The Water Clock

by The Water Clock

  They passed into the vestry and out into the churchyard. This had survived the Edwardian construction and the rebuilding of 1947. The yew tree and a spectacular vine were much older than the church and several of the headstones reached back into the sixteenth century. His mother’s headstone stood by an old rubble wall. He deftly replaced the lilies with the fresh bunch he had brought, and, as always, took a pebble he’d collected by the river from his pocket and set it on the stone. He didn’t pause to remember but followed Tavanter through a gap in the hedge into a small enclosure full of cheap, standard headstones. Some graves were unmarked and others carried simple wooden crosses. The grass was unkempt and there were no flowers. With the dusk a gentle fall of snow had begun and was peppering the ground. An owl hooted ridiculously like a sound effect from a TV thriller.

  They laughed, relieving the tension. ‘Paupers’ graveyard,’ explained Tavanter, taking a deep breath of ice-cold air. ‘Rather a lot of them, I’m afraid. As you can see someone has taken exception to them.’

  Most of the stones had been badly damaged – presumably with something heavy wielded by someone determined. Few had survived intact, most were split in two, the fragments scattered in the frosty grass.

  ‘Why the publicity?’ The radio report would have come from police calls. It was rare for them to advertise vandalism.

  ‘Not my choice. Police think I should have told them about what was going on in the porch. They think publicity will scare them off. I told ‘em that was why the kids did it. To get noticed.’

  ‘This is the first…’

  ‘Oh yes. Nothing like this before.’

  Dryden bent down and matched some of the broken stone shards to their disfigured headstones. Jack Gotobed 1823–1860. Martha Jane Elliot 1891–1976. Peter Noah Jones 1901–1964. Marjorie Phyllis Carter 1900–1972.

  He felt the corrupt damp rising from the ground. He shuffled his feet. ‘Any relatives still around?’

  ‘Hardly. Rural depopulation. The last burial here was in the 1980s. Still consecrated ground, of course. Anyway, you don’t ask questions about relatives out here. Old joke but it’s true. When they ran a school here in the 1930s there were four family names on the register and twenty-eight children. They have family trees – they just don’t have any branches on them.’

  They laughed together, the sound crackling in the frosty air.

  ‘Cost? Repair?’

  ‘Don’t think we’ll bother.’ Tavanter folded his hands inside his overcoat in a fluid movement which spoke of a lifetime in vestments. ‘Tidy up perhaps. I might get the tops of the stones rounded off. I’ll make a point of popping in over the next few weeks, leaving the lights on, generating some activity. But it won’t fool anyone. We might get a security light – but in the end it’ll make no difference.’

  ‘Any fears for the rest of the church?’

  Tavanter sighed. ‘I can’t tell you what to write, Dryden, but why give ‘em ideas? It’s totally vulnerable of course. There’s six churches in the circuit I cover – to provide security for all would wipe out our income. And they’re only churches – stone and mortar – we try to concentrate our resources on the people. They could take the windows out I suppose, although they’re meshed. If they got in there’s arson, but they won’t push their luck that far.’

  ‘Kids then, you reckon?’

  Tavanter gave him an old-fashioned look. ‘It’s not the only theory, as I am sure you’ve guessed. The police consider the sanctuary here at St John’s a hotbed of perverts. Buggery and vandalism – what’s the difference, eh?’

  ‘Where there’s kids there’s parents.’

  Tavanter nodded, enjoying himself. ‘On the whole they come under the heading of what I think our American cousins call white trash. Poor white trash.’

  Dryden raised his eyebrows in mock shock.

  ‘We’re all allowed our prejudices,’ said Tavanter, buttoning his overcoat to his neck.

  They stood awhile in what had become the night. The only light came from the thick frost now underfoot. They turned together and retraced their black footsteps etched out on the grass.

  Dryden stopped before the gap in the hedge that led back into the main graveyard and put a finger to his lips. He pointed down to a track of footsteps which had come out of the trees, shadowing their own to the paupers’ graveyard, but stopping short by the hedge. In the frost a cigarette butt smouldered. They heard a door open somewhere across the fields, letting the sound of a TV drift on the air. A dog barked and stopped when a door slammed.

