‘His body was found yesterday afternoon on the roof of the cathedral. It had probably been there since the summer of 1966. There wasn’t much left but it appears he jumped from the West Tower. The detective leading the case…’
‘My son.’ Stubbs blinked slowly, blankly. Dryden read disappointment in the look, almost antipathy. He decided to fill the silence rather than let it be.
‘What did you think had happened to Tommy Shepherd?’
‘At that time we felt certain he was being protected by someone, someone able to send him away, or someone able to keep him hidden. Looks like we were wrong…’
‘Yes. If it was suicide. Or it could be murder. Another member of the gang?’
Stubbs swallowed an inch of his neat malt whisky. ‘Possible, but unlikely. In my experience the gang members would have separated after the robbery and kept well away from each other. They would have been in a state of panic anyway – they’d seen the injuries to that poor woman…’
Panic. Dryden looked at the old man’s hands. One lay dead on the arm of the chair, the other gripped the whisky with easy practice. Stubbs gazed out into his garden. ‘They, the robbers, must have presumed she would die of those injuries. At first, of course, they wouldn’t have known that Tommy Shepherd had left his prints inside the Crossways. The plan would have been to split the money right after the robbery, possibly as they drove away. One of them would have had to keep the cups of course – but that could wait in the circumstances.’
For a crime that had happened more than thirty years ago his recall of the details was remarkably clear.
Then they would have dumped the car and gone back to whatever alibis they had concocted – if they’d bothered at all. When we let the press know we wanted to interview Tommy Shepherd he might have tried to contact the rest of the gang, but they’d hardly be likely to welcome such an approach. They must have had some arrangement for keeping in touch, possibly a meeting place, and a prearranged time. My guess is that would have been several weeks later. In the meantime we felt he was holed up somewhere, and fed and clothed by someone.’
‘You don’t think he could have lived rough on the Fen?’
‘A bit John Buchan, don’t you think? We looked hard for Shepherd for nearly six months, right into the winter. There’s no way he could have survived out there, let alone coped with the boredom. He wasn’t the type to curl up with a good book, you know. He would have tried his luck at some point and made a break for it.’
‘What about the rest of the camp at Belsar’s Hill? Surely they could have hidden him. Got him out?’
Stubbs paused and inspected the contents of his glass. ‘What exactly is the status of this interview, Mr Dryden?’
‘Your ball game. Off the record – all for background.’
‘You can have the information by all means – this is a case I would particularly like to see tied up. The reasons are my own but entirely professional. But nothing traceable, please. That’s clear?’
‘Yes. It is.’
Stubbs pressed a buzzer beside his chair. The unknown woman returned to refill the whisky bucket. This took a few minutes during which no word was spoken. Stubbs seemed to be in a world of his own, one apparently run on alcohol. As the woman filled the glass a sneer lingered on the former deputy chief constable’s puffy face.
When he took up the story again his voice was heavier and oiled: ‘We knew Tommy Shepherd was still in the area in the weeks after the AIo robbery. He sent us a letter. Or, to be exact, he dropped us a letter. By hand – but almost certainly not his hand.’
Dryden had lost the plot. A letter? Handwritten?’
‘Yes. If you could call it that. Someone’s education had been sorely neglected.’ The disfiguring sneer again. ‘It said that he would give himself up and provide us with the names of the rest of the gang if he could be assured of preferential treatment.’
Stubbs drifted off again into self-absorbed silence. So Tommy offered to shop the rest of the gang – that presented two decent motives for murder.
‘And your reply?’ prompted Dryden.
Stubbs’s eyes swam back into focus. ‘None. We planned a brief one at first. He asked us to make a statement to the press indicating publicly what the position would be. I was happy to do that. After all, according to the caravanette driver the man fitting Tommy’s description was not in the Crossways when the raid began. We would certainly have cut him out of the GBH or murder charges. Plus his role in bringing the rest to book, due no doubt to his sense of remorse at the injuries inflicted on Mrs Ward, would have helped soften the judge.’ The sneer reached theatrical proportions. ‘We would have been happy to plead for leniency.’
