If you snapped Ben Thomas in half you’d find New Labour written right through him, thought Dryden, and very little else. On the phone Thomas had the ability to pitch his voice at a tone which suggested he was standing up and in a hurry. This indicated both that he was giving you valuable time and that it was running out. He also annoyed Dryden intensely by using his first name.
‘I’ll be brief,’ promised Dryden. ‘I understand the district council is expected to meet an unexpectedly large bill for work on the cathedral restoration this year – due to a late decision to extend work to clear and repair guttering ahead of the cold weather. There appears to be some unease that the financial controls at the cathedral are lax and that council-tax payers are having to foot the bill.’
‘Who’s uneasy?’
‘Some of your fellow councillors. Leading figures.’
‘Who exactly?’
‘At the moment they are only prepared to comment privately. But I’ll run a story – so if you want to comment this is your chance, or chat off the record.’
Dryden had spent nine years on Fleet Street, three of them at Westminster for the News. He had quickly learned that the best way to get a comment from a reluctant politician was to say a story was running anyway. They couldn’t stand the idea of missing out – especially to another politician.
‘OK. Can we agree a quote at the end?’ Councillor Thomas took silence for consent, a provincial mistake which would one day cost him dear. ‘The annual restoration work which we bankroll is supposed to include routine maintenance to gutters and stonework. It appears that a very late decision was taken to extend this year’s programme to the transept…’
‘South-west transept?’
‘… Yup. As I said. We’re told that the work is required – public safety being at risk if water collected in the guttering and froze. The question we have to ask is why wasn’t the danger spotted earlier? Last year the restoration work was concentrated on the buttresses and stonework on the southwest transept – last year we could have extended that work for very little extra cost. This year new scaffolding has had to be erected, a hugely costly undertaking.’
‘How…’
But Thomas was ahead of him: ‘Thirty thousand quid makes a difference, Dryden’ – Dryden smiled at the missed opportunity to use his first name – ‘in a total council budget of just under six million. I’ve demanded a meeting with the Master of the Fabric and the Dean – after that we’ll move on to the contractors. Basically they have to get the message that this cannot happen again. I intend to get the money clipped off the annual bill spread over five years.’
There was a pause in which Councillor Thomas, Chairman of the Ely branch of the ‘Stop Children Smoking’ campaign, could be heard drawing deeply on a cigarette.
‘What’s so dangerous about water gathering in the gutters?’
‘Freezing water cracks stone. Thaw results in falling stone. Need a diagram?’
‘What’s causing the water to gather?’
There was a deep sigh from the far end of the line.
‘Leaves. Apparently they’re choking the mouths of the gargoyles. All right?’
‘Fine. And on the record?’
‘Errrrm. The council has responded promptly to an emergency request from the cathedral to extend work on the roof in order to protect the public from the possibility of falling stone caused by frost action. We look forward to discussing with the authorities future funding arrangements – blah, blah, blah… Make the rest up – OK?’
Dryden heard the receiver crash down.
‘Charming. Have a nice life. But make it a short one.’
Dryden’s phone rang again immediately. It was DS Stubbs. Dryden could almost smell the Old Spice.
‘Dryden? Just a heads up, thanks for the story by the way, it was fine and – hold on, I’ve just got another call…’ After a long pause in which Dryden was forced to listen to a lot more of the ‘Hall of the Mountain King’ than he really liked, Stubbs was back on the line. ‘I didn’t want you turning up for the noon presser – there’s nothing new on the case. The chief constable has taken a personal interest. He doesn’t like the suggestion that the Fens are a nice quiet backwater where bodies can be dumped with impunity. That’s all we are saying really: top priority, arrests expected soon, you know the drill.’
‘And the truth?’ Dryden found Stubbs’s solicitousness disturbing. He sensed a bargain in the making.
‘Progress. We’re pleased.’