  ‘Kids,’ said Tavanter, like a mantra.

  6

  Laura, the immobile victim of locked-in syndrome for nearly two years, had moved. When Dryden arrived they took him into a consulting room and gave him a cup of tea in a pea-green cup. The consultant neurologist, Mr Horatio Bloom, had a face like a horse, and an incessant insincere smile.

  ‘Your wife,’ he said, beaming with self-satisfaction.

  ‘My wife,’ said Dryden, sipping from the pea-green teacup.

  Bloom stiffened. They disliked each other. Bloom was not used to insubordination. Dryden was struggling with some complex emotions – not all of them uplifting.

  ‘Since, er’ – here Bloom referred to his notes – ‘since Laura’s accident your wife has not moved at all, complete paralysis. Obviously the internal organs have been operating but all muscle movement, including that associated with deep sleep, has been absent. Today she moved. I think we should be encouraged, Mr Dryden.’

  Dryden sipped. He wanted her back, of course. But he wanted her back as she had been. What he did not want was a painful and tortuous recovery which left him caring for a mumbling shell with a disintegrating personality: a human being by name only, demanding attention but giving nothing in return.

  ‘And nobody could have moved her?’ Dryden asked.

  Bloom readjusted his steel-rimmed glasses. ‘Mr Dryden. The nurses and staff here at the Tower are acutely aware of the importance of your wife’s posture. She is moved regularly to avoid bed sores and circulation problems but these alterations are logged with the charge nurse on duty.’

  Dryden didn’t really know why he asked the next question. ‘Is that charge nurse ever Gaynor Stubbs?’

  Bloom’s eyes flickered over the notes before him: he coughed and avoided a direct answer. ‘Your wife was checked by the physiotherapist at 5 p.m. today. She did undertake some work with her arms and neck, which she recorded when she returned to the nurses’ station. When she checked again at 5.45 p.m. your wife’s body was very nearly out of the bed, she had turned over on her right side and one arm was hanging outside the bed.’

  ‘No one else could have got into the room?’

  Bloom clasped his hands tightly as though restraining temper. ‘All visitors must sign the book and there are security cameras, as you know, in the main corridors.’

  Dryden thought of the open window: and beyond, the spreading darkness of the monkey-puzzle tree.

  ‘Can I see her?’

  Bloom led the way. A nurse was reading beside Laura’s bed. Bloom tapped a pen against the VDU screen: ‘The level of brain activity is slightly higher – perhaps five per cent more than normal at this time of the day compared to the average over the last two years.’

  Dryden sat and took up Laura’s hand. If she’d turned to the right, as the physiotherapist’s evidence implied, she would have been reaching for the pictures on the bedside table. He felt a stab of hope.

  ‘What next?’ But he knew the answer, loathed its Kip-lingesque preachiness.

  ‘We wait and watch, Mr Dryden. Time…’

  ‘… is the great healer,’ finished Dryden.

  ‘We shall, with your permission, install some monitoring equipment so that we can pick up any movements and record them. Then we can work on the limbs that seem to be most active.’ Bloom took Dryden’s indifference to this request as the signal to leave.

  Dryden leant in close to Laura’s face: as close as he’d bee
n in two years – but not quite touching. His lips were almost on hers: he spoke to them. ‘I wonder,’ he said, aloud.

  He walked to the window and tried to lift the sash. It moved smoothly letting a sudden cold blast into the stuffy room. Out in the dusk the monkey-puzzle tree glittered with frost.

  Dryden poured two fresh glasses of wine. He replaced the bread and some of the fruit, turned the lights off and sat looking out into the gardens. Beyond the high wall he imagined Humph waiting in the cab.

  ‘Humph sends his love.’ His voice was too soft and the sentiment came out half-hearted and limp. He turned to the bed in apology and repeated himself. ‘You’ll meet him one day – you’ll like him. There’s a lot to like.’

  There was a knock at the door and DS Stubbs’s head appeared. He still looked crisp and neat at the end of a fifteen-hour day.

  ‘Sorry. I have to scoot. Could we meet now?’

  Despite Laura’s immobility it was unthinkable that they would use the room for a private chat – an inexcusable admission that she was more an object than a silent witness.

