She leaned in close as the noise in the room rose with the consumption of free sherry.
‘You will have seen the planning and resources committee’s agenda on the request for extra funds for the cathedral restoration?’
It was a rhetorical question. Liz Barnett was one of his best contacts.
She pressed on. ‘Frankly they’ve got a bit of a cheek. It’s virtually a demand for a £30,000 contribution because they’ve discovered, at the very last moment, that they need to put up scaffolding around one of the transepts to reach the high gutters.’
She broke off to kiss a passing councillor who got her name wrong and then staggered away. ‘Anyway, apparently they needed to clear gutters ahead of a thaw. If the water collects and freezes, then cracks the stonework – it’s gargoyles crashing to the ground, plagues of frogs, that sort of thing.’
‘What’s the problem?’ Dryden could feel the effects of the alcohol as it stole over his modest intellect. He burped and ordered a fresh round of drinks.
‘The point is, why wasn’t this eventuality foreseen – cold weather in winter not being a totally unexpected development.’ She tossed her hair. ‘Apparently there’s some argybargy between the diocesan authorities and the contractors. You’ll need to put the questions. But it’s a bit of a shambles if you ask me.’
Dryden looked hopeful.
‘Although if you did, I would, naturally, be unable to comment at this time.’
Kathy appeared at Dryden’s elbow and ordered another round of drinks. The mayoress declined and drifted off to rescue a tray of alcohol from her husband’s embrace.
Dryden felt the room sway and was acutely aware of Kathy’s lips which had begun to whisper in his ear. He struggled briefly with an amorphous feeling of guilt. But the room was on the move and it seemed sensible to hold on to something. Their bodies touched in several places – in fact an increasing number of places.
Suddenly a woman screamed in that theatrical fashion usually reserved for amateur-night productions of The Mousetrap. Dryden thought two things very quickly. First that he was late visiting Laura. Second that he had somehow caused the scream.
But Roy Barnett had caused the scream by the simple expedient of collapsing to the floor – courageously holding on to his pint glass. He was now in the arms of two rather startled WRVS women who had been listening to his anecdotes for the last half hour. It looked like a modern-day re-enactment of the Death of Nelson. Liz Barnett was calmly calling an ambulance on her mobile. She hadn’t spilt her drink – and she was ordering another.
Dryden called Humph’s mobile and woke him up in a lay-by. The ambulance beat the cab to the Maltings by thirty seconds.
‘Follow that ambulance,’ said Dryden, enjoying himself. Humph happily handed Dryden a miniature bottle of Campari from the glove-compartment bar and slammed his foot down on the accelerator, but they had to imagine the screech of tyres.
Kathy watched them streak off into the night. She would recall little about the evening the next morning but the memory of the kiss lingered like a hangover.
3
The Tower Hospital had begun life as a workhouse in 1788: decorative stonework failed to offset the mean windows and the poor gothic humour of the single belltower. Standing on the edge of town it shared the high ground with a great railway-brick water tower of monumental ugliness. The hill and the rough common around it were known as The Ropes – a reference to the fact that it was once the site of the common gallows.
Here, in 1812, a group of seven luckless land labourers were hanged before a hungry crowd in broad summer sunshine. The so-called Littleport Rioters had made the mistake of drinking a large quantity of beer on starving stomachs and then embarking on two days of spectacular lawlessness. They were left for a month on the gibbet, like slaughtered crows on a line.
The workhouse closed without sorrow half a century later. With awful predictability it limped into the next century as an asylum: residency of the Tower being a local euphemism for anything from mild eccentricity to stark lunacy. By the 1950s the interior was a scandal: cracked tiled walls, Victorian plumbing, and unshaded light bulbs. It finally closed after a fire gutted the building and brought down the roof of the great hall, the scene of thousands of joyless communal meals.
What was left was bought by the Steeple Trust, private health care specialists, who fitted it out in the kind of unclinical luxury that would make any patient reach for their wallet. The Trust produced a glossy brochure boasting a heated swimming pool, saunas, and gym. It held a maximum of fifty ‘guests’. But the £2 million spent on the rebuilding completely failed to obscure the building’s innate malevolence. It stood against the night like the Victorian horror-house it had once been.