‘But?’
‘Command of the operation had passed to the Yard. They wanted to review the case – it took them a few days. By the time they agreed with our original decision Tommy had gone. We never got a reply. Now we know why, do we not?’
He hoovered up some more malt.
‘Where was the letter delivered?’
‘To one of the village stations – house at Shippea Hill. Middle of nowhere. It was found in the postbox early one morning.’
‘How do we know it was genuine?’
‘He put a fingerprint on it, in coal dust. Very neat. My guess is that he had gone to ground locally. As I say we were sure someone was sheltering him. Sherlock Holmes might conclude a coal cellar was likely. Whatever. He was in the Fens.’
The heat in the conservatory had begun to steam the windows. Trickles of water ran down the green-tinted panes. Stubbs was lost in a haze of dreamy mellowness. Dryden guessed he had already said much more than he’d planned.
‘So. How far had your inquiry got before the Yard arrived?’
Stubbs stood abruptly. Dryden stood too, expecting to be thrown out. But the former deputy chief constable was already out of the conservatory door and heading for a pine cabin at the foot of the open paddock behind the house. His gait was long and surprisingly steady. The dogs appeared from nowhere to circle their master.
By the time Dryden got to the cabin the door was wide open and Stubbs was sitting at a desk pulling open the drawers. The cabin was clearly a den. Books lined one wall and filing cabinets the other. A single word processor stood on the desktop with a printer attached. A paraffin heater was pumping out heat.
‘Memoirs,’ said Stubbs, by way of explanation. ‘Here.’ He handed Dryden a brown file marked with a reference number and the single word: ‘Crossways’.
Dryden looked inside.
‘They’re copies of course, they all are. An entire career. I’d like this one back. Don’t show it to anyone else please. Especially my son. Anyway – he should be able to get the originals. Not that he’d know what to do with it. Good luck, Mr Dryden.’
‘What do you want me to prove?’
‘The truth. It would tie up a loose end.’
He patted what looked like a manuscript. His finger found a buzzer on the desktop while he tidied sheets of paper into neat piles. The silent woman appeared again with the inevitable refill. Dryden was ushered out wordlessly.
Humph asked no questions when he got back to the cab but flipped on the tape, bathing the cab in Catalan conversation. They sped back to Ely thinking of entirely different things: an intimacy they often shared and certainly enjoyed.
10
Dryden used his mobile to do emergency services calls. Fire, ambulance and police. Ely Police reported an incident at one of the town’s two comprehensive schools – Friday night vandalism on a big scale, according to the officer on duty.
The noticeboard outside West Fen High was flecked with snow and said: ‘This is a Community School’. The building itself had been an advert for trendy sixties architecture. But one winter had scarred the concrete with damp. A thousand aerosol cans had done the rest. Like all bad buildings it had won an award which was bronze, ugly, and set in the wall by reception. The architects still used a picture of West Fen High in their promotional mater
ial. An aerial photograph. It was its best side.
The main building was six storeys high and box-like – a sugar cube on the landscape visible from fifteen miles. Four wings spread out from this central pile, prompting unfavourable comparisons with a modern prison. Set on the far side of the city’s ring-road the school was surrounded by fields under snow with just the occasional wobbly goalpost coming up for air.
The uniform at West Fen High was navy blue but you’d never guess. A knot of kids was on the drive in front of reception carrying rolled-up swimming towels. Already the school lights were on – splashing lurid orange squares over the snow. Above the main doors hung a banner – ‘East Anglia Regional Gala’. Dryden left Humph with his language tapes and struggled up the school’s main drive in the dusk. The flapping black greatcoat made him look like a scarecrow on the march.
Inside the main doors two first-formers sat behind a ‘welcome desk’. A ritual – even on a Saturday when the school was open to host sports events. The scandal of West Fen High’s academic results had at least one benefit – designation as a ‘sports college’ and an extra £1 million to build new facilities.
