The Water Clock

23

He’s coming.

In the moonlight Dryden watches him pause by the white van, calculating. A pale mac flaps in the storm. Around him the water rises and wavelets begin to slap at the wheel arches.

Out on the fen the moon lights an inland sea. A cow’s bellow is ripped from the wind. The telephone wires sing and a mile distant comes the crash of breaking glass as the arched window of the Baptist Chapel at Feltwell Anchor implodes under the weight of the water. Unheard, the flotilla of mobile homes grinds itself to matchwood against Black Bank.

He’s coming now, moving forward in a torchlight circle towards Burnt Fen Farm.

Dryden punches Andy Stubbs’s number into the mobile and listens to the recorded greeting. He’s left two messages already, to meet at the Old Farm. Bring the file. And bring a gun.

‘Where is he?’ he asks the house, and climbs quickly to the schoolroom.

At one end, behind a partition, is the sink. At the other a large mirror reflects the moonlight streaming in through the dormer window. Icicles are beginning to decorate the beams as the frost takes a grip on the melting water from the roof. A small wooden Victorian children’s chair remains in the room, and the sit-up teacher’s desk and seat. His mother taught him here, until water destroyed their lives.

A blackboard fills the wall opposite the window. On it Dryden writes: ‘Martha Jane Elliott. Pauper.’ He feels again the crunch of the snow in the graveyard at Little Ouse. The broken shards of the headstones are at his feet.

‘Kids,’ the Reverend Tavanter had said.

‘Kids,’ says Dryden, out loud, to the schoolroom.

From the window he sees the figure crossing the yard. Confidently swinging the torch. But the build is too light, the head too small, the step too nimble. He’s wrong. How can he be wrong?

Dryden flashes his torch twice into the shadows of the barn. There stands Billy Shepherd. The shotgun held expertly with the one arm. The lower body clad in waders. His father’s waders, salvaged from their hook on the wall. Around him the water swirls. An inch now, but rising. Billy picks a blast of wind to cover the sound as he uncocks the gun at Dryden’s signal.

He lets the figure pass, himself unseen.

Dryden crouches by the banisters on the first floor landing, an old haunt from his childhood, and a memory as vivid as the fear he feels. Below, water flows freely through the house, tumbling down the stone stairs to the cellar.

The minutes pass: one, two, and three… The back door, which has been banging rhythmically in the north wind, stops, missing a beat, then begins again.

He’s in the house.

Another minute trickles by. Dryden sees a black polished leather slip-on shoe stop at the edge of the moonlight circle below, and the silence is full of listening. The newcomer takes a bold step and looks up. Andy Stubbs, framed by the bone-white collar of his shirt, could be ten years older.

He takes the stairs in pairs. Breathless, stressed, but oddly in control. A brief but specific fear freezes Dryden’s heart.

Stubbs slides a hand inside his overcoat and draws out a brown manila file. The cover is stencil printed:

DRYDEN. LAURA – RTA. CLOSED.

Dryden grips it in relief. ‘At last. You’ve read it?’

Stubbs hasn’t taken his eyes off him. ‘Yes. But I knew. Or guessed. That’s why I played for time. I didn’t want the tribunal to know. They might have decided to punish us both.’

Dryden took a step closer. ‘You knew who it was?’

‘Now I have proof.’ He tapped the file with a gloved hand. ‘Your evidence.’

Dryden almost spat it out. ‘My evidence was worthless. If I’d known the driver’s identity we wouldn’t be here. My statement says nothing, nothing but the smell of dogs on old leather and a large blue paper parcel with a silver…’

‘Moon,’ finished Stubbs. ‘A silver, single moon, on a blue paper parcel that I wrapped.’

‘For who?’ Dryden asks, guessing the truth.

Outside a flash of lightning forks to the flood and for a second they see it all through the schoolroom window. The ragged white horses, the tree by the farm gate bent to the water, and the sky in black shreds screaming south.

‘There’s no mistake. I checked. Last Friday of November two years ago. It’s in the station diary. “Retirement of Deputy Chief Constable Bryan Stubbs.” Lunchtime do, nothing sordid. Top brass from Cambridge. Home Office rep. Speeches, buffet, a few drinks. I was on duty but I called in for the speech. We kept up appearances, then. I organized the whip-round, wrapped the present – the water clock. The cronies were drinking half pints and orange juices. Didn’t fool anyone.’

