his virtues. The bone structure was medieval, the face apparently the result of several blows of a Norman mason’s chisel into a single limestone block. Jet black hair followed the architectural design – cropped and severe. It was the kind of face that should have been illuminating an Anglo-Saxon chronicle.
He flipped up the vanity mirror and smudged a porthole in the condensation of the window. 4.10 p.m. A lead expanse of chill cloud over the fen, occasionally lit by the red and green of half-hearted fireworks. The temperature had not risen above freezing all day and now, as the light bled away, a mist crept out of the roadside ditches to claw at the cab’s passing tyres.
Dryden checked his watch. ‘We could do with being there,’ he said. Like most reporters he’d learnt the hard way that patience is a vice.
Humph adopted an urgent posture which produced no discernible increase in speed. The cab swept on while beside them a flock of Canada geese, just airborne, began its long slow ascent into the sky.
Two miles ahead a blue emergency light blinked – a lighthouse in the dusk. A mile away to the east the fairy lights of a pub twinkled in the gloom.
‘Tesco trolleys,’ said Dryden, searching his coat pockets for a pen. Instead he produced a miniature pork pie, the remnants of a quarter-pound of button mushrooms, and an untouched half-pound of wine gums.
Humph adjusted the rear-view mirror by way of answer. He’d known Dryden for two years now, since the accident which had put Dryden’s wife, Laura, in a coma. Humph had ferried him to the hospital through those first critical weeks. In that time he’d learnt to let Dryden finish his own sentences. If you can have a conversation entirely based on rhetoric then they did.
Dryden kicked his feet out, irritated that the cab afforded no more leg room than the average car. Had Humph answered? He was unsure.
‘I bet you. Three sodding Tesco trolleys and a hubcap. If we’re lucky. Brace yourself: another Pulitzer Prize.’ Dryden stretched scepticism to breaking point: it was often, wrongly, seen as cynicism.
They came to the sudden T-junction. They were common in the Fens, abrupt full-stops in the usually uninterrupted arrow-flight of the drove roads. Death traps. Over-confident drivers, lulled by seven miles of tarmac runway, suddenly found themselves confronted by a bank, and then a ditch with ten feet of iced water in the bottom.
A signpost stood at an angle beside the road: FIVE MILES FROM ANYWHERE CORNER. Dryden laughed, mainly because it wasn’t a joke.
Across their path lay the bank of the River Lark, a tributary of the Great Ouse – the Fens’ central artery. They parked up, short of a yellow and black scene-of-crime tape.
As Dryden reached the top of the bank an industrial arc lamp thudded into life, picking out a circular spotlight on the ice. Cue Torvill and Dean, he thought.
In the dusk the bright circle of light hurt his eyes. The Canada geese, having caught them up, flew startled through the arc lamp’s beam like bombers picked out in the searchlights of the Blitz. They attempted a landing on ice downriver – a disaster of flailing webbed feet shrouded in gloom.
Dryden started listing hardware in his notebook – a sure sign he knew he might be short of facts to pad out a story. Eight vehicles were drawn up along the foot of Lark Bank. Two local police patrol cars – blue stripes down the side of Ford Fiestas, the county police force’s diving unit in a smart purple-striped Cavalier with trailer, the fire brigade’s special rescue vehicle, a Three Rivers Water Authority Ford van, and an unmarked blue Rover which might as well have had CID in neon letters flashing from its number plate.
Out on the river four frogmen were trying to break through the ice to attach cables to something just below the surface. One called for oxyacetylene torches and soon the diamond-blue flames hissed, generating vertical mushroom clouds of steam in the frozen air.
What Dryden needed was a story line: and for that he needed a talking head. What he didn’t have was time.
He scanned the small crowd. He ruled out the senior fireman – politely known as ‘media unfriendly’ – and ditto the water authority PR who was even now smoothing down a shiny silver suit under a full-length cashmere coat.
With relief he recognized a plain-clothed detective on the far bank. Detective Sergeant Andy Stubbs was married to one of the nurses who cared for his wife. They’d met occasionally at the hospital, both keeping a professional distance. Dryden decided businesslike was best: ‘Detective Sergeant.’ It was nearly a question – but not quite. An invitation to chat.
Detective Sergeant Stubbs turned it down. ‘Dryden.’ He zipped up an emergency services luminous orange jacket. The body language shouted suspicion.
Dryden looked out over the floodlit river with an air of enthusiasm more suited to the terraces at Old Trafford. He grinned, rubbing his hands together with excitement, then he made his pitch. ‘What’s all this about then, Mr Stubbs?’ A mixture of deference and jollity which Dryden judged the perfect combination. The jollity was more than a front. He suffered from the opposite of clinical depression – a kind of irrational exuberance.
‘County has put a stop on all information, Dryden. We’re not quite sure what we’ve got. We’ve been out here three hours. Give me ten minutes and if nothing has come up I’ll give you a statement.’
‘I need to file in twenty minutes to make copy’
DS Stubbs nodded happily. He didn’t give a damn.
In the distance Dryden could see Humph’s cab. The internal light was on and dimly he could see the taxi driver gesticulating wildly. Humph was at conversational level in four European languages which he had learnt from tapes. This year it was Catalan. In December, to avoid Christmas, he would take two weeks holiday in Barcelona – alone and blissfully talkative. Typically he sought fluency in any language other than his own.
Stubbs appeared to have the same problem.
Dryden tried again. ‘Car then – under the ice.’ He beamed in the silence that followed as if he’d got an answer.
Out on the frosted river the frogmen were attaching four metal cables to the car roof at its strongest points, having melted the surface ice with hand-held blowtorches fed by gas lines running back to the fire brigade’s
