The Water Clock

by The Water Clock

  When he reached the top of the corkscrew stone staircase, the world opened out below him with breathtaking completeness. The general public had had access to the West Tower since the sixties and the final ascent was regulated by traffic lights operated from an office below. In the high season tourists climbed in batches of twenty past the green light, and once their arrival at the top had been confirmed on closed circuit TV, a batch of twenty would descend. The viewing platform itself was surrounded by a low stone wall and an iron safety railing. The view, priced at £1.80, encompassed a large part of southern England stretching from the university library at Cambridge to the giant grain silos at King’s Lynn on the coast to the north. On a damp Fen day, when the mist crept up from the river, the view barely encompassed the stone parapet of the tower.

  Josh Nene was already there. He had clearly seen the view enough times to take the edge off the novelty. He looked healthier than he had on the night he had led them up to find Tommy Shepherd’s body. But no happier. He was kitted out yet again in the immaculate blue overalls, over what looked like several layers of jumper, and the NENE & SONSblue hard hat. The ditchwater eyes were slightly bloodshot. He was engrossed in a tightly folded architectural plan when Dryden stepped out, with beguiling authority, into the crisp Sunday morning air. Around them the world was white and preternat-urally clear. He fixed his eyes on the distant horizon and breathed in the icy air in lungfuls. It helped to clear his head – still swimming from the painkillers they had given him at the hospital. The bells at the parish church of St Mary’s below signalled the ten o’clock service. One of the ringers must have been a learner, his bell clipping the sound of the one that preceded it, providing an uneven soundtrack.

  Nene looked up but didn’t bother with a smile. ‘Dryden.’ His voice whistled like a set of deflating bagpipes. He crunched a cigarette against the stonework and, lighting another, stuffed the plan in a back pocket. Dryden wondered how long he’d been there. The pale blue of his lips was still vivid.

  ‘Quite a climb,’ said Dryden, fishing in his pocket and producing a wine gum flecked with fluff. He belted up the black overcoat and fingered the bandage on his ear.

  Nene eyed it but showed no other interest. ‘Occupational hazard. I’ve got a couple more years in me yet. Two sons waiting to run the business then.’

  Dryden looked down the long Norman spine of the cathedral nave towards the central fifteenth-century Octagon Tower, built to replace the spire that had crashed to the ground during a Sunday service in 1426.

  Dryden smiled to himself and turned ninety degrees to look out along the south-west transept. The spot where Tommy Shepherd’s body had been found was directly below but too close to the foot of the tower to be seen from the viewing platform. From the Octagon’s central viewing gallery it was obscured by a stone pinnacle.

  He was dealing with the vertigo easily. The screaming pain in his head probably helped. ‘So he jumped from here? Was the safety fence up then?’

  Nene casually put a foot up on the safety bar and leaned over causing Dryden to suffer a wave of sympathetic nausea. ‘When’s then?’

  ‘Nineteen sixty-six – August, September. At a guess.’

  Nene flirted with an emotion Dryden had not yet seen on his face: interest perhaps, even surprise. He ran a pudgy hand through thinning white hair. ‘No. Nothing here then but the stone parapet. We put the ironwork in around sixty-nine after a suicide attempt. Lassie passed out before she could get to the edge.’

  They chuckled bleakly.

  ‘Nobody checked visitors then?’

  ‘Not really. Most people came up in tour parties with a guide. If someone came at any other time I think they just unlocked the door and let ‘em. Cost ‘em a few shillings of course – they were desperate for the money then with the West Tower and the Octagon on the move. But they wouldn’t have been counted down. Why bother?’

  ‘When were the video cameras put in?’

  ‘Recent that. Early 1990s, I think. We were asked to tender for the work but a specialist firm got the contract – we don’t get everything. There’s plenty of competition.’

  Dryden hadn’t suggested otherwise. He pursued the point. ‘But there can’t be that many firms able to take on work like this?’ He patted the stone parapet and imagined a slight swaying movement underfoot.

  ‘’S right. Skills are dying. But there’s no fortune in it either – the cathedral knows we rely on the contract. They get their pound of flesh.’

  ‘Do anything else?’

