The Water Clock

Friday, 2nd November

4

Dryden had slept badly on PK 122, his floating home since Laura’s accident. He’d concocted a nightmare of which he could remember only a single image: butchered meat hanging from the branches of the monkey-puzzle tree in the gardens of the Tower. The unremembered climax had brought forth a short audible yell just after dawn: he had heard the echo, and then the frightened chattering of the ducks on the ice. It was a rare nightmare, free of the suffocating presence of water – an elemental fear as much a part of his life as his fascination with water, a dynamic irony which he knew was very likely to kill him.

PK 122, a superannuated 1930s naval inshore patrol boat, was moored at Barham’s Dock, an old channel off the River Great Ouse about a mile south of the quayside at Ely. The dock was now no more than an overgrown ditch with just enough water at its mouth to moor the boat out of the mainstream. Underneath the long grass and bulrushes was an old timber quay, once used to load barges with vegetables and salad crops direct from the peat fields for the railhead at Ely and the London markets.

In a lonely landscape it was the loneliest of spots. Below the bank the boat was, effectively, lost to the outside world. Dryden’s mobile phone was the only link – except for the occasional passing pleasure boat on the main river, or dedicated hikers trying the towpath route seventeen miles south to Cambridge.

The crash that had put Laura into a coma had undone so many things they had planned together that he was determined to live a temporary life, with as little material luggage as possible. Most of their savings remained untouched, but three months after the crash he’d withdrawn £15,000 of the money he’d got for their flat to buy PK 122 and have her refurbished in the town boatyard.

He’d taken six weeks’ leave from the News, although they’d made it plain their good nature would stretch no further. The Crow had offered him a job after a few casual shifts he’d taken to fill up the time. He soon realized that the freedom of working for a weekly would allow him to visit Laura each day at the Tower, where she had been transferred immediately after the crash. The alternative had been to move her to a London clinic while taking his chances on the News with a newsdesk unlikely to listen sympathetically to requests for regular days off.

His mother died that first winter, having never fully recovered from the shock of the accident at Harrimere Drain. Then he rented out the new house and channelled the cash into an account for Laura. The News offered him terms to go quickly and he took them. Perhaps, somewhere, there was a hint of relief. Ten years as a reporter had sapped his enthusiasm even if his inquisitiveness remained undimmed. The Crow gave him a full-time job as senior reporter. He felt idiotically satisfied when he saw his first by-line.

PK 122 had spent most of her working life at Weymouth patrolling the naval harbour. She was steel, aluminium grey, and fitted out to weather a typhoon. The powerful single Merlin engine was new and mighty. On her polished wooden instrument panel a small silver plaque said simply: DUNKIRK. 1940. It was a romantic touch he could not resist. From the mahogany-panelled cockpit a hatchway gave into a naval wardroom from which a corridor ran to the prow, giving access to the galley, two toilets and a double shower he’d had put in to replace a tackle room. The cabin had six berths. Dryden had paid for her to be sealed against the damp and fitted with Calor gas heating. The contents of their London flat had been placed in long-term storage but he salvaged their books and filled the wardroom’s fitted shelves: a reaffirmation that they had, at least, a shared past. An oil-fired generator provided lights and powered the galley. On deck PK 122 boasted the latest in wind-powered generators, a nod to Dryden’s sometimes shaky environmental credentials. It cut in over the boat’s usual power supply when the wind speeds were high enough – which this far out on the fen was for most of the winter, and an uncomfortable chunk of the summer as well.

Their car, a write-off anyway, had been sold for scrap after the crash in Harrimere Drain. Since the night of the accident he had never driven and still rode in cars with at least one window slightly open in all weathers, and never in the back seat, even in a four-door. Running PK 122 was cheap. He used his wages from The Crow to outsource his transport needs to Humph.

Each morning the cabbie parked up about a hundred yards from the dock on the drove road which led to Barham Farm, where Dryden bought milk and eggs every week and paid his monthly £8 mooring fee. Humph, a delicate cook, rustled up fried egg sandwiches at home and brought them along. Dryden’s contribution was two cups of bitumen-strong coffee.

The nightmare had upset Dryden’s routine. He sloshed what was left of his third mug of coffee out over the ice and jumped back on board to get his overcoat and two fresh refills. He bristled as he heard Humph honk from the cab.

Dryden disliked anger and felt it was a defeat for self-Control. But Humph’s duties as an alarm clock were taken just a little too seriously – especially for someone who spent most of his time at work asleep.

