Dryden had diverted suspicions about the incident by making Humph confess to a wayward shot with a fowling gun delivered on a post-drinking night hunt for ducks. For now Dryden wanted to keep the police out of it, at least until he’d worked out what his assailant had been doing outside Laura’s window. The bruising to his crotch from the blow with the crowbar he kept to himself.
And now the West Tower – 215 feet of vertical anxiety leading to the kind of view that could prompt a seriously embarrassing evacuation of body fluids. But he climbed, not only motivated by the pursuit of a good story, but now by something much more personal – the atavistic desire to repay physical violence with retribution. He had no doubt the events of the last forty-eight hours or so were connected. He sensed that if he could find out why Tommy Shepherd fell to his death he would be closer to a solution. The key to the present was in the past. The problem was that someone from the past had shot him.
When he reached the top of the corkscrew stone staircase, the world opened out below him with breathtaking completeness. The general public had had access to the West Tower since the sixties and the final ascent was regulated by traffic lights operated from an office below. In the high season tourists climbed in batches of twenty past the green light, and once their arrival at the top had been confirmed on closed circuit TV, a batch of twenty would descend. The viewing platform itself was surrounded by a low stone wall and an iron safety railing. The view, priced at £1.80, encompassed a large part of southern England stretching from the university library at Cambridge to the giant grain silos at King’s Lynn on the coast to the north. On a damp Fen day, when the mist crept up from the river, the view barely encompassed the stone parapet of the tower.
Josh Nene was already there. He had clearly seen the view enough times to take the edge off the novelty. He looked healthier than he had on the night he had led them up to find Tommy Shepherd’s body. But no happier. He was kitted out yet again in the immaculate blue overalls, over what looked like several layers of jumper, and the NENE & SONSblue hard hat. The ditchwater eyes were slightly bloodshot. He was engrossed in a tightly folded architectural plan when Dryden stepped out, with beguiling authority, into the crisp Sunday morning air. Around them the world was white and preternat-urally clear. He fixed his eyes on the distant horizon and breathed in the icy air in lungfuls. It helped to clear his head – still swimming from the painkillers they had given him at the hospital. The bells at the parish church of St Mary’s below signalled the ten o’clock service. One of the ringers must have been a learner, his bell clipping the sound of the one that preceded it, providing an uneven soundtrack.
Nene looked up but didn’t bother with a smile. ‘Dryden.’ His voice whistled like a set of deflating bagpipes. He crunched a cigarette against the stonework and, lighting another, stuffed the plan in a back pocket. Dryden wondered how long he’d been there. The pale blue of his lips was still vivid.
‘Quite a climb,’ said Dryden, fishing in his pocket and producing a wine gum flecked with fluff. He belted up the black overcoat and fingered the bandage on his ear.
Nene eyed it but showed no other interest. ‘Occupational hazard. I’ve got a couple more years in me yet. Two sons waiting to run the business then.’
Dryden looked down the long Norman spine of the cathedral nave towards the central fifteenth-century Octagon Tower, built to replace the spire that had crashed to the ground during a Sunday service in 1426.
Dryden smiled to himself and turned ninety degrees to look out along the south-west transept. The spot where Tommy Shepherd’s body had been found was directly below but too close to the foot of the tower to be seen from the viewing platform. From the Octagon’s central viewing gallery it was obscured by a stone pinnacle.
He was dealing with the vertigo easily. The screaming pain in his head probably helped. ‘So he jumped from here? Was the safety fence up then?’
Nene casually put a foot up on the safety bar and leaned over causing Dryden to suffer a wave of sympathetic nausea. ‘When’s then?’
‘Nineteen sixty-six – August, September. At a guess.’
Nene flirted with an emotion Dryden had not yet seen on his face: interest perhaps, even surprise. He ran a pudgy hand through thinning white hair. ‘No. Nothing here then but the stone parapet. We put the ironwork in around sixty-nine after a suicide attempt. Lassie passed out before she could get to the edge.’
They chuckled bleakly.
‘Nobody checked visitors then?’
‘Not really. Most people came up in tour parties with a guide. If someone came at any other time I think they just unlocked the door and let ‘em. Cost ‘em a few shillings of course – they were desperate for the money then with the West Tower and the Octagon on the move. But they wouldn’t have been counted down. Why bother?’