The Water Clock

by The Water Clock

  Stubbs decided to talk, not because he could see any advantage in it, but because he liked Dryden, or more accurately he envied him: envied him his lack of order and responsibilities, his freedom, and his untied existence. And he pitied him. Pitied him for the very reason for that freedom: a beautiful wife confined to a hospital bed for the rest of her life.

  ‘There’s something under the ice,’ he said.

  Dryden screamed inwardly. He could see that for himself.

  ‘And that’s off the record – it’s all off – OK?’

  Dryden held out both hands to indicate that his notebook was back inside the greatcoat – not that that had ever stopped him remembering a good quote. ‘We never spoke, Mr Stubbs.’

  ‘The river froze last night around 2 a.m. – the frogmen say the sheet of ice was unbroken. So the car went in before then. The nearest habitation is the Five Miles from Anywhere, the pub over there. Must be a mile. They don’t get much trade in winter. They’ve heard nothing – saw a few fires around last night – but that’s par for the course around Guy Fawkes.’ As if on cue a distant percussion echoed round the fen. They turned to see a cascade of orange and red fireworks burst over the distant silhouette of Ely Cathedral, standing two hundred feet above the black peat Fens.

  ‘Who found it?’

  ‘Kids. Skating. You can see something clearly from above. But today’s the first day they’ve been out on the river – so it could have been there for weeks.’ Stubbs looked reluctant to go on. ‘I’ve got no real idea what we’ve got, Dryden, and that’s off the record too. I can’t afford some damn fool quote in the paper.’

  Not again.

  Six weeks earlier Stubbs had responded to an emergency call relayed from county headquarters. An anonymous member of the public said a car had crashed in a field known as Pocket Park on the edge of town. It was a local landmark and the site of Ely’s annual fair. By the time Stubbs got there it was dark and there was no sign of the car in the field. So he called it a hoax and went home to tea.

  The following day they found the driver dead at the wheel in the next field. The coroner ruled that the victim, an eighty-four-year-old pensioner, had died instantly from a heart attack, having swerved off the main road and carried a ditch.

  It was the local TV that crucified Stubbs. A two-man team from Cambridge caught him on his front step the next night. The house was in worst Barrett Estate Tudor. His wife, Gaynor, made the mistake of coming out to greet him with the two kids – a show of solidarity which made good TV. The news crew flooded the front garden with an arc lamp and blinded the kids, who started crying. It was just about the worst time to be asked the one question he couldn’t really answer.

  ‘Any message for the family of the dead man, Detective Sergeant?’

  Fatally, Stubbs tried irony: ‘We all make mistakes.’

  It was a great headline and excruciating TV. Stubbs was up for a police tribunal – failing to follow proper procedure. It didn’t help being the son of a former deputy chief constable. So no more quotes. And no more cock-ups – which explained what appeared to be massive overreaction to a dumped car.

  Dryden was running out of time. ‘No problem – all off the record. Just a short statement saying nothing is fine, but give us a clue. I’ve got a story to file – at the moment it looks like “mystery surrounds”. Bit thin. Any idea if the driver is still on board?’

  Stubbs started to answer and then they heard it: the thwup-thwup-thwup of the county helicopter following the Lark up-river from Mildenhall.

  ‘Well, we are honoured.’ Dryden made a mental note to get some stills off the fire brigade’s video for The Crow’s sister paper, The Express.

  Stubbs popped some chewing gum and tugged at the overtight tie and starched white nylon collar of his shirt. ‘It’s a car. It must have been doing sixty to get that far out from the bank. Either the driver’s in it or he got out just in time – and if he got out just in time he knew he was ditching it. So why ditch it that far from the bank? There are some fairly fresh tyre marks running to the edge, but no signs of a skid on the road. And as far as we can tell no other tyre marks at all in the last twenty-four hours.’

  The detective walked off to indicate the end of the conversation. The helicopter arrived on the scene and hovered about sixty feet above the frogmen, adding its searchlight to the blaze of electricity. Dryden checked his watch. He had another ten minutes in which to file – tops. The downdraught from the helicopter had taken a few more degrees off the temperature so he walked to the high flood bank, and then eastwards beside a bleak field of winter beet.

