Stubbs tried a sneer: ‘Anything else?’
‘Yup. The Tower. I’m worried about Laura. You don’t need to know the details. She’s been threatened, possibly by the murderer. The aim is to encourage me to concentrate on other stories. Over the next twenty-four hours it is going to become increasingly obvious that this is advice that I have declined to take.’
Stubbs pulled out his mobile and hit a pre-set number. ‘I’ll get a car to drop by. Put a man outside after dark.’
Humph pulled up in the cab. Dryden had some last-minute information for Stubbs. It wasn’t much but it would whet his appetite.
‘Stretham Engine. The rope ends are still in place, see the curator. I’d get it closed quickly, most of the forensic evidence should still be in place. He died in the pulley loft. The killer shot Camm there I think, then dropped the body down by rope, hence the neck injuries.’
Dryden slapped the dashboard and Humph produced a creditable skid as they pulled off They got round the corner before they realized they had nowhere to go. It was too dark to work their way through the danger points on the way back to Ely. Planning a return trip in the morning was out as the roads could well be closed by then. Dawn would give them their first chance to head south.
They bought fish and chips and Humph headed north to Hunstanton, a bleak seaside resort on the coast of the Wash ten miles to the north.
‘Honeymoon,’ said Humph, by way of explanation. He seemed to enjoy revisiting bitter memories.
The sea was attacking what was left of the pier, a Victorian cast-iron structure largely destroyed by a wayward trawler a decade earlier. The cab reverberated with a deep thump as each new set of waves dropped on the promenade. They worked their way through some more of Humph’s collection of miniature spirit bottles while happily watching the wind build towards storm force. Humph finally let his seat down and was instantly asleep. Dryden waited for dawn.
The schoolhouse at Isleham had been closed since the war but it seemed, even to the eleven- year-old Dryden, the right place for an inquest. The sombre single Victorian room was bare but for the pews, the teacher’s pulpitum commandeered as a witness stand, and a large mahogany desk brought in to preserve the majesty of the coroner. Dryden sat in the front pew, next to his mother, and sensed around them a cordon of sympathy which left them entirely alone.
A man who had called at Burnt Fen after the accident to talk to his mother sat at the far end of the front pew making notes. When he wasn’t scrawling with his pencil he fiddled rhythmically with a packet of cigarettes, and winked secretly at Dryden when everyone stood for the coroner. He seemed to be enjoying himself.
In the nightmare of the night before Dryden had seen his father’s body stretched out on a settle before the coroner. The blood, black and streaked, and the body white from the days in the water but punctured with yellow bruises. The eyes had woken him up. They were fish-like and a strand of weed had circled the throat like a gangrenous cut. In the dream water dripped from the settle to the floor.
But there was no body in the schoolhouse at Isleham. There was never a body.
He knew the inquest was important but the witnesses spoke a strange language that he could only struggle to understand. So much was unsaid to spare them the truth. Papers were submitted but unread. Euphemisms replaced the facts. But he knew the story in the end. The man in the front pew had written it up in The Crow.
The floods of the winter of 1977 had burst the banks at Southery, north of Ely, and only a few miles from Burnt Fen. The army, already called out to help keep back the sea at Lynn, filled the breach with sandbags. Black and white pictures of the operation were up on the schoolroom wall, showing marching lines of men under a low sky, with the solitary trees bent down in the storm.
But the River Ouse had broken through at a second spot, ten miles south, near the lock-gate town of Earith on the night of 17 December – a Saturday. With the army needed to maintain the wall of sandbags at Southery they called for volunteers. Farmers mostly, with entrenching tools. The pictures, pinned up alongside those of the army, showed a scene as from the Somme. The men covered in the black sticky silt, lit by bursts of arc light, and behind them the lethal gunmetal gleam of the water. Some grinned out of the dark beside a mobile canteen, wisps of ghostly cigarette smoke catching the lights.
The army had brought amphibious vehicles – beaver tanks – up-river to the breach and chained the convoy together as a floating dam. The current had done the rest, drawing them towards the breach where millions of tonnes of water were spewing out into the Fens. Once the floating dam was sucked into place submarine netting was dropped overboard to form the first membrane of a new river bank. Sandbags followed, and then hardcore, dragged along the bank from freight trains at the railway bridge at Earith. By ten that night the dam was in place. ‘Operation Neptune’ was a success. When a pistol shot marked the end of work the volunteers posed for pictures, but Dryden could never find his fathers face.
The words of the final witness, a Captain Wright, Dryden knew by heart – memorized from the cutting in The Crow. Six volunteers were needed to stay behind and mount the first watch.
‘First forward,’ he said of Dryden’s father, and the schoolroom had filled with the murmur of approval. Captain Wright had taken two men to the south end of the breach, two had been put to the north, and Dryden’s father and a labourer from Chatteris had been ferried over the river by amphibious vehicle to watch the far bank.
‘We all heard the noise at the same time, ‘ said Captain Wright, and the schoolroom’s hush was complete; the only sound a squeaking cycle wheel from the lane outside. Captain Wright had stopped then, inhibited, Dryden sensed, by his mother’s careful attention. The coroner nodded by way of encouragement.
‘It was terrible really… a vibration, in the earth. We checked the beaver tanks and they were fine. Our bank seemed solid too. That took a minute, I think – perhaps two. Then I heard a shout from the far bank.
‘“She’s going!”’ His mother had jumped at that – surprised by the strength of the witness’s voice.
‘They were both waving. Not panicking – just signalling I think. And then they sort of went away from us – that’s as best as I can describe it. They had a generator and an arc lamp over there so they were in this
