‘I’ll think about it,’ he said. ‘Let’s keep in touch.’
Dryden pushed his chair back, letting the plastic screech as it tore across the tiles.
7
Dryden found Humph’s cab waiting for him just outside the Tower’s gates. He was asleep but he had a paper note tucked into the chest pocket of his Ipswich Town tracksuit. The cab driver’s memory was poor and important messages were always consigned to paper and prominently displayed.
Dryden slipped the note free without waking his friend.
Gary phoned. Cathedral crawling with coppers. He’ll see you there. Wake me.
There was no need. A nerve-crackling squeal of tyres signalled DS Stubbs’s rapid exit towards town. He’d clearly just got the same message. Humph was on his tail before he’d cleared the gates of the Tower. They followed the unmarked police car effortlessly through the deserted streets and parked up on Palace Green, an open triangle of grass in front of Ely cathedral’s Norman west front. Overhead the county force’s helicopter swung as if on gyres, its solitary searchlight playing across the vast lead roof. Dryden had seen more police hardware in twenty-four hours than at any time in the last two years.
The clock tolled midnight and the sky, which had been weeping snow for the last hour, looked ready to unload a blizzard. The great grey-white lid of the sky was low enough to pick up the aluminium-white lights that illuminated the central Octagon Tower of the great church.
At ground level a solitary ambulance stood quietly, its light flashing a useless warning. There was none of the anxious rush associated with an accident, nor the almost tangible excitement that goes with the scene of a crime. A group of about a dozen uniformed PCs were standing around smoking and chatting in the hush habitual outside church.
Gary Pymore, junior reporter, stood shivering by the police incident van despite the ever-present full-length leather coat. He’d acquired a polystyrene cup of coffee and a sticky bun from the police mobile canteen. He fingered his ear stud as Dryden approached.
‘Hi. Thought I better let you know what was up. I can handle it of course.’
‘I’ll tag along,’ said Dryden, taking what was left of the bun out of Gary’s hand. Gary replaced the bun with a cigarette and Dryden watched with joy as the teenager’s eyes clouded with the effort of stifling a cough.
A small, tubby man stepped out of an ageing black Jaguar that had been parked up by the cathedral’s west doors. He had an overfed face, a neatly trimmed white beard, and the kind of pitted bald head that can put you off your food. His builder’s overalls were spotless and his plastic hard hat had the logo NENE & SONSon the front. He had the scrubbed neatness of a VIP visitor. He wore a heavy scarf at his throat and his eyes were brown and muddy, like the water in a building-site ditch.
Stubbs had acquired a clipboard and command of the scene. He bustled up officiously: ‘Josh Nene?’
Nene touched his hat and sniffed loudly. He looked to be fighting a mild temperature and a grumpy disposition.
Dryden left Gary by the mobile canteen and hung around just within earshot as Nene and Stubbs looked up at the scaffolding they could see against the night sky.
‘OK, sir. Can you lead the way up?’
By way of answer the builder unlocked a small wooden hatchway cut into the great oak doors of the cathedral.
Stubbs called Dryden over. ‘You can tag along. But this is a favour. One that I expect to see repaid on Tuesday morning.’
Dryden put his thumbs up. A wordless bargain he would be more than happy to break.
He stepped through the hatchway last and inhaled the scent of candles while suppressing the memory of a north London Catholic childhood. The vast nave was too dark to see but it was impossible not to sense the cavern of still space above them. They stood on the Norman tiled maze of the floor while they were issued with hard hats and fluorescent jackets.
Somewhere a door slammed and footsteps slapped on stone. With time Dryden’s eyes began to discern the dim symmetry of the vast church, the arches of the nave like the rib-cage of a great whale that had swallowed them whole. Directly above he could see the warm gold glint of a Christ-figure decorating the high Victorian painted roof.
Nene slipped with surprising agility through a small door in the massive south wall of the cathedral and they followed, Dryden feebly attempting to convince himself that he was unafraid of heights, and enclosed spaces, although he forgot both at one point when Nene’s torch failed and he remembered he was even afraid of the dark.