One of the first-formers behind the desk was asleep, the other must have been trying to win a bet as she was wearing the school uniform. She looked up with barely concealed annoyance from a well-thumbed copy of Hamlet. Tiny notes in red biro littered the margins.
‘Hi. Is the head around?’
‘You here about the vandals? Amazing – guess what they did?’
The headmaster, Bernard Matthews, poked his head out of his office as Dryden produced his notebook.
Matthews had that haunted look any teacher would get in a school like West Fen High if they shared their name with East Anglia’s best known turkey farmer. The sound of poultry clucking had dogged him down the years.
‘Dryden. Thank you, Gayle. I’ll look after our unexpected guest’
The Crow descended on West Fen High every year when the government published its league tables. Dryden’s sympathy for Matthews’s plight could not stop the resulting headlines. ROCK BOTTOM WEST FEN IS WORST IN EAST OF ENGLAND.
‘Vigilant as ever,’ said Matthews, grabbing a regulation corduroy jacket from the back of his door. ‘You might as well follow me.’
They set off down one of the cavernous corridors that linked the central block to the outlying classes and the sports complex. Every window was open and snow had blown in on to the lino.
‘Bastards got in late last night. Caretaker was away for the weekend – they must have known. The police made checks but only from the outside. Tell me. Coppers do have legs these days, do they?’
They passed a nature table in the corridor on which was a tank of tropical fish. Tropical no longer, they had suffocated thanks to a thin layer of ice above their heads.
Dryden walked on briskly, leading Matthews away from the nature table. ‘And they just opened all the windows?’
‘No. They started by opening all the windows. Then they got into the cellar and closed the heating system down. Then they did this.’
Matthews pushed open two double wooden doors into a tiled lobby – the entrance to the school’s swimming pool. The pool itself was under a thin ‘bubble’ roof and surrounded by glass doors which could be opened in summer, the architects having imagined well-behaved children lounging on the grass and taking an occasional dip between bouts of revision.
Every door was open and the pool’s surface was frozen a milky sky-blue. The pool wasn’t empty. Looking down through the thin ice into the unfrozen water below Dryden could see computer terminals. The vandals must have chucked them in and then opened the doors. Other oddities had been added to the soup.
‘Isn’t that a blow-up doll?’ said Dryden eagerly.
Matthews slipped glasses on and studied the flotsam. ‘’Fraid not, Dryden. Nice try. It’s an anatomical figure, taken from the biology lab.’
Other items included a desk, a basketball post, some wastepaper bins and a chemistry lab fume cupboard.
Dryden produced a banana from his coat pocket for tea and began to circle the pool. On the mobile he called Mitch, The Crow’s photographer, and told him the details. He’d just shut his shop up for the weekend and agreed to do the job.
At the far end of the building a retractable seating area had been rolled forward and a banner on the far wall proclaimed: ‘West Fen High. The Best in Sport’. Scattered over the seats were some disappointed-looking parents and some of the local ‘great and good’ looking suitably outraged.
A hand touched Dryden’s sleeve. Ben Thomas – Labour leader of the local council – was eager to see if his comments on the emergency work on the cathedral would make it into The Express. Dryden found it hard to believe it was only yesterday that they had discussed the story.
Thomas was also keen to get a quote in on school vandalism, but first he had a point to make. A party political point. ‘I blame the Tories of course.’
‘They broke in, did they?’
Thomas ploughed on, congenitally unable to spot irony. He was spindly tall and clever, disguising an Oxford education behind estuary English. Mid-thirties and serious, he taught in the city’s special needs school – a fact that cropped up in every speech he made. He wore his heart on both sleeves.
‘They’ve cut the school security bills. West Fen can only afford one caretaker – and he’s got to have some time off.’
What’s wrong with the school holidays? thought Dryden, but let the subject drop.
