Monday, 5th November
15
Detective Sergeant Stubbs had left a message on Dryden’s mobile. He’d meet him at nine on the river bank outside Camm’s boatyard. He didn’t mention the file on Laura’s accident. Dryden had made up his mind: no file, no more information. Which would mean he was on his own.
He stood on the towpath and the icy damp enveloped him far more effectively than the black greatcoat. He stood for several minutes, a painfully thin figure cut by the north wind. He fingered the bandage at his ear, the injured lobe throbbed with a sharp pain only partly deadened by the sub-zero temperatures and a hangover.
He walked the towpath to Camm House. Why had Stubbs’s investigation led here?
He shivered at the sight of the damp which had spread in an ugly scar across the pebble-dashed exterior of the house. Tilting his head back he smelt the rotting wood, the stagnant water, and the keen aroma of failure. A long narrow-boat dock ran beside the Victorian villa, the stagnant bottle-green water held back from the river by a dripping wooden lock. A crow strutted along the apex of the roof holding a pebble in its beak. It dropped it and watched as it rattled down the corrugated iron roof and lodged in the ice-filled gutter. Then it shrieked once, the echo bouncing off the low ceiling of snowcloud.
He decided to pre-empt his appointment with Stubbs. He knocked on the front door and shivered again. He rubbed his eyes in an attempt to expunge the echo of the late-night drinking session. The vivid image of Kathy was more difficult to remove: he saw her breasts swaying above him, the nipples just within reach of his lips. As his body warmed beneath the greatcoat he could smell her too, a novel combination of soap and a perfume he would soon be able to recognize. And the sounds: sounds which even now made him feel less alone.
He knocked again on the front door. Few skills were a reporter’s by second nature but knowing a house was empty from the sound of a hollow echo was one of them. He might as well have been tapping on a coffin lid. He peered in through the letterbox. Hatstand, Axminster (threadbare), hall table with a pile of unopened letters, and stairs leading up into gloom. He stood back and gave the frontage one more look. He thought a net curtain twitched, but then he always thought a net curtain twitched. They had a life of their own, net curtains.
The crow returned to the corrugated roof and after a brief scramble of birds’ feet on rusty iron it reconquered the apex. It looked at him with one eye. Much of a reporter’s life was pointless. Dryden rather enjoyed it. It was like having a licence for being idle. He dug his hands deeper into the greatcoat pockets and fished for some food. Then he heard the voices – recognizing with a dim sense of irritation the monotone of Andy Stubbs.
He walked round Camm House past a freshly repainted sign: OFFICE – HOLIDAY BOOKINGS, and crossed a yard strewn with discarded maritime flotsam to a grubby Porta-kabin. His knees, ever-sensitive to the damp, cracked with each step.
Not surprisingly they heard him coming. Stubbs was interviewing Paul Camm, the owner’s son, and Dryden’s eyewitness to the sinking of the pleasure boat Sally Anne on the night of the Maltings’ opening. The story would be in tomorrow’s Express, with picture.
Five days ago. Already it seemed like a long winter.
The Portakabin served as the boatyard’s office. Stubbs was making small neat notes in a small neat notebook. He clipped it shut and slipped an elastic band around it to hold it closed when he saw Dryden.
‘Keep in touch, Mr Camm. As soon as you hear anything. In the meantime we’ll start a search, along the banks by the boats, just a precaution. Anywhere else your father might have gone?’
Camm glanced briefly at Dryden but seemed to disregard him, or failed to recognize him. Dryden recalled now his distraction on the night of the sinking of the Sally Anne, the constant worried glances across to the flooded water meadows. If Camm’s father had been missing that night he had already been gone five days. Stubbs’s professional optimism couldn’t disguise the fact that there was little hope unless he’d run away. Suicide, murder or accident – the other options all led to death.
‘He liked his own company. Anywhere out on the Fen you can get by boat. Anywhere. What spare time he had he spent fowling.’
‘We’ll find him,’ said Stubbs, already looking at Dryden and seeing the bandaged ear for the first time: ‘Can I help?’
Dryden ignored the detective’s question and shook Camm by the hand. ‘Lost any more boats?’
Camm registered recognition. ‘Oh, hi. Nope. Just the one. We only lost that coz Dad, well, coz he’d gone missing. He did the narrow boats.’