The Water Clock

severed. House to house inquiries were underway last night to see if anyone had heard or seen anything suspicious.

Detectives will be hampered by the isolated nature of the scene of the crime. The nearest building is a public house – The Five Miles From Anywhere – over a mile to the east. Traffic at the T-junction is extremely rare. Field work in the area has been halted during the current bad weather.

Dryden got the copytaker to read the story back and then checked with the news desk that he was in time. He was.

The firework display was reaching its climax over the cathedral and the sky was now a riot of lurid colour. The forensic team had got the corpse out of the Nissan and placed it on a body bag. Two medics in protective white suits were struggling to get the stiff limbs inside the plastic shroud. Dryden moved closer while Stubbs was busy on the mobile. The corpse’s feet were still visible, tucked grotesquely into the small of the back. Around one ankle was a short length of heavy rope attached to what looked like a cast-iron pulley block. And one arm hung loose. The hand was tanned and strong and on the wedding finger was a single gold band. Somewhere, thought Dryden, the long wait has begun.

2

By the time Dryden got back to the office, via a chip shop with Humph, the newsroom looked like a cabin on the Marie Celeste. The advent of the computer had brought with it a lot of talk about the paperless office: but it was just talk. And The Crow – established 1882– was hardly at the leading edge of new technology. Waste paper covered almost the entire floor and plastic coffee cups lay in small heaps by the PCs. An ashtray fashioned from an old hubcap contained the contents of a small volcano. Spikes – supposedly banned with the introduction of the PCs – still bristled on every desktop to collect used copy and notes, and the occasional passing eyeball. The newsroom consisted of three reporters’ work stations, a larger mahogany news editor’s desk in the bay window, a subs’ table with two dumpy make-up computers, and a copytaker’s table complete with acoustic hood salvaged from a skip in 1965 when the old post office was demolished. Splash, the office cat, was curled up on the single fax machine for extra warmth. Behind a glass partition was the editor’s office. The glass had been obscured by various absolutely essential pieces of paper carrying information ranging from the tide times at Brancaster to the constitution of the Three Rivers Water Authority. This paper camouflage had been erected by reporters over the years and now entirely baffled any attempt by the editor to see his staff.

The office was on the first floor of The Crow’s premises in the centre of Ely, above the front counter and telesales. It looked out on Market Street where, tonight, frozen rain slanted across the amber blaze of the street lights. The top deck of the Littleport bus had just drawn up at the stop directly outside and, barely visible behind the streaming condensation, was what appeared to be the entire cast of St Trinian’s.

Dryden’s story, not surprisingly, had made the lead: HUNT FOR FEN KILLER in sixty-eight point across two decks shouted from the proofs left lying on the subs’ table. The top-single beside it was hardly in the same league: FIREWORK WARNING OVER KIDS’ PRANK.

He was rereading the copy when Kathy Wilde, his fellow senior reporter, thudded up the stairs, kicked open the newsroom door, and deposited the office’s allocation of fifty freshly printed copies on to the floor with a wallop that lifted the floorboards on which Dryden was standing.

Kathy, a red-haired Ulster woman, distracted attention from lurking depression and a tendency to put on fat by a nearly continuous exercise in extrovert behaviour. She knew someone would be in the office from the lights. It was one of her less dramatic entrances.

‘Would yer effing believe it.’ The Ulster accent was sharp enough to make the windows rattle. ‘Page eight! Stark-bollock naked in the front of his bloody Mondeo with a blow-up doll and these tossers stick it in the briefs on page eight!’

‘Pity he didn’t keep it in his briefs,’ said Dryden.

He liked it when Kathy laughed. She let herself go – one of Dryden’s litmus tests of character. She advanced towards him.

Kathy had developed a kind of cat-walk designed to draw attention to her hour-glass figure. It was an ample hour-glass through which a lot of sand had passed, but an hour-glass none the less. The effect was mildly hypnotic and Dryden froze like a rabbit in the headlights of an oncoming car.

Kathy invaded his personal space – in Dryden’s case an area slightly smaller than Norfolk. When she moved she sounded like a mobile in the wind – the earrings, necklace, and bracelets tinkling together.

She removed a piece of imaginary lint from Dryden’s shoulder. ‘You tell me – go on. I’ll take it from you. Tell me I don’t know a decent story when I see one.’ She thrust a mangled copy of the paper – hardly hot off the presses but still warm – into Dryden’s hands.

Kathy had come to England to do feature-writing shifts on the Fleet Street Sunday papers. She’d cut her teeth as a reporter on the stricken doorsteps of the Troubles. The Crow was a day job that paid the bills and gave her a base within striking distance of London for her lipstick-red MG sports car. She had a low view of The Crow’s professional competence and had not taken kindly to the occasional lecture from the paper’s poorly talented senior staff. For Dryden she made an exception: his Fleet Street track record put him on a pedestal. It also made him doubly desirable. She liked the emotional distance, the unselfconscious good looks, the scruffy oversized clothes on the six-foot-plus frame, and the shock of jet black hair. But she loved the CV most of all.

She realized, suddenly, just how close she was standing and backed off in confusion. Subsiding into the newsroom’s one battered armchair she burst into angry tears. It was a regular but effective performance. Her face, impish and animated, slumped and crumpled. A considerable amount of make-up began to coalesce giving her a tragic theatrical appeal to which Dryden was just a little susceptible.

He snapped out of it. ‘So they wouldn’t know a decent story if it bit them on the arse. What’s new?’

Kathy stemmed the floods to a series of appealing snuffles.

Dryden admired the front page splash. He’d been a reporter ten years and had often written the front page lead on the News – circulation one million. But he got just as big a kick out of The Crow – circulation 17,000 and falling.

Kathy’s snuffles threatened to upgrade to sobs. Action, he decided, was the best way to head-off emotion. ‘Look, I’ve got a night job – civic opening at the Maltings. Why don’t you come with me? We can have a drink and discuss Henry’s news judgement at the same time.’

Henry was the The Crow’s ancient editor and the constant object of critical attack. In one memorable harangue Kathy had told the assembled newsroom staff of The Crow – in Henry’s absence – that the editor was to modern journalism what ‘shit pie is to haute cuisine’. Dryden had found