The Water Clock

by The Water Clock

  Tuesday, 6th November

  18

  Dryden loathed the doorsteps of the recently bereaved. He knew that as he knocked on the door of Camm House it would, this time, not be empty. The night’s search parties along the river had found no trace of Reg Camm. The pathologist had meanwhile matched his dental records to the corpse retrieved from the Lark. In the morgue at eight o’clock the previous night Paul Camm had formally identified the body of his father. And here, twelve hours later, was Dryden. His professional objectives were clear: a brief interview with the widow and – the main priority – a picture of the deceased. He knocked again and saw the net curtains twitch.

  Peggy Camm answered the door. The cameo brooch this time held a silk scarf in place. Otherwise she was in black; a deep velvet black which sucked in what little light the house enjoyed. The dismal hallway reeked of white lilies. Dryden was mystified by the use of such a flower to witness death, it radiated a sickly sweet medicinal aroma. From a back room came the gentle tinkling of the teacups of condolence. Upstairs a child cried in that confused way reserved for the first encounter with death.

  They sat in the front room, an old-fashioned parlour in perfect keeping with the house’s post-war gloom.

  She looked at him kindly. ‘I remember now. Your father. I’m sorry about your mother. Last year, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Thanks. You’ve got a good memory. I was eleven when Dad died. You haven’t changed.’

  She smiled. ‘She was a good friend. I’m afraid I wasn’t. I faded away after your father died. I’m sorry.’

  Dryden shook his head. It didn’t matter now.

  ‘And I’m sorry about having to sit in this antiques shop,’ she said, brushing down her black velvet skirt. ‘Reg loved this room – he remembered it from childhood of course. I think he saw it as a representation of continuity. The children hate it, too stuffy and you can’t run round can you, not with all this stuff just waiting to topple to the floor.’ She adjusted a small porcelain figurine by her elbow.

  The accent was more finishing school than Fens.

  ‘Frankly, that’s why we’re in here. The children – the boys – don’t think I should be speaking to you. I think they are angry about Reg’s death, confused perhaps. But Reg rather liked The Crow, I think he’d want me to talk to you.’

  Thanks a million, thought Dryden, feeling unclean. Did he have some horribly apparent disease? He wanted to ask a few questions and put Reg Camm’s picture in the paper; the family would be ringing up later that week to pay for an obituary notice. He was doing them a bloody favour.

  Her hand twitched again at the brooch. ‘We imagined you’d like a picture as well.’ She touched a brown envelope stiffened with cardboard on the table between them. Inside was a large black and white print of a man at the wheel of a pleasure cruiser. He had a shock of corn-blond hair and the slightly ruddy skin of someone who has spent a lifetime out of doors. Dryden suppressed the image of the body of the Lark victim, and the blood-dripped corn-blond head which had looked out with a fish-dead eye.

  ‘Thank you. I am really very sorry to be butting in just now, it must have been a shock.’

  She fiddled absentmindedly with the brooch. ‘No. No. I wouldn’t have said a shock. Murder we didn’t expect of course… I’d rather you didn’t put this in the paper…’

  Dryden hoped the tabloids didn’t get to her, they’d eat her alive.

  ‘Reg had been unhappy for several years and had, well, tried to take his own life as a result. It’s not nice but there it is. I think failing to succeed, even in that, made it even worse. The last attempt was quite serious and we were all rather fearful of the future. He was a determined man.’

  Dryden looked suitably confused.

  ‘Debts,’ she said.

  Money, thought Dryden, but said: ‘I thought he inherited the boatyard from his father? It’s a well-established business…’

  ‘It could be a thriving one. But Reg mortgaged it in 1980. My husband could run a boatyard, Mr Dryden, but he couldn’t run a business. I’m afraid he panicked. We needed money rather quickly you see. Our first son, Paul, had leukaemia as a baby and the doctors said he’d have a much better chance going to a specialist at a London clinic – the Princess Grace. Rather expensive even then. A fortune in fact, and no credit accepted, at least not the kind we could offer.