He turned his back on the storm. ‘My father has been an alcoholic for nearly twenty years. My mother left him a decade ago. He used to be violent, now even that emotion is beyond him. He’ll have gone on drinking somewhere; they had bars, people who turned a blind eye. Golf clubs, the nineteenth, ha bloody ha. And then he’d have driven home. Or tried to. That’s when he slewed in front of you beside Harrimere Drain.

‘The coincidence. Your accident, his binge, didn’t go unnoticed. There were rumours. Talk in the station. Alibis quietly made. It has its own stench – a cover-up. I looked the other way with everyone else.’

Stubbs met Dryden’s eyes. ‘He’s never been a physical coward so he deserves some credit for saving you, but he wasn’t thinking clearly, and it showed. Presumption, a great vice in a policeman – as he told me so many times. He presumed you were the only person in the car because you were the only person in the front. He drove you to the Princess of Wales but he couldn’t take you in, not in his state. I’m surprised he got the car that far. And the alcohol would have kept his temperature up, he probably didn’t even think about the cold. Alcohol made him reckless, unthinking, blundering. But not evil. He was that to start with.’

The lightning strikes again. They look out into the darkness and see the bolt cut down the sky and ignite a telegraph pole. It crashes into the water in a plume of steam. Overhead the thunderclap rocks the farmhouse.

‘When you called looking for help after Tommy’s body was found he couldn’t stop himself, he saw it as a way of paying off his debts. And of course he sought vindication for his deceit. He always said Tommy Shepherd was guilty. The fact that he’d fabricated the evidence didn’t mean he was innocent. He wanted you to prove it.’

Dryden presses his forehead to the glass in the schoolroom window. ‘The water clock. Clepsydra.’ He saw again the gurgling glass mechanism and the ornate fretted face of the clock in Stubbs’s conservatory.

‘And the tribunal?’

Stubbs sighs deeply. ‘Busted me down to DC. Wish they’d thrown me out.’

The next sound is not nature’s. The shotgun blast is sharper than the thunder, nearer. When they get to the window they see Billy sprawled in the slush, a dark black, spreading river running from an ugly jagged hole through the thigh of the waders. The shotgun, still uncocked, lies beside him.

The banging back door misses another beat.

‘Who?’ asks Stubbs, but there is no time. There are only seconds now until they must meet Tommy’s killer.

Dryden leads the way into the front bedroom. Stubbs casts his torch beam across the iron bedstead, the wardrobes, the two armchairs coated with melting frost.

In one corner stands a screen Dryden’s mother used to block the draught. A large silvered mirror, blackened at the edges, hangs over the bed. On the window ledge a crow’s carcass twitches in the wind.

‘I need a minute with him,’ Dryden said. ‘Just listen. He thinks I’m alone. Go behind the screen.’

Stubbs hesitates.

‘I asked you to bring a gun.’

The policeman takes a pistol from his jacket pocket. ‘It was his. Shooting club,’ he says, slipping behind the screen.

Dryden plays decoy and settles in the armchair by the window. He counts sixty seconds in which his life does not flash before his eyes. Then he sees a torch’s swaying beam touch the wallpaper in the hallway. Then it dazzles his eyes, and he braces himself for the shot, but knows it will not come. A second’s silence deepens and the doubt blossoms. But then he hears it, the wheezing breath. The torch moves quickly on, checking the screen, the wardrobes, the bedstead and the mirror.

Dryden’s eyes reassemble the greys and blacks to form a picture. Josh Nene stands in the doorway, a shotgun held in the crook of his elbow. His boots glisten with water over the ever-present blue overalls.

‘Dryden.’ A cloud of steaming breath rises and catches a moonbeam. The ice is returning with the night. ‘My congratulations.’

Nene takes a step closer. The barrel of the shotgun shakes and his fingers clench and unclench themselves around the stock.

‘Who was the man outside?’

‘Billy Shepherd. I don’t blame you for not recognizing him. It’s been a long time.’

Nene’s eyes widen, the whites catching the flicker of the lightning outside.

Dryden keeps talking. ‘Surprised? That was one of the keys of course. He was alive because you thought he was in America. No need to kill him when Tommy’s body was found. But if he’d been here you’d have tracked him down. He didn’t know your name, but you couldn’t have risked him finding you if he knew Tommy was dead.’

