Dryden sipped his tea, he was damned if he was going to be intimidated by an ex-copper. The clocks chimed four and he glanced at the water clock. The elegant face read four o’clock precisely. He saw now that the fretted metalwork picked out a picture. Dogs running with hounds.
‘His body was found yesterday afternoon on the roof of the cathedral. It had probably been there since the summer of 1966. There wasn’t much left but it appears he jumped from the West Tower. The detective leading the case…’
‘My son.’ Stubbs blinked slowly, blankly. Dryden read disappointment in the look, almost antipathy. He decided to fill the silence rather than let it be.
‘What did you think had happened to Tommy Shepherd?’
‘At that time we felt certain he was being protected by someone, someone able to send him away, or someone able to keep him hidden. Looks like we were wrong…’
‘Yes. If it was suicide. Or it could be murder. Another member of the gang?’
Stubbs swallowed an inch of his neat malt whisky. ‘Possible, but unlikely. In my experience the gang members would have separated after the robbery and kept well away from each other. They would have been in a state of panic anyway – they’d seen the injuries to that poor woman…’
Panic. Dryden looked at the old man’s hands. One lay dead on the arm of the chair, the other gripped the whisky with easy practice. Stubbs gazed out into his garden. ‘They, the robbers, must have presumed she would die of those injuries. At first, of course, they wouldn’t have known that Tommy Shepherd had left his prints inside the Crossways. The plan would have been to split the money right after the robbery, possibly as they drove away. One of them would have had to keep the cups of course – but that could wait in the circumstances.’
For a crime that had happened more than thirty years ago his recall of the details was remarkably clear.
Then they would have dumped the car and gone back to whatever alibis they had concocted – if they’d bothered at all. When we let the press know we wanted to interview Tommy Shepherd he might have tried to contact the rest of the gang, but they’d hardly be likely to welcome such an approach. They must have had some arrangement for keeping in touch, possibly a meeting place, and a prearranged time. My guess is that would have been several weeks later. In the meantime we felt he was holed up somewhere, and fed and clothed by someone.’
‘You don’t think he could have lived rough on the Fen?’
‘A bit John Buchan, don’t you think? We looked hard for Shepherd for nearly six months, right into the winter. There’s no way he could have survived out there, let alone coped with the boredom. He wasn’t the type to curl up with a good book, you know. He would have tried his luck at some point and made a break for it.’
‘What about the rest of the camp at Belsar’s Hill? Surely they could have hidden him. Got him out?’
Stubbs paused and inspected the contents of his glass. ‘What exactly is the status of this interview, Mr Dryden?’
‘Your ball game. Off the record – all for background.’
‘You can have the information by all means – this is a case I would particularly like to see tied up. The reasons are my own but entirely professional. But nothing traceable, please. That’s clear?’
‘Yes. It is.’
Stubbs pressed a buzzer beside his chair. The unknown woman returned to refill the whisky bucket. This took a few minutes during which no word was spoken. Stubbs seemed to be in a world of his own, one apparently run on alcohol. As the woman filled the glass a sneer lingered on the former deputy chief constable’s puffy face.
When he took up the story again his voice was heavier and oiled: ‘We knew Tommy Shepherd was still in the area in the weeks after the AIo robbery. He sent us a letter. Or, to be exact, he dropped us a letter. By hand – but almost certainly not his hand.’
Dryden had lost the plot. A letter? Handwritten?’
‘Yes. If you could call it that. Someone’s education had been sorely neglected.’ The disfiguring sneer again. ‘It said that he would give himself up and provide us with the names of the rest of the gang if he could be assured of preferential treatment.’
Stubbs drifted off again into self-absorbed silence. So Tommy offered to shop the rest of the gang – that presented two decent motives for murder.
‘And your reply?’ prompted Dryden.
Stubbs’s eyes swam back into focus. ‘None. We planned a brief one at first. He asked us to make a statement to the press indicating publicly what the position would be. I was happy to do that. After all, according to the caravanette driver the man fitting Tommy’s description was not in the Crossways when the raid began. We would certainly have cut him out of the GBH or murder charges. Plus his role in bringing the rest to book, due no doubt to his sense of remorse at the injuries inflicted on Mrs Ward, would have helped soften the judge.’ The sneer reached theatrical proportions. ‘We would have been happy to plead for leniency.’
‘But?’
‘Command of the operation had passed to the Yard. They wanted to review the case – it took them a few days. By the time they agreed with our original decision Tommy had gone. We never got a reply. Now we know why, do we not?’
He hoovered up some more malt.
‘Where was the letter delivered?’
‘To one of the village stations – house at Shippea Hill. Middle of nowhere. It was found in the postbox early one morning.’
‘How do we know it was genuine?’
‘He put a fingerprint on it, in coal dust. Very neat. My guess is that he had gone to ground locally. As I say we were sure someone was sheltering him. Sherlock Holmes might conclude a coal cellar was likely. Whatever. He was in the Fens.’