The party of three came to a stone landing lit by a single unshaded light bulb with a wire cover. Two corridors met here at right angles, while ahead of them was a small door. The staircase turned onwards and upwards towards the viewing platform of the West Tower, 215 feet above the ground. Set in the wall were the massive steel ties of the emergency restoration in the 1960s, which had saved the great tower from collapse as its weight distorted the Norman foundations. The small door stood open, letting in silver-grey light. A policeman stood guard, hastily crushing a cigarette underfoot. Dryden recognized Sergeant Tom Pate, a man whose incompetence was legendary. His appearance in court giving evidence for the prosecution was almost always enough to secure an acquittal. Sergeant Pate looked with horror at the reporter. Stubbs looked with horror at the cigarette stub.
Nene led the way through the rusted iron doorway into the white light beyond. They were standing at the point where the narrow stone gutter of the nave met that of the south-west transept at a right angle. More than a hundred feet below them was the old cloister garden, set out in geometrical neatness like a model village. A golden retriever ran in tiny circles on the grass lawn illuminated by the yellow light streaming out from the French windows of the Bishop’s House.
Above them the sloping roof climbed to its apex, almost lost against the lead-coloured sky, and behind them the massive bulk of the West Tower rose up towards the low clouds, its outer walls studded with the heads of decorative imps and demons put there nearly eight hundred years earlier to ward off evil. A couple looked like Dryden’s relatives.
There was no handrail, just a low stone wall at knee height. Dryden, a dedicated physical coward of extraordinary range, felt the back of his knees wobble. He attempted a cough and produced instead a squeal of remarkable pitch and strangulated stress which everyone kindly pretended not to notice.
As they paused to catch their breath the snow began to fall at last – a sigh of relief from an overburdened sky. The large wet flakes seemed to make the heavens brighter as they fell in damp clusters. The fall accelerated visibly, quickly obscuring everything except the walkway on which they stood.
Nene, who was probably in his mid-fifties but looked older, wheezed with the effort of the climb and leant back against the stone until his breathing returned to normal. In the frost his lips had an unhealthy blue lustre.
Dryden took in the rooftop world. The darkness had gone in the flood of white but nothing was visible. Almost nothing. Through the blizzard a bright halogen-blue lamp stood out, about fifty feet along the transept gutter. Dimly a group of silhouettes was gathered round the light. It looked like a Christmas card of the nativity.
This was clearly their destination. With sickening inevitability Dryden considered the journey that lay ahead. He took the first step unasked, knowing that any delay could result in embarrassing hysterics. Fleetingly he considered how much of his life was focused on doing things he feared just to prove to himself he wasn’t a coward. The gutter was floored with a once treacherous layer of ice. One of Nene’s men had taken a pick to it, scouring the ice deeply to provide a safer footing. The stonework glittered around them with the first signs of a hoar frost and the snow was swaddling the ranks of gargoyles. Griffins, imps, dragons and cockatrices stared out into the white night.
As they approached the group it broke from its stiff tableau to reveal a crouching gargoyle where the crib of the nativity should have been. To Dryden the stone figure appeared to be some kind of hor
serider seated on a mythical animal – part dragon, part lion. Nene stepped round it and stood back on the far side, putting a foot casually up on the stone parapet for support.
All moments of recognition are emotionally charged. Most bring delight but in the few seconds it took Dryden to realize exactly what he was looking at the short black hair on his neck bristled and he felt the lurching impact of disgust. Logically his brain assembled the evidence of his eyes: the dry wisp of hair still clinging to the rider’s bowed head, the exposed yellow-china bones of one hand attached to the gargoyle’s neck with lichen, the verdigris-covered remains of an overcoat. But it was the skull he would remember. The yellowed dome was marked by the tiny canals which had once carried blood to the brain – an intelligent pattern now interlaced with the silver mucous trails of slugs, one of which, orange and fat, was heading for the dark safety of the unseen eye sockets.
‘Jesus,’ said Dryden.
One of the three men in the group that they had joined crossed himself. An owl flew through the lamplight and disappeared instantly into the snowfall.