But Dryden couldn’t argue with the service: as a cut-price chauffeur Humph was difficult to beat. The bills were presented weekly and bore all the hallmarks of fiction. Too low by a factor of ten, Humph refused to amend them repeating, mantra-like, that ‘he’d been going that way anyway’. Dryden had secured £40 a week from The Crow as standard expenses when he’d signed up and he made sure all of it got to Humph in one way or another – either as fares, shared meals, books, tapes, cigarettes, or, his other real vice, the occasional miniature bottle of spirits. The Capri’s glove compartment looked like an off-licence in toyland.

‘Freezing,’ said Dryden, unnecessarily, getting into the car and handing over the coffee in return for a fried egg sandwich.

Dryden straightened his legs out in the cab and knocked his head on the roof, prompting another surge of early morning irritation.

‘You could walk down and call me up, you know – the horn isn’t compulsory. Fresh air doesn’t kill.’

Humph retaliated by saying ‘good morning’ in Catalan and pressed the pause button on the cab’s tape deck. A silky voice repeated the phrase with almost identical pronunciation. Humph asked – again in Catalan – how Dryden had slept. He pressed the pause button again and the silky voice repeated the phrase.

‘Very impressive. Get a lot of Catalan speakers on the school run?’

Humph glugged coffee. The cabbie’s head, like his feet and hands, was completely out of scale with his duvet-sized torso. His face was child-like, his eyes a cornflower blue. For someone who never actually went outside he showed an enormous interest in the weather. ‘Minus 0.5 C and steady,’ he said.

The cab, expelling carbon monoxide in a black drift from the exhaust pipe, clattered along the drove road and out on to the A10. The hangover from his drinking binge the night before had locked Dryden’s brain in neutral. He opened the glove compartment and retrieved his diary. Its contents were largely irrelevant, especially this morning, as the Lark murder was likely to dominate his schedule until the next deadline on Monday. Four days. He suppressed the frustration and tried not to think about what he’d be doing if he was still on the News. With just two senior reporters The Crow demanded the talents of a jack of all trades, and certainly didn’t offer the luxury of covering one story a week, however sensational.

He hated Fridays anyway. Too much time to think. Too many grim diary jobs that he thought he’d left behind on his first weekly paper a decade earlier. Flower shows, WI meetings and, worst of all, the golden weddings. And the complaints – the day after press day was plagued by serial whingers who’d spotted tiny mistakes, and occasional whoppers. Dryden’s particular favourite since joining The Crow had been the week they’d included the death notice of Albert Morris in the ‘Used Cars’ column.

He snapped the diary shut. ‘Golden wedding,’ he said, ‘Jubilee estate. Mr and Mrs William Starr. Must remember to ask them how long they’ve been married.’

Humph grunted: sore subject. They sat in silence. Humph’s divorce had been acrimonious but short. His wife had run off with a plumber from a nearby village who weighed seven stone dripping wet. Part of the allure of cab driving since the separation had been the opportunity he might get to knock the bastard down.

‘Fifty years…’said Dryden, oblivious of his friend’s sensitivities and, for that matter, his own. He didn’t know which was worse – the thought that he would never celebrate his own golden wedding, or the thought that he would.

Nine a.m. News on Radio Littleport. The Mid-Anglian Water Board had issued a short-term warning of heavy snow. Dryden felt happier. News was a great distraction if you didn’t want to think about your own life. And another item: vandals had attacked St John’s Church, Little Ouse. Dryden resisted a memory. His mother was buried in the churchyard there. The stone had been retrieved from the ruin of Burnt Fen Farm.

Mr and Mrs William Starr, the golden wedding couple, lived in a dull house with dull paint on the front door. Dull, thought Dryden, and felt a fresh dollop of treacle trickling over his brain. They seemed surprised when Dryden accepted a sherry at 9.30 in the morning, and even more so when he asked for a refill. He made his escape under cover of the arrival of The Crow’s amiable photographer ‘Mitch’ Mackintosh, a miniature Scotsman with no apparent boredom threshold and an addiction to mindless gossip and fake Tam O’Shanters.

Dryden walked back to the office through a light snow shower having dispatched Humph to a lay-by for a nap. There was light in the sky but even now, in late morning, the day was in a long gloomy decline. The town centre was both brightly lit and dismal: that peculiarly depressing combination which smacks of the approach of Merry Christmas. Outside Woolworth’s a dog on a rope barked constantly at the too-early fairy lights and a small, wailing child was urinating in the gutter.