Dryden saw his chance: one of the few plus points of working for a weekly rag like The Crow was that you didn’t have to push hard all the time. ‘Fine. Look – I don’t suppose you could spare me ten minutes some time? I’d like to do a piece on how you’re organizing the inquiry; checking the missing people list, tracing the car, house-to-house, that kind of thing. Perhaps we could meet – over a drink?’ What a tart, thought Dryden. It is quite amazing the bilge people will believe if you flatter their self-esteem. He could virtually hear Stubbs purring on the other end of the line: there was nothing the detective sergeant would like more than to be held up as an example of methodical police work, especially with a tribunal hearing coming up on his spectacular balls-up over Pocket Park.
‘I can meet you at the Tower tonight. Gaynor’s on late shift – I’ll drop her off at ten,’ said Stubbs.
‘Fine – how about the canteen? They do a nice cup of cold tea.’ He sensed that if he hadn’t asked for the meeting Stubbs would have. He felt his skin crawl.
He felt the need for action, or at least distraction. According to the newsdesk diary Gary was down for magistrates court that afternoon. He crossed his name out and replaced it with his own – chief reporter’s prerogative. An afternoon of other people’s misfortunes would do nicely. He put Gary down for wedding forms, farming news and emergency calls. The newsroom was stuffy and over-heated and the rest of the staff would be in soon for a late, publication day, start. He left a message for Humph to pick him up after the court rose at 5 p.m., bought a bunch of lilies on the way to the courts, and rang the vicar of St John’s, Little Ouse.
5
The landscape slipped by Humph’s cab: a monochrome sea as flat as an ancient mariner’s nightmare. In one field of black earth a wild horse stood, its head and neck just clear of the blanket of ground mist. A disembodied mythical animal floating over an invisible land. Telegraph poles stood at crazy angles in the deep black peat – just scratching the low white sky above.
Humph ate a sandwich with one hand while guiding the cab out to Little Ouse with the other: a procedure not so much reminiscent of steering as tacking. He ate with delicate and exaggerated care. He was a finicky eater. As he always said, the problem was his hormones. Dryden imagined they were big hormones with Ipswich Town sweatshirts.
They found themselves running beside the frozen River Lark. At the spot where the car had been ditched they pulled up by the yellow and black scene-of-crime tape where a solitary PC stood guard. He looked too young to be out on his own let alone in a police uniform.
Dryden wound the window right down. ‘Any developments, Inspector?’
Humph smirked. They had few shared pastimes but baiting police constables was one of them.
The copper ignored him.
‘I understand the culprits may be armed and still in the area?’ This was news to the constabulary. The PC produced a two-way radio and walked off to check out in private how it worked.
Humph drove away before Dryden could do any more harm. They sped past the Five Miles from Anywhere – closed on winter evenings, its beer garden was full of picnic tables dripping in the mist.
A mile downstream was the site of an old cut used by the potato barges in the 1880s, similar to the one in which PK 122 was moored but much larger. The dock was being redeveloped as a marina. Building work had begun in the late summer and as they drove past Dryden could see lights burning in one of the Swedish-style chalets built to stand on wooden piles above the moorings. The river bey
ond was blocked by a pontoon above which a single-track bridge was being constructed to provide car access to the marina from the north.
Dryden told Humph to park up. A wrought-iron arch over the entrance spelt out the words: Feltwell Marina.
As Dryden stood listening for signs of life a voice made him jump: ‘Can I help?’ A body followed in the gathering gloom. The caretaker had seen him coming.
‘Saw the lights,’ said Dryden by way of explanation. Building work ahead of the big freeze had left the marina’s yard with half a dozen deep trenches criss-crossing the site.
The caretaker nodded. He was big and broad and dressed like a lumberjack. He had a ridiculous fur hat with ear-flaps tied up under his chin. Dryden would have laughed, but then he was big and broad and dressed like a lumberjack.
Dryden was always disappointed at his inability to intimidate. At six foot three, in the cavernous black overcoat, he felt he might just occasionally demand some respect. But the lumberjack didn’t look very impressed.
‘I just wondered,’ said Dryden, weakly. Any news about the car they got out of the river?’
‘Car?’
