There was still snow on the roof of the Capri when Humph pulled up. He’d slept in a lay-by half a mile down the main road after dropping Dryden off the night before. He was minus the bacon sarnies.
The sky overhead had filled with cloud, replacing the pin-sharp sunlight. A wind was blowing from the north and on it was the scent of the sea. The snow had lost its sharp crunch. There was colour in the landscape again, and, faintly now, the first tricklings of water.
‘Where first?’ Humph played his foot on what he laughingly referred to as the accelerator. His angelic face beamed.
‘The Crossways,’ said Dryden. ‘And brunch.’
They pulled off the A10 about fifteen miles north of Ely at the sign of the Happy Eater. The restaurant itself was a new building in plate glass and corporate colours. Beside it was a nine-pump garage with three lanes under a wide white canopy.
Dryden thought the old buildings had been demolished until he left Humph to find the loo. He followed the arrows to the rear and there it was: a model of 1960s modernity with CROSSWAYS picked out in angular script in the concrete cornice. Below was the builders’ date: 1965.
And behind it was the bungalow in which the Wards had lived. Dryden guessed it had never been used after the robbery. The wood of the window frames and the door jambs had rotted away. The concrete floors were cracked and a large giant hogweed grew from the corner of what must have been the sitting-room. Most empty homes leave an emotion hanging in the air, the result of long happy childhoods or even longer bickering marriages. But here Dryden sensed only the shock that ended their lives, or at least ended the life they had. It was a house that still remembered that single moment when a shotgun blast had interrupted the World Cup Final.
Dryden stood and listened for the shot. He retraced George Ward’s steps to the front door and out under the short covered walkway towards the back door of the old garage. The door hung from one hinge and dripped fungus. He stepped through into a short corridor which led to the back of the counter. Here George would have seen his wife on the floor; the cordite still in the air, the vivid splash of blood across the concrete, the disfigured face and the ringing echo of the shot circling the room for escape.
To Dryden’s right was the door of what must have been the strongroom. The plaster had fallen from the walls with the years and he could see that it had been built with double-thick brick walls and the door jamb was steel. The door itself had gone, probably stripped along with anything else of value. Perhaps it too had been steel. Inside the six foot by eight foot box the wooden shelves still stood, each covered in the vestiges of green felt baize. George Ward’s silver cups had lined the room. A thousand pounds’ worth according to the original police file. A tiny, purpose-built strongroom for a small fortune.
Dryden imagined Billy Shepherd out on the forecourt on that hot July day in 1966. Sleek, black-oiled hair, US Army jeans and long-peaked cap. Inside Camm, nervous and frantic. And the third man: the man Mrs Ward may have recognized. The man she did recognize. He knew that now clearer than she ever did.
He jumped as the snow on the roof relinquished its frosty grip on the corrugated iron and slid to the eaves, finally thudding to the ground in a slushy heap.
Thaw, he thought. He found Humph in the restaurant about to attack a fluffy three-egg omelette.
They sped south then, only temporarily thwarted by a diversion around Littleport Bridge – a sunken road which slipped under the main line to King’s Lynn. Here the first tricklings of the thaw had created a wash six feet deep in as many hours. They back-tracked and took the Fen roads to Stretham. The engine house, where Dryden had so recently been shot by the man in the balaclava, was open to the public. For five days each year enthusiasts ran the great steam engine of James Watt. A small crowd had struggled along the winter droves and were now dutifully arranged in a miniature amphitheatre around a guide. Train driver’s cap, lapel badges, and the unmistakable flat nasal delivery of the enthusiast proclaimed him for what he was proud to be: a steam nerd.
‘The two pistons of Watt’s Stretham Engine of 1823 are the longest, at sixteen feet nine inches, of any of the machines he designed after the accident at Sheffield in the summer of 1819 – an accident which you will no doubt already know resulted in the government inquiry of 1820…’ The amphitheatre shuffled uneasily. A small child asked loudly when he could go home.
The basement was still in the throes of conversion in readiness for the first summer of all-day opening. Beyond the toilets and the snack bar Dryden found a single door marked ‘Curator’. He knocked and introduced himself. The curator was young and bald with the tetchy manner which betrays that all human contact is considerably less enjoyable than reading a book.