The Water Clock

by The Water Clock

  But Bryan Stubbs and Dr Mitchell were slowed down by infirmity and alcohol. Tavanter helped them into the aisle and they processed on, arm-in-arm, like old comrades. Swaying like a couple of stage drunks in an end-of-the-pier-show they weaved towards the door. The coroner gave Dryden a nod. Stubbs paused, effortlessly guiding Dr Mitchell on towards the west end, as though he’d launched a toy sailing boat across a pond. He met Dryden’s question before it was asked.

  ‘Just tying up loose ends.’

  ‘You take a very personal interest in your old cases.’

  Tavanter joined them. Up close he looked ill, as if he’d lost a lot of weight in a very short space of time. His skin was too big for him.

  Stubbs unsnapped a silver-topped collapsible walking stick. ‘Great believer in being there in person. Allows the intuition to flow freely. Know what it’s telling me now?’

  Opening time? thought Dryden, but shook his head.

  ‘It’s telling me you’re going to find out who killed that young man. You’ve certainly got a better chance than my son.’

  He sailed off on an ocean of whisky.

  Tavanter leaned on the pew end and slipped into the seat beside the reporter. He looked exhausted and closed his eyes as if in prayer.

  Dryden had planned the question: ‘What would Tommy have thought?’ It invited self-incrimination, self-justification.

  Tavanter took the question seriously as Dryden knew he would. He placed his fingers together in a little steeple of thought. ‘Not much.’ The voice was languid and modulated, like a priest’s during confession. ‘Tommy’s faith was rooted, if at all, in rural ignorance. He knew no better. Not an excuse that could be called upon by those here today.’

  ‘I’m sorry. This isn’t the right place for questions.’

  ‘Quite wrong!’ It was nearly a shout. Tavanter opened his eyes as though seeing the inside of the chapel for the first time. He cast them up to Dr Mitchell’s sickly ceiling. ‘The very place, Dryden. I’ve asked all my best questions in front of God. My tragedy is that it appears to be a lousy place to expect answers.’

  Dryden wondered where to start. But Tavanter saved him the trouble. The priest of St John’s had been interviewed three times by the detectives in the Tommy Shepherd case in 1966.

  ‘I didn’t see Tommy again after he went missing that summer. It wasn’t through lack of trying. We were very close. I went to Belsar’s Hill but they said he was in Ireland. They were lying of course, but they must have thought I’d go to the police.’

  ‘Tommy never tried to use your relationship to get help, money, a place to hide?’ Dryden was fishing, the file had been circumspect, but reading between the lines had been easy enough.

  ‘That would presume our relationship was physical, which it wasn’t. For the record, that is actually a matter of regret to me. Especially today. But no, Tommy had no basis for blackmail.’

  Dryden thought of the hunched decaying remains on the cathedral roof. He’d never thought of Tommy as a human being, let alone a lover. In his experience murder wasn’t something that happened to real people, people whose going left other lives empty. Murder happened to cardboard cutouts who appeared on police WANTEDposters. Chalk outlines on the pavement.

  ‘Tommy could have lied. The circumstantial evidence of your relationship would have been enough to raise questions. It could have been very damaging.’ Tavanter was lost in the past. Dryden brought him back by touching the hem of his cassock: ‘Did he try?’

  ‘That’s all true. But frankly Tommy was no fool. Far from it. He knew exactly where he had me, in the palm of his delicate hand. He knew I’d do almost anything for him anyway, he didn’t need to resort to blackmail. I was looking for him.’

  ‘So you’ve no idea who was capable of killing him?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve got lots of ideas. Take our esteemed deputy chief constable. What if Tommy hadn’t been at the Crossways that day?’

  ‘But he offered to tell the police who was. He sent them a letter.’

  Tavanter let his eyes rest on Dryden’s. ‘But did he say he was there himself? If he had turned in his friends – an act of betrayal he was more than capable of, by the way – any one of them could have cleared Tommy. Where would that have left Stubbs? As the detective in charge of the case he was responsible for verifying the fingerprints. They could have lied to take Tommy down with them, but that would have required a collective act of revenge. Unlikely I think. If Stubbs faked the evidence and Tommy gave himself up, the future deputy chief constable’s career was over. What about that for a motive?’

