The Water Clock

17

A crowd of about 8,000 had filled Cherry Hill Park – an open field that boasted one of the few gradients steep enough in the Fens for tobogganing. It provided a natural grandstand to view the display in the cathedral meadow opposite. Humph parked up at the Porta, the massive medieval gateway to the cathedral grounds. Dryden left his friend heroically attempting to extricate himself from the cab and ran through into the crowds.

The police had decided to let the display restart – the best way of keeping the crowd in the park and not fouling up the emergency services. In the cathedral meadow a Catherine wheel whirled while acrid smoke drifted off to be caught up in the cathedral’s pinnacles. The great oaks and alders of the meadow cast black flickering shadows; beneath each stood a volunteer with stirrup pump and fire bucket.

Two fire engines and three ambulances had come in through the lower gates and were parked up behind the small row of mobile fish and chip shops, burger bars and hot soup sellers. Laid out on the grass or sitting on the ground were about twenty children, surrounded by a knot of parents and St John’s Ambulance Brigade volunteers.

There were plenty of noisy tears but no sign of blood – both good signs.

Dryden headed straight for the fireman in the bright yellow jacket: the incident controller. He recognized him – one of the bonuses of local newspapers.

‘Wondered when you’d turn up. Good news is that the kids are going to be fine. Scared stiff most of ‘em but all superficial burns – although a couple actually took a glancing blow off the thing. They’ve got some nasty bruises.’

The fireman turned round and picked a large burnt-out firework from a metal box. What was left of it was about three foot long and about as thick as the core of a toilet roll. It appeared to be smeared with blood.

Dryden felt the earth tilt. Scared of blood. Just scared. He concentrated on a point between the fireman’s eyes. ‘And the bad news?’

‘The first one to get in the way of this charming object was your colleague. Kathy Wilde. Over there.’ He pointed to the ambulances.

Dryden found himself analysing his feelings as he walked across the grass, winding his way through knots of happy smiling families. Happy smiling families didn’t seem to be his destiny. The women in his life seemed to be exposed to bizarre life-threatening dangers. He half-expected to find Kathy in a coma. He wondered, not for the first time, if he brought them bad luck. He felt a pang of guilt, but not a very strong one.

Kathy was sitting in a wheelchair wrapped in a blanket beside an ambulance. She had a patch over a swab on the right eye and a bandage, wrapped around her head, above the left.

He stood in front of her without speaking. Her one good eye looked skywards. ‘This is so fucking embarrassing.’

Dryden had removed his ear bandage. A plaster hung like a cheap earring. He took her hand. It was an oddly parental reaction and he felt she looked sadder as a result.

‘Oh, I’m all right,’ she said, answering a question that hadn’t been asked. ‘Just don’t let me anywhere near that tosspot of a lord mayor.’

There was a loud bang and a cheer as the display moved towards its climax. Kathy jerked in her seat and shouted out with the pain. A St John’s Ambulance volunteer appeared out of the dark. He was two sizes too small for a uniform that was three sizes too big. He had to roll his sleeves up to take Kathy’s pulse, an operation hampered by a sudden explosion of firecrackers.

Dryden let the echoes die away over the park. The crowd ‘ahhhhhhhed’ as a rocket showered them with golden snow-flakes.

‘And what did the worshipful mayor do?’

‘It was the first sodding firework. All he had to do was light the blue touch paper and retire. Retire! Too bloody right. Let’s have a whip-round now’

Dryden brushed his hand across her cheek. A sign of intimacy a minute too late.

‘He got his chain tangled up with the rocket, pulled it over when he walked off. Next thing I knew it was headed straight for me. It hit me here.’ She pointed to her eye.

‘I was wondering.’

Kathy started to laugh, which brought on tears.

Two orderlies arrived to lift her into the ambulance. Dryden promised to come and see her later. Then he collared a medic who appeared to be in charge. ‘She gonna be OK?’

‘Eyesight should be fine. Luckily the rocket was so large it couldn’t penetrate the socket. But the bruising is nasty and the force of the rocket may have cracked her skull. The eye filled up with mucus from the impact and the fumes. She’ll just need to rest and let it clear, then we’ll know for sure. And she’s going to go into shock soon.’

Dryden caught up with Roy Barnett in the VIPs’ enclosure with a large whisky in one hand and a cigarette in the other. His Bobby Charlton hairstyle had flopped badly over his left ear. He had been released from the Tower on Saturday and advised to rest and avoid alcohol. He was due back for a check-up in forty-eight hours. Dryden felt the appointment might be immaterial, he could be dead by then.

As Dryden approached he was just finishing an anecdote. ‘… So I said to the headmistress: Can I come too!’ There was a dutiful peal of laughter. Then he spotted Dryden advancing across the grass and tried to make a break for the civic Daimler.

The reporter expertly cut him off, flipping open his notebook as he did so.

