Bored, she began to clean the counter top methodically, until it gleamed and perfectly reflected the sunlight. She heard the roar as the game began and felt the tension of the opening ten minutes. Even Eric, already the worse for half a dozen bottles of Worthington, was strangely subdued. Outside nothing moved. It was a perfect summer’s day but in most homes the curtains were drawn to enhance the flickering black and white pictures from London.
West Germany’s first goal was greeted with silence. George swore and she heard a bottle smash in the grate. She glanced at her watch. 3.13 p.m.
She would say later in her statement to police that she didn’t know what had caught her attention. She found three men standing with their backs to the plate-glass window of the shop. Interviewed at Lynn Royal Infirmary she would tell detectives that she was sure they must have walked to the Crossways. She had a fine ear for a car pulling up on the forecourt and she was certain none had. She was right. The scene of crime team found tyre marks on the grass verge 500 yards to the south.
There had been some traffic that morning. What George called ‘bucket-and-spade specials’. Over-excited children in the back seat, bleary-eyed parents in the front. But there were no children that afternoon. Just the three men with their backs to the plate-glass window.
Amy Ward was puzzled rather than alarmed. She had never seen random violence, at least not until the new TV had shown the Mods and Rockers fighting on the promenade the summer before at Clacton and Brighton. She lit a cigarette and put the Radio Times away under the counter.
She told the police the next few minutes were incoherent in her memory. Without word or apparent signal the three men moved at once: the man she would later describe as having blue-black hair, young and slim and dressed in the new-style US jeans, strode away to stand by the two petrol pumps. He carried a rag and a wrench but she never saw his face which was partly obscured by a US-style peaked cap.
The man she would later describe as the leader moved quickly to the shop door and, stepping through, pulled a knitted black balaclava over his head and a sawn-off shotgun from a large ironmonger’s holdall. The other followed less confidently, fumbling with a balaclava. Amy’s bloodstream flooded with adrenalin. She stood, knocking her stool to the ground, and took a breath to call George. But the first man moved with surprising speed to bring the shotgun up to her chest. His voice, muffled through the jagged slit of the wool, said: ‘No. Not a sound.’
The other man hesitated in the doorway.
The leader clicked his fingers and said:
‘Till.’
The week, with plenty of traffic running up to the coast, had been a good one and there was nearly £600 in notes – including two £20 bills which George had swapped for change with one of the delivery men.
There were also three wage packets: one for the mechanic, and two for the drivers who ran the Wards’ small road-haulage business. The wages in cash totalled a further £48. The second man counted the money while the leader watched Mrs Ward – so close his breath played on her skin. He traced a finger down her sweater, from neck to belt.
She remembered saying: ‘Please don’t.’ She told the police she was sure he meant to rape her.
He breathed into her mouth: ‘Silver?’
She fumbled at a key held by a clasp to her belt and nodded to a reinforced wooden door to her left: ‘Storeroom,’ she said, or possibly: ‘In there.’ Her statements differed on this small point. He brushed past her, produced two large burlap sacks, unlocked the door, and disappeared inside, switching on the light.
George Ward’s collection of silver football trophies, some his own, but many just in safe keeping, was kept in neat rows on green baize. George had been an outstanding local sportsman until a knee injury had shredded his cartilage four years earlier. He compensated now by helping run local leagues and had always offered his storeroom as a safe place for sporting silverware. The entire collection was uninsured but its value would later be assessed at around £800 – £1,000. The cups were put into the sack and passed to the second man who added the cash and wage packets from the till. The leader stood at the strongroom door and said, ‘Come and give me a hand clearing up, darling.’
They all heard the sound of talking at the same time. Out on the forecourt the one with the American-style cap was putting petrol into a caravanette and chatting with the driver. He was taking the customer’s money and searching in his pockets for change.
Amy flipped up the counter flap and took three steps towards the plate-glass window. She said later she hoped to make some sort of signal to catch the attention of the driver. She heard the shotgun being cocked and turned to find the leader standing behind her. He had the gun in the crook of his arm and she remembered that his eyes, which were very dark, reflected the sunshine pouring in through the window.
