Nine a.m. News on Radio Littleport. The Mid-Anglian Water Board had issued a short-term warning of heavy snow. Dryden felt happier. News was a great distraction if you didn’t want to think about your own life. And another item: vandals had attacked St John’s Church, Little Ouse. Dryden resisted a memory. His mother was buried in the churchyard there. The stone had been retrieved from the ruin of Burnt Fen Farm.
Mr and Mrs William Starr, the golden wedding couple, lived in a dull house with dull paint on the front door. Dull, thought Dryden, and felt a fresh dollop of treacle trickling over his brain. They seemed surprised when Dryden accepted a sherry at 9.30 in the morning, and even more so when he asked for a refill. He made his escape under cover of the arrival of The Crow’s amiable photographer ‘Mitch’ Mackintosh, a miniature Scotsman with no apparent boredom threshold and an addiction to mindless gossip and fake Tam O’Shanters.
Dryden walked back to the office through a light snow shower having dispatched Humph to a lay-by for a nap. There was light in the sky but even now, in late morning, the day was in a long gloomy decline. The town centre was both brightly lit and dismal: that peculiarly depressing combination which smacks of the approach of Merry Christmas. Outside Woolworth’s a dog on a rope barked constantly at the too-early fairy lights and a small, wailing child was urinating in the gutter.
Dryden sought refuge in the newsroom. On the mat lay a plain brown envelope marked for the attention of Septimus Henry Kew, Editor, and stamped in red stencil lettering: Strictly Confidential. Dryden was rattling the package to his ear and just about deciding it was indeed a video cassette when Henry came up noiselessly behind him. He had a gift for this, an almost supernatural ability to appear at the wrong moment.
Dryden jumped guiltily at the editor’s dry cough.
Henry was tall and desiccated like a human praying mantis. His sex life appeared to be confined to the plain brown envelopes and lifetime membership of the Boy Scout movement. Today, thankfully, he was not in full uniform but the lapels of his tweed jacket bristled with insignia. The staff of The Crow called him ‘Woggle’ – but only behind his thin, straight back.
‘Just checking,’ said Dryden, handing over the envelope. ‘You can’t be too careful.’
Henry indicated by eyebrow semaphore that Dryden could indeed be too careful. But the editor said nothing, a favourite tactic, and an effective one.
Dryden scanned the newsdesk diary, a dog-eared tome which hung from a lavatory chain attached to the news editor’s desk. It was a vital aide memoire even in the age of e-mail. According to the news editor’s juvenile block-letter scrawl Kathy was out for the whole day with the WRVS doing a feature for The Express, the Tuesday freesheet, on looking after the rural elderly. Gary Pymore, the office junior, was in the local magistrates court for the appearance of Richard Churchill Hythe, Ely’s serial peeping tom.
Dryden dropped coins into the office coffee machine and leant his head against the cool steel fascia. Through the syrup he could just recall Liz Barnett, the mayoress, telling him something useful at the civic reception at the Maltings the night before. Something to do with the council and the cathedral repairs. He also made a note to ring the Tower and check on her husband’s condition.
He flipped through his contact book for the home number of Councillor Ben Thomas, the Labour group’s current council leader. He hit an answerphone and swore loudly before the beep. Henry coughed, producing a sound like a death rattle, and retreated behind the glass panel partition of his office.
Dryden left his message in a silky voice and then slammed the phone down, timing a heartfelt expletive to miss the tape. Dryden dealt with the complexities of journalistic morality with simple clarity. Elected officials were fair game, and elected self-important ones were simply asking for it. ‘Bastard,’ he said again, just for the sound of it. Henry coughed from behind the partition.
He tried to run a hand through his thick, jet black hair, where it duly got stuck. What next?
Gary Pymore, fresh from magistrates court, clattered up the stairs. Hearing the junior reporter coming was not difficult, Gary had suffered from meningitis as a child and lost a good part of his ability to balance. This had been treated by fitting his shoes with ‘blakeys’ – small metal plates once designed to preserve shoe leather. The treatment involved smacking his shoes against the ground as he walked and using the sound as a kind of sonic stabilizer. As a result he was, in motion, a human metronome. A metronome with acne.
‘Yours,’ he said, plonking a takeaway cappuccino down by Dryden’s elbow. To be exact it was a Fen cappuccino, and as such unrecognizable as coffee to an Italian.