  ‘Is it as good as money?’

  Tavanter smiled. ‘My fortune?’

  ‘Certainly a fortune spent on good deeds, but a fortune nonetheless. And spent. The AIDS centre in Cambridge was built with your money I believe, and is still run with it. Quarter of a million? Half a million?’

  ‘Yes. Oh yes. More. And we sceptics know that all charitable giving is selfish. I enjoy running the centre. It has given me a purpose in life. Status. Friends. A place of my own. So you think I killed Tommy to get the money?’

  ‘No. No, I don’t. But, for the sake of the argument, the money wouldn’t have had to be the reason for his death. It’s just that whoever did it would have got the money anyway, and faced the problem of finding somewhere to spend it. It was no small amount – if he got a share from the Crossways and his winnings, it was a small fortune. Well invested, a large fortune.’

  ‘You’ve turned detective? Don’t the police do these things better? But then they might be suspects too?’

  Tavanter tugged at his collar. ‘I was lucky. Lucky to the tune of seven hundred and fifty thousand. I bought some land in London. It was worthless then, except for a youth club. I sold it when developers moved in and the youth club needed it no longer. I gave the money to the diocese here, they asked for the details before accepting. I’m sure they can confirm if…’

  Dryden raised his hand. He knew the story but would check it anyway. They stood and walked to the chapel doors, left open by the departing deputy chief constable. Out in the garden of remembrance the mayoress sat with her back to them on a cast-iron bench.

  ‘And then there’s jealousy,’ said Tavanter, smoothing down his ash-white cassock. ‘She could tell you about that’

  Dryden’s golden rule: you can always ask one more question.

  ‘Did Roy Barnett know?’ The police file had been clear about Liz Barnett’s relationship with the young, handsome gypsy boy.

  Tavanter shrugged. ‘They went away a lot, she had some money. But he may have guessed.’

  ‘If Tommy was on the run and needed help why do you think he didn’t come to you? Wasn’t Little Ouse the perfect place to hide? St John’s was remote, he was unknown.’

  Tavanter’s grey eyes swam. ‘An astute question, Dryden. One I have asked myself many times. We’ve just consigned to God’s mercy the only soul on earth who could have given you an answer. Perhaps I don’t want that answer. Perhaps he used me. I gave him some money, not much, but some. God knows. We don’t.’

  Dryden found Liz Barnett in the rose garden. The mayoress had recovered what little of her composure had been lost. She was smoking, sucking in lungfuls of nicotine in the bitter cold air. She wore a full-length suede coat, and a brilliantly coloured scarf, held fast by the jet stone. The make-up was applied with an audience in mind – circle rather than stalls. The hands, fine but muscular, were decked out in silver rings. On the whole the effect was diverting and worked a treat. She was angry still, and spitting self-justification.

  She answered a question he hadn’t asked. ‘He wasn’t a bit like they said, you know.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘The police. Old Stubbs. He looks dreadful by the way, made my day. Pity Tommy wasn’t here to see it.’

  She turned and walked down the snow-covered path between ranks of memorial urns. Above, thin white smoke from the crematorium chimney thickened to grey and drifted up into the low clouds.

/>   ‘Low-life, scum, that’s what Stubbs said. They showed me pictures of that poor woman from the Crossways. Made me sick in a bucket. Said they’d have to interview Roy. They said Tommy was an animal. But I tell you what he wasn’t, Dryden.’

  They faced each other between two bare rose bushes. ‘He wasn’t at the Crossways.’

  She fished inside the suede coat, produced a small leather snapshot holder and flipped it open. Inside was a picture of two people laughing, drenched in sunshine after a rainstorm. One was Liz Barnett, hair a bright red, twenty years old, no make-up, in a white linen blouse. She looked fabulous. High cheekbones, flashing green eyes, and a perfect wide smile revealing flawless white teeth.

  The boy looked a lot younger than eighteen. The blue-black hair lay in rich curves over a fine narrow face. The eyes dominated the neat features, black and wide and slightly watery. He looked unsure, nervous even, but happy, his hair and shirt damped down from a shower, his bony shoulders showing through.

