The Water Clock

by The Water Clock

  Dryden strolled back to Humph’s cab. The cabbie was awake. Dryden was in need of a good meal and a drink. ‘Let’s eat. The Peking I think – all expenses spared.’

  16

  The Jubilee Estate stood on the edge of town and most of its streets petered out into the fen. Built by the Victorians it had been abandoned by the New Elizabethans in the 1950s. Now it was a sink estate – a concrete cesspit for the people society couldn’t flush away. In bad weather wild ponies wandered in off the fields to nuzzle the warm air vents at the council waste disposal unit. It was the kind of place that the statistics said didn’t exist.

  The Peking House Chinese restaurant stood in a shopping parade alongside a newsagent, washeteria, ladies’ hairdressers, pet shop, a corner minimarket, with its windows obscured by Day-Glo posters advertising cut-price everything, and a pub called the Merry Monk, which enjoyed a reputation for civil disorder of Wild West proportions.

  Humph parked outside – right outside, with Dryden’s passenger door aligned exactly with the restaurant’s plate glass entrance. Humph was a symphony in time and motion – other people’s.

  Dryden didn’t even ask if Humph was coming in. He turned to his friend. ‘It’s rude you know – sitting outside. He’s a friend of yours too.’

  Humph pressed the tape-deck button and the silky voice asked him what the weather was like in Barcelona. Humph told the silky voice.

  Sia Yew, proprietor of the Peking, was a one-time Hong Kong short-order chef. He’d spent the last five years of colonial rule in the kitchens of the officers’ mess – Royal Artillery. He emigrated to the UK equipped with a letter of recommendation from the governor general and a perfectly modulated upper-middle-class English accent. He had adapted this into pidgin English to meet the prejudices of his new clientele.

  Dryden took his usual table by the window – an honour he had never been denied largely due to lack of demand. He folded his legs beneath the plastic bucket seat and began to fiddle with the toothpicks. Gary, summoned to the free meal by mobile, fingered his spots and the plastic menu card.

  ‘Yο, people,’ said Sia. He had two teenage sons and enjoyed picking up the latest slang. He swung a blood-stained cleaver with one hand while the other held a cordless white telephone. The high-pitched tin voice of a hungry customer could just be heard.

  He finished taking down the takeaway order. ‘Ya. 14. 27. Two 58s. Fangyou – yes. Chop chop. Express. Burrbye.’

  Tucking the cordless into his smock pocket he stuck the order on a metal spike on the hob. He made no attempt to start cooking but took ostentatious care in extricating three beers from the cold cabinet and bringing them to Dryden’s table.

  He opened his own, took an impressive draught and burped. ‘Wicked,’ he said, making a mental note to ask his eldest what it meant. ‘Humph well?’ he asked, as if the cab driver wasn’t sitting ten feet away, double-glazed against the world of personal contact. They watched him holding a long conversation with his cousin Manuel who didn’t exist.

  Dryden sniffed. They sat in easy silence. Gary shook his beer and directed the plume of spray when he pulled the tab into the back of his mouth. Dryden idly pictured Sia’s customer expecting the feverish activity normally associated with the expression ‘Chop, chop, express’.

  He scanned the dark street outside and watched a yellow plastic child’s football roll past in the east wind followed by a few pages from last week’s edition of The Crow.

  Without turning his head he asked the usual question: ‘Any luck?’

  Sia was a regular gambler, a pastime he had picked up from the officers’ mess rather than from his forebears, a fact he was sensitive about. For Gary’s sake he made the point. ‘There is a difference between being born with a genetic disposition to gambling and enjoying the intellectual challenge of betting on horses.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’ asked Dryden.

  ‘About ten thousand a year.’

  Gary wasn’t listening. His jaw, normally slack, had become dislocated in a spectacular slump. He raised a single hesitant finger of alarm.

