Read Online Nightrise by Jim Kelly - Free Book Online Page B

horses – she heard the thudding hooves but saw nothing amongst the half-lit scrubland. The train disappeared into the mist as if plunging into a tunnel.
    Crossing under the railway down a dripping pedestrian passageway she emerged in a meadow and climbed the bank. The sky was lighter here and she thought there’d be blue sky by six. Ahead she could see the gibbet by the railway. Vee had always thought it took a dark imagination to call it that, but not this morning. She could imagine a body dangling from the single arm. This gibbet had been put up for the post bag, to be ripped from its hook by the speeding mail train. She’d seen a picture in the sorting office from the fifties with a post bag swinging, waiting for the train. It stood now only because no one could be bothered to take it down.
    A hundred yards further on the path joined the road and a sign said:
    HIGHFLYER DEPOT
    The sorting office was brick-built with a playful tower, mullioned windows and an arch leading into a hidden yard. The mainline ran down one side of the sorting shed, the branch line, which allowed for deliveries to the depot’s own platform, encircled the site in a huge loop the shape of a noose. North, unseen, Vee heard the clanging alarm signals from a level crossing. The Fens was the land of level crossings – hundreds of them, operated remotely, beside abandoned signalmen’s cottages. She always thought it made the place seem more secretive, as if you could only enter through a series of checkpoints.
    There was a postman behind the glass in reception who heaved up a small sack before she could say good morning. ‘Sheila wants a word,’ he said. ‘You can go up.’
    He flipped up the counter. Vee took the sack which seemed unusually heavy and pushed her way through plastic-sheet double doors into the sorting office. The interior of the building was a Victorian throwback to match the facade. About twenty men stood at a series of wooden frames, each divided into pigeon holes. In a wooden chute letters piled up as they sorted them into the different ‘walks’ – the postmen’s rounds, marked on the pigeon holes with their own tag: High Street West, Dunkirk, Bishops, Riverside, Caudle Fen. Another sorter took the letters from the pigeon holes and added them to mail bags hanging in a metal frame. A radio played the local commercial station.
    Vee liked the room, which exuded the almost hypnotic aroma of authentic industry: machine oil, rubber and wood. The floor was worn parquet, the frames oak, the wooden chutes in old pine. The pigeon holes were marked in an exquisite gold copperplate. Vee knew that the post office had installed the latest technology – Optical Character Recognition – down at Cambridge, but that the low volumes they took through Ely meant it was pretty much better to do it by hand like they’d always done. There’d been a plan to mechanize back in the 1990s but that had been shelved in one of the perennial rounds of cuts. As Vee worked her way down the back of the sorting booths she passed an office, cut off by wire grilles, two men inside at desks, sorting registered mail.
    An open metal staircase took her up to a mezzanine floor – a series of offices opening off an overseer’s balcony. Sheila Petit’s was the last in the row. She was one of several managers who shifted paper and monitored performance.
    The sign on the door said: District Inspector – Eastern Fens.
    The room was brutally functional except for a large framed aerial photograph of a set of farm buildings around a house on an open fen and a page of the
Cambridge Evening News
showing Petit toasting victory after the last district council elections.
Councillor
Petit was nominally an Independent, accepting the Tory Party whip. Unlike most independents she wasn’t just a Tory in sheep’s clothing. Vee had sat on the reporter’s bench at enough meetings to know she was her