Dryden sought refuge in the newsroom. On the mat lay a plain brown envelope marked for the attention of Septimus Henry Kew, Editor, and stamped in red stencil lettering: Strictly Confidential. Dryden was rattling the package to his ear and just about deciding it was indeed a video cassette when Henry came up noiselessly behind him. He had a gift for this, an almost supernatural ability to appear at the wrong moment.

Dryden jumped guiltily at the editor’s dry cough.

Henry was tall and desiccated like a human praying mantis. His sex life appeared to be confined to the plain brown envelopes and lifetime membership of the Boy Scout movement. Today, thankfully, he was not in full uniform but the lapels of his tweed jacket bristled with insignia. The staff of The Crow called him ‘Woggle’ – but only behind his thin, straight back.

‘Just checking,’ said Dryden, handing over the envelope. ‘You can’t be too careful.’

Henry indicated by eyebrow semaphore that Dryden could indeed be too careful. But the editor said nothing, a favourite tactic, and an effective one.

Dryden scanned the newsdesk diary, a dog-eared tome which hung from a lavatory chain attached to the news editor’s desk. It was a vital aide memoire even in the age of e-mail. According to the news editor’s juvenile block-letter scrawl Kathy was out for the whole day with the WRVS doing a feature for The Express, the Tuesday freesheet, on looking after the rural elderly. Gary Pymore, the office junior, was in the local magistrates court for the appearance of Richard Churchill Hythe, Ely’s serial peeping tom.

Dryden dropped coins into the office coffee machine and leant his head against the cool steel fascia. Through the syrup he could just recall Liz Barnett, the mayoress, telling him something useful at the civic reception at the Maltings the night before. Something to do with the council and the cathedral repairs. He also made a note to ring the Tower and check on her husband’s condition.

He flipped through his contact book for the home number of Councillor Ben Thomas, the Labour group’s current council leader. He hit an answerphone and swore loudly before the beep. Henry coughed, producing a sound like a death rattle, and retreated behind the glass panel partition of his office.

Dryden left his message in a silky voice and then slammed the phone down, timing a heartfelt expletive to miss the tape. Dryden dealt with the complexities of journalistic morality with simple clarity. Elected officials were fair game, and elected self-important ones were simply asking for it. ‘Bastard,’ he said again, just for the sound of it. Henry coughed from behind the partition.

He tried to run a hand through his thick, jet black hair, where it duly got stuck. What next?

Gary Pymore, fresh from magistrates court, clattered up the stairs. Hearing the junior reporter coming was not difficult, Gary had suffered from meningitis as a child and lost a good part of his ability to balance. This had been treated by fitting his shoes with ‘blakeys’ – small metal plates once designed to preserve shoe leather. The treatment involved smacking his shoes against the ground as he walked and using the sound as a kind of sonic stabilizer. As a result he was, in motion, a human metronome. A metronome with acne.

‘Yours,’ he said, plonking a takeaway cappuccino down by Dryden’s elbow. To be exact it was a Fen cappuccino, and as such unrecognizable as coffee to an Italian.

Gary threw himself into his own chair and put both feet up on the desk. Criminal overconfidence was his tragic flaw, compounded by the illusion that it was the spots. ‘Where’s Woggle?’ he whispered.

Dryden nodded to the partition.

Gary winked – a grown-up trick he had never quiet mastered as he was unable to limit it to one eye. ‘What a fucking corker this is,’ he said, waving his notebook.

Henry was ominously silent.

‘So anyway,’ continued Gary, ‘he’s up this ladder with his trousers down again right…’

Dryden was immediately confused, a common problem with Gary’s copy: ‘Where were his trousers then – at the bottom or the top?’

‘Round his ankles ‘course. Broad daylight… And, according to the prosecuting sergeant he was in a state of…’ and here Gary checked his shorthand: ‘A state of extreme excitement.’

An odd gurgling sound came from Henry’s office.

Dryden’s phone rang.

‘Ben Thomas. Hi – how can I help, Philip?’

If you snapped Ben Thomas in half you’d find New Labour written right through him, thought Dryden, and very little else. On the phone Thomas had the ability to pitch his voice at a tone which suggested he was standing up and in a hurry. This indicated both that he was giving you valuable time and that it was running out. He also annoyed Dryden intensely by using his first name.

‘I’ll be brief,’ promised Dryden. ‘I understand the district council is expected to meet an unexpectedly large bill for work on the cathedral restoration this year – due to a late decision to extend work to clear and repair guttering ahead of the cold weather. There appears to be some unease that the financial controls at the cathedral are lax and that council-tax payers are having to foot the bill.’

‘Who’s uneasy?’

‘Some of your fellow councillors. Leading figures.’

‘Who exactly?’