Most of the body had collapsed into the gutter. There was no flesh left on the exposed hand, arm, or the skull – most of which was tucked unseen into the wing folds of the stone gargoyle’s back. The attitude of the body suggested that he, or she, had tried to stand, using the gargoyle as support, but had only managed to raise one arm to the task before death had intervened. Lichen, like glue, had fixed the scene.
‘Jesus,’ said Dryden again, automatically searching his overcoat pockets for the cigarettes he had given up ten years before – except for the packet he kept in Laura’s room for the ritual evening smoke. Nene recognized the gesture and produced a packet, leaning gingerly across the body to offer one. They lit up in silence and flicked the ash and match over the gutter’s edge.
Stubbs, even more colourless now in the white world of snow, produced a crisp white notebook: ‘Mr Nene?’
Nene coughed weakly as though preparing for a speech. ‘Not much to tell.’ His voice was reedy and high-pitched. ‘I came up about five o’clock to check the roof ahead of tomorrow’s work. You can’t see the gutter from anywhere except the Octagon Tower to the east – this stretch is obscured anyway by one of the pinnacles which rise from the walls of the nave. And we’re too close to the base of the West Tower for this to be visible from the viewing platform. We were going to raise some scaffolding to clear the outer guttering in case water was trapped in the freeze. I found, er this, as you see it – and raised the alarm with Mr Hodgson.’
The cathedral policeman nodded. It was he who had crossed himself. Dryden knew Hodgson. Sanctimonious bastard, he thought and gave him a sympathetic smile.
‘Any suggestions?’ asked Stubbs.
Nene’s eyes were rheumy and ill. ‘My guess would be that he jumped from the tower – hit the roof and slid down to the guttering, Looks like he didn’t die straightaway – but managed to crawl into a half-sitting position behind the griffin.’
‘Date?’
‘We did work at this end of the cathedral twelve months ago – but much lower down. The last time anyone actually came up here to walk the gutters was probably in the mid-sixties, when the West Tower started to shift and we had to pin everything with steel rods.’
Dryden drew deeply on the illicit cigarette. ‘Aerial photographs?’
Stubbs winced. An obvious question he would never have thought of asking. It was a small consolation that Stubbs knew how bad a detective he was.
‘My guess is you wouldn’t have seen it unless you were looking for it,’ said Nene.
Dryden threw the remains of the cigarette over the wall and watched it drop like a miniature distress flare into the blizzard. He fought back the urge to ask for another. He tried a question instead. ‘Was the work on this roof part of the special extension of the restoration programme?’
The builder nodded. ‘Last part. We were going to run scaffolding up tomorrow – although I doubt we could have in this weather.’
‘Couldn’t you have done the work from here?’
Nene shook his head. ‘Health and safety regs. You need a working platform of a certain width – it’s OK to come up and survey it by foot but if you have to work on the stone you need more room. Much more room. And some of the gargoyles are choked at the mouth end – that’s several feet over the edge.’
Nene looked down but Dryden took his word for it.
‘So how long do you think our friend has been up here?’ repeated Stubbs, pointedly turning back to Nene.
Dryden leaned forward and edged towards the bone hand which had become joined to the gargoyle’s frosted neck. ‘It certainly didn’t happen yesterday. Lichen is a slow grower – there must be several summers’ worth here. Ten? Twenty? Thirty? More?’
‘Is that possible?’ asked Stubbs.
Nene lit a fresh cigarette before answering. ‘Yes. Yes, it is. It could be much longer. There’s not much left, even given the place is running with rats, and the gulls will have pecked it.’
There was an uncomfortable shuffling of feet. Those that could studied what was visible of the corpse.
Two ambulance men appeared from the small doorway in the West Tower carrying a collapsible stretcher and a silver body bag.
This I don’t need to watch, thought Dryden. Then he spotted something on the frosty stone ledge by the corpse. ‘You might want to look at that.’ He put his finger within an inch of what looked like a lichen-covered coin. Stubbs gravely produced a clear plastic exhibit bag into which he dropped the coin with a pair of callipers.
