The Water Clock

10

Dryden used his mobile to do emergency services calls. Fire, ambulance and police. Ely Police reported an incident at one of the town’s two comprehensive schools – Friday night vandalism on a big scale, according to the officer on duty.

The noticeboard outside West Fen High was flecked with snow and said: ‘This is a Community School’. The building itself had been an advert for trendy sixties architecture. But one winter had scarred the concrete with damp. A thousand aerosol cans had done the rest. Like all bad buildings it had won an award which was bronze, ugly, and set in the wall by reception. The architects still used a picture of West Fen High in their promotional material. An aerial photograph. It was its best side.

The main building was six storeys high and box-like – a sugar cube on the landscape visible from fifteen miles. Four wings spread out from this central pile, prompting unfavourable comparisons with a modern prison. Set on the far side of the city’s ring-road the school was surrounded by fields under snow with just the occasional wobbly goalpost coming up for air.

The uniform at West Fen High was navy blue but you’d never guess. A knot of kids was on the drive in front of reception carrying rolled-up swimming towels. Already the school lights were on – splashing lurid orange squares over the snow. Above the main doors hung a banner – ‘East Anglia Regional Gala’. Dryden left Humph with his language tapes and struggled up the school’s main drive in the dusk. The flapping black greatcoat made him look like a scarecrow on the march.

Inside the main doors two first-formers sat behind a ‘welcome desk’. A ritual – even on a Saturday when the school was open to host sports events. The scandal of West Fen High’s academic results had at least one benefit – designation as a ‘sports college’ and an extra £1 million to build new facilities.

One of the first-formers behind the desk was asleep, the other must have been trying to win a bet as she was wearing the school uniform. She looked up with barely concealed annoyance from a well-thumbed copy of Hamlet. Tiny notes in red biro littered the margins.

‘Hi. Is the head around?’

‘You here about the vandals? Amazing – guess what they did?’

The headmaster, Bernard Matthews, poked his head out of his office as Dryden produced his notebook.

Matthews had that haunted look any teacher would get in a school like West Fen High if they shared their name with East Anglia’s best known turkey farmer. The sound of poultry clucking had dogged him down the years.

‘Dryden. Thank you, Gayle. I’ll look after our unexpected guest’

The Crow descended on West Fen High every year when the government published its league tables. Dryden’s sympathy for Matthews’s plight could not stop the resulting headlines. ROCK BOTTOM WEST FEN IS WORST IN EAST OF ENGLAND.

‘Vigilant as ever,’ said Matthews, grabbing a regulation corduroy jacket from the back of his door. ‘You might as well follow me.’

They set off down one of the cavernous corridors that linked the central block to the outlying classes and the sports complex. Every window was open and snow had blown in on to the lino.

‘Bastards got in late last night. Caretaker was away for the weekend – they must have known. The police made checks but only from the outside. Tell me. Coppers do have legs these days, do they?’

They passed a nature table in the corridor on which was a tank of tropical fish. Tropical no longer, they had suffocated thanks to a thin layer of ice above their heads.

Dryden walked on briskly, leading Matthews away from the nature table. ‘And they just opened all the windows?’

‘No. They started by opening all the windows. Then they got into the cellar and closed the heating system down. Then they did this.’

Matthews pushed open two double wooden doors into a tiled lobby – the entrance to the school’s swimming pool. The pool itself was under a thin ‘bubble’ roof and surrounded by glass doors which could be opened in summer, the architects having imagined well-behaved children lounging on the grass and taking an occasional dip between bouts of revision.

Every door was open and the pool’s surface was frozen a milky sky-blue. The pool wasn’t empty. Looking down through the thin ice into the unfrozen water below Dryden could see computer terminals. The vandals must have chucked them in and then opened the doors. Other oddities had been added to the soup.

‘Isn’t that a blow-up doll?’ said Dryden eagerly.

Matthews slipped glasses on and studied the flotsam. ‘’Fraid not, Dryden. Nice try. It’s an anatomical figure, taken from the biology lab.’

Other items included a desk, a basketball post, some wastepaper bins and a chemistry lab fume cupboard.

Dryden produced a banana from his coat pocket for tea and began to circle the pool. On the mobile he called Mitch, The Crow’s photographer, and told him the details. He’d just shut his shop up for the weekend and agreed to do the job.

