As they left the city lights behind darkness swept over the flatlands as if a switch had been thrown. Lights dotted the distant Fen roads, some in ribbons marking the flow of traffic, others cottages and farms. Christmas had brought a now familiar outbreak of the kind of kitsch decoration beloved of smalltown America. As they slipped north they passed a farmhouse topped off with an illuminated Santa and sleigh, complete with two reindeer alternately lit red and green. A mile further on a roadside cottage was beaded with Christmas lights which flashed and appeared to shuffle in an electronic dance. To the east a Christmas tree winked on top of a grain silo half a county away.
After five minutes they spotted Sley’s lights ahead, ploughing on, always in sight along the arrow-straight road.
Dryden rubbed his hand across the windscreen to clear the view and Humph flicked the windscreen wipers. When the glass cleared Sley’s car had gone, the road stretching out before them as empty as a runway, the central row of cats’ eyes as bright as the stars. Humph trundled the Capri up the roadside bank, Dryden got out, slammed the door to cut out the vanity light, and let his eyes acclimatize. At the foot of the dyke a drain ten feet wide was an ice mirror, reflecting the moon rising behind the distant outline of the sugar-beet factory. Looking back he could see Ely, and as he watched the cathedral floodlights came on, picking out the silver leaded lantern tower. On the opposite side of the road was uninterrupted darkness: the next light going east probably a distant village outside Moscow.
He walked twenty yards along the bank and surveyed the scene again. The dyke’s waters were still an unruffled silver to the west, but the darkness to the east had been dispelled by a farmhouse, now glimpsed between high poplars which must have shielded it from Dryden’s original vantage point. It looked welcoming: lights burnt in the four Georgian windows which faced the road, a Christmas tree in one. As he watched a security light came on, followed by another, and he saw Sley’s 4x4 sliding between the trees and round to the rear of the house.
He ran back to the cab where Humph had wound down his window. ‘Wait here. If I’m not back in an hour get Interpol and a helicopter.’
Humph grunted, wound the window up, and closed his eyes.
Dryden walked down the centre of the road in the Capri’s headlights until he was level with the farm track. As he walked away from the main road and the comforting lights of the cab he was aware for the first time that the temperature had dropped further – into unknown territory. Pressing a finger to his cheek he felt the skin, hard and numb, and a dull pain had begun to grip his throat. The farmland around him was open and featureless under the moon, except for a single magnolia, unseen from the road, bent over an oval of starlit pond. Soon he was amongst the poplars skirting the house, and he could see the 4x4 parked amongst farm buildings to the rear. By a security light Dryden could see Sley on his back on the trolley again, retrieving whatever he’d stashed beneath the car.
This was the moment Dryden always dreaded: the tipping point between his life as an objective recorder and the less familiar role of active participant. Life for him often seemed to be something to watch. But now he knew he would learn nothing more unless he took an active role himself. The thought made his guts twist.
He was within six feet of the 4x4 when the sound of his footfalls alerted Sley to his presence.
‘Joe?’ said the voice under the car, untroubled.
‘Don’t think so,’ said Dryden, dropping down on his haunches.
Sley slid out without a smile, turning an oily rag in his hands like a garrotte.
Dryden, aware he might have made an error of heroic proportions, glanced back at the main road where he feared Humph would now be sleeping soundly. He regretted the Interpol joke, like almost all his jokes.
‘Sorry. It’s me again. We were passing and I saw your 4x4. I’ve seen it before.’
He’d said it quickly, crossing the line before he had a chance to retreat. Sley stood, one huge hand holding a metal box retrieved from under the chassis, which he folded into a green baize cloth he held in the other. Dryden was struck by the odd contrast, between the bony mass of the man’s hands and the deft, almost delicate, precision of the fingers. Silence was clearly a medium he was happy with so Dryden carried on. ‘On police CCTV. Someone’s been peddling cannabis to the kids. How’s the dog?’ he asked, nodding at the meshed interior of the rear of the vehicle.
‘Hungry,’ said Sley, glancing at the house still lit up in the darkness. The lights on the Christmas tree in the window seemed to tremble. ‘Look…’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I’ve got no idea what this is about…’
But Dryden knew he was lying. He’d have thrown him out if this didn’t make sense.
‘You grow it in the long shed at the allotments. Force it, I guess – then plant it out in the summer? That’d be it. I saw the red light – that’s sodium. And the blue? Mercury-iodide. There was case up in crown court last year. Very sophisticated. I’m just kinda interested in why, that’s all. To kids. How much you make?’
Sley twisted the cloth again. ‘Look, I’ve got to get on…’
Dryden turned again and with relief saw that Humph was out of the cab, standing in the headlights firing the tennis machine ball down the deserted lane for Boudicca to fetch.
‘That’s my oppo. He knows why I’m here. The police have the film, and we know where the stuff was grown. If you’re planning on bluffing I think that’s a big mistake.’
Sley opened one of his huge hands and revealed the metal box. ‘I need to get this to Joe.’
‘Joe,’ said Dryden. ‘Declan’s mate, right? Another customer? A bit mature for your market, surely, he must be fifty if he’s a day.’
Sley stepped a foot closer. ‘He’s forty-one. But he won’t make forty-two. Cancer – larynx. You should hear him talk.’
Dryden shrugged. ‘I was looking forward to it. Marcie said she’d pass on my number. But no go, eh?’
‘We left messages,’ said Sley. ‘But the illness is bad right now.’
‘What’s that to me?’ asked Dryden, sensing that he’d been expertly hooked into the trap of empathy.
‘That’s why we grew the cannabis,’ he said, getting out a packet of Marlboro and lighting one up. The ash at the end, after the first deep draw, was the same colour as his hair.
‘Joe started it on the allotment, when he knew the pain was coming. But the supply never stretched through that first winter. That really scared him, and he was too ill to plant again in spring, and he’d bought this place. So I took over the shed: it’s not difficult stuff to grow if you get the gear, and there’s guides on the net. He needs the supply, he needs to know it’s there. This year was good – you know, the wet spring, the clear summer. There’s a surplus so… it got sold.’
He slammed the door of the 4x4 and the echo ran round the Fen, bouncing back off a brick-built pumping station half a mile to the east. A dog barked four times, rhythmically, and was quiet.
‘Why don’t you come with me?’ said Sley, walking off towards the house. ‘Meet the customer.’
Dryden had sat through too many gloomy inquests on the bleak deaths of lonely drug addicts to see anything in Sley’s crime but callous greed. But he hesitated now, knowing that to meet the dying Joe would complicate the simple balance of good against evil. Could he leave the cancer victim out of the equation? And other questions remained: had reliving his time at St Vincent’s orphanage really driven Declan McIlroy to self-destruction? Was he part of the criminal circle which had grown and peddled the dope? Had he, perhaps, encroached on a market where someone else had enjoyed a monopoly? And why hadn’t Declan eased his own pain, and his final hours, with a home-grown joint? Dryden had wanted to talk to Joe all along, and now he had the chance. He, better than anyone, would know if his friend had any enemies who might have shortened his brutal life.