In another age, thought Dryden, they’d have hanged these people as witches.
Speedwing was a Water Gypsy, one of a small and almost entirely innocent group of thirty- and forty-somethings who tried to live an alternative life along the river bank in a necklace of narrow boats ranging from the chichi to the dilapidated. Local gossip attributed to them all manner of crimes, from naked moonlight dancing to peddling heroin. But the truth about the Water Gypsies was much more mundane, as Dryden had discovered in the weeks after Laura’s accident when, walking aimlessly by night, he had come upon them around a camp fire out by the clay pits. Drunk himself from a desperate raid on Humph’s glovebox bar he had found their anarchic party deeply satisfying. He’d sat, smoked and talked about a lifestyle which offered escape – a commodity which he savagely desired. And he’d flirted with Etty, the lonely but beautiful Water Gypsy who had made it clear Dryden could seek more than solace on the riverside. For that one night he joined them, and not only did they accept him, they let him back in when he needed them. But for Dryden the escape was only intermittent, for even from the watermeadows he could see the Gothic crenellations of The Tower Hospital, and the responsibilities it represented. And while their brand of alternative lifestyle embraced freedom and nonconformity, it also included alienation, loneliness and envy – a not entirely attractive cocktail.
But Speedwing was different. Speedwing was a druid, and the dish aerial on the roof of The Prancing Pony linked him via the internet to the rest of the druid world. Speedwing’s finest hour had come a few years earlier when the retreating tide had revealed Sea Henge – an Iron Age wooden ring, exposed on the beach at Holme, directly north of Ely on the Norfolk Coast. Speedwing had led the resistance to the decision to remove the ring to a museum for preservation and display. He had recited druidical verses, danced and paraded for the TV cameras, brandishing a staff decorated with feathers; and at the key moment had broken through a ring of bemused police constables to throw himself on the exposed central wooden plinth, where the archaeologists believed the bodies of the Bronze Age victims, exposed to be eaten by birds, had rotted in the sun. He hadn’t stopped the dig, but he’d established himself as the druid to watch. Dryden wasn’t the only journalist to have Speedwing’s mobile phone number: it was in the contacts book of half the hacks on Fleet Street. But only Dryden knew that his real name was Brian.
Dryden shivered, sensing an unseen sunset beyond the grey mist. Fatigue washed over him and he wanted desperately to lie down, close his eyes in the dim crepuscular light. Instead he knocked loudly with his knuckles on The Prancing Pony’s forward hatch, and the boat rocked in response. He looked along the river bank and strained to see anything earthbound: a line of pollarded willows floated on the mist, leading the eye into the white nothing of the open fen, and between the two a figure hung, one arm held out towards the water with the rigidity of a statue.
‘Brian?’ Dryden was thirty yards away when he said it but the mirrored water offered perfect acoustics.
The arm began to pull in a long line, which slipped, dripping, out of the water.
By the time Dryden got to him the eel trap was on the grass, a long wicker basket closed at one end, which enticed the eel in without allowing it the space to reverse out. A grey brown eel twisted inside, effortlessly flipping the trap from side to side.
‘Dinner?’ said Dryden.
Speedwing had a whiskered face, like the eels. His red hair was blanching to grey. His eyes were slate-black like the river.
‘Nah. Can’t stand ’em. But the restaurants in town’ll pay. Visitors like ’em.’
They walked back towards The Prancing Pony.
‘I got your press release,’ said Dryden. ‘But is this one really going to happen? A man’s been murdered.’
Speedwing caught hold of one of the lapels of Dryden’s overcoat: ‘I heard. That’s our point, isn’t it? Desecration. Perhaps he paid the price. So yes, we are up for it. That site is a sacred burial place. The Anglo-Saxons didn’t just pick any old spot, Dryden – it had probably been a place of worship for thousands of years. Now it’s a murder scene. We owe it to the ancestors to reclaim it. We owe it to the victim.’ Dryden recognized some of the tired phrases with which the true aficionado is at ease.
He let the druid ramble on while another, more interesting, question formed. At Sea Henge Speedwing had been a constant spectator, sleeping in the dunes behind the beach and haunting the archaeologists’ every move. Had he mounted a similar vigil at California? There were plenty of places amongst the pine trees from which he could have spied on Professor Valgimigli’s last days.