  They slipped down the corridor to the hospital’s heated pool. There was no one swimming in the cool Radox-green water. A cluster of plastic chairs was arranged on the pool-side beside an automatic drinks machine. Dryden paid for coffees. The pool glowed with underwater lighting. They sat for a moment in the dappled light, the only sound the faint hum of the electric pumps, which creased the surface with miniature waves of vibration.

  Body language was a study Dryden enjoyed. At the moment Stubbs’s was all wrong. He leaned forward in his chair, hands together, attentive. He wanted something, and it made Dryden wary.

  He also seemed unable to begin the conversation. Dryden decided to get what he could as quickly as he could. ‘So. Our man in the car – details?’

  ‘Prelim, autopsy results show time of death to be around twenty-four hours before the body was hauled out of the Lark, an entry bullet wound at the back of the skull and an exit through the mouth. That’s where all the blood came from. None of this came out at the press conference by the way – you didn’t miss a thing.’

  ‘Bullet wound?’

  ‘Yup. The traumatic injuries to the neck came after death. There are some threads of heavy rope – similar to that used to attach the iron pulley to one of the ankles. Doc thinks the body was hanged after death, causing the rupture of the neck muscles and the snapped spine at the base of the skull.’

  ‘But otherwise he was perfectly healthy?’

  Their laughter rebounded off the white tiled walls. It was easy to be cynical about the dead. Stubbs showed tiredness for the first time. He closed his eyes and rested his head back over the chair. Above him the sickly reflections of the pool weaved themselves across the ceiling like a slow-motion disco.

  ‘Yup. A picture of health if he wasn’t on a mortuary slab. In his fifties. Naturally tanned skin, well-developed muscles and tendons, lean torso. Liver clean as a whistle, no sign of cigarettes. Exceptional lung capacity in fact. His skin suggests an outdoor job. Good quality blue overalls, woollen socks. One oddity.’

  Dryden tried not to look interested. He already had enough for a decent story and the words ‘off the record’ didn’t mean he couldn’t use the information. He’d just leave Stubbs’s name out of the paper.

  ‘Despite the clean liver a high level of alcohol in the blood.’

  ‘So the killer got him blitzed first – anything else in the blood?’

  Stubbs gave the reporter a look which just might have been admiration. ‘Sedative. Pretty massive dose apparently.’

  ‘Tricky slipping a Mickey Finn to a complete stranger – suggests he knew him well?’

  ‘Suggests,’ agreed Stubbs, adjusting the strangulated tie.

  ‘The ropes?’

  Stubbs was reddening slightly at the cross-examination. Not so much at the implied insubordination as its expertise.

  ‘Best lead we’ve got. Cut roughly after death with a knife. The pathologist reckons he must have dropped at least thirty feet to produce the neck injuries. In which case there’s a long cast-off lying around somewhere. Two short lengths were cut to fasten the pulley to his foot.’

  Dryden cast around for a line: ship’s ropes, haulage ropes, bell ropes, tug-of-war?

  ‘Odd chemical traces on the ropes: chlorine and machine oil mainly. Lab at Cherry Hinton is doing a full set of tests now.’

  Dryden breathed in the vapours of the swimming pool: ozone, no hint of chlorine.

  Stubbs tried to read Dryden’s face and failed. The medieval features were blank.

  ‘What about the hands on the victim – prints?’

  ‘Checking. Anyway, the killer appears to have made at least one mistake. On October 31st, the day before the victim was found, the blue Nissan Spectre was involved in a road traffic accident on the Littleport by-pass. Just after 10 p.m. There was a shunt at the roundabout and he got whacked in the boot by the driver behind.’

  ‘Hell. Do you think he had the body in the back?’

  Stubbs ignored the question. He unwrapped some spearmint gum and began to chew audibly.

  Dryden cracked his fingers one by one. If they were going to play irritating noises he’d win.

  ‘Driver behind reported it because our man in the Nissan Spectre wouldn’t give his name – instead he offered the bloke £50 cash to get lost and save his no-claims bonus. He thought the damage would cost more than that to repair. Chummy drives off but our man gets the registration number.’

  ‘And a description of the driver?’

