‘And?’
‘And she moved. There’s no doubt. It’s very encouraging. Some movement both of the…’ The clipboard again. ‘Upper right arm and lower right leg and a slight tilting of the cranium. That’s very good news. Spinal articulation.’
‘But nobody actually saw her move?’
‘No. That’s what the sensors are for.’ Bloom removed his glasses as though preparing for a long explanation to the village idiot.
Dryden got in first. ‘But presumably the sensors are simply that, electronic pads which detect movement. Fit them to a clock on the wall and they’d detect movement – that doesn’t mean the clock’s alive, let alone conscious. Surely the key question is whether Laura moved, or someone moved her?’
The consultant gave him a long hard look designed to intimidate. Dryden returned it with topspin.
‘Are you suggesting that a member of the medical staff here is so incompetent…?’
‘No. Although a little more scepticism might not go amiss. I’m suggesting that before you invite me to dance a jig at the news I think all the other possibilities should be discounted. False hope, doctor, is something I can live without. I’m asking you to humour a sceptic. So: what next, Doc?’
Bloom reddened. ‘It’s Mr actually. Mr Bloom. I’m a surgeon.’
Dryden contrived to look like someone who had just forgotten the one thing they have been told to remember at all costs.
Bloom placed his fingers together in a neat lattice. ‘Too early. We must wait for the results of some of the tests. So far we have nothing dramatic. Some extra brain activity, perhaps.’
‘What are we looking for?’
‘Clear evidence of biological changes in muscle and nervous tissue. We would expect the occasional large limb movement to be accompanied by many more micro-movements within the muscle and tissue system; that’s what we’re looking for. And continued higher brain activity’
‘And that’s what we haven’t found?’
‘So far we have found no such evidence. It’s my opinion that we will.’
Dryden ended the interview. ‘I’d like to see my wife. Alone.’
Bloom’s eyes glazed over. It was like being eyeballed by a dead fish.
Laura’s body had been rearranged. She lay absolutely straight in the bed with her head raised slightly on two shallow pillows. The bedclothes had been smoothed flat and perfectly replaced. He sat beside her, watching the very slight rising, and falling, of the chest.
He saw it then, and knew why Laura had moved. A single corner of paper showed between the flattened pillowcases. He eased it out, and, putting it on the bedside table, turned on the reading light. It was a single half-mile square cut from a river chart. It showed a short stretch of the Lark, and Feltwell Marina, where Dryden planned to move PK 122 that night.
Later, as Dryden lay on Kathy’s couch, he considered the implications. Clearly someone had moved Laura and placed the map under the pillow. Whoever it was wanted Dryden to know that they could strike at any time. They knew his plan to leave the boat at Feltwell. Roberts, he knew, had been aboard his floating home when it was moored at Barham Dock. They could get to Laura, and they could get to him. He must be close to the killer – or killers. Would they give him the luxury of another warning?
After the Tower Humph had dropped him outside the Cutter Inn on the river bank at midnight. Two drunks were arguing on the towpath but otherwise the world was white and silent. He’d slipped PK 122’s moorings and set off by moonlight upriver to the confluence with the Lark.
The sluices at Denver had been opened the day before and both rivers now ran freely between frozen reed banks. Instead of turning into the Lark he slipped further north on the main river until it met Brandon Creek. He swung upstream to the Ship Inn where there were moorings. He tied up at 2 a.m. and left a note on the boat saying he would phone to confirm the mooring and the fee. Humph picked him up on the main road an hour later.
He’d let himself into the flat with Kathy’s key.
He found the couch and was almost immediately asleep but not before he saw again the loping figure of Joe Smith blending into the mist.
‘Belsar’s Hill,’ he said to the empty room.
Over Stretham Mere, Telstar makes another hyperactive orbit of the earth across a clear night sky. Somewhere in mid-Atlantic Francis Chichester, on the first leg of his round-the-world solo voyage, looks up and sees it too. And from their prison cells Myra Hindley and Ian Brady watch the stars as the first summer of their life sentence for the Moors Murders drags slowly by.
One month after the Crossways robbery three men make their way to Stretham Engine but, their minds on other things, they fail to notice the speeding pin-point star.