At the far end of the building a retractable seating area had been rolled forward and a banner on the far wall proclaimed: ‘West Fen High. The Best in Sport’. Scattered over the seats were some disappointed-looking parents and some of the local ‘great and good’ looking suitably outraged.

A hand touched Dryden’s sleeve. Ben Thomas – Labour leader of the local council – was eager to see if his comments on the emergency work on the cathedral would make it into The Express. Dryden found it hard to believe it was only yesterday that they had discussed the story.

Thomas was also keen to get a quote in on school vandalism, but first he had a point to make. A party political point. ‘I blame the Tories of course.’

‘They broke in, did they?’

Thomas ploughed on, congenitally unable to spot irony. He was spindly tall and clever, disguising an Oxford education behind estuary English. Mid-thirties and serious, he taught in the city’s special needs school – a fact that cropped up in every speech he made. He wore his heart on both sleeves.

‘They’ve cut the school security bills. West Fen can only afford one caretaker – and he’s got to have some time off.’

What’s wrong with the school holidays? thought Dryden, but let the subject drop.

Thomas was a county councillor, and shadow education spokesman, as well as leader of the district council. His education brief had got him an invitation to the swimming gala. The Tories held a hefty majority on the county council – and therefore had control of the education authority budget as well. Thomas’s personal ambitions had been cruelly thwarted by democracy.

Normally Dryden dealt with rent-a-quotes like Thomas by putting his notebook away. This time he spotted an opportunity to find out some useful inside knowledge on former Deputy Chief Constable Bryan Stubbs. Thomas was Labour’s representative on the authority’s police committee.

‘So what do you reckon the damage is?’

Thomas looked around and failed to suppress a smile as Dryden flipped open the notebook.

‘Got to be fifty thousand – biggest problem is unthawing the pipes. They can’t do it quickly, they’ll burst. We might have to close the school for a few days.’

‘And you blame the tight budget? Surely the school got a million off the government – the Labour government – to set up the sports college?’

‘Oh yeah. But what about running the thing? That’s down to the council allocation of the government grant…’

Thomas set off, verbally losing himself in the maze which is local government finance. When he finally emerged Dryden closed his notebook.

‘By the way… does the name Bryan Stubbs ring any bells? Police bells?’

‘Retired two years ago? We voted through the terms – he went early, at sixty-one I think.’

‘You didn’t try to keep him?’

Thomas cast a theatrical glance around the pool and took a step closer to Dryden.

‘Hardly. Bloke was bent.’

‘Bent?’

‘We reviewed the file. Over the years at least half a dozen complaints of fabricating evidence. He’d got to the top because he knew where the bodies were buried – it was that generation. The sixties – they all went up together. Most of them grew out of it, but Stubbs was an “old-fashioned” copper. Heroes and villains.’

‘I’m looking at a case back then – in the sixties. Halfway through they called in Scotland Yard. Is that rare?’

‘No. Before they set up regional crime squads the Yard had all the expertise. But I’d be careful – sometimes they called them in to clean up dirty tricks, especially if the case is high profile. They often ended up investigating the investigation – not the crime.’

‘So you were happy to see him go?’

‘He wanted out – doctor’s report said cancer. Smelt more like cirrhosis to me. He had a reputation for boozing. We agreed terms – got him out. Best for everyone.’

‘His son is up on a disciplinary charge now – know anything about that?’

‘Not much. I read it in your paper in fact. Nothing to do with us really – down to the local tribunal unless someone appeals.’

‘What’s your guess?’

‘With the papers watching – and plenty of his dad’s enemies still around – he could get busted down a rank.’

Dryden couldn’t resist a final blow below the belt. ‘Your kids at West Fen?’

Thomas zipped up his leather jacket. ‘Nope. Anyway – better be off.’

No, thought Dryden, letting him go. They’re at Ely’s grammar school. Hypocritical bastard.

The visiting school bus had left and the kids were now snowballing the school windows in the dusk. He met Mitch, the mad photographer, coming in: ‘Fill your boots – it’s like the set for Titanic in there.’ The photographer was hardly visible behind a high-tech pyramid of photographic equipment.

‘Great job,’ said the Scot, as he swept past the welcome desk.