Barnett rearranged the offending chain. ‘Nasty business, Dryden, very nasty.’

‘She’s going to be fine by the way, so are the kids. Thought you’d want to know.’

‘Oh. Yes. Good. Wonderful work by the emergency services. You can quote me.’

‘Thanks. Perhaps you can tell me what happened.’

Over the mayor’s shoulder Dryden could see some of his Labour Party colleagues. Most were smirking. Barnett had got to the ceremonial top in local politics thanks to his money. He’d made a £50,000 donation to the party in the mid-1960s – a bribe that secured three terms in the Mansion House and a nameplate on the party’s town centre HQ which read ‘Barnett House’. He was well aware he had no friends. He was even aware he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box, a level of self-knowledge that made him easy to underestimate. Dryden noticed, not for the first time, his eyes. The rest of his face was crowded with a bigger person’s features. But the eyes were doll-like, black, and oddly threatening.

‘Simple accident. I bent down to light the fireworks and the chain of office slipped round the rocket. The fuse was very bright so I jumped back and the rocket fell over. Frankly – and this is off the record – I blame the organizers. It wasn’t very secure.’

‘Then what?’

‘I ran.’

‘And then what?’

‘It went off. Straight at the crowd. Pure fluke. Total accident. One in a million, etcetera.’

Dryden closed his notebook and Barnett breathed easier. He considered offering Dryden a drink but thought better of it.

‘A word about Tommy Shepherd.’

The rest of the guests had moved off to see the climax of the display outside. Dryden attacked the drinks table. He mixed some vodka, blackcurrant, Pernod and lemonade. The resulting drink glowed with a sickly incandescence like an indoor firework.

Barnett watched uneasily. He considered his answer as he looked out at the last of the fireworks breaking over the cathedral. They fell, lighting his face alternatively green, gold, red, and blue.

‘I’ve been expecting someone to ask.’

‘Why?’

The mayor grabbed a bottle of malt whisky and poured a three-inch slug. Then he mixed it, to Dryden’s horror, with an equal measure of R White’s lemonade. Some things, if not many, were sacred.

‘Why d’you think?’

‘Because he had an affair with your wife – which you probably knew about at the time. Because someone threw him off the top of the West Tower and killed him. Because someone knew his body was going to be found last Thursday, someone with links to either the cathedral or the council, or both.’

‘You’re way ahead of me. I knew all right – about Tommy and Liz. The marriage wasn’t in very good shape then. She wasn’t the only one shopping around. I just didn’t appreciate her choice. A bloody gypsy, for Christ’s sake.’ He looked disgusted still, after more than thirty years.

‘Who do you think killed Tommy?’

Barnett laughed and gulped some whisky. ‘Not me. I could have done, cheerfully. I probably came as close as I ever will. But I wouldn’t have pushed him off a two-hundred-foot tower. I’d have strangled the little shit with my own hands. And nobody would ever have found the body – I can promise you that.’

Dryden could see the logic in Barnett’s answers, a logic that seemed too readily at hand.

‘I wanted to know what Tommy was like. Did you ever meet him?’

‘Once. The first time we went out to Belsar’s Hill with the council. He was a kid. Good looking. Gabby. Bright.’ Barnett looked out at a dying firework: ‘Innocent.’

‘So you don’t think he was at the Crossways?’

‘I don’t think so. If he was he had nothing to do with injuring that woman. I thought he was a bit of a coward. He wouldn’t face me. I went out again, to Belsar’s Hill. This was shortly after they – after it – began. I knew he was there but they sent out his brother – Billy. Same stock. Bit older. He brought his dog with him. I brought a shotgun. But what could I do?’

The last fireworks exploded: a necklace of brilliant chrysanthemums strung across the night sky.

‘Gladstone Roberts, owner of Cathedral Motors – you’re old friends I believe?’ Dryden knew that Roberts and Barnett were business partners. The mayor’s newsagents had found outlets at Roberts’s garages. Roberts also provided the van fleet for Barnett’s deliveries.

‘Yes. Why?’

‘Good business.’ Dryden let his face set in stone.

Barnett cast around for escape.

Dryden persisted. ‘How’d he get started?’

‘Long time ago. I think at the start there was another partner in the business – a silent partner. The late sixties. That’s where the money came from, and the town council gave him a grant to clear the ground – it used to be a landfill site, toxic waste, chemicals, mainly from the beet factory. It was a ratepayers’ liability. So we gave him some money to make it safe and then he got the land for a decent price. All above board, it’s called planning gain.’

Dryden didn’t move a single muscle.

‘And I didn’t take part in the debate – if that’s what you’re thinking.’

Gary raced up with impeccable bad timing. He’d brought the office antique camera.

Dryden clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Just in time. Perhaps my colleague could take a picture of you with the children.’

On his way back to the cab Dryden met Humph puffing down the path. ‘Next stop, the Tower,’ said Dryden, walking briskly the other way.

