When I have answers I can die. I’ve remembered too much to think about a life now. So I won’t see you again, and now, at the end of my life, that’s the saddest thing.
I’m going to bury my son.
Jason
‘There is someone I have to see before I die,’ said Dryden. ‘Because there are two questions now. Why did he kill her, and why did he take Jude’s bones away?’
Dryden thought of the body hanging on the wire. Had Jason Imber taken his questions to Neate’s garage?
He rang Humph and met him on Market Street. The cabbie was half out of the car, sweat in wide wet horseshoes under his arms. ‘There’s something up at the unit – when I dropped Laura at the doors there were coppers everywhere. Security bloke says one of the patients has done a hop from a ground-floor room. Police are all over it like a horse blanket.’
Driving north out of the city Dryden could see a loose cordon of three policemen making their way across a field of lettuce towards the woodlands which skirted the bypass. Humph dropped Dryden on the main road by the gates to the unit and the reporter cut across the grounds through a boundary marked by leylandii. At reception he saw a squad car on the forecourt and a PC at the automatic doors.
Desmond Samjee was out in the hospital garden with a patient in a wheelchair, the swaddled figure hardly visible in a nest of blankets.
‘I thought he was under police guard?’
Desmond fished in his pockets and began to assemble a roll-up. ‘How’d you know it was Imber?’
‘I didn’t,’ said Dryden, smiling. ‘But it’s a bloody good guess, right? You don’t get this kind of operation if someone discharges themselves. Imber wasn’t meant to walk away from police protection. He was scared to death someone was after him. If they’d guessed he might do a runner they’d have had him in custody for an interview at least. He knows a lot more about that last night in Jude’s Ferry than he’s telling. So – how’d he get out?’
‘Call of nature for the woman PC. She asked a nurse to keep an eye on him but she got distracted and our friend took his chance.’
‘And they couldn’t catch a man in pyjamas doing a runner across a floodlit car park?’
‘It was midnight, and he had a car outside, plus one small technicality I guess – he wasn’t under arrest. It was all supposed to be for his protection.’
‘A car?’ said Dryden. ‘What, waiting?’
‘No, no. His wife dropped off a people carrier the day before. The doctors told her to bring in his CD collection as it might jog the memory banks – he told her he wanted to listen in the car and chill out. She says she believed him, but she didn’t mention it to the PC. So he had the keys, and he grabbed some clothes from a locker in the orderlies’ room. Left his mobile by the bed. By the time they realized he’d got out through the window he was on the road – one of the nurses arriving for the shift saw him turning north on the A10. He could be anywhere.’
Desmond’s face radiated his pleasure at the misfortunes of the Establishment. ‘Perhaps he’s gone home.’
Dryden thought about the automatic gates to Imber’s house at Upwell. ‘Maybe. But I’m not sure he knows where that is.’
35
Back in the cab Dryden tracked down his mobile under the passenger seat, wrapped in a greasy pork-pie wrapper. Humph said it had rung but he’d given up the search.
‘You’d be amazed at what’s under that seat,’ said the cabbie, sniffing a mini Scotch egg he’d found amongst the debris.
Dryden scrolled down to find he’d got a text message:
MEET TEN POACHERS HIDE WICKEN FEN MATT SMITH
Dryden looked at the name long and hard. Matthew Smith, the missing brother and Paul Cobley’s partner. The police had used the media to try to find him, including
He handed the phone to Humph, who read the message, nodded, and fired up the Capri.
They drove silently in the soft summer rain, the horizon never more than a sodden field away. Pickers out with the salad crops stooped amongst the vivid green heads of broccoli and lettuce.
Dryden hit the return call button on the mobile but got transferred to voicemail. He cut himself off and sent a text instead: WHY?
Wicken was a last precious corner of the old fenland, a maze of pools and rivers hidden in a wilderness of briar and reeds, the water mottled by surfacing fish and side-winding grass snakes. The National Trust had a lodge at the entrance, a bitumen black wooden teepee surrounded by a verandah. An elderly couple weighed down with binoculars and packs were setting out down one of the duckboarded pathways as they arrived but otherwise the fen was quiet: the small car park empty and the cafe closed. The dense fine rain had reduced the landscape to the ghosts of trees and reeds, and a single windmill. Dryden thought about ringing Shaw and telling him about the message, filling him in on the whereabouts of Matthew Smith. But what was the point before he found out what Smith wanted to say?
Dryden paid for a ticket at the counter and found a map mounted on a board showing the paths through the reserve. Poacher’s Hide was the most distant of the many which dotted the winding waterways, a single cabin overlooking a wide lake marked as the habitat of migrating swans. Access was by the duckboard walkways maintained by the Trust, although there were plenty of other ways into the reserve for those who knew the lie of the land. Dryden trudged out into the fen, the visibility falling as he moved deeper into a world dominated by water. Twenty minutes later he was at the hide, deftly hidden in a thicket of thorns on the edge of the lake.
He paused for a few seconds, wondering if there was any danger, aware that he’d made himself come this far
