He passed out for what seemed like a very long time. When he came to it was with a jolt and a fresh surge of guilt and anxiety. For the first time he remembered the accident, the moment of impact was beyond recall, but he knew that he had escaped and that Laura was still there, now, below the black water of Harrimere Drain. He knew the water was filling the car but he also remembered the gulp of sweet air he had taken as he escaped.
He dropped a foot to the tarmac and felt the pain run down his nerves, a cold bolt of electric agony. He used the weight of his arms on the wheels to edge closer to the doors – four feet away the sensors picked him up, the glass swished back, the nurse looked up, and he passed out.
But as consciousness swam away that last time he saw one image from the night. He was lying in the back of a car, full-length across the back seat. The car was speeding, he felt the lurches, but no pain. Occasionally, and more frequently as the journey continued, they would pass under a street light. The back of the car was large, even spacious, and he recalled the smell of leather, real leather, not plastic imitation or leatherette. There was nothing on the back seat by his head except a blanket which had been furled up under his neck. He remembered the smell of it. A mixture of oil and dog. Beside his head on the floor behind the passenger seat lay a large parcel. It was one foot by two feet and wrapped in bright blue paper dotted with silver stars, and a single golden full moon.
Friday, 2nd November
4
Dryden had slept badly on PK 122, his floating home since Laura’s accident. He’d concocted a nightmare of which he could remember only a single image: butchered meat hanging from the branches of the monkey-puzzle tree in the gardens of the Tower. The unremembered climax had brought forth a short audible yell just after dawn: he had heard the echo, and then the frightened chattering of the ducks on the ice. It was a rare nightmare, free of the suffocating presence of water – an elemental fear as much a part of his life as his fascination with water, a dynamic irony which he knew was very likely to kill him.
PK 122, a superannuated 1930s naval inshore patrol boat, was moored at Barham’s Dock, an old channel off the River Great Ouse about a mile south of the quayside at Ely. The dock was now no more than an overgrown ditch with just enough water at its mouth to moor the boat out of the mainstream. Underneath the long grass and bulrushes was an old timber quay, once used to load barges with vegetables and salad crops direct from the peat fields for the railhead at Ely and the London markets.
In a lonely landscape it was the loneliest of spots. Below the bank the boat was, effectively, lost to the outside world. Dryden’s mobile phone was the only link – except for the occasional passing pleasure boat on the main river, or dedicated hikers trying the towpath route seventeen miles south to Cambridge.
The crash that had put Laura into a coma had undone so many things they had planned together that he was determined to live a temporary life, with as little material luggage as possible. Most of their savings remained untouched, but three months after the crash he’d withdrawn £15,000 of the money he’d got for their flat to buy PK 122 and have her refurbished in the town boatyard.
He’d taken six weeks’ leave from the News, although they’d made it plain their good nature would stretch no further. The Crow had offered him a job after a few casual shifts he’d taken to fill up the time. He soon realized that the freedom of working for a weekly would allow him to visit Laura each day at the Tower, where she had been transferred immediately after the crash. The alternative had been to move her to a London clinic while taking his chances on the News with a newsdesk unlikely to listen sympathetically to requests for regular days off.
His mother died that first winter, having never fully recovered from the shock of the accident at Harrimere Drain. Then he rented out the new house and channelled the cash into an account for Laura. The News offered him terms to go quickly and he took them. Perhaps, somewhere, there was a hint of relief. Ten years as a reporter had sapped his enthusiasm even if his inquisitiveness remained undimmed. The Crow gave him a full-time job as senior reporter. He felt idiotically satisfied when he saw his first by-line.
PK 122 had spent most of her working life at Weymouth patrolling the naval harbour. She was steel, aluminium grey, and fitted out to weather a typhoon. The powerful single Merlin engine was new and mighty. On her polished wooden instrument panel a small silver plaque said simply: DUNKIRK. 1940. It was a romantic touch he could not resist. From the mahogany-panelled cockpit a hatchway gave into a naval wardroom from which a corridor ran to the prow, giving access to the galley, two toilets and a double shower he’d had put in to replace a tackle room. The cabin had six berths. Dryden had paid for her to be sealed against the damp and fitted with Calor gas heating. The contents of their London flat had been placed in long-term storage but he salvaged their books and filled the wardroom’s fitted shelves: a reaffirmation that they had, at least, a shared past. An oil-fired generator provided lights and powered the galley. On deck PK 122 boasted the latest in wind-powered generators, a nod to Dryden’s sometimes shaky environmental credentials. It cut in over the boat’s usual power supply when the wind speeds were high enough – which this far out on the fen was for most of the winter, and an uncomfortable chunk of the summer as well.