The Water Clock

Thursday, 8th November

22

He got out of the car at just after 7.30 that morning. The dawn was a white cold gash to the east. The sea was a molten lead grey where the light caught the waves still marching south. The shreds of a deckchair flapped from the railings on the front and wind screamed through the iron pillars of the old pier.

He got back in and turned on the radio. The state of emergency in the Fens was top of the bulletin. The forecast was the same. The wind would hold at storm force for another twelve hours piling up the tide, which was due to peak at just after dusk. The temperature had dipped below freezing overnight but was rising again. Some snow and ice would survive until the air froze again at nightfall but until then billions of tonnes of water would melt into the rivers. Disaster was as unavoidable as the setting of the sun.

Humph tracked down two bacon sarnies at the greasy spoon next to the town’s cab rank. Most of the drivers had been out all night ferrying people around in the gale. All had stories of fallen trees, flooded roads, and stranded families. They filled Humph’s flasks with tea and drove south under clouds stained with cordite. The gale, tailing them, buffeted the car. In the telegraph wires straw hung and the chaff blew past them on the wind. The first set of traffic lights they met were without power. At the second a military Red Cap directed the traffic.

The main A10 ran like a backbone through the Black Fen, the peatlands which surrounded the Isle of Ely. A breach in the main river would bring disaster swiftly by nightfall, but first each of the individual fen basins would have to fight its own, miniature battle of the banks as local dykes and drains filled with melt water. An ice-blocked culvert, a weak earthwork, a fen where the peat had shrunk to take the field level below sea level, there were a hundred different reasons for the same result: inundation. Already the waters were creeping up into the fields.

Dryden studied his Ordnance Survey map, matching it to the one the water authority had produced of the danger areas. He found what he was looking for, a mobile home site on a fen six feet below sea level. To the east of them, Feltwell Anchor was already a grey sea. The water had brimmed up out of the main dyke an hour earlier and now flattened an already two-dimensional landscape. The wind whipped up a swell and the wavelets broke against the drove road sending spume flying into the field beyond.

They pulled off the road to the east and followed a drove. The cab rocked in the sidewind.

‘Jesus,’ said Dryden, looking east.

They’d found the Feltwell Anchor caravan site, the location for nearly a hundred mobile homes. But it wasn’t where it should have been. It had set sail, a flotilla of caravans, drifting south towards the road. The mobile homes dipped and nudged each other in the wind. Most of the families had got out but Dryden could see small groups clinging to the roofs. A dog howled from one caravan which, snagged by a fence post, had been left behind by the drifting fleet.

Ahead of them, coming west, a line of emergency vehicles was threading its way along the edge of the fen. Seagulls, blown inland, followed them in a cloud, mistaking them for tractors ploughing the land.

The unmistakable chains aw whine of an outboard motor cut through the wind. Humph parked in a passing place on the single-track drove and handed Dryden a pair of binoculars he kept in the glove compartment, then he struggled out on the driver’s side, stood for a second in the buffeting wind, and retrieved a camera and tripod from the boot.

Humphrey H. Holt, thought Dryden. Man of Action.

Six inshore rescue dinghies were out on the fen, edging their way forward in the flood, checking half-drowned farm buildings. One farm stood alone about half a mile from the drove road, the apex of its roof dotted with half a dozen people waving towards the boats. A barn, twisting in the gale, collapsed like a piece of origami, a cloud of chickens briefly rising from the debris.

They heard the crash on the wind, and something else.

‘Dryden!’

Running towards them from where the emergency vehicles had parked up was Gary. He was fully kitted out for the operation: ankle-length leather coat, wrap-around fighter-pilot dark glasses, and black fake leather slip-ons. By the time he got to them the weight of the coat had almost done for him. Each slip-on had acquired about a hundredweight of cloying peat.

Unbelievably he was smoking. ‘Hi,’ he wheezed, ‘this is a good one. They got most of them off before the water came over but there’s still about forty out there…’ The cigarette was torn out of Gary’s mouth by the wind. He fumbled for a replacement.

A dog came ashore by the cab and shook itself before trotting off towards the nearest fire engine. ‘Bill sent me out because of them…’ Gary pointed further east, across a dry fen, to a line of terraced houses set bizarrely in a north-south line atop a raised bank. ‘Lode Cottages. Apparently they don’t want to move. The army’s bringing in food and stuff. Bill wants me to do the story’

Dryden felt the familiar wave of professional despair. ‘And this?’ He pointed out at the floating caravan site. ‘Isn’t this a story?’