  Cherry Street, a cul-de-sac, was directly opposite the façade of the Peking. It ran out towards the fen where bollards stood preventing incursions by marauding gypsies who had been on the land several generations longer than the residents. Despite this, the locals delighted in telling them to ‘fuck off home where they came from’.

  The local council mirrored the sentiment if not the precise wording.

  But there was no gypsy in sight. What was in sight, advancing steadily up Cherry Street towards the Peking, was a platoon of riot police. The street lighting glinted on their black perspex helmets.

  Dryden stood and squinted through the Peking’s steamy windows.

  The police, in full public disorder gear, held their plastic shields expertly in an unbroken wall at the front while those behind held them aloft to form what any Roman general would have recognized as a perfect illustration of the defensive stratagem known as the ‘tortoise’. A sublime comic effect had been achieved by an order to advance in silence. They were tip-toeing up Cherry Street like the chorus line from some modern military ballet.

  Dryden took his seat and placed it closer to the window. It looked like Stubbs was going to get his arrest in time to impress the disciplinary tribunal. Presumably the fact that the Lark victim had been shot justified the military response. But the body language indicated a certain lack of tension. It looked more like a training exercise than the arrest of an armed killer.

  A police car, with standard jam-sandwich markings, drew up and blocked off the top end of the street. Its blue light flashed silently.

  Meanwhile, in the back kitchen of No. 29 Cherry Street, George Parker Warren was placing his second egg in the frying pan and considering with some satisfaction the fact that the teapot had now been brewing for nearly eight minutes. Perfect. Or nearly so. Another minute perhaps? The local water was hard and the tea needed time to brew. He lit a cigarette.

  The tip-toeing police tortoise had stopped immediately outside.

  In the kitchen George Parker Warren, retired car thief and occasional mechanic, poured his tea and reflected that despite the recent death of his beloved wife, Rebecca – there had been little hope after she had started drinking the Brasso – he could still look after himself.

  It was just the loneliness really. Company. That’s what he missed. Nobody ever seemed to drop round now Rebecca had gone. He’d had a few days in hospital recently to fix his bladder and he’d rather enjoyed it. Surrounded by people, even if they were sick people. He stared at the clock they’d bought together on their honeymoon at Skegness. It ticked and echoed in the empty house.

  ‘Company,’ he said out loud, and sipped his tea. He even missed prison – at least the food was good.

  The phalanx of padded policemen wheeled expertly with miniature Japanese steps to face George’s front door.

  There was a silence in which George sensed something. Had someone knocked? He went out into the hall. Silence. Imagination was a funny thing, he thought, feeling better.

  The order to make a forced entry into No. 29 was given by hand signal and by the time they hit George’s front door they really had built up quite a speed. They saw the splinters fly from the Peking.

  Dryden winced. ‘Hope they got the right address.’

  After a brief attempt to break the world record for the number of uniformed police officers crammed into a terraced house, a group of three PCs appeared with George. He had been restrained – a procedure that had broken both his china teacup and his nose in about the same number of places.

  ‘Here we go,’ said Dryden, ripping the ring-pull off another can of beer. ‘They’ve been watching those repeats of The Sweeney again.’

  Sia placed two plates of chicken chow mein on the table. The usual.

  Dryden deployed chopsticks for the meal. ‘Hard luck, Gary.’

  Gary didn’t even look at his. It was one of the eternal verities of lif
e as a junior reporter that when shit did happen – it happened to you.

  ‘Talk to the neighbours before the coppers get to ‘em. Then get down to the station to see what the story is. My guess is he’s been arrested in connection with the Lark killing. We’ve got a line in tomorrow’s paper already – but get any details for The Crow. It’s too late to update now.’

  Gary’s shoes banged noisily out of the Peking.

  A small crowd had already begun to gather outside No. 29. Nobody was as excited as Gary. Dryden reflected that despite some serious handicaps, including phonetic spelling and Olympic stupidity, Gary was probably a born reporter.

  Humph flashed the lights on the Capri. Dryden bolted his food, a bad habit he enjoyed, and jumped in.