  ‘Reg had friends, rather bad friends as it turned out, and he went to one of them to organize everything. He was duped: quite blatantly in fact. There’s no way that this business will ever make enough money to meet the repayments. But then we have our son. So who can say if he made that much of a hash of things. I think Reg thought he had failed his family, not just us, but his parents and grandparents. The boatyard was his inheritance and he felt that all he was leaving for Paul and James was a burden.’

  Dryden leant forward in the old armchair, his knees cracking loudly in the silent parlour. ‘Can I ask you a question about your husband’s past? About the time before he met you?’

  Was that fear in her eyes? ‘Yes. Yes, of course. There were no secrets you know, not between us. Reg had rather a wild youth – letting off steam. He was very lucky: he was the only child and the business was very lucrative. He went to a private school in Cambridge, foreign holidays, everything he wanted really. I often think he felt he lived the rest of his life in penance for having wasted such opportunities. He had no need. But there it is.’

  ‘You met?’

  ‘In 1968. Our first date was at the Picture Palace. A Man For All Seasons. It had won an Oscar.’

  Dryden cut the reminiscences. ‘Did he ever mention friends from his past – Tommy Shepherd?’

  ‘That was the man they found on the cathedral roof, wasn’t it?’ She took silence for yes. ‘He knew Tommy I think. Reg was a modest teenage rebel: Mods and Rockers, that kind of thing. There was a whole crowd of them. I think Reg’s money helped – otherwise I don’t think they would have given him the time of day. I got the impression that they did a lot of betting, horse racing. Reg got an allowance but when he was in trouble, which was pretty often, it was stopped. That’s when he needed another source of income. It was all over by the time we met, but I think it had been a bit of a, well, passion.’

  She blushed. Perhaps not the only passion.

  ‘Reg was, in some ways, quite a weak person. Easily led is too trite – but it can’t be far from the truth. Perhaps they went a bit far. Anyway he dropped them, all the old crowd. He said he wanted to start again – that was good enough for me. His father paid off his debts. It was a difficult time for both of them – but it was a new beginning.

  ‘His reputation wasn’t good though. My parents tried to stop the marriage. I met Reg at night school – at the college. I was doing teacher training. Your mother was a lecturer in fact. Reg was doing business accounting, trying to show his father that he was serious about taking on the yard.’

  ‘Have you any idea who killed your husband, Mrs Camm?’

  She shook her head and stood.

  ‘You said there were no secrets, Mrs Camm, none at all do you think? Tommy was involved in a robbery before he disappeared. Could your husband have got involved in that?’

  ‘I think… I believe, that my husband told me everything. Nothing he told me would warrant his murder. That is enough for me.’

  Within thirty seconds Dryden was standing on the doorstep. Would she, he wondered, have married someone involved in the Crossways robbery? If she found out, what would have been her reaction? Betrayal perhaps. Anger.

  He paused on the doorstep. ‘Was Mr Camm insured, Mrs Camm?’

  She didn’t miss a heartbeat. ‘I think that’s a family matter, Mr Dryden. Will you drop the photograph back?’

  ‘Of course. Thank you.’

  He was talking to a closed door.

  19

  Belsar’s Hill – the travellers’ site that had been the home of Tommy Shepherd at the time of the Crossways robbery – had been an encampment for
more than a thousand years. A ten-foot-high earthwork in a perfect circle surrounded a hollow corral. Through the site ran an old drove road, cutting in half a landscape already a thousand years old when the Normans landed at Hastings. The earth couldn’t be farmed, and the site couldn’t be levelled, because of its status as an Ancient Monument. The rampart provided natural protection from the elements and for animals – with wide gates closing off both ends of the drove road after dark. In the sixties the county council had put in a waterpipe and a toilet block on the basis that a gypsy site at Belsar’s Hill was in very few people’s backyards. Protests from the few local farms had been vociferous, then bitter, then resigned and now folklore.

  As Humph’s Capri clattered through the open gate the dull percussion of barking dogs rose to greet them. An unruly pack strained from a set of leashes tied to an iron stake in the centre of the clearing. Half a dozen shiny aluminium caravan trailers stood neatly in the lee of the western half of the ramparts. The snow was dotted with dogshit and paw prints.