He cocks the gun. ‘We have very little time, Dryden, but I am intrigued. May I ask how we find ourselves here?’

Dryden hears a footstep slide behind the screen, Nene misses it.

‘We find ourselves here because of Martha Jane Elliott – 1891 to 1976. Or rather because of her gravestone.’

‘My wife’s aunt.’

‘Your wife’s aunt and benefactor. The woman who left a small fortune to your wife, which enabled you to buy the building yard and a business in which, until then, you had been merely a lowly employee.’

‘A badly paid, exploited and abused employee.’ Nene takes another step forward into the light. Despite the cold Dryden can see a sheen of sweat on his forehead.

‘The churchyard at St John’s at Little Ouse tells a different story. Martha died a pauper. She had no money to leave. I checked with the Registrar of Wills to make sure. That was a mistake, vandalizing the headstones.’

Nene’s eyes flicker, calculating. ‘One mistake. I left the stone. There was no hurry. But things got out of hand. I had to act quickly’

‘You were there that night I visited John Tavanter?’

Nene studies the room and makes no answer.

Dryden keeps talking. ‘Did Reg have to die? You’d ruined his life of course, but was he the killing type? But then he wanted to die anyway, he’d tried enough times. Perhaps he would have come after you, or gone to the police. That’s more likely. A confession would have been fatal for you. You’d have lost everything. And you’d risked so much to keep it.

‘And he’d never guessed. No one had. Pretending your wife inherited the money was a masterstroke. And you waited ten years. That’s impressive. A decade of patience. Perhaps you were Gladstone Roberts’s silent partner in Cathedral Motors? Good return, no doubt. And silence guaranteed.’

Nene laughs but his calculations are running too fast now, out of control.

‘What did you tell your wife?’

Nene humours him with an explanation. ‘That Aunt Martha had left her a fortune. I got a friendly solicitor to produce a will. That way she didn’t have to lie.’

‘But you paid a price. More than thirty years waiting for Tommy’s body to be found. Bad heart?’

‘I don’t have a heart, Dryden.’

Nene backtracks to the landing and glances down to the hallway below. Nothing. He checks the view from the dormer window, then the gun, and reloads the empty barrel.

Dryden lives by words. Now he needs them to stay alive.

‘I looked back over the council minutes. Every year you added your little bit of wisdom, just enough to postpone any work on the south-west transept roof. Removing the body was tricky and dangerous, but one day you could have done it. So why rush?

‘One mystery. How did you find out Tommy’s secret signal?’

Nene smiled, reliving the past. ‘Broke his fingers. He was never very brave.’

‘And the postcards?’

‘We do work in the States. Heritage stuff. It was Boston that year. I sent the cards over with the shipment of stone and asked for them to be sent back.’

They smiled together.

Dryden pushed on. ‘But this year it backfired, emergency work was needed and you had twenty-four hours to do something about it. So you sent a note to Reg.’

Nene shivers. ‘Reg bit all right. Pathetic really’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘Said Tommy had been back in touch, wanted to repay some of the money. Restored Reg’s faith in human nature it did. I think he wanted to believe it. Believe something, anything. It got him there. That’s all that mattered.’

Lightning torches across the sky outside the dormer window and the crash follows almost instantly.

‘Did you push Tommy? I imagine you’d envisaged a private killing. Time to get the body out, or perhaps find a place in the walls? You were in every day on restoration work. But instead you had to push him…’

Nene sneers. ‘Wrong again. He was always unreliable. He jumped.’

‘What’d you have – a knife? Did he have a choice?’

Nene shrugs, checks his watch. Dryden’s life is ticking away.

‘After Tommy fell you must have looked round the base of the tower and found he’d fallen into the high gutter. But it wasn’t that much of a problem in the short term. If the body was found it would look like suicide and you’d tell the others you hadn’t met him and they could have their money back. But then he wasn’t found, and you thought he might never be, or at least when he was Reg might have left town, moved on. And Billy was set on the States. So you kept the money, banked it, and waited.

‘There were the winnings as well – how’d you get them off him before he jumped?’

‘He wanted to count it out. With the cash from Crossways. See how rich he was.’

