‘How high did it get last time?’
‘Made the bottom of our stairs. I sent her away, sister’s. I sat on ‘em for a week waiting. Freezing. At night there’s a commotion. I come down and ground floor’s aswimmin’ with rats. Ratking, they calls it, just like a ball of string. Live string.’
Great, thought Dryden. I have to find the village doomsayer.
‘I left in the end. Got back a week later. Lost everything. Roof went. I ain’t going again. We’re’s all stayin’. Even the young uns. Ask ‘em.’
Out in the fen to the north the water was beginning to edge along the furrows. An army amphibious vehicle climbed up from the fields. A white-haired officer with three crowns on his collar flipped open the top hatch and spread out an Ordnance Survey map.
Dryden approached with due deference. ‘Hi. Sorry to interrupt. Dryden, Philip Dryden, local paper.’
‘Talbot. Captain. Peter, TA. Good ter meet ya.’ The accent was upper-class singsong slang. They shook hands in a very military kind of way.
‘How many men have you got out, sir?’ Army drill, always call ‘em sir. Talbot began to fold up the map.
‘All the county TA – about three thousand. Cambridge-shires.’
Dryden flipped open a notebook. ‘These people don’t seem to want to move.’
‘We can live with that. We’ll sandbag ‘em. Bringin food. Can’t have you chaps filming us dragging them off the land, can we?’
The wind was back, stronger and less predictable. Despite the sodden peat it was drying the topsoil and lifting it in red-brown dust clouds.
Talbot slapped the roof of the duck. ‘We’ll need more of these tonight, and the bridge-building kit. That’s a bit beyond my boys, I’m afraid. Last time they brought amphibious tanks in to fill the breaches in the banks, parked them up and infilled with sandbags.’
‘I know.’
‘Publicity stunt of course. They had to try something. Banks were bound to go eventually. Still, they might try it, who knows? Corker for you lot though, eh? Good story and all that.’
Dryden looked underwhelmed. ‘Water’s not my favourite element. I just live on it.’
‘Swim?’
‘No. Never.’
Suddenly the wind blew itself out and it was completely and blissfully silent. The soldiers stopped sandbagging and lit cigarettes. The old man stopped digging in his vegetable garden.
Dryden was looking west when the lightning forked down into the flood, seeking out the chimney stack of a half-drowned farmhouse. He closed his eyes too late – the lightning leaving a varicose-veined electric image on the retina which hung before him like a mirage as the flash was followed immediately by the rumble.
Talbot looked positively ecstatic at this development. ‘Blimey. Spectacular, eh?’
A military motorcycle messenger arrived with an ace reporter as pillion. Gary, his spots in full disaster formation, tried to run to the duck but his black slip-ons, now ankle-deep in mud, slowed him down.
‘This is Captain Talbot – Gary Pymore, one of my colleagues at The Crow’
Gary saluted. Talbot winced.
Talbot gave Gary a briefing on the present situation from his map. Dryden used his mobile to check his answerphone. The two pieces of information he needed were waiting for him. One from the Land Registry at Stepney confirmed the Reverend John Tavanter’s story of his £750,000 windfall. The other, from the Probate Registry for East Cambridgeshire, confirmed Dryden’s suspicions.
Now he knew.
But he needed proof. He tore a page from his notebook and, leaning on the duck’s bonnet, he wrote a message in neat capitals.
MEET ME AT THE OLD FARM, BURNT FEN.
MIDNIGHT. T
He’d known for some time that it would come to this. With no forensic evidence and no witness it was the only way of catching Tommy Shepherd’s killer. He had to meet him. The message was bait that the murderer could not resist. Dryden’s problem was making sure he didn’t become his third victim.
He folded the paper and wrote a full name and address. Then he gave it to the military messenger who, with Talbot’s encouragement, agreed to deliver it on his return journey to Ely.
Gary looked longingly at the motorbike as it sped south.
Dryden took two of his cameras. ‘The deadline for The Crow is three this afternoon. File what you’ve got by two – that’ll give them a chance to get things in order. Then stay here tonight. Spend some time with these people. Human interest stuff. The village that wouldn’t die, you know the line. Memories of the last time, what it’s like spending a night surrounded by the floodwaters, boiling up for tea, etcetera.’