  Dryden put a leg outside the car. He dangled it as if fishing for a Dobermann pinscher. He caught an Alsatian instead, which came bounding out from beneath one of the caravans and left four feet of bubbling slobber along the nearside cab window.

  A caravan door opened and Joe Smith appeared.

  Why am I not surprised? thought Dryden. And he’s got that bloody wrench again.

  Humph switched his latest language tape back on and closed his eyes. The sound of the sea filled the cab as Manuel described a day on the beach at Tarragona.

  ‘Thanks. A friend in need,’ said Dryden.

  Smith ambled up to the car with the calm assurance of ownership. The dogs orbited the vehicle like satellites. He wore a heavy quilted jacket against the cold, the empty left arm pinned up across the chest. Dryden inched the window down and fed a brown envelope through the crack. It held large photographic prints of the circus winterground’s fire. Smith examined them slowly, nodding.

  ‘Coincidence, you here,’ offered Dryden, looking around the encampment as if for the first time. ‘I was looking for Billy Shepherd. Tommy’s brother.’

  Smith crouched down on his haunches. ‘You’ve seen him, Mister.’

  Dryden noted that the accent was stronger, more streetwise, less forgiving. He wasn’t surprised by the answer but he contrived to look it. Smith bore so little resemblance to the one picture Dryden had seen of Tommy that it was difficult to believe they shared a mother, let alone that they had been born less than a year apart. Only the cobalt blue-black hair provided a link across four decades.

  ‘Any chance of talking to him as well?’

  Shepherd stood in answer and walked away towards one of the caravans with the Alsatian at his heels. Both disappeared inside. Dryden followed after a decent interval.

  The trailer’s interior was immaculate: a museum of trinkets and mementos of dubious taste. The Alsatian had metamorphosed into a family pet and was curled under the table. China figurines crowded the shelves and the walls were all but obscured by heavy gilt-edged frames around prints and photographs. Lace fringed the net curtains, cushions and tablecloth. The smell of furniture polish was so strong it hurt Dryden’s throat. It seemed colder inside the caravan than out, the cosiness of the heavy snow being replaced by an almost antiseptic, over-polished cleanliness. Billy Shepherd lit a gas heater with a pop, its warmth creeping out to reawaken the damp.

  Dryden sat at a glass-topped table and Shepherd offered him a cigarette–Lucky Strike. Dryden took one and examined it carefully. Billy answered the unspoken question. ‘US air base at Mildenhall. Old habits.’

  Under the glass table top was a large black and white print of Houdini’s successful attempt to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

  ‘America?’ asked Dryden. It was as good a place to start as any.

  Shepherd drew deeply on the Lucky Strike. ‘Nineteen sixty-eight. After Tommy went missing.’

  Dryden wondered, if Tommy had lived would he look like this? Smith’s face was hard and unforgiving, the facets meeting in sharp cheekbones below the bottle-green eyes.

  ‘We’d dreamed about it as kids. Grandad had been.’ He tapped the glass top over the print. ‘Full of stories. Kids’ dreams. So I went.’

  Dryden’s silence enticed him on.

  ‘There was an uncle in Jersey City – Mum’s brother. I worked in a car breakers in Washington Heights. Married a local girl. Family. Then this…’

  He nodded at the empty sleeve pinned to his overalls.

  ‘Accident?’

  ‘Car crusher.’ They winced together. ‘Came back last Christmas. Left the wife – we’re separated. Brought the daughter. That’s my life, anything else while you’re here?’

  ‘I’m trying to find out who killed your brother. I need some help.’

  Shepherd fixed his extraordinary green eyes on Dryden. The Alsatian growled in his sleep.

  Dryden pressed on. ‘The police thought Tommy had killed himself when they found his body. Now they’re not so sure. The body pulled out of the Lark last week was Reg Camm, who left his prints at the Crossways. Something he had in common with Tommy. The only difference being that they already had Tommy’s on file. Did you see your brother after the robbery?’

  Shepherd put a finger into his eye and appeared to remove his pupil. He examined the contact lens while Dryden’s stomach did a somersault.

