The Water Clock

than an overgrown ditch with just enough water at its mouth to moor the boat out of the mainstream. Underneath the long grass and bulrushes was an old timber quay, once used to load barges with vegetables and salad crops direct from the peat fields for the railhead at Ely and the London markets.

In a lonely landscape it was the loneliest of spots. Below the bank the boat was, effectively, lost to the outside world. Dryden’s mobile phone was the only link – except for the occasional passing pleasure boat on the main river, or dedicated hikers trying the towpath route seventeen miles south to Cambridge.

The crash that had put Laura into a coma had undone so many things they had planned together that he was determined to live a temporary life, with as little material luggage as possible. Most of their savings remained untouched, but three months after the crash he’d withdrawn ?15,000 of the money he’d got for their flat to buy PK 122 and have her refurbished in the town boatyard.

He’d taken six weeks’ leave from the News, although they’d made it plain their good nature would stretch no further. The Crow had offered him a job after a few casual shifts he’d taken to fill up the time. He soon realized that the freedom of working for a weekly would allow him to visit Laura each day at the Tower, where she had been transferred immediately after the crash. The alternative had been to move her to a London clinic while taking his chances on the News with a newsdesk unlikely to listen sympathetically to requests for regular days off.

His mother died that first winter, having never fully recovered from the shock of the accident at Harrimere Drain. Then he rented out the new house and channelled the cash into an account for Laura. The News offered him terms to go quickly and he took them. Perhaps, somewhere, there was a hint of relief. Ten years as a reporter had sapped his enthusiasm even if his inquisitiveness remained undimmed. The Crow gave him a full-time job as senior reporter. He felt idiotically satisfied when he saw his first by-line.

PK 122 had spent most of her working life at Weymouth patrolling the naval harbour. She was steel, aluminium grey, and fitted out to weather a typhoon. The powerful single Merlin engine was new and mighty. On her polished wooden instrument panel a small silver plaque said simply: DUNKIRK. 1940. It was a romantic touch he could not resist. From the mahogany-panelled cockpit a hatchway gave into a naval wardroom from which a corridor ran to the prow, giving access to the galley, two toilets and a double shower he’d had put in to replace a tackle room. The cabin had six berths. Dryden had paid for her to be sealed against the damp and fitted with Calor gas heating. The contents of their London flat had been placed in long-term storage but he salvaged their books and filled the wardroom’s fitted shelves: a reaffirmation that they had, at least, a shared past. An oil-fired generator provided lights and powered the galley. On deck PK 122 boasted the latest in wind-powered generators, a nod to Dryden’s sometimes shaky environmental credentials. It cut in over the boat’s usual power supply when the wind speeds were high enough – which this far out on the fen was for most of the winter, and an uncomfortable chunk of the summer as well.

Their car, a write-off anyway, had been sold for scrap after the crash in Harrimere Drain. Since the night of the accident he had never driven and still rode in cars with at least one window slightly open in all weathers, and never in the back seat, even in a four-door. Running PK 122 was cheap. He used his wages from The Crow to outsource his transport needs to Humph.

Each morning the cabbie parked up about a hundred yards from the dock on the drove road which led to Barham Farm, where Dryden bought milk and eggs every week and paid his monthly ?8 mooring fee. Humph, a delicate cook, rustled up fried egg sandwiches at home and brought them along. Dryden’s contribution was two cups of bitumen-strong coffee.

The nightmare had upset Dryden’s routine. He sloshed what was left of his third mug of coffee out over the ice and jumped back on board to get his overcoat and two fresh refills. He bristled as he heard Humph honk from the cab.

Dryden disliked anger and felt it was a defeat for self-Control. But Humph’s duties as an alarm clock were taken just a little too seriously – especially for someone who spent most of his time at work asleep.

But Dryden couldn’t argue with the service: as a cut-price chauffeur Humph was difficult to beat. The bills were presented weekly and bore all the hallmarks of fiction. Too low by a factor of ten, Humph refused to amend them repeating, mantra-like, that ‘he’d been going that way anyway’. Dryden had secured ?40 a week from The Crow as standard expenses when he’d signed up and he made sure all of it got to Humph in one way or another – either as fares, shared meals, books, tapes, cigarettes, or, his other real vice, the occasional miniature bottle of spirits. The Capri’s glove compartment looked like an off-licence in toyland.

‘Freezing,’ said Dryden, unnecessarily, getting into the car and handing over the coffee in return for a fried egg sandwich.

Dryden straightened his legs out in the cab and knocked his head on the roof, prompting another surge of early morning irritation.

‘You could walk down and call me up, you know – the horn isn’t compulsory. Fresh air doesn’t kill.’

Humph retaliated by saying ‘good morning’ in Catalan and pressed the pause button on the cab’s tape deck. A silky voice repeated the phrase with almost identical pronunciation. Humph asked – again in Catalan – how Dryden had slept. He pressed the pause button again and the silky voice repeated the phrase.

‘Very impressive. Get a lot of Catalan speakers on the school run?’

Humph glugged coffee. The cabbie’s head, like his feet and hands, was completely out of scale with his duvet- sized torso. His face was child-like, his eyes a cornflower blue. For someone who never actually went outside he showed an enormous interest in the weather. ‘Minus 0.5 C and steady,’ he said.

The cab, expelling carbon monoxide in a black drift from the exhaust pipe, clattered along the drove road and out on to the A10. The hangover from his drinking binge the night before had locked Dryden’s brain in neutral. He opened the glove compartment and retrieved his diary. Its contents were largely irrelevant, especially this morning, as the Lark murder was likely to dominate his schedule until the next deadline on Monday. Four days. He suppressed the frustration and tried not to think about what he’d be doing if he was still on the News. With just two senior reporters The Crow demanded the talents of a jack of all trades, and certainly didn’t offer the luxury of covering one story a week, however sensational.

He hated Fridays anyway. Too much time to think. Too many grim diary jobs that he thought he’d left behind on his first weekly paper a decade earlier. Flower shows, WI meetings and, worst of all, the golden weddings. And the complaints – the day after press day was plagued by serial whingers who’d spotted tiny mistakes, and occasional whoppers. Dryden’s particular favourite since joining The Crow had been the week they’d included the death notice of Albert Morris in the ‘Used Cars’ column.

He snapped the diary shut. ‘Golden wedding,’ he said, ‘Jubilee estate. Mr and Mrs William Starr. Must remember to ask them how long they’ve been married.’