‘It seemed quite easy to get out on the roof where the body was found…’
‘’Tis now. The door was rusted in. Hadn’t been opened in a lifetime. I crowbarred it open when I got out there Friday afternoon.’
Nene had relaxed again and rearranged his scarf against the cold. ‘Thing is if you go out on the structure you don’t see much – you’re too close. The water outflow is measured to make sure the gutters are free. Modern survey work is based on precise measurements taken from the ground; the exact position of the pinnacle that shielded that poor sod from view will have been mapped to within a centimetre a hundred times. There’s no need to go up there.’
‘So why did you go up there?’
Nene eyed him flatly. ‘Better ask the surveyors. Their decision.’
‘So if it had been down to you nobody would have gone up to the south-west transept roof this year?’
‘That’s right. They said the gutters were blocked with leaves. I’d leave ‘em. The leaves rot – the water forces its way through eventually. It’s not like a domestic roof – there’s a dozen outfalls on the south-west transept roof alone. We were below the roof last year, and we would have been back in five under the current programme of works. But they said it was an issue of public safety. Ask me someone scared ‘em. Told ‘em a big freeze would bring down the stonework. Rubbish.’
Dryden shut the notebook. ‘Thanks very much, Mr Nene. You have been very helpful, very helpful indeed.’ That always gave them the jitters, Dryden thought happily.
Nene looked at him through rheumy eyes. His lips had shaded to a pale lifeless red. Dryden decided he had a bad heart. He should chuck it in while he still could.
Dryden descended with shaking legs and made his way to a bench on Palace Green. It had a brass plaque: In Memoriam: Canon John Virtue Gillies. 1883-1960.
‘Good age,’ said Dryden of the long-dead canon, and rubbed his ear.
Two Japanese tourists took pictures of each other in the snow and a ginger tom wandered by, picking its way through Dryden’s footprints. The cathedral’s doors were shut against the cold but the sound of hymns seeped out.
Besides being shot the night before, he had woken up that morning in bed on PK 122 to find Kathy’s naked body beside him. It was a narrow bunk bed and their bodies were folded neatly together in a frictionless union of knees, crotches, elbows and breasts. A brief echo had come to Dryden of the Lark victim – the cold body crushed and distorted like meat in a can. But it was only an echo – Kathy’s body was as warm as a radiator and a lot better designed. He had bathed in the heat and, equally as palpable, the guilt.
The fiery Ulsterwoman had been waiting in her car when Humph had dropped him home from the hospital at four that morning. She’d driven straight back to Ely from her night shift on Fleet Street.
She was wide awake by the time she’d seen the cathedral on the horizon. She’d planned a stroll on the river bank by PK 122. She knew Dryden was a poor sleeper – perhaps she’d cadge a coffee, or more.
She’d taken over the patient and Humph, exhausted, had slipped into the night. Dryden had undressed and showered in the tiny bathroom in the bow while she’d made soup and poured the whiskies. He hadn’t jumped when he felt her hand on his back, gently smoothing the soapsuds in lazy circles. It was a master stroke of seduction, taking them both beyond the point where his guilt lay, beyond logical abstraction and considerations of betrayal. They’d come to sex without passing any moral barriers. He hadn’t thought of Laura until it was all over. Or not quite. He’d thought of her for that moment of release as he had in his dreams.
He smiled now in the icy morning air and blew out a plume of steam. The cloud of condensation hung around him in the still air. ‘My wife,’ he said soundlessly.
He had already begun to construct the layers of defence. Like a child he rubbed the wound on his head as if it alone were excuse enough. He winced as the pain brought water to his eyes, which he left to swell into tears.
‘Self-pity,’ he said, again to no one.
If she came out of the coma he would tell her everything.
He stood quickly, his knees cracking in the cold. He looked at the cathedral’s blue and gold clock and saw that the hands were almost on eleven. Soon the bell would toll. He told himself that when it had finished he would never think of the night again. It was a childhood game which had never worked. Anxieties clung to him despite the passing of time. The bell tolled ahead of the hour. Then came the first tenor stroke of eleven o’clock.
Kathy had agreed. She’d sensed the guilt and left quickly, pulling on clothes and declining a cup of coffee.