Dryden draws his legs up under him. ‘Crossways. Amy Ward did recognize you of course, or thought she did. You’d done the building work at the garage the year before. Fitted the strongroom.

‘What was the plan after you killed Reg? You got George Warren to steal the car. My guess was, you were the driver on the night. You were heading for the new marina at Feltwell Anchor. I presume the caretaker owes you some favours. He told you I was moving the boat there.

‘And those pits dug for the bridge piles are ready-made graves. But they’re flooded – which is why you weighted the body. You missed the turning and ended up in the Lark. You were lucky to get out with a bad cold.’

But Nene doesn’t laugh. Dryden’s time is up.

‘And Laura. That was Gladstone Roberts of course. Applying some pressure. But you checked it out first. The lie of the land. That’s when we spotted you and followed you to Stretham Engine. Why there?’

‘I had a gun there.’

Dryden feels his blood freeze. Nene might have killed him then, if he’d been alone.

Nene is bored now. Dryden has nothing new to tell him. Now, he thinks. For God’s sake do it now, Stubbs.

Nene raises the gun and aims expertly from the hip.

There are three simultaneous loud bangs, the sound of the screen being thrown back, and two shots. A brutal red light captures Stubbs halfway across the room – like an overexposed photograph. The blast catches him in the shoulder and flings him back with terrifying force against the wall. In the second that the red light bathes the room he seems to hang there, pinioned like a butterfly.

The scene seems to freeze then with the soundtrack a buzzing painful echo. Only Nene is moving. Walking towards him with the shotgun raised. Something is coming out of his mouth. Black and thick it rolls over his chin and spatters his overalls. A spurt jumps from his neck and he lifts a hand to staunch the flow. His eyes are startled and white, but fixed and unblinking.

Dryden rushes him, throwing him back against the mirror, and then dives for the open door. But Nene catches his arm with an almost mechanical force. Dryden wheels to face him and the blood spurts again, blinding him. He smashes a fist into Nene’s face and the grip instantly releases as he tumbles to the ground. Then the thread breaks – the thin line of sanity that had brought him to Burnt Fen snaps. He senses the water outside, encircling, and the panic rises with the flood.

Half-blind, Dryden scrambles down the stairs. The water is knee-deep in the hallway below. Frantically he wades to the front door and throws it open as the lightning comes again. The world outside is a riot of water. Ice, cracked and floating past, gathers against the farmhouse walls. He backtracks down the hall and hears upstairs Nene’s stumbling footfalls.

The panic buzzes in his spine and lifts the hairs on his head. He runs across the yard as the thunder crashes again and, passing Billy’s body, rounds the barn. Here, in his childhood, he fished in the pond which stretched to the road. In the darkness he does not know he is on it until his feet slip on the surface. The still deep water, in the long shadow of the barn, has kept its carapace of ice.

He skates for a few seconds and then falls, breaking through, and the water goes over his head. The shock almost stops his heart and he sinks, blindly struggling now, out of the light.

And back. Slowly back, as he falls into the darkness and the pain begins to fade. The panic has obliterated the present. He leapfrogs the years to his childhood, past Laura, past Fleet Street, past school. A newsreel of his life in reverse.

And then it’s Boxing Day again. So he closes his body into a ball so that he can reach the skates. The Christmas skates. It’s his nightmare and he’s living it again. He finds the laces and releases them and the weights fall away.

For a moment he hangs in perfect balance. Then slowly he rises. Rises to the clear ice surface above. The pain has gone and he gulps the anaesthetic water until his face touches the ice and his hair begins, instantly, to freeze to the surface. His hands press up with a feeble force.

The sense of loss is overwhelming, as it always is. The warm farmhouse at Christmas. The fire. The present still to be opened. And his parents. All of this, just the other side of the ice.

He hears the footsteps before he sees them. The thuds rhythmic and ever stronger. For a second he finds a new fear. That they’ll pass him by. But then they’re over his head. The familiar patterned soles of his father’s waders.

The blow is stunning when it falls. Cracking the ice and covering the world with millions of silver fissures. And the sound! From the cotton-wool silence of the frozen water to the storm above. The sudden crackling of the lightning, the rolls of thunder and the liquid rush of the flood.

A hand, massively strong, reaches down and drags him back into the world. He hugs him then. And calls his father’s name. And Philip Dryden cries for joy.