  ‘Radio News,’ said Humph. ‘An accident at the fireworks display by the cathedral. Some kids hurt.’

  The thought of blood and burns turned Dryden’s stomach. They both jumped as a rocket exploded overhead and silver rain fell on the dreary streets of the Jubilee Estate.

  17

  A crowd of about 8,000 had filled Cherry Hill Park – an open field that boasted one of the few gradients steep enough in the Fens for tobogganing. It provided a natural grandstand to view the display in the cathedral meadow opposite. Humph parked up at the Porta, the massive medieval gateway to the cathedral grounds. Dryden left his friend heroically attempting to extricate himself from the cab and ran through into the crowds.

  The police had decided to let the display restart – the best way of keeping the crowd in the park and not fouling up the emergency services. In the cathedral meadow a Catherine wheel whirled while acrid smoke drifted off to be caught up in the cathedral’s pinnacles. The great oaks and alders of the meadow cast black flickering shadows; beneath each stood a volunteer with stirrup pump and fire bucket.

  Two fire engines and three ambulances had come in through the lower gates and were parked up behind the small row of mobile fish and chip shops, burger bars and hot soup sellers. Laid out on the grass or sitting on the ground were about twenty children, surrounded by a knot of parents and St John’s Ambulance Brigade volunteers.

  There were plenty of noisy tears but no sign of blood – both good signs.

  Dryden headed straight for the fireman in the bright yellow jacket: the incident controller. He recognized him – one of the bonuses of local newspapers.

  ‘Wondered when you’d turn up. Good news is that the kids are going to be fine. Scared stiff most of ‘em but all superficial burns – although a couple actually took a glancing blow off the thing. They’ve got some nasty bruises.’

  The fireman turned round and picked a large burnt-out firework from a metal box. What was left of it was about three foot long and about as thick as the core of a toilet roll. It appeared to be smeared with blood.

  Dryden felt the earth tilt. Scared of blood. Just scared. He concentrated on a point between the fireman’s eyes. ‘And the bad news?’

  ‘The first one to get in the way of this charming object was your colleague. Kathy Wilde. Over there.’ He pointed to the ambulances.

  Dryden found himself analysing his feelings as he walked across the grass, winding his way through knots of happy smiling families. Happy smiling families didn’t seem to be his destiny. The women in his life seemed to be exposed to bizarre life-threatening dangers. He half-expected to find Kathy in a coma. He wondered, not for the first time, if he brought them bad luck. He felt a pang of guilt, but not a very strong one.

  Kathy was sitting in a wheelchair wrapped in a blanket beside an ambulance. She had a patch over a swab on the right eye and a bandage, wrapped around her head, above the left.

  He stood in front of her without speaking. Her one good eye looked skywards. ‘This is so fucking embarrassing.’

  Dryden had removed his ear bandage. A plaster hung like a cheap earring. He took her hand. It was an oddly parental reaction and he felt she looked sadder as a result.

  ‘Oh, I’m all right,’ she said, answering a question that hadn’t been asked. ‘Just don’t let me anywhere near that tosspot of a lord mayor.’

  There was a loud bang and a cheer as the display moved towards its climax. Kathy jerked in her seat and shouted out with the pain. A St John’s Ambulance volunteer appeared out of the dark. He was two sizes too small for a uniform that was three sizes too big. He had to roll his sleeves up to take Kathy’s pulse, an operation hampered by a sudden explosion of firecrackers.

  Dryden let the echoes die away over the park. The crowd ‘ahhhhhhhed’ as a rocket showered them with golden snow-flakes.

  ‘And what did the worshipful mayor do?’

  ‘It was the first sodding firework. All he had to do was light the blue touch paper and retire. Retire! Too bloody right. Let’s have a whip-round now’

  Dryden brushed his hand across her cheek. A sign of intimacy a minute too late.