‘I guess,’ Gary shouted. All three of them stood leaning into the gale.

‘Stay with it. The most important thing is pictures. Got a camera?’

Gary opened his leather coat flasher-style. Underneath were three cameras.

‘Take hundreds. We’ll do the cottages. Catch us up.’

Lode Cottages were flotsam from the agricultural revolution. A lode was a fossil riverbed. When the rivers moved, snaking their way across the Fens over the centuries, they left behind their clay beds. Over time, as the Fens were drained and the peat shrank, the lodes were left as high clay banks, ideal for beaded villages. Lode Cottages were built for agricultural labourers in the early nineteenth century. They stood fifteen feet above the peat. In 1947 this had proved to be ten feet too low.

The dozen houses had been built as tied cottages for the farm across the fen. They were red-brick Victorian, an out-of-place remnant of an industrial suburb, strung beside the drove road facing west. From the high ground Dryden looked towards the cathedral, a distance of some fifteen miles. The Ship of the Fens was just that, a black solid superstructure on a watery horizon. A patchwork of drowned fens and peat-brown fields lay at their feet.

Water, rising. His father’s body was never buried but his mother took him to the funeral of the labourer who had died with him. It had been Dryden’s first Fen burial. Like all of them it had been wet, distinguished by the sound of a pine coffin being dropped into the black peat water. An unspeakable fear. Not only drowned in water, but buried in it.

The familiar panic came with a preliminary rush of adrenalin to the muscles, the pulse audible in his ears, and then the slight constriction of the stomach and the first intimation of a heave, like the barely perceptible roll of a boat as it leaves harbour.

But he had a mantra: Keep talking. Keep breathing. Keep thinking.

He retrieved the binoculars from his rucksack. To the north he could trace the course of the Old West River from close by the cathedral to his old home at Burnt Fen. The farmhouse still stood high and dry, sitting on its own miniature island.

It was time for ‘T’ to send another message.

Two ten-ton army trucks arrived with a crashing of gears. They were loaded with sandbags and soldiers – TA volunteers. A dog barked from an upstairs window in Lode Cottages. Out on Feltwell Anchor the mobile homes were still living up to their name. The flotilla had drifted towards a grass bank and the inflatable outboard rescue boats were circling them like sheepdogs. He could just make out Gary’s flapping leather coat amongst the gaggle of emergency rescue vehicles on the bank.

The wind, suddenly, dropped. If Dryden had known anything about meteorology he would have known this was a very bad sign.

He found an old man pulling up winter vegetables in his back garden. A pile of beet was at his back and he’d just moved on to the sprouts.

‘Remember the last time?’ asked Dryden.

The old man straightened up. ‘Hardly likely to forget it, lost the wife.’

First prize, thought Dryden. Idiot question of the year.

The man was sweating in the wind. They both looked out over the fen.

‘Pneumonia: that’s the real problem. All this gets in the papers but we ain’t gonna drown up here, are we? It’s a winter in a damp cold house that’s the killer. Everyone forgets when the water drops.’

‘Here long?’

‘All my life, sixty-eight years. Born here. Not this one, one on the end. We moved when we married.’

‘How high did it get last time?’

‘Made the bottom of our stairs. I sent her away, sister’s. I sat on ‘em for a week waiting. Freezing. At night there’s a commotion. I come down and ground floor’s aswimmin’ with rats. Ratking, they calls it, just like a ball of string. Live string.’

Great, thought Dryden. I have to find the village doomsayer.

‘I left in the end. Got back a week later. Lost everything. Roof went. I ain’t going again. We’re’s all stayin’. Even the young uns. Ask ‘em.’

Out in the fen to the north the water was beginning to edge along the furrows. An army amphibious vehicle climbed up from the fields. A white-haired officer with three crowns on his collar flipped open the top hatch and spread out an Ordnance Survey map.

Dryden approached with due deference. ‘Hi. Sorry to interrupt. Dryden, Philip Dryden, local paper.’

‘Talbot. Captain. Peter, TA. Good ter meet ya.’ The accent was upper-class singsong slang. They shook hands in a very military kind of way.

‘How many men have you got out, sir?’ Army drill, always call ‘em sir. Talbot began to fold up the map.

‘All the county TA – about three thousand. Cambridge-shires.’

Dryden flipped open a notebook. ‘These people don’t seem to want to move.’

‘We can live with that. We’ll sandbag ‘em. Bringin food. Can’t have you chaps filming us dragging them off the land, can we?’

The wind was back, stronger and less predictable. Despite the sodden peat it was drying the topsoil and lifting it in red-brown dust clouds.