‘At the moment they are only prepared to comment privately. But I’ll run a story – so if you want to comment this is your chance, or chat off the record.’

Dryden had spent nine years on Fleet Street, three of them at Westminster for the News. He had quickly learned that the best way to get a comment from a reluctant politician was to say a story was running anyway. They couldn’t stand the idea of missing out – especially to another politician.

‘OK. Can we agree a quote at the end?’ Councillor Thomas took silence for consent, a provincial mistake which would one day cost him dear. ‘The annual restoration work which we bankroll is supposed to include routine maintenance to gutters and stonework. It appears that a very late decision was taken to extend this year’s programme to the transept…’

‘South-west transept?’

‘… Yup. As I said. We’re told that the work is required – public safety being at risk if water collected in the guttering and froze. The question we have to ask is why wasn’t the danger spotted earlier? Last year the restoration work was concentrated on the buttresses and stonework on the southwest transept – last year we could have extended that work for very little extra cost. This year new scaffolding has had to be erected, a hugely costly undertaking.’

‘How…’

But Thomas was ahead of him: ‘Thirty thousand quid makes a difference, Dryden’ – Dryden smiled at the missed opportunity to use his first name – ‘in a total council budget of just under six million. I’ve demanded a meeting with the Master of the Fabric and the Dean – after that we’ll move on to the contractors. Basically they have to get the message that this cannot happen again. I intend to get the money clipped off the annual bill spread over five years.’

There was a pause in which Councillor Thomas, Chairman of the Ely branch of the ‘Stop Children Smoking’ campaign, could be heard drawing deeply on a cigarette.

‘What’s so dangerous about water gathering in the gutters?’

‘Freezing water cracks stone. Thaw results in falling stone. Need a diagram?’

‘What’s causing the water to gather?’

There was a deep sigh from the far end of the line.

‘Leaves. Apparently they’re choking the mouths of the gargoyles. All right?’

‘Fine. And on the record?’

‘Errrrm. The council has responded promptly to an emergency request from the cathedral to extend work on the roof in order to protect the public from the possibility of falling stone caused by frost action. We look forward to discussing with the authorities future funding arrangements – blah, blah, blah… Make the rest up – OK?’

Dryden heard the receiver crash down.

‘Charming. Have a nice life. But make it a short one.’

Dryden’s phone rang again immediately. It was DS Stubbs. Dryden could almost smell the Old Spice.

‘Dryden? Just a heads up, thanks for the story by the way, it was fine and – hold on, I’ve just got another call…’ After a long pause in which Dryden was forced to listen to a lot more of the ‘Hall of the Mountain King’ than he really liked, Stubbs was back on the line. ‘I didn’t want you turning up for the noon presser – there’s nothing new on the case. The chief constable has taken a personal interest. He doesn’t like the suggestion that the Fens are a nice quiet backwater where bodies can be dumped with impunity. That’s all we are saying really: top priority, arrests expected soon, you know the drill.’

‘And the truth?’ Dryden found Stubbs’s solicitousness disturbing. He sensed a bargain in the making.

‘Progress. We’re pleased.’

Dryden saw his chance: one of the few plus points of working for a weekly rag like The Crow was that you didn’t have to push hard all the time. ‘Fine. Look – I don’t suppose you could spare me ten minutes some time? I’d like to do a piece on how you’re organizing the inquiry; checking the missing people list, tracing the car, house-to-house, that kind of thing. Perhaps we could meet – over a drink?’ What a tart, thought Dryden. It is quite amazing the bilge people will believe if you flatter their self-esteem. He could virtually hear Stubbs purring on the other end of the line: there was nothing the detective sergeant would like more than to be held up as an example of methodical police work, especially with a tribunal hearing coming up on his spectacular balls-up over Pocket Park.

‘I can meet you at the Tower tonight. Gaynor’s on late shift – I’ll drop her off at ten,’ said Stubbs.

‘Fine – how about the canteen? They do a nice cup of cold tea.’ He sensed that if he hadn’t asked for the meeting Stubbs would have. He felt his skin crawl.

He felt the need for action, or at least distraction. According to the newsdesk diary Gary was down for magistrates court that afternoon. He crossed his name out and replaced it with his own – chief reporter’s prerogative. An afternoon of other people’s misfortunes would do nicely. He put Gary down for wedding forms, farming news and emergency calls. The newsroom was stuffy and over-heated and the rest of the staff would be in soon for a late, publication day, start. He left a message for Humph to pick him up after the court rose at 5 p.m., bought a bunch of lilies on the way to the courts, and rang the vicar of St John’s, Little Ouse.