  ‘Loads. Rebuilding. Specialist stone work. Water authority too – specialist stuff again. We used to do general building, but I’ve tried to focus on the high value-added stuff, that’s where our name is known. Some export stuff as well, States mainly.’ He patted the stonework. ‘Craftsmanship. The diocesan work is our bread and butter. The contract runs on a ten-year cycle. We’ve just started a new one.’

  ‘Nice position to be in.’

  ‘Wasn’t so nice six months ago when we didn’t know for sure if we had a future. I employ sixty people. That’s a lot of families. One of the biggest employers in the town.’ Nene spread his short pudgy fingers over an ample belly.

  Self-satisfied bastard, thought Dryden.

  He produced a notebook, not as an aide memoire, but purely to intimidate. ‘And it’s been your firm doing the work for how long exactly?’

  ‘Cork & Co did the first modern restoration under the Victorians – eighteen eighties. I did my apprenticeship with them. Fifteen long years. I bought them out in seventy-six. Since then it’s been Nene & Sons but it’s the same outfit – just a lot bigger. Annual turnover…’

  ‘Annual profits…?’

  Nene adjusted the lapels of the smart blue overalls. ‘Private company, Dryden. Private information. But we do all right.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘My wife – Elizabeth – we own all the equity.’

  ‘I see.’ But Dryden didn’t. He thought money was supposed to make you happy. Nene’s face had thirty years of misery written over it in capital letters.

  ‘It’s difficult to believe that Tommy Shepherd’s body could stay up here for thirty-five years without being found.’

  Nene lit up and began to wheeze as he smoked. Dryden sensed his witness had become hostile.

  ‘Why? There’s plenty of spots on the roof that can’t be seen easily from here or the Octagon. We do visual checks each year but most of the survey work is done from the ground by theodolite.’

  ‘And that’s your responsibility, is it?’

  The bells stopped suddenly at St Mary’s and they heard the mechanism of the West Tower’s clock turning below them as it began to strike the quarter-hour.

  ‘No. That’s down to the diocese – the Master of the Fabric. They employ a firm of surveyors as well. But they’re looking for structural weakness, movement and cracking. We rely on their reports to frame the restoration programme which the Dean and Chapter then have to pass.’

  Snow began to fall and Dryden turned his face up to meet the flakes. He felt a warm trickle of blood set out from the bandage down the inside of his neck. He fingered the blood and examined it cooly.

  Nene gave him a look reserved for runaway lunatics.

  ‘Gunshot. Someone tried to kill me.’ Dryden had always wanted to say that. He contrived a shrug which indicated this happened almost every day.

  He had, at last, got Nene’s full attention. ‘Wha…?’

  ‘What about aerial photography?’ Dryden enjoyed cutting Nene off, he wasn’t as imperturbable as he liked to think.

  Nene hastily lit a fresh cigarette. He took three attempts to light it. ‘As I said t’other evening we get regular requests to overfly from commercial aircraft – the RAF boys and the Americans are banned from flight paths which go straight over the top. Not that you’d think it if you watch them line up to come into Mildenhall. Still, that’s the official line.

  ‘Most are for reproduction and sale. You know the kind of thing,
aerial pictures of pubs and people’s backgardens to stick on the wall. They don’t have the kind of detail you’d need to spot a body from five hundred feet, not one mostly obscured by stonework. I’ve looked through a few we’ve got in the office and you can’t see a thing without a magnifying glass, and then only what looks like a pile of leaves.’

  Through his bones Dryden felt the deep vibration of the cathedral organ signalling the start of a service below. Out to the east they turned to a noise – the sound of a giant blanket being snapped in the wind. Instead they saw a vast flock of Canada geese rise from the reserve at Wicken Fen and head south.

  ‘It seemed quite easy to get out on the roof where the body was found…’

  ‘’Tis now. The door was rusted in. Hadn’t been opened in a lifetime. I crowbarred it open when I got out there Friday afternoon.’