She heard the caravanette pulling off and said: ‘You can’t get away with this. I know you.’ She may have said something more, but her memory could never retrieve it.
The several statements she made to police never explained these words. She denied that she did know him, and was unable to say why she had said what she said, other than to guess that it was an attempt to buy time.
Then they heard the cheers. The tension of the first twenty minutes suddenly released. England had equalized. George was whooping. Another bottle smashed in the grate, then another. They sounded close, next door, not thirty yards away.
That was the moment that changed her life. The gang leader fired the gun at a range of between six and eight feet slightly to the left side of her skull. The blast tore away her right cheekbone and jaw and shattered into bonedust her left collarbone. She would taste the lead and cordite in her mouth for months. Metal shot and bone fragments were retrieved from the brick wall six feet behind her. She lost her right eye and the sight in both. Shreds of tobacco from the cigarette, which she had held in her mouth throughout the robbery, were embedded in her wounds and were a constant source of infection. At the time she recalled no pain but distinctly remembered a voice she had not yet heard saying: ‘Christ. Christ. You’ve killed her.’
Later she recalled, briefly, her husband whispering to her that the ambulance was coming. Then no more. She would not regain consciousness for nearly three weeks. The rest of her life was punctuated by severe bouts of depression and the recurring image of the jagged slit of a mouth in a black, woollen balaclava. The teeth she recalled were small, white, and perfect, like those of a child.
Saturday, November 3rd
8
At weekends Dryden abandoned time but embraced food. PK 122’s handsome ship’s clock had stopped at 9.19 a.m. – in 1948. He removed his wristwatch on Friday night, a tiny ceremony which gave him immense pleasure. During the week he grazed on a conveyor belt of pork pies, crisps, sweets, and anything else he could get in his pockets. At the weekend he ate Big Time: and first call was the Box Café, affectionately known to a small but undiscerning clientele as Salmonella Sid’s. He walked to town along the river bank in the hyper-clear air which follows a snowstorm. About six inches had fallen in the night and it was still held by frost to the pitched cathedral roof on the horizon. He stopped on the bank and studied the south-west transept through pocket binoculars. The scene-of-crime lamp was still in place – as was a single policeman, huddled in the high doorway through which he had climbed last night. He hoped it was the incompetent Sergeant Pate.
Salmonella Sid’s was a steam box. A wall of hot air and grease hit you when you came through the door. Dryden ordered the Full English and settled down with a discarded copy of the Mirror. The body on the roof of the cathedral had made a paragraph on page ten: HEAVENS ABOVE! Nice touch. He made a note to bill them – like most of Fleet Street they were lousy payers. He’d check the rest of the tabloids when he got to the office. He’d filed 350 words for the Telegraph, Times, and Independent as well; they’d ordered and would eventually have to pay up whether they ran the copy or not. The Guardian had just taken a paragraph and he gues
sed they might send a staffer out to do a colour piece. The News, his old employers, had taken 350 words. He doodled on the Mirror with a biro. If the tabloids used it as well as the serious papers he’d make about £700.
Not bad for an hour’s work – even if it had been at one in the morning.
Loaded down with enough cholesterol to block the Channel Tunnel he headed for the office. The front counter was open taking ads but the rest of the building was empty. Henry had a flat above the offices on the third floor but enjoyed a private entrance from the backyard to his flat. At weekends the only indication of his existence was the occasional creaking board and the strains of Radio Three. Jean, the bellowing deaf telephonist, had Saturdays off. A long line of temps dealt patiently with enquiries from readers who all seemed to like shouting.
Dryden checked his answerphone.
