The Water Clock

by The Water Clock

  Out under the monkey-puzzle tree Dryden again saw the tiny pinpoint fire of a cigarette burning in the dark. It was the slightest of lights and danced and disappeared on the very edge of vision. He waited for the security guard with the Alsatian to appear from the shadows.

  He sat and smoked the obligatory Greek cigarette. ‘So, Laura, what’s the story so far? I’ve been on The Crow two years and the biggest crime until the day before yesterday was a sub-post office robbery – unarmed – at Littleport. That turned out to be two juveniles. In the last forty-eight hours, by contrast, two bodies have turned up in grotesque, some would say bizarre, circumstances.

  ‘The first has been shot in the back of the head and dumped in the River Lark inside the boot of a stolen car. After death he was hanged by rope causing traumatic injuries to the neck. He was drunk at the time of death but otherwise appears to have enjoyed a healthy lifestyle. Fifties, corn-blond. Odd age to be a murder victim. Passions are normally spent. His prints were on the police computer. They’d been found at the scene of a robbery in 1966 at a roadhouse on the A10 – the Crossways. We don’t know who he was then, and as yet we don’t know now.

  ‘The day after the body in the Lark is found another one turns up. He is found on the roof of the cathedral. He’s probably been up there since shortly after the robbery. The body is that of Tommy Shepherd, a gypsy and petty thief, wanted at the time of his disappearance for his part in the Crossways robbery. Besides a half-eaten driving licence he has in his back pocket two winning betting slips for a meeting at Newmarket on the day of the robbery. More than £500. A small fortune then.’

  He paused as a shadowy figure being led by an Alsatian on a lead crossed the lawns, then turned back to Laura: ‘Theories? The link is clearly crucial but difficult to unravel. Did the Lark victim die because Tommy Shepherd’s body was about to be found? Who knew it was about to turn up? Someone who knew Tommy was up there – probably the person who pushed him off more than three decades before. But why would the discovery of the body necessarily mean the Lark victim had to die?’

  ‘The police think Tommy Shepherd jumped – suicide. But then, how did anyone know he was on the roof? Witness? Suicide looks increasingly unlikely anyway. He’d have to get up there in daylight and if he’d jumped in daylight he would have hit the roof with a hell of a crash a hundred feet above the heads of hordes of tourists. My guess is that he was up there at night and was helped over the side. When he fetched up in the gutter he tried to stand. Why? Hardly the act of a man bent on suicide. And somewhere in the world he had £500 waiting for him – or perhaps he had it on him. He’d offered to tell the police the names of the rest of the gang. He could also count on at least his share of the haul from the Crossways robbery. Enough in 1966 to start a new life. My guess is he died a pauper and someone else got the money.’

  There was a muffled knock at the door. ‘Mr Dryden? There’s a Mr Holt at the front counter.’

  It was a stunning concept. Humph, standing up.

  By the time Dryden got to reception the cabbie had beaten a retreat to the car, which was parked, engine running, in the floodlit forecourt. It was moving before Dryden closed the door.

  ‘You got outta the car?’ asked Dryden.

  ‘It happens. Your mobile’s turned off by the way. A bloke jumped the wall, over there, going in.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Fifteen minutes ago. I walked round to the gates and saw him making his way to a ground-floor room. He stood with his back to the wall by a lit window. I think he saw me coming – so he bolted back over the wall. Then I heard a car set off. It passed the gates going east. The nurse at reception said it was Laura’s room.’

  They didn’t need to discuss it. The Capri’s bald tyres squealed as Humph swung out on the drove road. Ahead of them, about a mile across the fen, they could see retreating red tail-lights. Overhead a large full moon radiated white light over a frozen night landscape.

  Dryden savoured the rush of adrenalin: ‘Kill the lights. Let’s see if we can catch him by moonlight.’

  Humph flicked off the headlights and for the first few hundred yards Dryden navigated by leaning out of the passenger window. After that their eyes became accustomed to the night. They kept half a mile behind their quarry.

  ‘Slow up. Let’s keep him in sight but don’t get any closer.’ They were travelling east across the Great West Fen towards the River Ouse, running into a dead end, a network of droves, all of which ended at the river’s high flood banks.