  Dryden flipped the snapshot over. Newmarket. August 65. With Gypsy. She took the picture back and slipped it carefully into the holder.

  ‘Got one of Roy?’ It was a cheap shot but she laughed.

  ‘Just for the dartboard. We all make mistakes. Tragedy is when you make one that ruins your life.’

  ‘He’s a good socialist.’

  She didn’t laugh. ‘Yes. Yes, he was. That must have been it.’ Her eyes searched the fen beyond the river.

  ‘But it wasn’t politics with Tommy?’

  She gave him an old-fashioned look. ‘No, Dryden. It wasn’t politics. But it was a lot more than sex. All right?’ She looked back at the waiting car as if uncertain whether to go on. ‘He wasn’t at the Crossways. He was with me.’

  Dryden considered this alibi. ‘Wouldn’t it have been helpful to have said that at the time? You might have saved his life.’

  She took a step back and Dryden thought she’d decided to walk off but she rocked back on her heels and delivered a full-handed slap across his face before he’d even thought of ducking. His eyes swam for a second and he felt tears well.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  Dryden managed to suppress the surge of adrenalin. ‘That’s all right then.’ He placed his cold palm against the stinging skin.

  She didn’t look sorry. ‘This isn’t a game, you know. A newspaper story. It’s about two ruined lives – three.’

  Dryden, having overcome the urge to punch her in the face, now fought back the urge to apologize. ‘So why didn’t you tell the police?’

  She ignored the question. ‘We were at the coast. We went to Newmarket on the way, Tommy won, he wouldn’t say how much but he was flush. Then we went to the beach. We had a radio and Tommy listened for the news all afternoon. I guess he knew the job was on.

  ‘He paid for the B&B at Orford. God knows what they thought. I was married, twenty. He was eighteen. Sounds a bit sordid, doesn’t it? Actually it was rather romantic. I’d been married eighteen months, things weren’t working out. Tommy was fun. He’d never been to the cinema. He’d never sat down to eat a meal unless it was at home. He’d never been on holiday. He’d certainly not been to school, none of the kids at Belsar’s Hill could muster an attendance record. Illiterate.’

  She paused and changed tack. ‘Sensitive. He was the youngest in the family, spoilt I suppose. He’d been in trouble a few times, but no more than a lot of kids. But he’d done a fraction of the things they said he had. He’d been set up a few times for things he couldn’t have done. They planted evidence, drummed up witnesses, basic stuff. But with his record he didn’t stand a chance in front of the bench in a town like this. Gyppo. The family couldn’t pay fines.

  ‘We were away that night at the B&B when they raided Belsar’s Hill. We’d given false names so there was no need to run. They took his brother, Billy, in for questioning, along with the father – Old John. Then they put out the statement, on the morning news, saying they’d found Tommy’s fingerprints at the Crossways. Billy said they’d picked up the prints from Tommy’s caravan.

  ‘After that there was no point in coming forward with an alibi. The people at the B&B couldn’t swear Tommy was on the coast that afternoon. Anyway the police were hardly likely to let it stand in the way of forensic evidence they’d planted themselves. And we knew they’d planted it.’

  The mayoress drifted off into a memory as she started a fresh cigarette.

  Dryden smuggled a wine gum from his jacket pocket into his mouth. ‘And then?’

  ‘Billy phoned the B&B. Tommy trusted him. Left him the number. He said to stay away but they cooked up some place for Tommy to hide. Billy was like him, coarser, knew a bit more about the world, but he loved Tommy. Billy said the police would charge him with murder if the Ward woman died, even if they were claiming he was the third man, the one outside on the forecourt.

  ‘And he didn’t want to hurt me with the alibi anyway. Roy still had a chance of the parliamentary nomination then. Wouldn’t have looked very good, would it? Family values weren’t an issue in the 1960s, they were taken for granted. It was a basic requirement: wife, family and church. He wouldn’t have got on the parish council if the papers had said his wife was having an affair with an eighteen-year-old boy, let alone a gypsy.’

  ‘Did Roy ever know? Does he know?’

  Dryden took half a step back by way of precaution.