Stubbs studied it by the light of the arc-lamp. ‘Half-crown. 1961.’
Dryden moved back into the light. Stubbs was holding two other exhibit bags – both containing what looked like the remains of documents.
‘Pockets?’
Stubbs nodded. ‘Standard procedure. This was from the back pocket of the trousers, or what’s left of them. They were inside this.’ He produced another plastic evidence bag inside which was a fisherman’s oilskin pouch. ‘Waterproof. Otherwise nothing would have lasted.’
He held the bag to the light. ‘One’s a driving licence. The name’s gone but the number’s still legible. We can trace it through vehicle registration at Swansea. The other’s what looks like a betting slip.’
Stubbs flipped the plastic bag over and turned the torch on the faded white paper. A misspent youth told Dryden all he needed to know. The betting slip was pre-computers. An on-course bookie’s mark had faded beyond recognition. But the torn halves told a happier story: the winnings had been collected.
Dryden kept nodding while he memorized what he could read: ‘£5 to win – Bridie’s Heart. 50–1.’ The rest was partly destroyed but read: ‘£5… Ayers Ro… 50–1.’
Dryden shivered. ‘Well – at least we know something for sure. He – or she – liked taking risks.’
Bright sunshine fell that day on Stow Bardolph Fen fifteen miles north of Ely. The single-carriageway A10 crosses it from south to north en route for the coast at Lynn and the popular windswept beaches at Hunstanton, Brancaster and Cromer. That summer the first hovercraft service had opened from Ramsgate to Calais but, despite the growing attractions of ‘abroad’, thousands still braved the North Sea for a traditional British holiday.
The Crossways filling station stood, and still stands, although much altered, at the junction with two byroads – one out to the farms at Cold Christmas, the other to the sluices at Denver. Then it was a state-of-the-art roadhouse: an outpost of sensational modernity. Teenagers came on scooters to view the automatic drinks dispenser and buy cigarettes and pop. Today it is a Happy Eater.
That afternoon Amy Ward was alone in the shop minding the till. It was no ordinary afternoon. In London, at Wembley Stadium, a crowd of 100,000 was about to watch the World Cup Final. Saturday, July 30, 1966. England would play West Germany in a game nobody who saw it would ever forget. Amy would never forget that day either, but for very different reasons.
She was slim, dark, and plain – but dressed to catch the eye. She wore a pink sweater pulled tight over her breasts while a miniskirt, clipped at the waist by a broad leather belt, clung to her thighs. Resourceful, unimaginative, and self-contained the twenty-four-year-old Amy was reading the Radio Times. The front had a colour picture of Bobby Moore, England’s tall, blond, and imperious captain. Amy lingered wistfully over the image.
George was at home in their newly built (George always said ‘jerrybuilt’) bungalow directly behind the shop. The two buildings were joined by a short corrugated-iron covered walkway. George was watching the build-up to the game on TV, along with millions of others around the world. He’d given Eric Dean, the Crossways’ resident mechanic, the afternoon off. It was a sore point with Amy. She wasn’t a football fan – and she wasn’t interested in listening to the game on the radio – but she’d have liked to have seen it. The Queen was there. George’s brother had phoned that morning from New Zealand. He was watching too. Everyone was watching except Amy. She’d strung bunting over the forecourt of the garage and a Union jack flew from the flagpole. But George hadn’t even asked if she’d like to watch. It wasn’t as though they’d be busy. She hadn’t seen a car go past since two o’clock that afternoon. The roads were deserted. Next day the papers would all say the same thing. It was the day the nation came to a standstill. The day England won the World Cup.
So it was just George and Eric who sat on the Wards’ new sofa and shared a packet of Embassy Filter Tips. Between them on the new purple and blue shag-pile carpet (‘This is luxury you can afford – buy Cyril Lord’) stood a crate of bottled Worthington White Shield. Just before the game began Amy smiled, despite herself, when she heard George, always patriotic, joining in the chorus of ‘Jerusalem’. It was her last smile.
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