  ‘We’ve got ‘im,’ said Humph, and the moonlight showed, for a second, the excitement in his eyes.

  And then they lost him. The tail-lights winked out.

  Humph let the cab idle to a halt. Silence descended on them like a giant duvet.

  ‘Reckon he heard us following?’ asked Dryden.

  Humph nodded. ‘He’s gone to earth.’

  The sky was an astonishing planetarium of starlight with a single satellite traversing from eastern to western horizon. The earth was black and featureless but for the dim tracery of dykes and ditches with their wisps of mist. The only sound was that of water percolating through the peat. Across a vast field the ghost-like form of a badger trotted on a secret assignment.

  Dryden stood by the cab. Humph got out as well. Twice in one day.

  ‘What’s that?’ Humph pointed east towards the river. A single black chimney stood against the stars. ‘Let’s go.’ It was the first time Humph had ever provided a destination.

  It took them ten minutes of threading across country to arrive at Stretham Engine. The main building was in the shape of a tall brick cottage loaf with a slim chimney rising from one corner. It had been built in 1831 – one of ninety steam-driven pumping houses which replaced hundreds of windmills across the Fens. Stretham was one of the few to remain, largely because the engine was still in working order and had been designed and installed by James Watt himself, the father of steam. Dryden recalled writing a story that it was to open for the public in the spring after renovation with a grant from the Millennium Fund. But for the most part, since it had last pumped water from the Great West Fen up into the River Ouse in 1941, it was a forgotten landmark. A single needle of brick, which on low, cloudy days seemed to scratch the sky.

  Humph was out of the cab before Dryden. On his feet he looked lighter, like a spinning top balanced precariously on two tiny feet so neat and close they looked, by comparison with his girth, like a single point. He bustled to the boot and produced two industrial-weight torches and an overcoat that could have covered a small horse.

  Dryden, astonished by Humph’s burst of mobility, took the torch without a word.

  They circled the engine house once. There were two doors both bolted and padlocked from the outside. None of the narrow windows were at floor level and the wooden doors to the coal chutes were held fast by iron bars padlocked to the brickwork.

  ‘It’s a lock-out,’ said Dryden.

  They were standing by the main door when the otherwise still night was rustled by a faint breeze. The door before them swung open with a theatrical creak.

  ‘Spoo-ky,’ said Dryden.

  They examined the door. The padlock was locked and the bolt in place but the latch had been carefully detached from the wood of the door jamb. To the eye it would look shut but a good shove would detach the door, allowing it to swing inwards – a good shove being considerably more force than that applied by a midnight breeze.

  ‘This is the bit in the film where I normally say something like: “No sane person would go in”,’ said Dryden.

  ‘There’s no car in sight,’ said Humph.

  ‘And if he’s in there he’s outnumbered.’

  ‘And this isn’t a late-night movie.’

  They went in.

  Inside they stood quietly in the dark and sensed the space around them. Their torch beams barely touched the joists fifty feet above – like Blitz-time searchlights rifling the clouds. James Watt’s great steam engine took up the lower t
wo-thirds of the void. The giant machinery glimmered dully with the polish applied by a thousand steam enthusiasts. To one side sat a squat diesel engine, a metallic Swiss-roll of beaten panels, which had replaced Watt’s engine finally in the 1940s – only for it to be made redundant by the electricity pumping station further up river.

  The machinery creaked as the various metals cooled at different rates with the chill of the night.

  ‘Let’s stick together.’

  Dryden considered this redundant sentence. ‘Oh all right then.’ He indicated a flight of brick steps leading down to the cellars.

  ‘Can’t we stick together up here?’ Humph’s euphoria was dissipating. Besides, he knew Dryden well and there was nothing as foolhardy as a dedicated coward.

  Dryden led the way. One of the cellars was being used as a storeroom by builders preparing the engine house for its first season as a tourist attraction. They’d constructed wooden handrails for the stairs and begun building a tearoom in one of the coal cellars, which was bathed in the moonlight from a row of freshly cleaned skylights. Plumbing gear littered the floor in another, where the porcelain kit for a set of toilets had been stored.