  He looked out over the black water and shivered at a memory from his childhood. Another frozen river and a skating child. The sound of cracking ice and the sudden plummet into the shocking water. The colour had been extraordinary. The painfully clear blue of a winter’s sky seen through the crushed white lens of the ice. He’d sunk, drifting down river, away from the jagged circle where he had crashed through the ice. Looking up into the receding world, he had been too young to know he was drowning. He’d felt like sleeping after the first panic of the fall. Sleeping where the light was dimmer and wouldn’t hurt his eyes. Below. He had been ten, and drowning, looking up into a world he didn’t want to leave.

  Boxing Day. He’d been given skates but told to stick to the frozen pond behind the barn. But that was dull. The channel which began by the barn led away from Burnt Fen on its tiny island and out into the secret maze of drains and ditches frozen silent in that bitter winter. He’d skated faster, faster, and finally out, with a great whoop, into the wide expanse of the river.

  He still loved that place – not ten miles from where he now stood. It had been his world. He could see for ever and see no one. He hadn’t been a lonely child. He had a voice inside him to keep him company. But the voice failed him that Boxing Day morning. It didn’t see the thin ice where the swans had slept.

  But the voice had not deserted him. As he sank, it whispered a single word. ‘Skates.’ They’d been his best present. He’d sat by the Christmas tree to open the blue and silver parcel. ‘Skates,’ said his voice again. And he’d understood. So he pulled the laces and watched them sink into the gloom below.

  He’d risen until his head bumped the ice which froze to his hair, anchoring him to the spot. He wanted to cry then, for the rest of Christmas he was going to miss. His voice had gone. Or too far away to hear.

  That was the one moment he would always remember. The unhappiest moment of a happy childhood. The empty desolation of being on the wrong side of that sheet of ice, in the cold sterile water, while the fire burnt at the farm and the smell of Christmas food seeped out of the kitchen. And above him always the criss-crossed pattern of his own skates.

  Humph hooted from the cab. Dryden ambled over, drained of energy by the familiar chilling memory. The crow had called on the mobile and they wanted copy. Humph delivered all messages in a flat monotone – indicating indifference. ‘I told ‘em the police were about to issue a statement and you were holding on for that… another ten minutes. They’ll ring back…’

  Dryden slammed the cab door and leant on the roof with his notebook. As so often when faced with a white sheet of paper and a deadline Dryden thought about something else. He saw Humph on the steps of the high court, the decree nisi in one hand, and his daughter by the other. It was the last time he’d seen him smile.

  Humph waved the mobile at him through the side window. Dryden kicked the side of the cab and began to compose a paragraph for the Stop Press. In the best traditions of British journalism it said nothing with great style.

  He was steeling himself for the ordeal of filing it to Jean, The Crow’s half-deaf copytaker, when the fire brigade’s winch started to whine. As the cables took the strain he heard the ice crack. By the time he got to the bank a spider’s web of silver lines had appeared across the ice. The helicopter dropped thirty feet and the downblast swept the loose ice to the banks. The car jerked up a foot, the steel frame creaking
and howling under the strain. The metallic blue roof appeared, then the rear windscreen, and then the boot. By the time it reached the bank, water was pouring from two broken side windows. It came to rest on the bank top and, as the cables held it fast, the frogmen searched the inside by torchlight.

  It took thirty seconds for their body language to tell him everything he needed to know. He could see relaxation in every practised movement. No sign of a driver or passengers.

  Dumped car – big deal. But he got the details. A Nissan Spectre. Latest registration. No bumps, scrapes or window stickers. Road tax paid. Glove compartments empty. They put the torches on the boot and bonnet. Dryden was getting into the cab when one of the firemen gave a shout. He sprinted back, telling Humph to hold the copytaker on line.

  They had the arc lamp trained on the open boot. For a second Dryden could not understand what he saw: it looked like the back of a butcher’s van. Inside was what was left of a large slab of ice glistening with melted water. Inside that was a body in an unrecognizable form. It had not been cut to fit, but compressed and twisted into the space.