  ‘He got his chain tangled up with the rocket, pulled it over when he walked off. Next thing I knew it was headed straight for me. It hit me here.’ She pointed to her eye.

  ‘I was wondering.’

  Kathy started to laugh, which brought on tears.

  Two orderlies arrived to lift her into the ambulance. Dryden promised to come and see her later. Then he collared a medic who appeared to be in charge. ‘She gonna be OK?’

  ‘Eyesight should be fine. Luckily the rocket was so large it couldn’t penetrate the socket. But the bruising is nasty and the force of the rocket may have cracked her skull. The eye filled up with mucus from the impact and the fumes. She’ll just need to rest and let it clear, then we’ll know for sure. And she’s going to go into shock soon.’

  Dryden caught up with Roy Barnett in the VIPs’ enclosure with a large whisky in one hand and a cigarette in the other. His Bobby Charlton hairstyle had flopped badly over his left ear. He had been released from the Tower on Saturday and advised to rest and avoid alcohol. He was due back for a check-up in forty-eight hours. Dryden felt the appointment might be immaterial, he could be dead by then.

  As Dryden approached he was just finishing an anecdote. ‘… So I said to the headmistress: Can I come too!’ There was a dutiful peal of laughter. Then he spotted Dryden advancing across the grass and tried to make a break for the civic Daimler.

  The reporter expertly cut him off, flipping open his notebook as he did so.

  Barnett rearranged the offending chain. ‘Nasty business, Dryden, very nasty.’

  ‘She’s going to be fine by the way, so are the kids. Thought you’d want to know.’

  ‘Oh. Yes. Good. Wonderful work by the emergency services. You can quote me.’

  ‘Thanks. Perhaps you can tell me what happened.’

  Over the mayor’s shoulder Dryden could see some of his Labour Party colleagues. Most were smirking. Barnett had got to the ceremonial top in local politics thanks to his money. He’d made a £50,000 donation to the party in the mid-1960s – a bribe that secured three terms in the Mansion House and a nameplate on the party’s town centre HQ which read ‘Barnett House’. He was well aware he had no friends. He was even aware he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box, a level of self-knowledge that made him easy to underestimate. Dryden noticed, not for the first time, his eyes. The rest of his face was crowded with a bigger person’s features. But the eyes were doll-like, black, and oddly threatening.

  ‘Simple accident. I bent down to light the fireworks and the chain of office slipped round the rocket. The fuse was very bright so I jumped back and the rocket fell over. Frankly – and this is off the record – I blame the organizers. It wasn’t very secure.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I ran.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘It went off. Straight at the crowd. Pure fluke. Total accident. One in a million, etcetera.’

  Dryden closed his notebook and Barnett breathed easier. He considered offering Dryden a drink but thought better of it.

  ‘A word about Tommy Shepherd.’

  The rest of
the guests had moved off to see the climax of the display outside. Dryden attacked the drinks table. He mixed some vodka, blackcurrant, Pernod and lemonade. The resulting drink glowed with a sickly incandescence like an indoor firework.

  Barnett watched uneasily. He considered his answer as he looked out at the last of the fireworks breaking over the cathedral. They fell, lighting his face alternatively green, gold, red, and blue.

  ‘I’ve been expecting someone to ask.’

  ‘Why?’

  The mayor grabbed a bottle of malt whisky and poured a three-inch slug. Then he mixed it, to Dryden’s horror, with an equal measure of R White’s lemonade. Some things, if not many, were sacred.

  ‘Why d’you think?’

  ‘Because he had an affair with your wife – which you probably knew about at the time. Because someone threw him off the top of the West Tower and killed him. Because someone knew his body was going to be found last Thursday, someone with links to either the cathedral or the council, or both.’

  ‘You’re way ahead of me. I knew all right – about Tommy and Liz. The marriage wasn’t in very good shape then. She wasn’t the only one shopping around. I just didn’t appreciate her choice. A bloody gypsy, for Christ’s sake.’ He looked disgusted still, after more than thirty years.