He’d waved from the deck of the PK 122 but she’d not looked back. The tyres of the red MG had squealed through the frosty gravel.
The last tenor stroke of eleven o’clock boomed out. Before the echo returned he’d thought of her again.
13
The Crow’s offices were normally deserted on a Sunday but he met Henry coming out of his flat in full Scout commissioner’s uniform and regalia. The editor was unnaturally and strangely excited. His bony throat pulsated with the bobbing of his Adam’s apple.
‘Scouts’ sports day,’ he explained breathlessly to Dryden as he rearranged his badges in front of the mirror.
‘Goodo,’ said Dryden, and got a vaguely suspicious glance in return.
He hit the phones. During his time with the News at Westminster he’d built up good contacts with a press officer at the Treasury. About the same age as Dryden, he’d lived close by in north London. He’d invited him and his wife to Laura’s family café for lunch. They’d got on. He rang him at home.
Money was the key to the puzzle. A lot of cash, assuming the Crossways gang had flogged George Ward’s silver, was still unaccounted for after more than thirty years. There was the £510 Tommy Shepherd had won, there was the £648 in cash and the silver – valued at £800-£1,000. More than £2,000.
He left a message on the answerphone. What would that £2,000 be worth today?
In The Crow’s darkroom Dryden emptied the paper’s antique camera and put half a dozen prints in the fixer from those he had taken of the fire at the circus wintergrounds. Then he made a coffee and reminded himself that only sad fuckers worked on Sunday. He unlocked the drawer of his desk to retrieve the file Stubbs Senior had given him on the Crossways robbery. It was a résumé, presumably written for the incoming Scotland Yard detectives, of those interviewed in connection with Tommy’s disappearance. It was sixty pages long, close-typed on A4, and it took him two hours to read. He was interrupted only once by the phone on his desk. He let it ring and listened to the message.
‘Hi.’ It was Kathy. ‘You there?’
He picked up the phone just too late to stop her ringing off – and felt the guilty rush of relief.
Once he’d finished the file Stubbs Senior had given him he still had a Sunday afternoon to waste until Tommy’s funeral. But now he had something to waste it on. The squad Stubbs had led had done a thorough job. More than thirty interviews had been conducted with what the police liked to call Tommy Shepherd’s ‘associates’. Two had caught Dryden’s attention. In the first days of the investigation Stubbs had personally interviewed the Reverend John Tavanter, a newly installed vicar in his first parish at St John’s, Little Ouse. Later, in the September of 1966, he had brought Liz Barnett, then a twenty-year-old housewife and local Labour party activist, in for questioning. Both had what the files coyly called a ‘romantic’ attachment to the suspect.
But Dryden decided to start with Gladstone Roberts, then a local hoodlum, interviewed within hours of the Crossways robbery. His links with the suspect were more business-like.
Dryden locked up and walked out of the town centre, now swaddled in a foot of unblemished Sabbath snow. Cathedral Motors stood just off a roundabout on the ring-road about a mile from The Crow’s offices. It was a new garage, built when the by-pass was completed in the late 1970s, and it included a car wash, shop, and a spacious showroom. The pumps were automatic but an attendant sat behind a computer in a perspex booth. Suspicious of anyone on foot, he eyed Dryden with open distrust. Dryden beamed. ‘Hi. Howya doing? Mr Roberts about? Gladstone Roberts.’
The attendant, a teenager of obvious timidity only emphasized by a daring silver earring, reached for the phone on the till. He wore a baseball cap marked Cathedral Motors and the kind of large brash wristwatch that can tell you the time under fifty fathoms of water.
‘Name?’
‘Dryden. Philip Dryden. The Crow. Tell him it’s about Tommy Shepherd.’
There was a short conversation during which the would-be deep-sea diver failed to take his eyes off Dryden’s face. He replaced the receiver with exaggerated care as if it might go off with a bang. Dryden got the impression he was trying to memorize his lines.
‘Mr Roberts will be down in a few minutes, Mr Dryden. Sorry we don’t have a seat. Mr Roberts is off to church so he said to mention that he would only have a few seconds to spare.’
‘Church?’ said Dryden, and smiled. He recalled the police résumé on Gladstone Roberts: the words ‘vicious’, ‘petty’, and ‘crook’ had stood out along with ‘educationally subnormal’. He didn’t recall devout.