  Rats, Dryden thought, and he adopted a peculiar skipping walk designed to keep his feet off the ground as much as possible. They returned gratefully to the main floor and played their torch beams on the single metal corkscrew stairway which led up to the loft: fifty feet of cast iron tortured into a spiral.

  ‘You stay here – I won’t be a sec.’ Dryden knew with sickening self-knowledge that his bravery was the product of a tremendous desire to show off. He took the stairs two at a time in a desperate attempt to postpone the onset of vertigo. Unfortunately he ran out of breath first, halfway up, and had to cling to the fragile metal banister for support. Below he could see Humph waiting like a pocket diving bell in an underwater movie, his torch beam sweeping the ocean floor around him.

  He made the trapdoor to the loft in one more unbroken run, pushed it open with surprising ease, and tripped over the wooden lip in his hurry to find safety. He fell to the floor, producing a plume of dust which hung in the stale air.

  When his breathing stilled he cast the torchlight around the loft. Unlike the floor below this was cluttered with Victorian flotsam: wooden buckets, coal shovels, winches, tackle, ropes, and pulleys. The walls were lined with storage cupboards – vertical lockers for the workforce which must have once been needed to keep the great engine pumping twenty-four hours a day. They were wooden with brass locks and hinges and looked like a row of vertical coffins.

  A workbench ran one length of the room – its G-clamps, vices, and loose tools covered in a sedimentary layer of white dust. The floor was uneven, punctured by several closed trapdoors. Dryden guessed that these were used to raise and lower machinery for repairing and maintaining the engine directly below.

  He stopped to examine the silence. He could hear Humph’s nervous cough and nothing else. An owl hooted and he laughed without conviction. In the silence that followed he hoped to hear nothing but instead, from one of the lockers, he thought he imagined the shuffle of a foot. Before fear immobilized his muscles he walked noisily across the loft and pulled it open, his heartbeat crashing in his ears. A pair of moth-eaten overalls hung from a single nail and for a second he saw, by way of hallucination, a body inside it with the bloody snapped neck of the Lark victim.

  The flood of relief when he realized his nerves had betrayed him had the effect of a swiftly administered malt whisky. He felt a flood of goodwill and laughed, this time making a decent job of it. A tarpaulin hung from the beams at the far end of the loft and he pulled it back with bravado to complete the search. It took at least a second to realize that this time he was looking at a real human face. Or rather a human head. The features, other than the eyes, were obscured by a black woollen balaclava. He saw the eyes and the fear in them. Then a crowbar caught him in the crotch. Fireworks went off in his eyes and a pain so pure seared his spine that for a second he was able to admire it before it shut down the rest of his nervous system.

  He came to within a minute. The air sang with the echo of something. He was on his feet before he realized it was a gunshot, and at the trapdoor when he heard the second. At the foot of the stairs he could see Humph’s body, sprawled flat on the stone-flagged floor.

  ‘Humph!’ He felt better for the yell.

  He swung down the stairs and realized, guiltily, that he was already hoping he wouldn’t have to try mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He paused ten feet short of the lifeless figure to avoid the sight of blood.

  ‘Humph?’ A whisper this time.

  ‘Yup.’ The cabbie’s voice was clipped, bored and slightly embarrassed. Outside they heard the distant sound of a car engine coughing into life and then accelerating across the fen.

  ‘You’re not hit?’

  ‘Nope. Fucker pushed me over.’

  ‘And you’re not hit?’

  Humph struggled on to one elbow and raised his head. He gave Dryden a look of pained annoyance.

  ‘No. But you are.’

  A warm trickle of blood was making its way down Dryden’s neck. He felt his ear and examined the mushy red mess on his finger tips.

  James Watt’s great steam engine swam before his eyes in a perfect circle. He collapsed like a folding deckchair to the stone floor and dreamt of a criss-cross pattern on ice.

  The losers dropped their betting slips surreptitiously, a snowfall of disappointment settling on the Newmarket terraces.