‘Dryden?’ He recognized the languid tones immediately. He imagined the Reverend John Tavanter at the payphone mounted in the hallway of the retreat at St John’s. ‘Bad news I’m afraid. The vandals returned last night after we’d left. Persistent, aren’t they? They attacked the stones again and crushed the pieces nearly to rubble. Dreadful mess. No one heard anything of course. I thought you might want to know… I’m at home Sunday evening if you need to ask any further questions. You mentioned a picture. If the photographer rings me at the centre in Cambridge I can meet him there any time Sunday afternoon. Cambridge 666345. Goodbye, Dryden.’
However hard Dryden tried he could never imagine Tavanter saying: ‘God bless’.
A second message: ‘Andy Stubbs here. Swansea have come up with the name of our man on the roof.’
Dryden cursed loudly; he’d hoped it would take them longer. This way the dailies got a crack at the story before his next deadline. It was another favour from Stubbs – and a useless one.
‘It’s Thomas Shepherd, no middle name. Shepherd spelt S.H.E.P.H.E.R.D. Official address given as Belsar’s Hill – that’s a gypsy site out on the Great West Fen. We’ve checked the files and at the time of his disappearance in the summer of 1966 he was a suspect in a robbery and attempted murder investigation. The robbery took place at…’
Stubbs’s notebook crackled.
‘The Crossways garage on the A10 on July 30th – you may have a file on that if The Crow was published. Our file is pretty pathetic. His finger…’ Dryden’s tape cut out.
Third message: ‘Sorry. As I was saying – his fingerprints were found at the scene. He went to ground immediately after the robbery. His family claimed he was in Ireland. He was never seen again by a reliable witness. He was nineteen. On the run, clear evidence which would have put him inside for fifteen years at least, and half the force looking for him – looks like a reasonable scenario for suicide to me. There were two other members of the gang, never identified. The inquiry was closed down in 1968 but had made very little progress once Shepherd had disappeared. Hope that helps.’
There was one more message. It was Stubbs again.
‘Hi – sorry, you asked about cause of death. That far back it’s impossible to make even an educated guess. Coroner likely to go for death by misadventure and leave it at that. He’s already released the body for burial. The pathologist says both thighs were broken and one leg – the right I think – had broken in so many places it was virtually powder. The right arm was also badly broken. Looks like he fell on that side. Left arm and leg are intact. One oddity. All the fingers on the right hand are broken just above the middle knuckle.
‘Anyway, he must have hit the roof with a hell of a crash, probably near the apex, and then slid into the gutter. Our blokes say that with injuries like that he couldn’t have lasted more than a few minutes – especially on a cold night. I didn’t tell you any of that. Everything is non-attributable. Bye.’
Stubbs was clearly trying hard to win Dryden’s help in publishing the photo fit story. There must be a good chance they were going to demote him. Embarrassing at the best of times, but even more so for the son of a former deputy chief constable.
The Crow had been published every Friday since the beginning of 1946. Before that it had come out on Thursday – market day. In 1982 Henry had launched The Express, a down-market tabloid for Tuesday. It was designed to protect The Crow’s Friday circulation by deterring free newspapers.
Paper copies of The Crow were too unwieldy to store, but the library had them on microfiche. Dryden inhaled a cup of coffee from the machine and wrapped himself in the greatcoat. The library was a brutal sixties block nicely situated right outside the cathedral. The cold snap had kept the borrowers at home. Dryden headed straight for the records room in the basement.
He found the first report on the robbery in early August – the Friday following the raid. There was an update each week and plenty of coverage throughout the summer’s so-called silly season when news was scarce. The location of the Crossways filling station on the main route north to the coast helped keep the story topical throughout the school break. The condition of Mrs Ward also kept the story going. She was on the critical list for four weeks and did not finally return home until Christmas.
According to the cuttings, the Crossways was a very different place from the one she had left in an ambulance on 30 July. Her husband had sold out to Shell and the café had closed. An interview with the couple in February 1968 said they had decided to keep the bungalow and run the garage on a franchise. The mechanic, the other witness in the robbery, left to work in King’s Lynn.
Dryden read and reread the reports. The evidence against Thomas Shepherd was conclusive: his fingerprints at the scene and the description given by the motorist who stopped for petrol were good enough. But his decision to flee the police hunt was just as eloquent of guilt.