  ‘You’d have thought so, wouldn’t you?’ Stubbs stretched his legs. He looked tired and worried: the prospect of the approaching police tribunal seemed to be giving him sleepless nights. Dryden felt better. ‘The witness is a teacher from one of the secondary schools in town. Intelligent bloke, mid-thirties, all his faculties. But about as observant as this plastic cup.’

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘The suspect wore a hat – US cap-style. No glasses. That’s it. He didn’t get out of his car.’

  ‘Not much of a photofit there then.’

  ‘Quite. Which is where I’d like your help.’

  Dryden didn’t believe in fate but he felt that he’d been waiting for this moment for two years. Stubbs wanted a favour – and favours deserved repayment. He saw a fading manila envelope in a locked filing cabinet marked ‘Dryden – Laura Maria: RTA. Confidential’. Inside, perhaps, was an explanation and a clue. An explanation of why the police had so far refused to let him see the file and a clue to the identity of the man who had pulled him from Harrimere Drain and driven him to the hospital. Now, at last, he saw a way of getting to read it.

  Stubbs coughed unhappily into the echoing silence of the pool. ‘We’re getting the witness into the station on Monday to try and put together a poster.’

  ‘How many pictures of heads with caps on have they got?’

  Stubbs’s face creased in what might have been anger. ‘Look. I’ve been honest…’

  Dryden made eye-contact.

  ‘… as I can be… We now think our man is local. He may well be working with others – also local. If they read in the paper that the police are confident they can put out a photofit of the killer then they may panic.’

  Dryden always looked at people’s hands when they said the word panic. Stubbs were dry and still.

  ‘They may do a runner. Break cover. Try to build an alibi. We – I – would like you to run the story in The Express on Tuesday. It’ll get picked up everywhere else and we’ll arrange for a separate briefing for the Standard in London – just in case our boys are outsiders. You can write what you like…’

  ‘But you’d like me to refrain from the truth – that the photofit, if it was ever published, would simply remind half the male population of East Anglia under fifty of the other half…’

  ‘Indeed. In fact we’d be happy if the article gave the impression that we were confident the photofit – which we will say we pl
an to publish on Wednesday – will bear an uncanny resemblance to the man we are seeking urgently in connection with the Lark murder.’

  Dryden could guess the rest. When the photofit did not appear the police would simply announce that they were close to an arrest and did not want to alert the killer by revealing his identity. He crushed his plastic coffee cup and attempted to lob it into a bin – it caught the edge and bounced back into the antiseptic pool. They watched it bob on the miniature waves.

  But that, thought Dryden, was only half the plot. ‘And your disciplinary tribunal is when?’

  Stubbs blushed, the blood breaking through the barrier of talc. He looked suddenly younger and uncertain. For the first time Dryden considered the possibility that they were the same age.

  ‘Tuesday.’

  ‘Bit desperate, isn’t it?’ Dryden could see them now. Stubbs waiting nervously outside while they read the front page of The Express and its promise of a breakthrough in the hunt for the Lark killer.

  Stubbs watched the cup bob in the pool.

  ‘What are their options?’ Dryden was beginning to enjoy himself. He fished in his jacket pocket and retrieved a half-eaten sausage roll.

  Stubbs’s complexion reflected the watery green of the pool. ‘Demotion. Slapped wrist. Who knows?’

  ‘But if they spend Tuesday reading how the Lark murder inquiry – under the inspired leadership of Detective Sergeant Andy Stubbs – has got one up on those flash bastards from the Regional Crime Squad they might be more inclined to put the Pocket Park incident down to inexperience?’

  They smiled together. Dryden’s normally immobile features were lit by a rare flash of real excitement. Stubbs made several small movements designed to signal that the meeting was over. Dryden contrived to miss them all.

  ‘And all this would amount to a favour?’

  Stubbs looked wary. ‘Of sorts. Clearly you’d be ahead on the story.’

  ‘Although the story would be hogwash of course, even if it was exclusive hogwash.’

  Dryden looked at the detective sergeant’s hands. He was nervously tracing the crease on his trousers. He decided to let Stubbs sweat a bit before offering a straight swap – the story in the paper for the file on Laura’s crash.