‘Hi.’ It was Kathy. ‘You there?’
He picked up the phone just too late to stop her ringing off – and felt the guilty rush of relief.
Once he’d finished the file Stubbs Senior had given him he still had a Sunday afternoon to waste until Tommy’s funeral. But now he had something to waste it on. The squad Stubbs had led had done a thorough job. More than thirty interviews had been conducted with what the police liked to call Tommy Shepherd’s ‘associates’. Two had caught Dryden’s attention. In the first days of the investigation Stubbs had personally interviewed the Reverend John Tavanter, a newly installed vicar in his first parish at St John’s, Little Ouse. Later, in the September of 1966, he had brought Liz Barnett, then a twenty-year-old housewife and local Labour party activist, in for questioning. Both had what the files coyly called a ‘romantic’ attachment to the suspect.
But Dryden decided to start with Gladstone Roberts, then a local hoodlum, interviewed within hours of the Crossways robbery. His links with the suspect were more business-like.
Dryden locked up and walked out of the town centre, now swaddled in a foot of unblemished Sabbath snow. Cathedral Motors stood just off a roundabout on the ring-road about a mile from
The attendant, a teenager of obvious timidity only emphasized by a daring silver earring, reached for the phone on the till. He wore a baseball cap marked Cathedral Motors and the kind of large brash wristwatch that can tell you the time under fifty fathoms of water.
‘Name?’
‘Dryden. Philip Dryden.
There was a short conversation during which the would-be deep-sea diver failed to take his eyes off Dryden’s face. He replaced the receiver with exaggerated care as if it might go off with a bang. Dryden got the impression he was trying to memorize his lines.
‘Mr Roberts will be down in a few minutes, Mr Dryden. Sorry we don’t have a seat. Mr Roberts is off to church so he said to mention that he would only have a few seconds to spare.’
‘Church?’ said Dryden, and smiled. He recalled the police resume on Gladstone Roberts: the words ‘vicious’, ‘petty’, and ‘crook’ had stood out along with ‘educationally subnormal’. He didn’t recall devout.
Looking around, Dryden felt subnormal might have been a bit wide of the mark as well.
The car showroom was full of waxed BMWs and two Bentleys polished to the point where they seemed to have gained an extra, translucent skin. The piped-in Muzak was classical, had a rock ‘n’ roll beat, and was at that annoying sound level known as discreet. He counted a long five minutes.
Roberts bustled in looking preoccupied. He was immaculate in white shirt, floral tie, gold Rotary Club tie-pin, dark blue suit, and polished slip-on black leather shoes. This was dress as performance art. It shouted respectability.
It was immediately obvious why the police file may have been slightly unkind to Gladstone Roberts – he was black. Ely was not famous for its melting-pot society. The town was insular and insulated. A multicultural event in the Fens was a phone call from London.
‘Mr Dryden?’ The natural deep tone of Roberts’s Trini-dadian skin had weathered badly over the last forty years. But the lilting joyful voice was just discernible below the flat East Anglian accent.
It was a question, and looking into the pained dark brown eyes he saw that it needed a bloody good answer.
‘Tommy Shepherd.’
Roberts shook his head slightly and screwed up his eyes – a performance designed to ask: ‘Do I know that name?’ But he said nothing.
‘His body was found on Friday. He’d…’
Roberts looked at the floor. He seemed weighed down by the effort of pretending he didn’t know what Dryden was talking about.
Then he nodded. ‘Of course. The suicide.’ He fished in his pockets for a packet of Hamlet cigars and lit up without offering one. Dryden wondered if the greyness in the dark wrinkles was ash.
‘I’m just doing a piece on Tommy Shepherd – you probably remember the robbery at Crossways in 1966?’
‘Why would I remember that, Mr Dryden?’
Dryden recognized he had arrived at the dividing line between being a reporter and a detective. He was reluctant to cross it due to a combination of innate cowardice and the lack of a blue uniform covered in comforting buttons and insignia. Also Roberts was the last person he wanted to insult. He imagined that years of racial discrimination had been insult enough.
He stepped in close and felt a surge of power as Roberts rocked back on his heels. ‘I’ve seen the police file, Mr Roberts. On Thomas Shepherd and those associated with him between 1964 and 1966. I wanted a brief word – in private.’
They found somewhere private. The office was above the showroom with an internal picture window looking down on the cars. With the snowfall the lights had come on to counter the gloom. The cars sparkled in that depressing way reserved for impossibly expensive merchandise.
Roberts didn’t offer Dryden a seat.
‘Are you aware of the penalties associated with breaching the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, Mr Dryden?’
Good line, thought Dryden.
Roberts sat perched on a ridiculously large walnut desk. Gilt-edged picture frames covered the leather surface:
