The Moon Tunnel(56)
The bailiff held out a laminated ID card: OFFICIAL BAILIFF stood out in Day-Glo yellow, followed by Licensed by East Cambridgeshire County Council. ‘Look. We’ve got to take some furniture – by rights we should take it all, OK?’
‘Whose authority?’ asked Dryden, producing a notebook.
‘The council,’ he said, holding up the ID again.
Dryden’s mobile trilled: a brief inappropriate snatch of ‘In The Mood’. It was a text message from Garry Pymoor. ICQ. PANIC HERE. POLICE ARREST OVER AZEGLIO. GTG.
Garry chose the most inappropriate moments to experiment with text shorthand. It took Dryden a full minute to work out ‘I seek you’ and ‘Got to go’.
Dryden walked out into the street, losing sight of all landmarks as he did so. The fog was deepening, and the traces of chemical on the air caught at his throat. He looked down and realized he couldn’t see his shoes, and he had to activate the backlight on the mobile phone to see the numbers.
He called Garry.
‘Dryden!’ The note of hysteria in the junior reporter’s voice was palpable.
‘Who’d they arrest – a name?’
He heard Garry’s notebook pages being torn back. ‘Yup. But it’s not official. Charlie said Jean saw the police leading the bloke away in cuffs on Market Street – bloke called Mann – a volunteer at the museum? He’s not been charged so Charlie says we can run the stories as long as we don’t use the name – that right?’
‘Yup. Dead right. Just do a paragraph – straight up and down and no fancy stuff OK? Police yesterday said they had arrested a man in connection with… etc. Put me through to Bracken.’
‘Hi. Where are ya?’ said Bracken.
‘On the way to the widow’s. What you gonna do with the arrest?’
‘Paragraph on the front, I guess – a box, separate it out from the rest.’ The Crow was on dangerous ground – if the police went ahead and charged Mann all the details in Dryden’s reports would be sub judice. But they could always squeeze through the gaps in the law if they could claim they’d bunged in the late-breaking news with no time to change the paper.
‘Fine. I’ll phone,’ said Dryden, cutting off Bracken before he could offer any advice.
Dr S. V. Mann? He had been Azeglio Valgimigli’s lecturer and mentor at university. Why had DS Cavendish-Smith arrested him in connection with his former student’s murder?
He got Vee Hilgay’s new address and promised to keep her up on the hunt for the missing Dadd. Then he found the Capri, the fog lifting suddenly to increase visibility to the other side of the street. As they drove out of Ely on the West Fen Road he texted Laura.
I ND HELP. FIND ANYTH ON DR S V MANN – CAM ACADEMIC. P.
23
The Princess of Wales Hospital stood on the edge of town, dominated by a fascist 1930s water tower in red brick. The facilities had been mothballed after the war, during which it had been briefly famous as a centre for treating RAF pilots, most of whom had suffered severe burns. The majority of the site had been given over to a series of one-storey convalescence wards, each embellished with its own extended line of french windows so that the patients could sit, looking south. Behind the glass Dryden always imagined the swaddled figures of the recovering pilots, immobile in wheelchairs, dreaming of clouds, while overhead the occasional vapour trail indicated the flight of their comrades towards occupied Europe.
The mist transformed the car park into a wilderness of tarmac. Humph chose a spot close to the entrance to the A&E department, which had recently reopened to deal with minor accidents. At the counter Dryden asked a nurse for Hereward House – the address he had glimpsed on Dr Louise Beaumont’s statement to Cavendish-Smith – and was directed to a block of 1950s flats beyond the convalescence wards, standing alone, a grim concrete cube in the fog, like some outpost of the former Soviet union .
Dryden considered the names on the push-button intercom and pressed Flat 8. He wasn’t sure of the number and the nameplate said Dr Elizabeth Haydon. His chances of success, even if it was the right flat, and she was in, were slim. It was too easy to say no over an intercom, and without the face-to-face contact of the doorstep he had just one chance to get his pitch right. On top of that Dr Beaumont had been informed of her husband’s brutal murder just a few hours earlier.
‘Dr Haydon,’ said a crisp voice. The worst outcome, Dryden thought, to get what might be a protective friend rather than Dr Beaumont herself. And the answer had been too quick, so Dryden guessed the nurse on the A&E counter may have rung a warning ahead.