  Nene had relaxed again and rearranged his scarf against the cold. ‘Thing is if you go out on the structure you don’t see much – you’re too close. The water outflow is measured to make sure the gutters are free. Modern survey work is based on precise measurements taken from the ground; the exact position of the pinnacle that shielded that poor sod from view will have been mapped to within a centimetre a hundred times. There’s no need to go up there.’

  ‘So why did you go up there?’

  Nene eyed him flatly. ‘Better ask the surveyors. Their decision.’

  ‘So if it had been down to you nobody would have gone up to the south-west transept roof this year?’

  ‘That’s right. They said the gutters were blocked with leaves. I’d leave ‘em. The leaves rot – the water forces its way through eventually. It’s not like a domestic roof – there’s a dozen outfalls on the south-west transept roof alone. We were below the roof last year, and we would have been back in five under the current programme of works. But they said it was an issue of public safety. Ask me someone scared ‘em. Told ‘em a big freeze would bring down the stonework. Rubbish.’

  Dryden shut the notebook. ‘Thanks very much, Mr Nene. You have been very helpful, very helpful indeed.’ That always gave them the jitters, Dryden thought happily.

  Nene looked at him through rheumy eyes. His lips had shaded to a pale lifeless red. Dryden decided he had a bad heart. He should chuck it in while he still could.

  Dryden descended with shaking legs and made his way to a bench on Palace Green. It had a brass plaque: In Memoriam: Canon John Virtue Gillies. 1883-1960.

  ‘Good age,’ said Dryden of the long-dead canon, and rubbed his ear.

  Two Japanese tourists took pictures of each other in the snow and a ginger tom wandered by, picking its way through Dryden’s footprints. The cathedral’s doors were shut against the cold but the sound of hymns seeped out.

  Besides being shot the night before, he had woken up that morning in bed on PK 122 to find Kathy’s naked body beside him. It was a narrow bunk bed and their bodies were folded neatly together in a frictionless union of knees, crotches, elbows and breasts. A brief echo had come to Dryden of the Lark victim – the cold body crushed and distorted like meat in a can. But it was only an echo – Kathy’s body was as warm as a radiator and a lot better designed. He had bathed in the heat and, equally as palpable, the guilt.

  The fiery Ulsterwoman had been waiting in her car when Humph had dropped him home from the hospital at four that morning. She’d driven straight back to Ely from her night shift on Fleet Street.

  She was wide awake by the time she’d seen the cathedral on the horizon. She’d planned a stroll on the river bank by PK 122. She knew Dryden was a poor sleeper – perhaps she’d cadge a coffee, or more.

  She’d taken over the patient and Humph, exhausted, had slipped into the night. Dryden had undressed and showered in the tiny bathroom in the bow while she’d made soup and poured the whiskies. He hadn’t jumped when he felt her hand on his back, gently smoothing the soapsuds in lazy circles. It was a master stroke of seduction, taking them both beyond the point where his guilt lay, beyond logical abstraction and considerations of betrayal. They’d come to sex without passing any moral barriers. He hadn’t thought of Laura until it was all over. Or not quite. He’d thought of her for that moment of release as he had in his dreams.

  He smiled now in the icy morning air and blew out a plume of steam. The cloud of condensation hung around him in the still air. ‘My wife,’ he said soundlessly.

  He had already begun to construct the layers of defence. Like a child he rubbed the wound on his head as if it alone were excuse enough. He winced as the pain brought water to his eyes, which he left to swell into tears.

  ‘Self-pity,’ he said, again to no one.

  If she came out of the coma he would tell her everything.

  He stood quickly, his knees cracking in the cold. He looked at the cathedral’s blue and gold clock and saw that the hands were almost on eleven. Soon the bell would toll. He told himself that when it had finished he would never think of the night again. It was a childhood game which had never worked. Anxieties clung to him despite the passing of time. The bell tolled ahead of the hour. Then came the first tenor stroke of eleven o’clock.

  Kathy had agreed. She’d sensed the guilt and left quickly, pulling on clothes and declining a cup of coffee.

  He’d waved from the deck of the PK 122 but she’d not looked back. The tyres of the red MG had squealed through the frosty gravel.

  The last tenor stroke of eleven o’clock boomed out. Before the echo returned he’d thought of her again.