Humph looked skywards. It had taken him twenty minutes to get out of the cab.

While Dryden waited for him he fished out the Ordnance Survey map from the glove compartment. Belsar’s Hill was marked as an historic site, a stippled circle with the lettering in a Gothic typeface. He’d need to go, to see the gypsies. Which meant dogs.

‘Dogs,’ he said, out loud. But it didn’t help.

As soon as they got to the Tower, Dryden knew Laura had moved again. He was ushered into a consulting room and given the regulation pea-green teacup. It was the consultant with the horse’s face again: Mr Horatio Bloom. He looked mildly excited as he bustled in with a clipboard. He wore a silver-grey suit and polka-dot bow-tie. Standard registrar’s uniform.

‘Good news,’ he said, addressing Form 1A on the first day of term.

Dryden tilted his head to one side. He was irritated at being sidelined on to Bloom’s territory and away from Laura.

‘The sensors picked it up at 2.07 this morning.’ Bloom checked the clipboard to make sure he had the time right. ‘We didn’t call you at the time – I wanted to check the equipment and make sure there was no mistake. And we’ve done tests.’

‘And?’

‘And she moved. There’s no doubt. It’s very encouraging. Some movement both of the…’ The clipboard again. ‘Upper right arm and lower right leg and a slight tilting of the cranium. That’s very good news. Spinal articulation.’

‘But nobody actually saw her move?’

‘No. That’s what the sensors are for.’ Bloom removed his glasses as though preparing for a long explanation to the village idiot.

Dryden got in first. ‘But presumably the sensors are simply that, electronic pads which detect movement. Fit them to a clock on the wall and they’d detect movement – that doesn’t mean the clock’s alive, let alone conscious. Surely the key question is whether Laura moved, or someone moved her?’

The consultant gave him a long hard look designed to intimidate. Dryden returned it with topspin.

‘Are you suggesting that a member of the medical staff here is so incompetent…?’

‘No. Although a little more scepticism might not go amiss. I’m suggesting that before you invite me to dance a jig at the news I think all the other possibilities should be discounted. False hope, doctor, is something I can live without. I’m asking you to humour a sceptic. So: what next, Doc?’

Bloom reddened. ‘It’s Mr actually. Mr Bloom. I’m a surgeon.’

Dryden contrived to look like someone who had just forgotten the one thing they have been told to remember at all costs.

Bloom placed his fingers together in a neat lattice. ‘Too early. We must wait for the results of some of the tests. So far we have nothing dramatic. Some extra brain activity, perhaps.’

‘What are we looking for?’

‘Clear evidence of biological changes in muscle and nervous tissue. We would expect the occasional large limb movement to be accompanied by many more micro-movements within the muscle and tissue system; that’s what we’re looking for. And continued higher brain activity’

‘And that’s what we haven’t found?’

‘So far we have found no such evidence. It’s my opinion that we will.’

Dryden ended the interview. ‘I’d like to see my wife. Alone.’

Bloom’s eyes glazed over. It was like being eyeballed by a dead fish.

Laura’s body had been rearranged. She lay absolutely straight in the bed with her head raised slightly on two shallow pillows. The bedclothes had been smoothed flat and perfectly replaced. He sat beside her, watching the very slight rising, and falling, of the chest.

He saw it then, and knew why Laura had moved. A single corner of paper showed between the flattened pillowcases. He eased it out, and, putting it on the bedside table, turned on the reading light. It was a single half-mile square cut from a river chart. It showed a short stretch of the Lark, and Feltwell Marina, where Dryden planned to move PK 122 that night.

Later, as Dryden lay on Kathy’s couch, he considered the implications. Clearly someone had moved Laura and placed the map under the pillow. Whoever it was wanted Dryden to know that they could strike at any time. They knew his plan to leave the boat at Feltwell. Roberts, he knew, had been aboard his floating home when it was moored at Barham Dock. They could get to Laura, and they could get to him. He must be close to the killer – or killers. Would they give him the luxury of another warning?

After the Tower Humph had dropped him outside the Cutter Inn on the river bank at midnight. Two drunks were arguing on the towpath but otherwise the world was white and silent. He’d slipped PK 122’s moorings and set off by moonlight upriver to the confluence with the Lark.

The sluices at Denver had been opened the day before and both rivers now ran freely between frozen reed banks. Instead of turning into the Lark he slipped further north on the main river until it met Brandon Creek. He swung upstream to the Ship Inn where there were moorings. He tied up at 2 a.m. and left a note on the boat saying he would phone to confirm the mooring and the fee. Humph picked him up on the main road an hour later.

He’d let himself into the flat with Kathy’s key.

He found the couch and was almost immediately asleep but not before he saw again the loping figure of Joe Smith blending into the mist.

‘Belsar’s Hill,’ he said to the empty room.