‘Slow up. Let’s keep him in sight but don’t get any closer.’ They were travelling east across the Great West Fen towards the River Ouse, running into a dead end, a network of droves, all of which ended at the river’s high flood banks.
‘We’ve got ‘im,’ said Humph, and the moonlight showed, for a second, the excitement in his eyes.
And then they lost him. The tail-lights winked out.
Humph let the cab idle to a halt. Silence descended on them like a giant duvet.
‘Reckon he heard us following?’ asked Dryden.
Humph nodded. ‘He’s gone to earth.’
The sky was an astonishing planetarium of starlight with a single satellite traversing from eastern to western horizon. The earth was black and featureless but for the dim tracery of dykes and ditches with their wisps of mist. The only sound was that of water percolating through the peat. Across a vast field the ghost-like form of a badger trotted on a secret assignment.
Dryden stood by the cab. Humph got out as well. Twice in one day.
‘What’s that?’ Humph pointed east towards the river. A single black chimney stood against the stars. ‘Let’s go.’ It was the first time Humph had ever provided a destination.
It took them ten minutes of threading across country to arrive at Stretham Engine. The main building was in the shape of a tall brick cottage loaf with a slim chimney rising from one corner. It had been built in 1831 – one of ninety steam-driven pumping houses which replaced hundreds of windmills across the Fens. Stretham was one of the few to remain, largely because the engine was still in working order and had been designed and installed by James Watt himself, the father of steam. Dryden recalled writing a story that it was to open for the public in the spring after renovation with a grant from the Millennium Fund. But for the most part, since it had last pumped water from the Great West Fen up into the River Ouse in 1941, it was a forgotten landmark. A single needle of brick, which on low, cloudy days seemed to scratch the sky.
Humph was out of the cab before Dryden. On his feet he looked lighter, like a spinning top balanced precariously on two tiny feet so neat and close they looked, by comparison with his girth, like a single point. He bustled to the boot and produced two industrial-weight torches and an overcoat that could have covered a small horse.
Dryden, astonished by Humph’s burst of mobility, took the torch without a word.
They circled the engine house once. There were two doors both bolted and padlocked from the outside. None of the narrow windows were at floor level and the wooden doors to the coal chutes were held fast by iron bars padlocked to the brickwork.
‘It’s a lock-out,’ said Dryden.
They were standing by the main door when the otherwise still night was rustled by a faint breeze. The door before them swung open with a theatrical creak.
‘Spoo-ky,’ said Dryden.
They examined the door. The padlock was locked and the bolt in place but the latch had been carefully detached from the wood of the door jamb. To the eye it would look shut but a good shove would detach the door, allowing it to swing inwards – a good shove being considerably more force than that applied by a midnight breeze.
‘This is the bit in the film where I normally say something like: “No sane person would go in”,’ said Dryden.
‘There’s no car in sight,’ said Humph.
‘And if he’s in there he’s outnumbered.’
‘And this isn’t a late-night movie.’
They went in.
Inside they stood quietly in the dark and sensed the space around them. Their torch beams barely touched the joists fifty feet above – like Blitz-time searchlights rifling the clouds. James Watt’s great steam engine took up the lower two-thirds of the void. The giant machinery glimmered dully with the polish applied by a thousand steam enthusiasts. To one side sat a squat diesel engine, a metallic Swiss-roll of beaten panels, which had replaced Watt’s engine finally in the 1940s – only for it to be made redundant by the electricity pumping station further up river.
The machinery creaked as the various metals cooled at different rates with the chill of the night.
‘Let’s stick together.’
Dryden considered this redundant sentence. ‘Oh all right then.’ He indicated a flight of brick steps leading down to the cellars.
‘Can’t we stick together up here?’ Humph’s euphoria was dissipating. Besides, he knew Dryden well and there was nothing as foolhardy as a dedicated coward.
Dryden led the way. One of the cellars was being used as a storeroom by builders preparing the engine house for its first season as a tourist attraction. They’d constructed wooden handrails for the stairs and begun building a tearoom in one of the coal cellars, which was bathed in the moonlight from a row of freshly cleaned skylights. Plumbing gear littered the floor in another, where the porcelain kit for a set of toilets had been stored.
Rats, Dryden thought, and he adopted a peculiar skipping walk designed to keep his feet off the ground as much as possible. They returned gratefully to the main floor and played their torch beams on the single metal corkscrew stairway which led up to the loft: fifty feet of cast iron tortured into a spiral.
‘You stay here – I won’t be a sec.’ Dryden knew with sickening self-knowledge that his bravery was the product of a tremendous desire to show off. He took the stairs two at a time in a desperate attempt to postpone the onset of vertigo. Unfortunately he ran out of breath first, halfway up, and had to cling to the fragile metal banister for support. Below he could see Humph waiting like a pocket diving bell in an underwater movie, his torch beam sweeping the ocean floor around him.