There was a long silence in which the sound of cogs could be heard turning. Was that a thought crossing his mind?
‘Fuck off,’ said the caretaker and whistled. An Alsatian dog bounded into the light trailing a line of dribble any rabies victim would have been proud of. Dryden’s guts dissolved and the surge of panic was so strong he couldn’t move his legs. With what looked like exaggerated calm he flipped open a laminated wallet containing a press card, which failed to impress the dog. Then again it was a decade old, and someone else’s.
‘Philip Dryden. The Crow’
‘Fuck off,’ said the caretaker. It didn’t count as repetition because it was at least an octave lower and a lot louder.
Dryden fucked off. The last thing he saw was a half-finished sign propped up against the marina’s prospective site office. ‘Feltwell Anchor Marina opens: April 1’. Work on the bridge would not take as long, but the river would be blocked for several months at least. But for the kids, and the ice, the Lark victim would have stayed undiscovered into the spring.
‘Local knowledge,’ said Dryden to nobody, fishing in the pockets and producing a packet of mushrooms which he munched as they swept on through the gloom.
The village of Little Ouse lay at the end of a three-mile drove – a long, dispiriting ride across the peatlands on a track constructed of slabs of concrete laid inexpertly heel-to-toe. It had been a soft drove until the war, when the concrete had been laid by the Ministry of Production to speed the supply of vegetables to London. The corrugated surface played a soundtrack back to drivers – a kind of dismal rumbling background beat.
Two rows of brick tied cottages formed what was once the heart of the village. They stood in the lee of the high river bank. A tortured cast-iron bridge crossed the Lark. A home-made wooden sign hung from its railing in the gloom of a winter’s dusk: At Your Own Risk’. The church of St John, rebuilt by the Victorians, was demure and neat in contrast to the monumental vicarage, a neo-Gothic classic in damp red brick, which stood beside it in the same stand of tall pines. Much of the odious decoration was hidden beneath a facade of ivy. Like most poor Victorian buildings it was dominated by a minor feature, the front porch – a stone portico supported by carved caryatids of two clerics with bishops’ crooks.
They pulled up and Humph killed the engine. He was asleep before the sound died.
The light was gone from the day and the dusk was violet except for the white ice on the trees. The vicarage loomed over them, some of the windows lighted. Two men came out and made their way to a woodstore beside the church, returning laden with logs for a fire. Beneath the portico they stopped to chat to a figure lost in the gloom. Then they were gone, but the figure lingered. The wind whispered through the pines. A full minute passed before the Reverend John Tavanter stepped out into what was left of the day.
He wore a heavy black overcoat but nothing on his head, which was globe-like and radiated intelligence. Dryden guessed he was in his mid sixties, a rounded, almost sensual figure with the dreamy childish features of a poet. A teetotal Dylan Thomas. He exuded a comfortable confidence, although his hands fluttered in a minor betrayal of something less assured.
He saw Dryden, spread his hands in a blessing, and looked to the sky. ‘Snow soon,’ he said, in a pulpit voice.
Dryden slammed the cab door and enjoyed the triple echo. They walked towards the church. They’d met before over the previous two years in a depressing round of parishioners’ deaths, farm accidents, and petty vandalism in the parish – and finally at his own mother’s funeral. St John’s at Little Ouse was the least vibrant of Tavanter’s six churches, the solitary Sunday service drawing a congregation of twenty, limping in from outlying farms.
Some, most perhaps, knew the story of the desolation of St John’s. In small communities sexual scandal has a half-life as long and corrosive as radium. Tavanter had come to St John’s, his first parish, from Oxford in the spring of 1965. The obstacles in his modernizing path were formidable – the nagging poverty of his congregation and their almost pagan need for a style of religion he could not condone, let alone deliver. He had arrived with ideas of social mobility then popular in his theological college. He found a congregation which wanted a medieval preacher to take up residence in the manse with a suitable wife. They suspected his motives and eventually, worse still, his morals. For years they despised him while he fought to love them without hatred.