Talbot slapped the roof of the duck. ‘We’ll need more of these tonight, and the bridge-building kit. That’s a bit beyond my boys, I’m afraid. Last time they brought amphibious tanks in to fill the breaches in the banks, parked them up and infilled with sandbags.’

‘I know.’

‘Publicity stunt of course. They had to try something. Banks were bound to go eventually. Still, they might try it, who knows? Corker for you lot though, eh? Good story and all that.’

Dryden looked underwhelmed. ‘Water’s not my favourite element. I just live on it.’

‘Swim?’

‘No. Never.’

Suddenly the wind blew itself out and it was completely and blissfully silent. The soldiers stopped sandbagging and lit cigarettes. The old man stopped digging in his vegetable garden.

Dryden was looking west when the lightning forked down into the flood, seeking out the chimney stack of a half-drowned farmhouse. He closed his eyes too late – the lightning leaving a varicose-veined electric image on the retina which hung before him like a mirage as the flash was followed immediately by the rumble.

Talbot looked positively ecstatic at this development. ‘Blimey. Spectacular, eh?’

A military motorcycle messenger arrived with an ace reporter as pillion. Gary, his spots in full disaster formation, tried to run to the duck but his black slip-ons, now ankle-deep in mud, slowed him down.

‘This is Captain Talbot – Gary Pymore, one of my colleagues at The Crow’

Gary saluted. Talbot winced.

Talbot gave Gary a briefing on the present situation from his map. Dryden used his mobile to check his answerphone. The two pieces of information he needed were waiting for him. One from the Land Registry at Stepney confirmed the Reverend John Tavanter’s story of his £750,000 windfall. The other, from the Probate Registry for East Cambridgeshire, confirmed Dryden’s suspicions.

Now he knew.

But he needed proof. He tore a page from his notebook and, leaning on the duck’s bonnet, he wrote a message in neat capitals.

MEET ME AT THE OLD FARM, BURNT FEN.

MIDNIGHT. T

He’d known for some time that it would come to this. With no forensic evidence and no witness it was the only way of catching Tommy Shepherd’s killer. He had to meet him. The message was bait that the murderer could not resist. Dryden’s problem was making sure he didn’t become his third victim.

He folded the paper and wrote a full name and address. Then he gave it to the military messenger who, with Talbot’s encouragement, agreed to deliver it on his return journey to Ely.

Gary looked longingly at the motorbike as it sped south.

Dryden took two of his cameras. ‘The deadline for The Crow is three this afternoon. File what you’ve got by two – that’ll give them a chance to get things in order. Then stay here tonight. Spend some time with these people. Human interest stuff. The village that wouldn’t die, you know the line. Memories of the last time, what it’s like spending a night surrounded by the floodwaters, boiling up for tea, etcetera.’

‘You off?’ Gary cast furtive glances at the floodwaters.

‘Yup. I’ll file the main story now for the front. Keep in touch.’ Dryden shook Talbot’s hand. ‘Look after him, Captain.’

Dryden and Humph made the last five miles as dusk fell, via the level crossing at Shippea Hill. The smell of roast lamb drifted across the water to meet them. The overhead cables on the mainline to Norwich had toppled into the flood electrocuting an entire flock of sheep.

As they approached Ely the cathedral floodlights flickered and died. In the market square a dozen gypsy caravans were drawn up in a rough circle. Billy Shepherd, aka Joe Smith, was stretching a tarpaulin to create a windbreak. In town the wind was more bluster than power. But the streets were lined with broken tiles and moss balls fell from the old roofs. The flag on the cathedral was in tatters.

Billy Shepherd almost managed a smile. ‘Council moved us, said the site would be under by midnight. But it’s re-freezing fast. That’ll give us some time until sun-up tomorrow. We left the animals on the bank, I’m going back.’

Dryden saw his chance to enlist an ally. He hadn’t planned it like this. That’s why it was so good. ‘I saw you out at Little Ouse.’

The gypsy wordlessly strapped the tarpaulin down with expert rope work.

Dryden skipped the silence. ‘Tavanter can’t know. Tommy didn’t know. But if you want to meet him, Tommy’s killer, you can.’

Billy stood in the lee of the caravan and expertly rolled a cigarette with one hand. The cat-green eyes were very bright.

‘Burnt Fen Farm. Out by Shippea Hill. Eleven p.m. On the dot. Dump the car on the main road, walk the rest. The causeway is still dry. I’ll need some help. No one else.’

Billy had no questions, which was answer enough. Dryden walked back towards The Crow with a light head.