  ‘I don’t want to be involved with the police.’

  Dryden decided, bizarrely, on honesty. ‘This is more than a story for me. I need to know because I have to help the police, and I have to help them because I want something in return. I need it very badly.’

  A masterstroke. The inference was plain, they were both on the same side.

  ‘And I need it very quickly.’

  Shepherd mumbled a command to the dog, which slunk out from under the table and slid under a bunk bed. He took a long time to take a single drag from the Lucky Strike.

  ‘Tommy and I did meet after the Crossways. We were brothers, like all brothers we had a secret place.’

  ‘Stretham Engine?’

  Shepherd began to tear the packet of Lucky Strike into thin shreds of cardboard. ‘I met Tommy the day after the robbery. He’d been away at the coast. The boardwalk. He’d been with – a friend.’

  ‘Liz Barnett.’

  ‘Do you need me to tell this story?’

  There was plenty Dryden didn’t know. And he wanted to cross-check the mayoress’s version of events that day. ‘Tommy was on the run; how did he know the police had found his prints at the Crossways?’

  ‘Radio. Idiots put out a description. If they’d sat it out for twenty-four hours he would have walked straight into their arms. But then that would have made it damn clear he’d never been there in the first place. They wanted him to run. And they knew he would. They’d raided the camp here that night – straight after the robbery. They hadn’t found the prints then of course, they popped up overnight. They picked them up here, his caravan’s gone now. Smashed the place up a bit in fact, got us all out in the dark around the fire. Like a prisoner of war camp…’

  He expelled a square yard of acrid smoke: ‘Like yesterday… the memory’ Shepherd blinked and the cat-green eyes were filled with water. ‘They had the local copper with ‘em so they could spot Tommy. We looked like twins then; they knew we’d try to pull something. We all looked the same, that’s the problem with gyppos of course… Ask anyone.’

  Dryden laughed with his eyes. ‘Was Stubbs there that night? The detective inspector in charge of the case, head like a cannonball?’

  ‘Yup. Mean man. He was gonna solve it all right. One way or another. History’s written by the victors, right? He won. Tommy did it.’

  ‘Did he?’

  No answer. Billy traced with his finger the image of Niagara Falls under the glass table top. ‘We were allies.’

  ‘Against?’

  ‘Everyone. Old man mainly.’

  ‘Was he alive then
?’

  ‘Just. He died the following year… liver… or what was left of it. It was a long slow death. It’s a pity Tommy missed it.’

  The bitterness took a couple more degrees off what warmth there was in the air.

  ‘This was his caravan. Grandad’s before. No one’s lived in it since.’

  ‘He was… violent?’ Dryden was fishing.

  ‘He was what the shrinks call an abuser… and that’s answer enough. If he’d lived we’d have killed him one day.’ He looked out of the trailer’s window at a sudden squall of snow. ‘We planned it enough times.’

  ‘So when you met, what did Tommy say?’

  ‘He wanted to know what the police had on him, other than the fingerprints. I said they might have a description from a passing driver of a caravanette. It sounded like him, an ID parade would have got Stubbs the final nail in the coffin.’

  ‘Because the man on the forecourt, the man with the US-style cap, was Tommy’s image?’

  Billy just looked through him.

  ‘So Stubbs planted the prints. Why did he pick Tommy? If his prints weren’t at the scene, why did he go for him?’

  Billy shrugged. ‘The woman was gonna die. There was loads of pressure. The witness description fitted Tommy. Tommy had a record. Tommy was in the frame, simple. But I know Tommy wasn’t there.’

  They looked at each other for slightly longer than is normal in any kind of society.

  ‘They didn’t have your prints on record?’

  Billy shook his head. ‘I was smarter. Tommy was a fall guy. They always went for him.’

  ‘How did you keep him alive?’

  Billy laughed, the cat-green eyes brightening up a few volts. ‘They put surveillance on this place. Two cars. Plain as daylight. I’d go out on the river to fish. They didn’t bother to keep me in sight. The food was in the tackle box, plus what I caught. He even put on weight.’