Thomas was a county councillor, and shadow education spokesman, as well as leader of the district council. His education brief had got him an invitation to the swimming gala. The Tories held a hefty majority on the county council – and therefore had control of the education authority budget as well. Thomas’s personal ambitions had been cruelly thwarted by democracy.
Normally Dryden dealt with rent-a-quotes like Thomas by putting his notebook away. This time he spotted an opportunity to find out some useful inside knowledge on former Deputy Chief Constable Bryan Stubbs. Thomas was Labour’s representative on the authority’s police committee.
‘So what do you reckon the damage is?’
Thomas looked around and failed to suppress a smile as Dryden flipped open the notebook.
‘Got to be fifty thousand – biggest problem is unthawing the pipes. They can’t do it quickly, they’ll burst. We might have to close the school for a few days.’
‘And you blame the tight budget? Surely the school got a million off the government – the Labour government – to set up the sports college?’
‘Oh yeah. But what about running the thing? That’s down to the council allocation of the government grant…’
Thomas set off, verbally losing himself in the maze which is local government finance. When he finally emerged Dryden closed his notebook.
‘By the way… does the name Bryan Stubbs ring any bells? Police bells?’
‘Retired two years ago? We voted through the terms – he went early, at sixty-one I think.’
‘You didn’t try to keep him?’
Thomas cast a theatrical glance around the pool and took a step closer to Dryden.
‘Hardly. Bloke was bent.’
‘Bent?’
‘We reviewed the file. Over the years at least half a dozen complaints of fabricating evidence. He’d got to the top because he knew where the bodies were buried – it was that generation. The sixties – they all went up together. Most of them grew out of it, but Stubbs was an “old-fashioned” copper. Heroes and villains.’
‘I’m looking at a case back then – in the sixties. Halfway through they called in Scotland Yard. Is that rare?’
‘No. Before they set up regional crime squads the Yard had all the expertise. But I’d be careful – sometimes they called them in to clean up dirty tricks, especially if the case is high profile. They often ended up investigating the investigation – not the crime.’
‘So you were happy to see him go?�
��
‘He wanted out – doctor’s report said cancer. Smelt more like cirrhosis to me. He had a reputation for boozing. We agreed terms – got him out. Best for everyone.’
‘His son is up on a disciplinary charge now – know anything about that?’
‘Not much. I read it in your paper in fact. Nothing to do with us really – down to the local tribunal unless someone appeals.’
‘What’s your guess?’
‘With the papers watching – and plenty of his dad’s enemies still around – he could get busted down a rank.’
Dryden couldn’t resist a final blow below the belt. ‘Your kids at West Fen?’
Thomas zipped up his leather jacket. ‘Nope. Anyway – better be off.’
No, thought Dryden, letting him go. They’re at Ely’s grammar school. Hypocritical bastard.
The visiting school bus had left and the kids were now snowballing the school windows in the dusk. He met Mitch, the mad photographer, coming in: ‘Fill your boots – it’s like the set for Titanic in there.’ The photographer was hardly visible behind a high-tech pyramid of photographic equipment.
‘Great job,’ said the Scot, as he swept past the welcome desk.
11
Laura’s room was no longer a mausoleum. A new box of electronic medical tricks had been installed by the bedside and linked to her arm and ankle by electrodes. The screens danced in vivid greens and blues, emitting comforting beeps. Laura looked whiter than ever. A print-out chugged out a line of figures: a glacial waterfall of white paper, which had already reached the floor and begun to fold itself into a neat concertina of vital data.
Dryden poured two glasses of wine and settled down by the window. The snow had thickened during the day and was punctured by birds’ feet. The monkey-puzzle tree sagged with the load. The day was ending, but as the gloom deepened, he let the darkness engulf the room. The white light streamed in softly from the snowfield.
‘Humph sends his love, Laura.’ He looked to the bed. ‘I told him to come in but getting him out of that cab is like pulling a cork from a bottle of port. A rather morose, plump cork.’
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