old – that’s something you’ll discover for yourself.’
McNally came back in the room with a plastic folder, his irritation at the intrusion palpable.
Joyce Cummings put a finger to her lips, smiled beautifully at the doctor and fled.
30
By the time they got to the edge of the Fens night had fallen and a full moon was climbing into the sky behind the distant cathedral tower. They stopped for tea at a mobile cafe in a lay-by. Humph swung his door open to take in the night air, but Dryden sat on a plastic chair set up on the verge, watching the car lights strung out across the landscape. The tea was acrid and stewed, the taste further marred by the stringent smell of exhaust gas in the air.
He thought about St Swithun’s, its tower silhouetted against the setting sun that last night. In the New Ferry Inn the free beer was flowing, while in the nave of the church Kathryn Neate struggled with her grief. And George Tudor, leaving home in St Swithun’s Cottages below the allotments, climbing the hill to take his place beside the child’s grave. He was Kathryn’s cousin after all, nobody could have disputed his right to be at Jude’s funeral. But why had he not been there at the start? Why the theatrical entry, the pointed solidarity?
What had really happened when they all got back to Neate’s Garage? Had they turned on George Tudor then and made him pay with his life for giving Kathryn a son? But the scene Fred Lake had described in the Neates’ kitchen that evening didn’t sound like the prelude to murder. Something else had happened to prompt the killing and he needed a clear view of that evening from outside the family ring to see what it was.
He walked to the cab and got the OS map for the eastern fens, tracking a route across country to Sedge Fen and Paul Cobley’s cottage. Fortified by a double hot dog, Humph agreed to the diversion, leaving the main road at Mildenhall and skirting the floodlit runways of the US base before the cab emerged into open country beyond, the distant lights of cottages and farmhouses studding the night, lightless now that the moon had risen to be obscured by rain clouds.
Sedge Fen was a hamlet flung across both banks of the Little Ouse. At its heart was a now abandoned industrial site, a miniature Manhattan of silos and storage warehouses which had once provided grain, potatoes and salad crops for the London market. A grubbed-up railway line ran across the open fields. A signpost directed Humph to Sedge Fen Methodist Church, a wooden ark next to a modern bungalow from which light flooded out onto a large American car. Dryden knocked and a woman with perfect teeth and big hair knew the way. ‘End of the lane, turn right – ’bout a mile. There’s just two cottages. They’re in the one with the new windows. They’ve got a flashy BMW, and a van, but we’ve seen neither for a week. They go on holiday a lot – for the tan. You a friend?’ she asked, and Dryden, who didn’t bother to answer, could see that she was trying to stop the smile turning into a sneer.
The drove ended at the cottages: the deadest of dead ends. The houses stood in darkness but as Dryden got out of the cab the downstairs lights in one came on. He walked up the short drive, stamping on the gravel, trying to flush out any dogs, but nothing moved. The lights were on in the modernized house so he went to the door and knocked loudly, listening to the echo bounce back off a brick barn half a mile away. A dog barked then, but to the north, where a security light lit the foot of a pylon.
He stepped to the side and looked in at the front room. The overhead light was on and so was the TV, although the sound was down. He worked his way down the side of the house through a gate to the kitchen door. Inside he could hear a radio playing and the light over the hob was on.
There was a custom-built wooden studio in the garden, beside the double garage, and through the window Dryden could see two computer work stations with flat screens big enough for design and make-up. The lights, which had been on, flicked off. On the door was a company logo and sign: DesignSolutions.
The studio lights flicked back on. ‘Time switches,’ said Dryden, and went back to the car. ‘Looks like they’re away, like the woman said,’ he told Humph as the cab trundled a three-point turn. Dryden watched the lights in the rear-view mirror, so that he almost missed the post box a hundred yards down the lane where there was a lay-by for the van to park up.
‘Hold on,’ he jumped out and flipped up the unlocked cover to reveal a bundle of letters which he took back to the cab and examined by the vanity light.
‘That’s nice,’ said Humph. ‘And you reckon estate agents have no moral compass?’
There were some utility bills marked for Mr P. R. Cobley and Mr M. James, and what felt like some brochures and freesheets for the ‘occupiers’. But there was one package, in a jiffy bag, marked for Cobley & James and stamped PHOTO POST.
‘Look the other way,’ he said to Humph, and ripped it open. It was a set of holiday snaps, Dryden guessed Greece. Paul Cobley was in most, pictured in cafes, bars and neck deep in a blue pool. But there was one of them both, slightly off-kilter so Dryden guessed it had been taken with a timer, kneeling in the sand. Dryden recognized Cobley’s partner immediately and there were several things he didn’t know about him: he didn’t know what he’d been doing with his life for the seventeen years since he’d left Jude’s Ferry, he didn’t know how he’d earned his living, he didn’t know how many times he’d been in love. But he knew one thing. He had a twin brother.
31
They saw the fairy lights on the pub as soon as they turned off the main road half an hour later – shuffling white and red bulbs neatly outlining the building. But the car park was nearly empty now that darkness had driven the evening trade home, or back to the boats. When Humph killed the engine they could hear a party somewhere out on the water amongst the floating gin palaces, the clash of glasses punctuated by overloud voices.
Dryden left Humph enjoying a nightcap from the glove compartment and found Woodruffe in the bar reading the
Dryden looked around. There were half a dozen customers at one table and two teenagers at the bar talking
