Out on the fen the moon lights an inland sea. A cow’s bellow is ripped from the wind. The telephone wires sing and a mile distant comes the crash of breaking glass as the arched window of the Baptist Chapel at Feltwell Anchor implodes under the weight of the water. Unheard, the flotilla of mobile homes grinds itself to matchwood against Black Bank.
He’s coming now, moving forward in a torchlight circle towards Burnt Fen Farm.
Dryden punches Andy Stubbs’s number into the mobile and listens to the recorded greeting. He’s left two messages already, to meet at the Old Farm. Bring the file. And bring a gun.
‘Where is he?’ he asks the house, and climbs quickly to the schoolroom.
At one end, behind a partition, is the sink. At the other a large mirror reflects the moonlight streaming in through the dormer window. Icicles are beginning to decorate the beams as the frost takes a grip on the melting water from the roof. A small wooden Victorian children’s chair remains in the room, and the sit-up teacher’s desk and seat. His mother taught him here, until water destroyed their lives.
A blackboard fills the wall opposite the window. On it Dryden writes: ‘Martha Jane Elliott. Pauper.’ He feels again the crunch of the snow in the graveyard at Little Ouse. The broken shards of the headstones are at his feet.
‘Kids,’ the Reverend Tavanter had said.
‘Kids,’ says Dryden, out loud, to the schoolroom.
From the window he sees the figure crossing the yard. Confidently swinging the torch. But the build is too light, the head too small, the step too nimble. He’s wrong. How can he be wrong?
Dryden flashes his torch twice into the shadows of the barn. There stands Billy Shepherd. The shotgun held expertly with the one arm. The lower body clad in waders. His father’s waders, salvaged from their hook on the wall. Around him the water swirls. An inch now, but rising. Billy picks a blast of wind to cover the sound as he uncocks the gun at Dryden’s signal.
He lets the figure pass, himself unseen.
Dryden crouches by the banisters on the first floor landing, an old haunt from his childhood, and a memory as vivid as the fear he feels. Below, water flows freely through the house, tumbling down the stone stairs to the cellar.
The minutes pass: one, two, and three… The back door, which has been banging rhythmically in the north wind, stops, missing a beat, then begins again.
He’s in the house.
Another minute trickles by. Dryden sees a black polished leather slip-on shoe stop at the edge of the moonlight circle below, and the silence is full of listening. The newcomer takes a bold step and looks up. Andy Stubbs, framed by the bone-white collar of his shirt, could be ten years older.
He takes the stairs in pairs. Breathless, stressed, but oddly in control. A brief but specific fear freezes Dryden’s heart.
Stubbs slides a hand inside his overcoat and draws out a brown manila file. The cover is stencil printed:
DRYDEN. LAURA – RTA. CLOSED.
Dryden grips it in relief. ‘At last. You’ve read it?’
Stubbs hasn’t taken his eyes off him. ‘Yes. But I knew. Or guessed. That’s why I played for time. I didn’t want the tribunal to know. They might have decided to punish us both.’
Dryden took a step closer. ‘You knew who it was?’
‘Now I have proof.’ He tapped the file with a gloved hand. ‘Your evidence.’
Dryden almost spat it out. ‘My evidence was worthless. If I’d known the driver’s identity we wouldn’t be here. My statement says nothing, nothing but the smell of dogs on old leather and a large blue paper parcel with a silver…’
‘Moon,’ finished Stubbs. ‘A silver, single moon, on a blue paper parcel that I wrapped.’
‘For who?’ Dryden asks, guessing the truth.
Outside a flash of lightning forks to the flood and for a second they see it all through the schoolroom window. The ragged white horses, the tree by the farm gate bent to the water, and the sky in black shreds screaming south.
‘There’s no mistake. I checked. Last Friday of November two years ago. It’s in the station diary. “Retirement of Deputy Chief Constable Bryan Stubbs.” Lunchtime do, nothing sordid. Top brass from Cambridge. Home Office rep. Speeches, buffet, a few drinks. I was on duty but I called in for the speech. We kept up appearances, then. I organized the whip-round, wrapped the present – the water clock. The cronies were drinking half pints and orange juices. Didn’t fool anyone.’
He turned his back on the storm. ‘My father has been an alcoholic for nearly twenty years. My mother left him a decade ago. He used to be violent, now even that emotion is beyond him. He’ll have gone on drinking somewhere; they had bars, people who turned a blind eye. Golf clubs, the nineteenth, ha bloody ha. And then he’d have driven home. Or tried to. That’s when he slewed in front of you beside Harrimere Drain.
‘The coincidence. Your accident, his binge, didn’t go unnoticed. There were rumours. Talk in the station. Alibis quietly made. It has its own stench – a cover-up. I looked the other way with everyone else.’
Stubbs met Dryden’s eyes. ‘He’s never been a physical coward so he deserves some credit for saving you, but he wasn’t thinking clearly, and it showed. Presumption, a great vice in a policeman – as he told me so many times. He presumed you were the only person in the car because you were the only person in the front. He drove you to the Princess of Wales but he couldn’t take you in, not in his state. I’m surprised he got the car that far. And the alcohol would have kept his temperature up, he probably didn’t even think about the cold. Alcohol made him reckless, unthinking, blundering. But not evil. He was that to start with.’
The lightning strikes again. They look out into the darkness and see the bolt cut down the sky and ignite a telegraph pole. It crashes into the water in a plume of steam. Overhead the thunderclap rocks the farmhouse.
