The Water Clock

said from the start that he should talk to Laura. At first he had taken her hand and constructed animated one-way conversations. He’d almost believed them himself in those first weeks, desperately misunderstanding every facial tick as a subtle appeal to understanding. But with time his speeches had become soliloquies, delivered with no real conviction that they were ever heard.

But he never lied. He told her often that he had not deserted her that night. That he had been powerless to help. But he feared she couldn’t hear, and if she couldn’t hear then she must still believe he had put his life before hers. That was the thought which brought him back each night to talk to her. The first sentence was always awkward: like the opening line of a bad play delivered to a half-empty theatre. Stagy, inappropriate, and inevitably feeble. Before delivering it he allowed himself a single cigarette – the only one of the day. Greek, acrid, and cinder hot. He projected the smoke out now into the still air of the room for Laura to smell.

‘And I thought it was going to be a Tesco trolley – shows how wrong I can be.’

He glanced at the bed. The coppery hair was lifeless and artificial. Laura’s breathing whistled slightly like a cat’s.

‘A great story – at last. They’d even be interested in this one on the News. The body of a man found dumped in the boot of a car and then run into the river. Neck broken – snapped – his head nearly severed. The river freezes and wraps him in an ice cube. There’s only one set of tyre marks leading to the spot. The ice stops the river traffic so it could have been there for weeks – anyway there’s virtually none in winter – but kids spotted it skating.’

Dryden stubbed the cigarette, disliking the habit as he did at the end of every smoke.

‘Now DS Stubbs thinks, according to the local radio news, that this is a London job. Nasty, vicious crimes being a typical capital offence.’

He enjoyed the weak witticism and missed Laura for not spotting it.

‘The regional crime squad has been contacted but the script is written: south London thugs decapitate their victim and drive into the Fens to dump the body. By the time some weekend Captain Pugwash had banged his cruiser into it the body would have been fishmeal. Gangland is hardly weatherwise – so they can be forgiven for overlooking the possibility of the ice. And it’s a good spot – lonely even by Fen standards. You get winter croppers in the fields but they never stray far from the shelter of the picking machines. The pub, the Five Miles from Anywhere – you remember it, we sat by the river in the summer – it hardly opens in the winter.

‘But a gangland killing? If you’ve got the presence of mind to drive the victim’s body here in the first place, why dump it in a river in a car that can be traced – the police have the registration number, even the tax disc. OK, it’s almost certainly stolen but it still represents an additional risk. It gives the police somewhere to start. And these are supposed to be professionals?

‘And then they’ve deliberately stranded themselves in the middle of the fen. It’s night, presumably, and by this point well below freezing. The police now say that there are no unaccounted-for tyre tracks within half a mile of the dumped car on any of the drove roads. So he, she, or they, have to walk to a second vehicle, or several miles to the nearest main road. The police are starting house-to-house in the morning. To walk to the nearest rail station would have taken three hours.’

Out in the dark garden the moon rose through the branches of a monkey-puzzle tree.

Somewhere in the Tower the gentle sob of someone in pain punctured the thick luxurious silence.

‘So my guess is that if they were outsiders they panicked for some reason – were forced to dump the car – and then set off across the fen on foot. In which case there must be a chance they’re still out there – and if they’ve been unable to find shelter they must be in bad shape. If they have found shelter then somebody else could be in bad shape, especially with the coppers blundering around doing house-to-house.’

Dryden stood and pressed his nose against the ice-cold window. In the walled garden the monkey-puzzle tree cast bizarre Byzantine patterns of shadow – tangled limbs of deeper shadow in which it was easy to imagine the shape of a figure standing watch.

‘So I think it’s much more likely they’re local. In which case their victim is likely to be local too.’

He heard the cathedral bell toll midnight. Under the monkey-puzzle tree he thought he saw the shadows move. A tiny pin-point of red, which he had mistaken for the reflection of his own cigarette, fell to the ground. Out on to the frosted grass strolled a security guard, an Alsatian loping behind.

He took Laura’s hand, lifting it like an exhibit from the unruffled linen sheet. He fought back the guilt that always rose when he left – the result of his own self-pity. And he fought off a cynical laugh – a sign, he knew, that he no longer really felt this lifeless form was his wife.

If this was a charade, who was it for?

‘I’d better get back to the boat,’ he said too loud. ‘The ice is breaking up and I’d better get the pumps going. Your parents have written – a long letter. I’ll read it tomorrow. And there’s some pictures, I’ll bring those too.’

He placed the dead weight back on the sheet. At the door he forced himself to complete the ritual parting.

‘Goodnight, Laura.’

He closed the door and in the silence listened. Sometimes he wished so hard to hear her call his name that he conjured up her voice. It was an illusion so strong there was a danger that one day he would miss the real thing.

Sometimes, just before dawn, he would lie in the dark trying to see behind the headlights, and the glare of the two fog lamps, straining beyond the dazzle to see a face behind the wheel But there never had been time. A second? Two? No sooner had the car pulled out than it was slewed across his path. The two seconds that changed his life.

It wasn’t his fault. Nobody ever said it was. But he had been daydreaming, he’d admitted that much. They said it didn’t matter. The tyre marks told the story.

They’d been to dinner at New Farm. 1999. Winter. A Friday evening in late November. Dryden and his mother had left Burnt Fen in ‘79, two years after his father’s sudden death. A local farmer let the land while the old house crumbled. They moved to London and his mother taught full-time in a comprehensive in the featureless suburb where they lived. The dream was over then.