The Water Clock(56)
Dryden smiled. One last question, the golden rule: ‘When did you know the work on the cathedral would be extended to the roof of the south-west transept?’
Liz Barnett’s eyes narrowed in the effort to remember. ‘Last Tuesday – just after Roy authorized the money to be paid out. Why?’
Two days before the discovery of the Lark victim, thought Dryden. ‘Fate, I guess. If you believe in it. Tommy’s body would still be up there otherwise.’
She offered him a lift back to town but Dryden needed the walk to clear his head. His footsteps in the snow were regular and purposeful – unlike the disconnected and jumbled thoughts in his mind. Could Roy Barnett have killed the gypsy boy to save his marriage and his career? Or did Bryan Stubbs, facing the prospect of disgrace if Tommy testified that he was on the coast at the time of the robbery, decide to remove a deadly witness?
His steps took him to the Tower. The joyless history of the Crossways was beginning to undermine his own fragile good humour. It was an event which seemed to have wrecked the lives of everyone involved. All except one, of course. Whoever had kept the money.
For the first time Laura’s room felt like a morgue. The cold white clinical tiles seemed to suck the warmth from the air. He sat, silently, for an hour knowing it was a betrayal. He felt abandoned and lonely, leaning his forehead against the cold window pane and feeling the despair flood to his eyes. Outside, in the gloom, the monkey-puzzle tree sagged under its load of snow.
He found Humph waiting just beyond the gates. The latest snowfall had accumulated on the roof. Inside, the cab driver had abandoned Catalan for the evening and was happily working his way through his collection of miniature spirit bottles. He’d had three and had just turned the cap on the fourth. Dryden joined him, picking a Campari from the selection Humph had amassed in his regular runs to Stansted Airport. They drank in silence. Trappist monks on a night out.
Humph drove carefully to the town centre and dropped him off. Then Dryden walked to Kathy’s flat and stood under a street light looking up at the darkened bedroom window.
It was part of a Victorian villa split into four units. He’d walked her home after the last office Christmas party – an act of gallantry that had ended in a confused attempt at a goodnight kiss. He watched for an hour as the snow fell. Then he crossed the street and knocked once. She opened the door a minute later, brushing her hair back from a smile, and they climbed silently to the flat above. ‘Have you got a typewriter?’
Kathy disappeared into a cupboard under the stairs and emerged with a battered Imperial her father had given her when she first joined the local paper in Derry.
‘Drink?’
‘Coffee. Black.’ He sat drunkenly on the sofa with the typewriter perched on his knees. He fed in a leaf of clean A4 and wrote – in capital letters – WHAT DO I KNOW?
– That Tommy wasn’t at the Crossways – but that the gypsy boy knew who was.
– That Tommy offered to name the members of the Crossways gang to win his freedom.
– That the Lark victim – a member of the Crossways gang – died two days before Tommy’s body was found.
– That the money, neither the haul from the Crossways nor Tommy’s winnings, had ever come to light.
– That Gladstone Roberts, according to the police file, was suspected of being the fence who had sold the silver from the Crossways robbery.
– That Roberts had set out to intimidate him and make him drop the case.
– That Liz Barnett had loved Tommy.
– That John Tavanter had loved him too.
– That Roy Barnett had probably hated him.
– That Deputy Chief Constable Bryan Stubbs planted his fingerprints at the Crossways.
And that Laura’s never coming out of the coma…
Kathy returned with two cups of coffee which they never drank.
The Reverend John Tavanter had conducted many paupers’funerals in his years at St Johns. Disappointment had undermined this, his first, ministry in small, but cumulative, instalments. Now the weight of failure was almost insupportable: each new sign of God’s uninterest an insurmountable barrier to the regeneration of his faith. The paupers’ funerals were the milestones in this long journey from scepticism into cynicism: biblical in their bleak denial of the joys of life, they offered none of the comforts which he preached would lay in death. John Tavanter was for the first time aware of the possibility that his life could be a failure. Worse. That it could end in the annihilation of death without salvation.
His faith, a wisp of smoke now compared to the fire which had burned when he left Oxford, was no longer a defence against the despair he felt. Paupers’ funerals marked the nadir of what faith was left. So low was his reservoir of belief that when the day of a funeral dawned he would open his eyes to the high Victorian ceiling and its cobwebbed corners and think only of that which the pagan gods could bring: the symbols of light and darkness, of burning shadeless sun or enveloping mist and rain, the overpowering presence of the Fen weather.