  But they had won. The snapshot proved that. There was more joy in that small square of photographic paper than in most of the rest of her life. A faded souvenir from a day she felt she’d stolen from someone else.

  Her writing on the back. ‘Newmarket. August 65. With Gypsy.’ He called her Amber for the earrings she’d worn the first time they’d met. The time she wouldn’t tell him her name. And she called him the one thing only she could get away with: Gypsy.

  He was at home at the racecourse, that’s why he’d brought her. But she distrusted him, even there. The cigarette cupped in the hand, the easy charm that got him what he wanted. Why, she thought even then, had she gone this far?

  ‘Nothing to lose,’ he’d said, taking her money and his own. The horse was High Flyer. He’d studied the form. The Sporting Life rolled into his jacket pocket. She knew his secret only later – that he could read the numbers, but not the words.

  ‘Nothing to lose,’ he said. All of it – on the one chance.’

  He said it again when he got back from the bookie’s stand: ‘All of it.’

  She’d loved that. Loved the contrast with her own careful life in the new semi by the golf course. Loved the idea that she too had nothing to lose. The marriage she had was so hollow it echoed when she cried. A routine chore as spiritless as the jangling progress of the milkman’s early morning round.

  Gypsy had nothing. No bank account. No address. No worries. Perhaps that’s what she loved. The footloose freedom. But she wanted him as well. He’d taken his shirt off in the queue for a drink before the big race. Wooden brown, boney, and painfully thin. Younger than his eighteen years. His hair looked expensive, blue-black like slate. It was that day, later, in the burnt brown grass he’d played in as a child, that she let him in to what was left of her life.

  High Flyer. 33-1. A long shot. But he knew the form. Or knew something. She’d seen him talking to the men by the ring. She knew that way of talking, the sideways mouth, the eyes elsewhere. She didn’t ask.

  He’d smuggled her through the crowd to the rail. One man, drunk, picked a fight. Gypsy looked at him, smiled, said he’d fight him if he wanted. She saw his hands then, with the knuckles white and ready.

  They got to the front. He told her the colours to watch. Gold and emerald green. But the horses went by in a pack racing for the line, and she’d been too stunned by the noise and the beauty of them moving to spot High Flyer.

  Then he was picking her up, kissing her, and she smelt t
he cheap cigarettes and beer in his hair. They bought the first bottle at the bar on the grass. He’d wrapped his shirt round it and shot the cork over the crowd. That was the joke about the snapshot. It wasn’t rain that soaked them, it was champagne.

  Then he’d taken her by the hand, up through the grandstand, to the terrace bar. It was cool and the shade seemed to swallow sound.

  ‘Dress code,’ said the flunkey on the door. So he’d put the shirt back on.

  ‘Champagne,’ he’d told the barman, handing over the winnings. Then they sat on the terrace and looked down, for once, on the losers.

  The barman took the picture. It was her best day. She never knew if it was his.

  Sunday, 4th November

  12

  Dryden had climbed to the top of the cathedral’s West Tower with ill-disguised vertigo and a pathetic sense of martyrdom. The bullet which had removed his ear lobe the night before had been fired directly upwards from the floor of Stretham Engine by the man in the black balaclava. Just his luck – to be hit by a warning shot. The bullet had passed through inch-thick wooden planking before finding its target. The casualty nurse who had tended to him said he would benefit from the bleeding.

  Dryden had diverted suspicions about the incident by making Humph confess to a wayward shot with a fowling gun delivered on a post-drinking night hunt for ducks. For now Dryden wanted to keep the police out of it, at least until he’d worked out what his assailant had been doing outside Laura’s window. The bruising to his crotch from the blow with the crowbar he kept to himself.

  And now the West Tower – 215 feet of vertical anxiety leading to the kind of view that could prompt a seriously embarrassing evacuation of body fluids. But he climbed, not only motivated by the pursuit of a good story, but now by something much more personal – the atavistic desire to repay physical violence with retribution. He had no doubt the events of the last forty-eight hours or so were connected. He sensed that if he could find out why Tommy Shepherd fell to his death he would be closer to a solution. The key to the present was in the past. The problem was that someone from the past had shot him.