Had Shepherd been on the run for years before his death on the cathedral roof? Or did he jump within hours of seeing the injuries to Amy Ward at the Crossways and hearing the radio news that the police were on his track?
One thing made Dryden uneasy – it was a fact rather than a question. The identity of the police officer who had first led the hunt for the A10 robbers before Scotland Yard had been called in to take over the investigation in early 1967: Detective Inspector Bryan Stubbs, then at the start of a career that would take him to the giddy heights of Deputy Chief Constable. A fine career in detection that he must have then hoped would be carried on by his son, Andrew.
Dryden got back to the office via the High Street butchers where he bought a hot steak and kidney pie and three sausage rolls. No point in dying of hunger.
He looked Stubbs Senior up in the directory. It was a Newmarket number. Dryden was surprised it wasn’t ex-directory – most ex-coppers were. A rare display of public accountability? Or arrogance?
Stubbs Senior answered on the tenth ring. After a brief introduction Dryden said what he wanted. He reckoned he had less than a one in fifty chance of getting anything out of him – and even that was certain to be background only.
‘It’s about a case you investigated in 1966. The papers called it the World Cup Robbery…’
Dryden left silence as a question.
‘Yes. Yes, of course, I remember it well.’
‘There’s been a development.’
If the former deputy chief constable made a reply it was lost in the chimes of what sounded like a shopful of clocks. Dryden checked his wristwatch: 11 a.m. precisely.
Stubbs Senior didn’t bother to explain. ‘Don’t tell me that gypsy kid has finally turned up?’
Dryden wondered how close the Stubbs family was. Had they talked that morning?
‘You could say that. Could we meet, briefly? It would only take a few moments.’
There followed a pause worthy of a deputy chief constable. ‘Dryden, you said? Philip Dryden?’
Dryden decided this needed no answer.
‘I live at Manor Farm – on the Newmarket to Lidgate road. Any time after four would be fine.’ He repeated the address and put the phone down.
Dryden tackled the
weekend calls. There was a rota for the chore but he picked up the job most Saturdays. In return Henry looked kindly on his expense claims. One incident worthy of the name: the fire brigade reported an overnight blaze at the circus wintergrounds on Grunty Fen, a stretch of bleak bogland beyond the reclamation skills of even modern drainage engineering. It was an area known locally as The Pools. The police said they were investigating arson. By the newsroom clock he just had time to visit the scene and make his appointment with Stubbs Senior.
Mitch, the gibbering Scotsman, minded his High Street photographic shop on a Saturday and didn’t take pictures for The Crow or The Express unless in an emergency. Dryden grabbed the office camera, an antique that looked like a prop from a Charlie Chaplin film, and headed for the taxi rank.
Humph was first in line. The cabbie had dealt with the impact of divorce on his private life by simply expanding work to fit the empty hours now available. An hour off meant sixty minutes’ kip in a lay-by.
‘Newmarket by way of The Pools. Top speed,’ said Dryden not bothering with hello.
Humph thrummed his delicate fingers against the steering wheel in anticipation of the drive.
They clanked through town past the occasional dedicated shopper flecked with snow. On the market square a few traders had put up stalls for the Saturday craft market but most were watching proceedings from inside the Coffee Pot café. The Salvation Army band played stoically at the foot of the war memorial to a crowd that consisted of two dogs and an unaccompanied, and empty, pushchair.
They swept down Forehill and out on to the fen. It took them ten minutes to get out to The Pools. At this time of year the fields of snow were punctured with ponds of ice. Three months a year, out of season, it was the wintergrounds for a travelling circus. It was Kathy’s beat and she got a steady stream of stories, mostly about the animals. Chipperfields it wasn’t; nothing more exotic than a llama amongst the livestock, and the usual old-fashioned rides like dodgems and a small rusting Ferris wheel. The scene was bleak to the point of beauty, like a TV ad for the Irish Tourist Board.
The Water Clock Page 9
