The Water Clock

by The Water Clock

  How long did they float? Laura, he was sure, had passed out in those few seconds. Then the car lurched to the left and slid down. He knew he panicked then. He remembered kicking his feet and finding water round his shoes. A thread of sanity tried to hold, telling him to search for the door handle, search for the window handle, pull back the seat for Laura. But it was no good. The terror rose and his consciousness retreated, blacking out.

  Then he was back. Brought back. By what? A distant sound perhaps, a faint echo of rescue. He gulped for air but found water. The dull race of the river came to him, just heard behind the lurching beat of his heart. Gravity told him he hung from the seat belt facing down towards the engine. His thrashing hands found the seat-belt buckle and he flicked it open, setting himself into a slow fall. He gulped water in painkilling mouthfuls – stilling the scream of agony across his chest.

  He sensed the sound again – a percussion through the water. Then someone broke into his dying moment. He felt the hands searching blindly in the dark. At first they repelled him, seeking him out, clutching, unseen. But he must escape, so he lunged towards them and they instantly contracted, catching his arms and pulling him with startling force across the front seat towards the semi-light beyond.

  Did he think of Laura then? He tried to imagine he had. This was the single second he relived the most. The point when he willed himself to believe that he had tried to stay, or at least promised to return.

  As the hands lifted him towards the open door his face broke free into an air pocket and he gulped, in a frenzy, filling his lungs. Then he was breathing water again, but rising, up towards the silver surface of the drain. He was unconscious by the time he reached it.

  He came to on the forecourt of a hospital. He was in a wheelchair, just beyond the bright circle of light cast by a security lamp over the main doors, and slipping in and out of consciousness. But he had no idea if it was hours or seconds between each painful bout of reality. He thought he saw someone once, hurrying away from the light. Had he dreamed it? He was unable to shout or speak and the figure was gone in a second, like the hint of a sail at sea.

  A canopy above the entrance was marked princess of wales hospital. Inside, he could see the low lighting of a reception desk where a nurse sat, her head dipped below the counter, rising only intermittently to answer the phone.

  He passed out for what seemed like a very long time. When he came to it was with a jolt and a fresh surge of guilt and anxiety. For the first time he remembered the accident, the moment of impact was beyond recall, but he knew that he had escaped and that Laura was still there, now, below the black water of Harrimere Drain. He knew the water was filling the car but he also remembered the gulp of sweet air he had taken as he escaped.

  He dropped a foot to the tarmac and felt the pain run down his nerves, a cold bolt of electric agony. He used the weight of his arms on the wheels to edge closer to the doors – four feet away the sensors picked him up, the glass swished back, the nurse looked up, and he passed out.

  But as consciousness swam away that last time he saw one image from the night. He was lying in the back of a car, full-length across the back seat. The car was speeding, he felt the lurches, but no pain. Occasionally, and more frequently as the journey continued, they would pass under a street light. The back of the car was large, even spacious, and he recalled the smell of leather, real leather, not plastic imitation or leatherette. There was nothing on the back seat by his head except a blanket which had been furled up under his neck. He remembered the smell of it. A mixture of oil and dog. Beside his head on the floor behind the passenger seat lay a large parcel. It was one foot by two feet and wrapped in bright blue paper dotted with silver stars, and a single golden full moon.

  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 so
und 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?’