He blamed himself for hiding the truth. So, on Advent Sunday 1975, a bright day full of unforgettable yellow sunlight which managed to flatten a landscape already steamrollered by nature, he announced from the pulpit that he was gay. It was a life-defining moment and one he replayed with pride on the video tape that was his memory. In a single practised sentence he gained the authority he deserved, and lost a congregation. At the end of the sermon the hymn had been Bunyan’s ‘To Be a Pilgrim’. He had sung it alone.
They drove him out: not in the hail of earth and invective that would have been his punishment a century before, but by indifference and malice. He preached to an empty church for six months. On saints’ days they would gather within sight of St John’s across the peat fields to pray. He watched them, his vestments blowing uselessly in the wind, while they raised their voices in hymn. He left within a year after a pauper’s funeral which he had briefly prayed might be his own.
It was God or chance that arranged the next episode in John Tavanter’s life. By then he did not care if it was someone else’s God. He joined a team ministry in Stepney, in London’s East End, where he helped the poor who asked no questions. In 1983 he used his savings to buy a plot of land on the canal bank beside St Barnabas’s Church so that a youth club could be added to the Victorian church hall. It cost him £26,000: the land was of little value to anyone else.
Within a month the diocese had decided to close St Barnabas and merge two congregations at a new church half a mile away. Developers wanted the land for executive housing – the gentrification of the inner city was then beginning to gather pace. The only obstacle was Tavanter’s half acre. He sold for £750,000.
When it came it was a delicious moment. The solicitors handed over the cheque in their wood-panelled offices in Bow High Street. Cold rain ran in rivulets down the fake mullioned window panes.
£750,000.
The figure hung in the air despite the weight of its astonishing implications. He returned to Cambridge and founded a centre for the care of terminally ill patients with AIDS. He called it, in one of many acts of retribution, the St John’s Centre. In return for transferring ownership of the hospice and its financing foundation to the local diocese he was appointed team vicar for a group of six Fen parishes, based at the vicarage of St John’s. He used the rambling building as a centre for the carers of AIDS patients, in need of somewhere to escape the pressures of the deathbed.
It was a victory
and John Tavanter spent most of the rest of his life trying not to glory in it. Those parishioners who remembered him treated him like a ghost.
Dryden and Tavanter liked each other in that kind of instant superficial way which can be the first step in a long friendship. Tavanter saw in the reporter a fellow outsider, someone who watched life as a spectator, a game devised for ordinary, normal people. Dryden recognized in Tavanter the wry attitude of someone estranged from society, and not entirely unhappy with the arrangement. When his mother died he chose Little Ouse for the burial. Tavanter had been matter-of-fact, helpful and humane.
They walked to St John’s in silence. In the porch a single electric light bulb shone on a squalid scene: cigarette butts, a few bottles of cider, two condoms and a syringe, in a nest of old clothing and newspaper.
‘Kids,’ said Tavanter, nudging the nest with his foot. ‘The syringe is for show. But one day it won’t be.’ He flicked an imaginary strand of hair from his forehead, a constant mannerism which reminded nobody of the thick blond hair of which he had once been sinfully proud.
‘Place must have changed,’ said Dryden, expertly leading his witness on.
Tavanter was aware of the reporter’s skills but trusted him: in the past they had talked privately about stories and the result had been sympathetic and intelligent.
‘Some. About two centuries in forty years. When I first came to St John’s they didn’t have teenagers. They certainly didn’t look like teenagers – they had the same windblown faces and hand-me-down clothes as their parents. But they dreamed then about the same mundane things: owning a TV, running a car, sex and marriage. I don’t think I married a woman at St John’s who didn’t turn out to be pregnant at the altar.’
‘Now…?’
He shrugged and gave Dryden a first, direct look. His eyes were beautiful, even Dryden could see that, a turtle-dove grey with enough depth for a drowning. Tavanter unlocked his church. St John’s was Edwardian, built on an earlier medieval site. The church interior was as neat and cold as a crypt.
The Water Clock Page 6