bought a bunch of lilies on the way to the courts, and rang the vicar of St John’s, Little Ouse.
5
The landscape slipped by Humph’s cab: a monochrome sea as flat as an ancient mariner’s nightmare. In one field of black earth a wild horse stood, its head and neck just clear of the blanket of ground mist. A disembodied mythical animal floating over an invisible land. Telegraph poles stood at crazy angles in the deep black peat – just scratching the low white sky above.
Humph ate a sandwich with one hand while guiding the cab out to Little Ouse with the other: a procedure not so much reminiscent of steering as tacking. He ate with delicate and exaggerated care. He was a finicky eater. As he always said, the problem was his hormones. Dryden imagined they were big hormones with Ipswich Town sweatshirts.
They found themselves running beside the frozen River Lark. At the spot where the car had been ditched they pulled up by the yellow and black scene-of-crime tape where a solitary PC stood guard. He looked too young to be out on his own let alone in a police uniform.
Dryden wound the window right down. ‘Any developments, Inspector?’
Humph smirked. They had few shared pastimes but baiting police constables was one of them.
The copper ignored him.
‘I understand the culprits may be armed and still in the area?’ This was news to the constabulary. The PC produced a two-way radio and walked off to check out in private how it worked.
Humph drove away before Dryden could do any more harm. They sped past the Five Miles from Anywhere – closed on winter evenings, its beer garden was full of picnic tables dripping in the mist.
A mile downstream was the site of an old cut used by the potato barges in the 1880s, similar to the one in which
Dryden told Humph to park up. A wrought-iron arch over the entrance spelt out the words: Feltwell Marina.
As Dryden stood listening for signs of life a voice made him jump: ‘Can I help?’ A body followed in the gathering gloom. The caretaker had seen him coming.
‘Saw the lights,’ said Dryden by way of explanation. Building work ahead of the big freeze had left the marina’s yard with half a dozen deep trenches criss-crossing the site.
The caretaker nodded. He was big and broad and dressed like a lumberjack. He had a ridiculous fur hat with ear-flaps tied up under his chin. Dryden would have laughed, but then he was big and broad and dressed like a lumberjack.
Dryden was always disappointed at his inability to intimidate. At six foot three, in the cavernous black overcoat, he felt he might just occasionally demand some respect. But the lumberjack didn’t look very impressed.
‘I just wondered,’ said Dryden, weakly. Any news about the car they got out of the river?’
‘Car?’
There was a long silence in which the sound of cogs could be heard turning. Was that a thought crossing his mind?
‘Fuck off,’ said the caretaker and whistled. An Alsatian dog bounded into the light trailing a line of dribble any rabies victim would have been proud of. Dryden’s guts dissolved and the surge of panic was so strong he couldn’t move his legs. With what looked like exaggerated calm he flipped open a laminated wallet containing a press card, which failed to impress the dog. Then again it was a decade old, and someone else’s.
‘Philip Dryden.
‘Fuck off,’ said the caretaker. It didn’t count as repetition because it was at least an octave lower and a lot louder.
Dryden fucked off. The last thing he saw was a half-finished sign propped up against the marina’s prospective site office. ‘Feltwell Anchor Marina opens: April 1’. Work on the bridge would not take as long, but the river would be blocked for several months at least. But for the kids, and the ice, the Lark victim would have stayed undiscovered into the spring.
‘Local knowledge,’ said Dryden to nobody, fishing in the pockets and producing a packet of mushrooms which he munched as they swept on through the gloom.
The village of Little Ouse lay at the end of a three-mile drove – a long, dispiriting ride across the peatlands on a track constructed of slabs of concrete laid inexpertly heel-to-toe. It had been a soft drove until the war, when the concrete had been laid by the Ministry of Production to speed the supply of vegetables to London. The corrugated surface played a soundtrack back to drivers – a kind of dismal rumbling background beat.
Two rows of brick tied cottages formed what was once the heart of the village. They stood in the lee of the high river bank. A tortured cast-iron bridge crossed the Lark. A home-made wooden sign hung from its railing in the gloom of a winter’s dusk: At Your Own Risk’. The church of St John, rebuilt by the Victorians, was demure and neat in contrast to the monumental vicarage, a neo-Gothic classic in damp red brick, which stood beside it in the same stand of tall pines. Much of the odious decoration was hidden beneath a facade of ivy. Like most poor Victorian buildings it was dominated by a minor feature, the front porch – a stone portico supported by carved caryatids of two clerics with bishops’ crooks.
They pulled up and Humph killed the engine. He was asleep before the sound died.
The light was gone from the day and the dusk was violet except for the white ice on the trees. The vicarage loomed over them, some of the windows lighted. Two men came out and made their way to a woodstore beside the church, returning laden with logs for a fire. Beneath the portico they stopped to chat to a figure lost in the gloom. Then they were gone, but the figure lingered. The wind whispered through the pines. A full minute passed before the Reverend John Tavanter stepped out into what was left of the day.
He wore a heavy black overcoat but nothing on his head, which was globe-like and radiated intelligence. Dryden