  ‘Does he care? Don’t ask me. He guessed the basics I think – but no details.’

  ‘Jealous man?’

  ‘Indifferent man. Our marriage had broken very quickly. He’d been the first to find someone else. He paid for his.’

  Dryden bit his tongue.

  ‘And I didn’t,’ she said, answering the question anyway.

  ‘But he had ambitions. You too?’

  She ignored the question in the best traditions of New Labour’s media training.

  ‘I dropped Tommy off near Belsar’s Hill to meet Billy on the day after the robbery. Some old pumphouse down by the river, I…’

  ‘The one at Stretham?’ But Dryden knew the answer.

  ‘Yes. How did…’

  It was Dryden’s turn not to answer the question. ‘Could he have killed himself? The police had enough evidence to hang him. He must have thought the Ward woman would die.’

  ‘Tommy? Never. He could do desperate things, Dryden. Had done desperate things. But there was no room for despair. Cornered he might have been dangerous, but only to someone else.’

  They walked back towards the car. She leaned forward and lightly touched Dryden’s stinging cheek. ‘Sorry about that, a woman scorned…’

  Dryden smiled. One last question, the golden rule: ‘When did you know the work on the cathedral would be extended to the roof of the south-west transept?’

  Liz Barnett’s eyes narrowed in the effort to remember. ‘Last Tuesday – just after Roy authorized the money to be paid out. Why?’

  Two days before the discovery of the Lark victim, thought Dryden. ‘Fate, I guess. If you believe in it. Tommy’s body would still be up there otherwise.’

  She offered him a lift back to town but Dryden needed the walk to clear his head. His footsteps in the snow were regular and purposeful – unlike the disconnected and jumbled thoughts in his mind. Could Roy Barnett have killed the gypsy boy to save his marriage and his career? Or did Bryan Stubbs, facing the prospect of disgrace if Tommy testified that he was on the coast at the time of the robbery, decide to remove a deadly witness?

  His steps took him to the Tower. The joyless history of the Crossways was beginning to undermine his own fragile good humour. It was an event which seemed to have wrecked the lives of everyone involved. All except one, of course. Whoever had kept the money.

  For the first time Laura’s room felt like a morgue. The cold white clinical tiles seemed to suck the warmth from the air. He sat, silently, for an hour knowing it was a betrayal. He felt abandoned and lonely, leaning his forehead against the cold window pane and feeling th
e despair flood to his eyes. Outside, in the gloom, the monkey-puzzle tree sagged under its load of snow.

  He found Humph waiting just beyond the gates. The latest snowfall had accumulated on the roof. Inside, the cab driver had abandoned Catalan for the evening and was happily working his way through his collection of miniature spirit bottles. He’d had three and had just turned the cap on the fourth. Dryden joined him, picking a Campari from the selection Humph had amassed in his regular runs to Stansted Airport. They drank in silence. Trappist monks on a night out.

  Humph drove carefully to the town centre and dropped him off. Then Dryden walked to Kathy’s flat and stood under a street light looking up at the darkened bedroom window.

  It was part of a Victorian villa split into four units. He’d walked her home after the last office Christmas party – an act of gallantry that had ended in a confused attempt at a goodnight kiss. He watched for an hour as the snow fell. Then he crossed the street and knocked once. She opened the door a minute later, brushing her hair back from a smile, and they climbed silently to the flat above. ‘Have you got a typewriter?’

  Kathy disappeared into a cupboard under the stairs and emerged with a battered Imperial her father had given her when she first joined the local paper in Derry.

  ‘Drink?’

  ‘Coffee. Black.’ He sat drunkenly on the sofa with the typewriter perched on his knees. He fed in a leaf of clean A4 and wrote – in capital letters – WHAT DO I KNOW?

  – That Tommy wasn’t at the Crossways – but that the gypsy boy knew who was.

  – That Tommy offered to name the members of the Crossways gang to win his freedom.

  – That the Lark victim – a member of the Crossways gang – died two days before Tommy’s body was found.

  – That the money, neither the haul from the Crossways nor Tommy’s winnings, had ever come to light.

  – That Gladstone Roberts, according to the police file, was suspected of being the fence who had sold the silver from the Crossways robbery.