  A great Guy Fawkes rocket burst overhead, the stark white light making the image burn into his retina.

  There was one body. Male? The face stared at them – one particular eyeball so close to the surface of the ice it reflected the blue electricity of the arc lamp back into the night. The thick, greying, corn-blond hair was matted with dried blood.

  At first Dryden thought the head had been severed from its body. It lay twisted and back over its own shoulder. Then he saw the knuckle of bloodied vertebrae protruding from the neck and the thick flap of flesh that still joined shoulder to head. The sudden exposure to the heat of the lamps was melting the ice quickly, the fingers of one hand beginning to protrude along with a naked, blue-veined foot. Around the flesh streaks of black blood made the white skin look like ice-cream drizzled with chocolate.

  One of the frogmen was sick in the long grass. Stubbs was unmoved. In control. He called the police photographer over to capture the position of the body before the ice melted. Then he used the squad-car radio to get the pathologist, coroner’s officer, and forensic team. Murder inquiry procedure.

  Dryden told the copytaker the story was coming: he did that twice to make sure she’d heard the first time. Three hundred and fifty words by five-thirty. He wrote the intro and gave the rest off the top of his head. It wasn’t great – but it was in time.

  Police launched a murder hunt yesterday after the butchered body of a man was found locked in the boot of a car winched out of the frozen River Lark, near Ely.

  The police recovered the car – a new blue Nissan Spectre – from 15 feet of water two miles south of the village of Prickwillow after children skating on the river spotted it below the ice.

  Det. Sgt. Andrew Stubbs of Ely Police, said: ‘Clearly we are treating this incident as suspicious. We have begun a murder inquiry and would appeal to anyone who can help with information to come forward.’

  The police were unable to provide any clue to the identity of the dead man or the ownership of the car. Forensic experts from Cambridge were due to arrive at the scene late last night. The body was being prepared for removal to the city mortuary at Waterbeach.

  One eyewitness to the recovery of the car, Ely taxi driver Mr Humphrey H. Holt, said: ‘When they got the car out it was a block of ice. Then they got to work on it with the blowtorches. All hell broke loose when they opened the boot. It must have been a horrible sight – they were obviously distressed.’

  Detectives will concentrate on trying to identify the dead man. It is understood that his head was nearly severed. House to house inquiries were underway last night to see if anyone had heard or seen anything suspicious.

  Detectives will be hampered by the isolated nature of the scene of the crime. The nearest building is a public house – The Five Miles From Anywhere – over a mile to the east. Traffic at the T-junction is extremely rare. Field work in the area has been halted during the current bad weather.

  Dryden got the copytaker to read the story back and then checked with the news desk that he was in time. He was.

  The firework display was reaching its climax over the cathedral and the sky was now a riot of lurid colour. The forensic team had got the corpse out of the Nissan and placed it on a body bag. Two medics in protective white suits were struggling to get the stiff limbs inside the plastic shroud. Dryden moved closer while Stubbs was busy on the mobile. The corpse’s feet were still visible, tucked grotesquely into the small of the back. Around one ankle was a short length of heavy rope attached to what looked like a cast-iron pulley block. And one arm hung loose. The hand was tanned and strong and on the wedding finger was a single gold band. Somewhere, thought Dryden, the long wait has begun.

  2

  By the time Dryden got back to the office, via a chip shop with Humph, the newsroom looked like a cabin on the Marie Celeste. The advent of the computer had brought with it a lot of talk about the paperless office: but it was just talk. And The Crow – established 1882– was hardly at the leading edge of new technology. Waste paper covered almost the entire floor and plastic coffee cups lay in small heaps by the PCs. An ashtray fashioned from an old hubcap contained the contents of a small volcano. Spikes – supposedly banned with the introduction of the PCs – still bristled on every desktop to collect used copy and notes, and the occasional passing eyeball. The newsroom consisted of three reporters’ work stations, a larger mahogany news editor’s desk in the bay window, a subs’ table with two dumpy make-up computers, and a copytaker’s table complete with acoustic hood salvaged from a skip in 1965 when the old post office was demolished. Splash, the office cat, was curled up on the single fax machine for extra warmth. Behind a glass partition was the editor’s office. The glass had been obscured by various absolutely essential pieces of paper carrying information ranging from the tide times at Brancaster to the constitution of the Three Rivers Water Authority. This paper camouflage had been erected by reporters over the years and now entirely baffled any attempt by the editor to see his staff.

