The Water Clock

He made the trapdoor to the loft in one more unbroken run, pushed it open with surprising ease, and tripped over the wooden lip in his hurry to find safety. He fell to the floor, producing a plume of dust which hung in the stale air.

When his breathing stilled he cast the torchlight around the loft. Unlike the floor below this was cluttered with Victorian flotsam: wooden buckets, coal shovels, winches, tackle, ropes, and pulleys. The walls were lined with storage cupboards – vertical lockers for the workforce which must have once been needed to keep the great engine pumping twenty-four hours a day. They were wooden with brass locks and hinges and looked like a row of vertical coffins.

A workbench ran one length of the room – its G-clamps, vices, and loose tools covered in a sedimentary layer of white dust. The floor was uneven, punctured by several closed trapdoors. Dryden guessed that these were used to raise and lower machinery for repairing and maintaining the engine directly below.

He stopped to examine the silence. He could hear Humph’s nervous cough and nothing else. An owl hooted and he laughed without conviction. In the silence that followed he hoped to hear nothing but instead, from one of the lockers, he thought he imagined the shuffle of a foot. Before fear immobilized his muscles he walked noisily across the loft and pulled it open, his heartbeat crashing in his ears. A pair of moth-eaten overalls hung from a single nail and for a second he saw, by way of hallucination, a body inside it with the bloody snapped neck of the Lark victim.

The flood of relief when he realized his nerves had betrayed him had the effect of a swiftly administered malt whisky. He felt a flood of goodwill and laughed, this time making a decent job of it. A tarpaulin hung from the beams at the far end of the loft and he pulled it back with bravado to complete the search. It took at least a second to realize that this time he was looking at a real human face. Or rather a human head. The features, other than the eyes, were obscured by a black woollen balaclava. He saw the eyes and the fear in them. Then a crowbar caught him in the crotch. Fireworks went off in his eyes and a pain so pure seared his spine that for a second he was able to admire it before it shut down the rest of his nervous system.

He came to within a minute. The air sang with the echo of something. He was on his feet before he realized it was a gunshot, and at the trapdoor when he heard the second. At the foot of the stairs he could see Humph’s body, sprawled flat on the stone-flagged floor.

‘Humph!’ He felt better for the yell.

He swung down the stairs and realized, guiltily, that he was already hoping he wouldn’t have to try mouth-to- mouth resuscitation. He paused ten feet short of the lifeless figure to avoid the sight of blood.

‘Humph?’ A whisper this time.

‘Yup.’ The cabbie’s voice was clipped, bored and slightly embarrassed. Outside they heard the distant sound of a car engine coughing into life and then accelerating across the fen.

‘You’re not hit?’

‘Nope. Fucker pushed me over.’

‘And you’re not hit?’

Humph struggled on to one elbow and raised his head. He gave Dryden a look of pained annoyance.

‘No. But you are.’

A warm trickle of blood was making its way down Dryden’s neck. He felt his ear and examined the mushy red mess on his finger tips.

James Watt’s great steam engine swam before his eyes in a perfect circle. He collapsed like a folding deckchair to the stone floor and dreamt of a criss-cross pattern on ice.

The losers dropped their betting slips surreptitiously, a snowfall of disappointment settling on the Newmarket terraces.

But they had won. The snapshot proved that. There was more joy in that small square of photographic paper than in most of the rest of her life. A faded souvenir from a day she felt she’d stolen from someone else.

Her writing on the back. ‘Newmarket. August 65. With Gypsy.’ He called her Amber for the earrings she’d worn the first time they’d met. The time she wouldn’t tell him her name. And she called him the one thing only she could get away with: Gypsy.

He was at home at the racecourse, that’s why he’d brought her. But she distrusted him, even there. The cigarette cupped in the hand, the easy charm that got him what he wanted. Why, she thought even then, had she gone this far?

‘Nothing to lose,’ he’d said, taking her money and his own. The horse was High Flyer. He’d studied the form. The Sporting Life rolled into his jacket pocket. She knew his secret only later – that he could read the numbers, but not the words.

‘Nothing to lose,’ he said. All of it – on the one chance.’

He said it again when he got back from the bookie’s stand: ‘All of it.’

She’d loved that. Loved the contrast with her own careful life in the new semi by the golf course. Loved the idea that she too had nothing to lose. The marriage she had was so hollow it echoed when she cried. A routine chore as spiritless as the jangling progress of the milkman’s early morning round.

Gypsy had nothing. No bank account. No address. No worries. Perhaps that’s what she loved. The footloose freedom. But she wanted him as well. He’d taken his shirt off in the queue for a drink before the big race. Wooden brown, boney, and painfully thin. Younger than his eighteen years. His hair looked expensive, blue-black like slate. It was that day, later, in the burnt brown grass he’d played in as a child, that she let him in to what was left of her life.

High Flyer. 33-1. A long shot. But he knew the form. Or knew something. She’d seen him talking to the men by the ring. She knew that way of talking, the sideways mouth, the eyes elsewhere. She didn’t ask.

He’d smuggled her through the crowd to the rail. One man, drunk, picked a fight. Gypsy looked at