‘Looks like he fell in here,’ said Dryden to Humph, edging towards the gap in the safety rail. ‘Hard to believe he got caught by a boat – unless it was night time. Surely you’d see him, or hear him. Mind you, half the skippers on the white ships are pissed by ten.’ Dryden thought about it – the drifting gin palaces tinkling with wine bottles.
Humph took a step towards the edge and they both felt the planks twist under their feet. ‘He might have hit those,’ said the cabbie, pointing down. Directly below the missing safety rail the bridge’s central support was buttressed with timbers. ‘That would have knocked him out; he could have drifted into the slipstream and then…’ He used one hand like a cleaver to cut down on the fingers of the other.
They walked over towards the ambulance and stood a respectful distance away as they slid the stretcher on board. The victim’s hair was black, cut stylishly short at the back, the jawline military-straight, hinting at a good diet and inherited wealth, a solid build without being athletic, and despite the pallor – a tan which hadn’t come out of a bottle. His clothes were casual but expensive – an olive-green linen shirt, moleskin trousers and one remaining brown leather shoe. Dryden could see a watch and what looked like the trailing lead of a mobile phone’s handsfree set entangled with the arm. The sock on the shoeless foot hung loose, the exposed skin ribbed from the long immersion in the river water. He looked away, disturbed by the intimacy and vulnerability of a semi-naked foot.
The stretcher was half-way in when he turned his head towards them, and as the sun broke through the clouds Dryden glimpsed the eyes: pale green against the skin, and in the blast of light he was sure that, while water trickled down from the hairline, tears fell as well. As they slid him into the rear of the ambulance the man grabbed one of the paramedics by his fluorescent jacket and Dryden heard him choke and then the voice, forced out, ragged with stress.
‘Don’t leave me alone.’
Dryden waited for them to go, light blinking silently, before approaching the diving team, who stood now in a circle inhaling ritual cigarettes. The Express’s last edition was long gone so there was no need to push for more information, a luxury which ironically made his job that much easier. Boudicca padded up with him and lay at his feet like a croissant.
Two of the divers were sharing a cigarette, their wetsuits unzipped to the waist and turned back and out of the arms, revealing pallid white muscle and damp hair. One was tall, his long arms painfully pale and hairless, the other squat and tanned, with black curly hair over much of his torso. The support team were smoking too, diligently checking equipment as they repacked it into the unit van. Dryden felt excluded from this aggressively male club and fiddled ineffectually with the top button of his white shirt.
The sudden sunlight had transformed the landscape and revealed a wide sky of chef’s-hat clouds. ‘You boys got here quick,’ said Dryden, making sure they saw him pocket his notebook. ‘We got some pix, so if you want copies shout.’
‘Eel catcher spotted him,’ said the tall diver, speaking expertly while holding the cigarette between his jaws. Ely still boasted a council waterman, and Dryden had often seen him moving stealthily on the river at dawn by Barham’s Dock in a low-sided fowlers’ punt.
‘How long you reckon he’s been in there?’ said Dryden, waving as Mitch drove off.
The tanned diver shrugged, squeezing water from his hair. ‘With a bit of luck, just overnight. There’s some hypothermia, any longer than that and he may have trouble recovering. Plus there’s a bump on the head – it’s a three-inch gash and it’ll need stitches. Guess he tumbled in off the bridge. We’re gonna close it, by the way, at least until they repair and strengthen the rails. It’s in a pretty dangerous state.’
‘Nobody noticed the broken handrail then? Not yesterday, not this morning?’
A shrug again. ‘It’s a lonely spot.’
They tried to turn away, cutting short the interview, but Dryden took a half step in. ‘Did he say much? He looked upset – distraught really. Does he remember what happened? Think he jumped?’
An exchange of glances: ‘We don’t want to see any quotes in the paper, OK?’ said the tall one. Dryden nodded. ‘At the moment he can’t remember his own name.’
Dryden thought about that. ‘Amnesia? Believe him?’
They both nodded, but it was the tanned one, squatting down now to remove his leggings who added: ‘Sure. Mostly. But he must remember something because that’s not just pain in his eyes. He’s terrified of something.’ They turned then to go. ‘Or he’s terrified of someone. Nightmare is he can’t remember who.’
11
Dryden checked with the news desk that the paper had gone and then walked back into town in the sun, tourists beginning to appear as he walked the towpath south. The Isle of Ely rose up from the fens ahead, the cathedral trailing a pennant of low cloud, all that remained of the morning’s leaden sky.
He wondered what it was like not to have a memory. A blessing, perhaps. Laura’s coma had been marked by a complete absence of any recall of their accident. The hours spent trapped in the lightless car beneath the winter water was literally a black box; a memory too terrifying to allow a replay. His wife’s recovery had been marked by many advances. But not a single shaft of light had fallen into that lost world.
Ely, bathed in sunshine now, had come to life. In Market Square he spotted that one newspaper vendor was already on his pitch. The Express and The Crow were printed a mile out of town, and the editor had recently introduced an early print run for both in order to catch sales before the shops closed. The seller was a man known as Skeg, thirty perhaps, his face punctured with a single cheek stud, the hair cut savagely short, emphasizing a small triangle of dyed red stubble below his lip, but above his chin. Skeg’s job was on the bottom rung of the employment ladder, a career normally reserved for a band of outcasts.
Dryden had to admit that Skeg was not quite so easy to pigeonhole. He lived on one of the dilapidated river boats which took up cheap moorings in the town’s clay pits, and he’d come across him several times working at Wicken Fen nature reserve, clearing weed from the waterways, tagging and counting birds. And always, at his heels, the half-drowned short-haired terrier, tugged along on a blue rope. Sometimes Skeg would disappear from his pitch for months, trying another job, but he always reappeared.
Dryden bought a paper, even though he could have waited and got a free one back at the office, and flicking it open at the fold enjoyed the sight of his double front-page bylines. The thrill, even after twenty years on newspapers, was palpable.
Skeg had sensed the inner smile: ‘Done all right then,’ he said, and Dryden remembered instantly why he didn’t like him as much as he normally liked outcasts. There was sarcasm beneath the conviviality, and something cruel about the eyes. At his feet the dog lay curled, ribs showing. Skeg had his own copy open to the feature on Jude’s Ferry, and the picture Dryden had taken inside St Swithun’s, the now shattered crusader’s tomb beside an inset of what it had looked like before the wayward shelling.
‘Yeah,’ said Dryden. ‘Decent day’s work.’
Skeg took his pound coin and rummaged for the change in a wooden tray. The dog edged forward to snuffle at Dryden’s feet and he felt the first wave of panic as it bared its teeth. He drew in breath, fighting the impulses which were coursing through his nervous system.