  The office was on the first floor of The Crow’s premises in the centre of Ely, above the front counter and telesales. It looked out on Market Street where, tonight, frozen rain slanted across the amber blaze of the street lights. The top deck of the Littleport bus had just drawn up at the stop directly outside and, barely visible behind the streaming condensation, was what appeared to be the entire cast of St Trinian’s.

  Dryden’s story, not surprisingly, had made the lead: HUNT FOR FEN KILLER in sixty-eight point across two decks shouted from the proofs left lying on the subs’ table. The top-single beside it was hardly in the same league: FIREWORK WARNING OVER KIDS’ PRANK.

  He was rereading the copy when Kathy Wilde, his fellow senior reporter, thudded up the stairs, kicked open the newsroom door, and deposited the office’s allocation of fifty freshly printed copies on to the floor with a wallop that lifted the floorboards on which Dryden was standing.

  Kathy, a red-haired Ulster woman, distracted attention from lurking depression and a tendency to put on fat by a nearly continuous exercise in extrovert behaviour. She knew someone would be in the office from the lights. It was one of her less dramatic entrances.

  ‘Would yer effing believe it.’ The Ulster accent was sharp enough to make the windows rattle. ‘Page eight! Stark-bollock naked in the front of his bloody Mondeo with a blow-up doll and these tossers stick it in the briefs on page eight!’

  ‘Pity he didn’t keep it in his briefs,’ said Dryden.

  He liked it when Kathy laughed. She let herself go – one of Dryden’s litmus tests of character. She advanced towards him.

  Kathy had developed a kind of cat-walk designed to draw attention to her hour-glass figure. It was an ample hour-glass through which a lot of sand had passed, but an hour-glass none the less. The effect was mildly hypnotic and Dryden froze like a rabbit in the headlights of an oncoming car.

  Kathy invaded his
personal space – in Dryden’s case an area slightly smaller than Norfolk. When she moved she sounded like a mobile in the wind – the earrings, necklace, and bracelets tinkling together.

  She removed a piece of imaginary lint from Dryden’s shoulder. ‘You tell me – go on. I’ll take it from you. Tell me I don’t know a decent story when I see one.’ She thrust a mangled copy of the paper – hardly hot off the presses but still warm – into Dryden’s hands.

  Kathy had come to England to do feature-writing shifts on the Fleet Street Sunday papers. She’d cut her teeth as a reporter on the stricken doorsteps of the Troubles. The Crow was a day job that paid the bills and gave her a base within striking distance of London for her lipstick-red MG sports car. She had a low view of The Crow’s professional competence and had not taken kindly to the occasional lecture from the paper’s poorly talented senior staff. For Dryden she made an exception: his Fleet Street track record put him on a pedestal. It also made him doubly desirable. She liked the emotional distance, the unselfconscious good looks, the scruffy oversized clothes on the six-foot-plus frame, and the shock of jet black hair. But she loved the CV most of all.

  She realized, suddenly, just how close she was standing and backed off in confusion. Subsiding into the newsroom’s one battered armchair she burst into angry tears. It was a regular but effective performance. Her face, impish and animated, slumped and crumpled. A considerable amount of make-up began to coalesce giving her a tragic theatrical appeal to which Dryden was just a little susceptible.

  He snapped out of it. ‘So they wouldn’t know a decent story if it bit them on the arse. What’s new?’

  Kathy stemmed the floods to a series of appealing snuffles.

  Dryden admired the front page splash. He’d been a reporter ten years and had often written the front page lead on the News – circulation one million. But he got just as big a kick out of The Crow – circulation 17,000 and falling.