  13

  The Crow’s offices were normally deserted on a Sunday but he met Henry coming out of his flat in full Scout commissioner’s uniform and regalia. The editor was unnaturally and strangely excited. His bony throat pulsated with the bobbing of his Adam’s apple.

  ‘Scouts’ sports day,’ he explained breathlessly to Dryden as he rearranged his badges in front of the mirror.

  ‘Goodo,’ said Dryden, and got a vaguely suspicious glance in return.

  He hit the phones. During his time with the News at Westminster he’d built up good contacts with a press officer at the Treasury. About the same age as Dryden, he’d lived close by in north London. He’d invited him and his wife to Laura’s family café for lunch. They’d got on. He rang him at home.

  Money was the key to the puzzle. A lot of cash, assuming the Crossways gang had flogged George Ward’s silver, was still unaccounted for after more than thirty years. There was the £510 Tommy Shepherd had won, there was the £648 in cash and the silver – valued at £800-£1,000. More than £2,000.

  He left a message on the answerphone. What would that £2,000 be worth today?

  In The Crow’s darkroom Dryden emptied the paper’s antique camera and put half a dozen prints in the fixer from those he had taken of the fire at the circus wintergrounds. Then he made a coffee and reminded himself that only sad fuckers worked on Sunday. He unlocked the drawer of his desk to retrieve the file Stubbs Senior had given him on the Crossways robbery. It was a résumé, presumably written for the incoming Scotland Yard detectives, of those interviewed in connection with Tommy’s disappearance. It was sixty pages long, close-typed on A4, and it took him two hours to read. He was interrupted only once by the phone on his desk. He let it ring and listened to the message.

  ‘Hi.’ It was Kathy. ‘You there?’

  He picked up the phone just too late to stop her ringing off – and felt the guilty rush of relief.

  Once he’d finished the file Stubbs Senior had given him he still had a Sunday afternoon to waste until Tommy’s funeral. But now he had something to waste it on. The squad Stubbs had led had done a thorough job. More than thirty interviews had been conducted with what the police liked to call Tommy Shepherd’s ‘associates’. Two had caught Dryden’s attention. In the first days of the investigation Stubbs had personally interviewed the Reverend John Tavanter, a newly installed vicar in his first parish at St John’s, Little Ouse. Later, in the September of 1966, he had brought Liz Barnett, then a twenty-year-old
housewife and local Labour party activist, in for questioning. Both had what the files coyly called a ‘romantic’ attachment to the suspect.

  But Dryden decided to start with Gladstone Roberts, then a local hoodlum, interviewed within hours of the Crossways robbery. His links with the suspect were more business-like.

  Dryden locked up and walked out of the town centre, now swaddled in a foot of unblemished Sabbath snow. Cathedral Motors stood just off a roundabout on the ring-road about a mile from The Crow’s offices. It was a new garage, built when the by-pass was completed in the late 1970s, and it included a car wash, shop, and a spacious showroom. The pumps were automatic but an attendant sat behind a computer in a perspex booth. Suspicious of anyone on foot, he eyed Dryden with open distrust. Dryden beamed. ‘Hi. Howya doing? Mr Roberts about? Gladstone Roberts.’

  The attendant, a teenager of obvious timidity only emphasized by a daring silver earring, reached for the phone on the till. He wore a baseball cap marked Cathedral Motors and the kind of large brash wristwatch that can tell you the time under fifty fathoms of water.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Dryden. Philip Dryden. The Crow. Tell him it’s about Tommy Shepherd.’

  There was a short conversation during which the would-be deep-sea diver failed to take his eyes off Dryden’s face. He replaced the receiver with exaggerated care as if it might go off with a bang. Dryden got the impression he was trying to memorize his lines.

  ‘Mr Roberts will be down in a few minutes, Mr Dryden. Sorry we don’t have a seat. Mr Roberts is off to church so he said to mention that he would only have a few seconds to spare.’

  ‘Church?’ said Dryden, and smiled. He recalled the police résumé on Gladstone Roberts: the words ‘vicious’, ‘petty’, and ‘crook’ had stood out along with ‘educationally subnormal’. He didn’t recall devout.