‘The house? Can you remember which house?’
Stutton shrugged. ‘It was a long time ago – it might have been Osmington.’ Dryden knew it, a Tudor fortified hall surrounded by a wide moat in a village to the north. It was National Trust now and The Crow had covered a small fire there last winter which had burnt out the visitors’ café.
‘And someone died,’ said Stutton, his face in shadow. ‘I remember Mum talking about it. That was it – one of the servants found ’em lifting the stuff so they clumped the bloke, split his head open. Bled to death down the stairs, that was the story. They found him in the morning, at the top, bled dry.’
10
‘It’s supposed to be haunted,’ said Humph, ripping the cellophane off a pre-packed Big British Breakfast triple sandwich. The cabbie surveyed Ely Gaol, home to the town’s museum, with evident relish. ‘You wouldn’t get me in there.’
‘Right,’ said Dryden. ‘So we can add the museum to almost every other building in the town, can we?’
Humph ignored him, inhaling a sausage from the sandwich filling with a slight popping sound.
‘I get about,’ he added, looking through the window away from Dryden at a tractor attempting a U-turn in Market Street.
‘What was the last thing you were in besides this car or your house?’ said Dryden, relentlessly pursuing the point, despite the knowledge that Humph’s immobility was a symptom of some psychological need to hide from the world while travelling through it.
Humph dabbed his lips with a page he had callously ripped from The Crow. ‘I went into the gas showroom before Christmas.’
Dryden, point made, searched his pockets for a snack. He discovered an individual pork pie wrapped in a till receipt. ‘Haunted by whom?’ he asked eventually.
‘Food rioters. Hanged for theft. They rattle their chains,’ said Humph, clearly an ear-witness.
Dryden checked his watch: 1.45 pm. The smog was still thick, and shredded, clawing the gaol walls like ghostly fingers. He walked through a wrought-iron gateway into the old exercise yard, now used as an activity area, with a set of replica stocks and life-size cut-outs of onetime prisoners looking suitably desperate. A party of schoolchildren sat huddled on wooden benches shivering, attacking lunch boxes after an enforced two-hour tour of the museum.
Dryden had telephoned ahead and the assistant curator for the museum and archives was in the foyer to meet him. Dryden needed a boxful of wartime memorabilia to bury with the bones unearthed at California, a promise he had been willing to fulfil for Azeglio Valgimigli. He felt a bond with the victim, and was determined to make his second burial in some way atone for the brutality of his first.
Dr S. V. Mann was, Dryden guessed, in his late seventies at least. A former Cambridge academic historian, he was seeing out his retirement amidst the ticking silence of the museum service as a volunteer. He was extremely tall, perhaps an inch beyond Dryden’s six foot two inches, and only slightly stooped by age. His hair had thinned, revealing a capacious skull. Otherwise he was an identikit of the English hearty outdoor type, his face, perpetually wind-tanned and marred by liver spots. A slightly worn dark blue bow-tie was tied casually under his chin, and a tweed jacket hung from his bony shoulders, the elbows patched with leather. Dryden imagined that at home he had a walking stick emblazoned with those little metal shields which record the triumphs of long-distance walkers. There was about him the faint odour of Kendal mint cake and pipe tobacco.
‘We have the place to ourselves, Mr Dryden,’ said Dr Mann, smiling, his voice steady. The manners were always punctilious, even if they edged dangerously towards the patronizing. The full-time staff at the museum suffered Dr Mann’s presence with ill-disguised distaste, and Dryden unkindly felt sure they envied his academic credentials and effortless knowledge. Talking to the press was one of the onerous duties they were happy to hand over to their unpaid volunteer.
Dryden had visited the museum many times in his childhood, all of these later coalescing into one stultifying vision of boredom. In those days the place had been firmly in the butterflies-behind-glass era: turn-of-the-century oak display cabinets holding a bewildering array of objects – the formative beginning of Dryden’s fierce hatred of pottery shards. But the late 1990s had marked a sea change: a new curator – a woman – had arrived, bringing fresh ideas and the vigour to see them through. A curved, interactive double-wall display now took visitors through the story of the flooding and draining of the Fens, complete with audio and video clips. Somewhere Dryden could hear a presentation in progress in the museum’s film theatre. The modernized rooms were fitted with sensors which triggered audio commentary as visitors entered. Many of the display cabinets now boasted interactive audio-visual material, and a portable tape tour was available at the counter. None of which made pottery shards any more interesting.