The Water Clock(42)

It was a stunning concept. Humph, standing up.

By the time Dryden got to reception the cabbie had beaten a retreat to the car, which was parked, engine running, in the floodlit forecourt. It was moving before Dryden closed the door.

‘You got outta the car?’ asked Dryden.

‘It happens. Your mobile’s turned off by the way. A bloke jumped the wall, over there, going in.’

‘When?’

‘Fifteen minutes ago. I walked round to the gates and saw him making his way to a ground-floor room. He stood with his back to the wall by a lit window. I think he saw me coming – so he bolted back over the wall. Then I heard a car set off. It passed the gates going east. The nurse at reception said it was Laura’s room.’

They didn’t need to discuss it. The Capri’s bald tyres squealed as Humph swung out on the drove road. Ahead of them, about a mile across the fen, they could see retreating red tail-lights. Overhead a large full moon radiated white light over a frozen night landscape.

Dryden savoured the rush of adrenalin: ‘Kill the lights. Let’s see if we can catch him by moonlight.’

Humph flicked off the headlights and for the first few hundred yards Dryden navigated by leaning out of the passenger window. After that their eyes became accustomed to the night. They kept half a mile behind their quarry.

‘Slow up. Let’s keep him in sight but don’t get any closer.’ They were travelling east across the Great West Fen towards the River Ouse, running into a dead end, a network of droves, all of which ended at the river’s high flood banks.

‘We’ve got ‘im,’ said Humph, and the moonlight showed, for a second, the excitement in his eyes.

And then they lost him. The tail-lights winked out.

Humph let the cab idle to a halt. Silence descended on them like a giant duvet.

‘Reckon he heard us following?’ asked Dryden.

Humph nodded. ‘He’s gone to earth.’

The sky was an astonishing planetarium of starlight with a single satellite traversing from eastern to western horizon. The earth was black and featureless but for the dim tracery of dykes and ditches with their wisps of mist. The only sound was that of water percolating through the peat. Across a vast field the ghost-like form of a badger trotted on a secret assignment.

Dryden stood by the cab. Humph got out as well. Twice in one day.

‘What’s that?’ Humph pointed east towards the river. A single black chimney stood against the stars. ‘Let’s go.’ It was the first time Humph had ever provided a destination.

It took them ten minutes of threading across country to arrive at Stretham Engine. The main building was in the shape of a tall brick cottage loaf with a slim chimney rising from one corner. It had been built in 1831 – one of ninety steam-driven pumping houses which replaced hundreds of windmills across the Fens. Stretham was one of the few to remain, largely because the engine was still in working order and had been designed and installed by James Watt himself, the father of steam. Dryden recalled writing a story that it was to open for the public in the spring after renovation with a grant from the Millennium Fund. But for the most part, since it had last pumped water from the Great West Fen up into the River Ouse in 1941, it was a forgotten landmark. A single needle of brick, which on low, cloudy days seemed to scratch the sky.

Humph was out of the cab before Dryden. On his feet he looked lighter, like a spinning top balanced precariously on two tiny feet so neat and close they looked, by comparison with his girth, like a single point. He bustled to the boot and produced two industrial-weight torches and an overcoat that could have covered a small horse.

Dryden, astonished by Humph’s burst of mobility, took the torch without a word.

They circled the engine house once. There were two doors both bolted and padlocked from the outside. None of the narrow windows were at floor level and the wooden doors to the coal chutes were held fast by iron bars padlocked to the brickwork.

‘It’s a lock-out,’ said Dryden.

They were standing by the main door when the otherwise still night was rustled by a faint breeze. The door before them swung open with a theatrical creak.

‘Spoo-ky,’ said Dryden.

They examined the door. The padlock was locked and the bolt in place but the latch had been carefully detached from the wood of the door jamb. To the eye it would look shut but a good shove would detach the door, allowing it to swing inwards – a good shove being considerably more force than that applied by a midnight breeze.

‘This is the bit in the film where I normally say something like: “No sane person would go in”,’ said Dryden.

‘There’s no car in sight,’ said Humph.