his anecdotes for the last half hour. It looked like a modern-day re-enactment of the Death of Nelson. Liz Barnett was calmly calling an ambulance on her mobile. She hadn’t spilt her drink – and she was ordering another.
Dryden called Humph’s mobile and woke him up in a lay-by. The ambulance beat the cab to the Maltings by thirty seconds.
‘Follow that ambulance,’ said Dryden, enjoying himself. Humph happily handed Dryden a miniature bottle of Campari from the glove-compartment bar and slammed his foot down on the accelerator, but they had to imagine the screech of tyres.
Kathy watched them streak off into the night. She would recall little about the evening the next morning but the memory of the kiss lingered like a hangover.
3
The Tower Hospital had begun life as a workhouse in 1788: decorative stonework failed to offset the mean windows and the poor gothic humour of the single belltower. Standing on the edge of town it shared the high ground with a great railway-brick water tower of monumental ugliness. The hill and the rough common around it were known as The Ropes – a reference to the fact that it was once the site of the common gallows.
Here, in 1812, a group of seven luckless land labourers were hanged before a hungry crowd in broad summer sunshine. The so-called Littleport Rioters had made the mistake of drinking a large quantity of beer on starving stomachs and then embarking on two days of spectacular lawlessness. They were left for a month on the gibbet, like slaughtered crows on a line.
The workhouse closed without sorrow half a century later. With awful predictability it limped into the next century as an asylum: residency of the Tower being a local euphemism for anything from mild eccentricity to stark lunacy. By the 1950s the interior was a scandal: cracked tiled walls, Victorian plumbing, and unshaded light bulbs. It finally closed after a fire gutted the building and brought down the roof of the great hall, the scene of thousands of joyless communal meals.
What was left was bought by the Steeple Trust, private health care specialists, who fitted it out in the kind of unclinical luxury that would make any patient reach for their wallet. The Trust produced a glossy brochure boasting a heated swimming pool, saunas, and gym. It held a maximum of fifty ‘guests’. But the
Roy Barnett had been detained overnight after being discharged from the local hospital’s accident and emergency department. His condition was described as comfortable. This was hardly surprising as he had had at least twice as much to drink as Dryden, who didn’t know what day it was.
There was a suggestion, however, that a mild heart attack had joined forces with the alcohol to produce the collapse. Dryden would check his condition in the morning. Next time he had a chance he would also ask the mayor, chairman of the local Labour party’s public services pressure group, exactly why the NHS wasn’t good enough for him.
Liz Barnett didn’t bother to visit. Roy slept soundly and unloved.
Laura Dryden was in ‘Flat 8’ on the ground floor of the Tower – a suite comprising a bedroom, bathroom, WC, and visitor’s room. It cost the insurance company ?360 a week, a fact Dryden hardly appreciated given his complete disdain for the management of risk. Laura had taken out the accident insurance policy without his knowledge and lodged it with their solicitor, alongside, as it turned out, a batch of policies covering Dryden and her parents, all paid for by the proceeds from the TV soap opera
The bedroom, nearly two years after the accident, was almost free of medical equipment. A small computer screen showed Laura’s pulse and other vital data against a soothing corporate blue background. A clutch of multi- coloured plastic pipes at her wrist brought in liquid food. Others, discreetly hidden, ferried out the waste. The room struggled to look non-utilitarian. But the institutional cleanliness, and the precise neatness, made it appear like an exhibit in a museum of modern life – ‘Contemporary Bedroom’. Personal effects were arranged on the table and a single shelf in that self-conscious way typical of a house opened to the public. It could have been a room inside a glass paperweight.
There were two bedside tables. One held fruit and some fresh bread rolls, broken, with a glass of Italian sparkling white wine. The other, hairbrushes, make-up, and a small picture of Laura’s parents marked ‘At home – Torino, 1958’. There was a picture of Laura with Dryden – ‘Honeymoon, 1990, Rome’. They looked criminally confident.
At first the national tabloids had ‘monstered’ the story – sending their best reporters and snatch photographers out to the Fens to provide a string
Dryden met them there by agreement and read them brief bulletins on Laura’s progress, letting out snippets of newsworthy trivia: the letter of support from the rival cast of
The inevitable request for a picture, made a month after the accident, caused a wave of nausea and a hot spit of self-loathing for his trade. But he knew the pressures: news editors were tired of Laura’s fight for life and bored with the reality of a colourless and featureless coma. The story was changing from hope to tragedy and the lifeless picture exclusive was the next inexorable step. If he refused he knew the consequences: the super-telephoto lenses, the bribes to hospital staff, the invasion of his own privacy, the unpeeling of their lives. And, despite Laura’s deepening coma, he felt a bond with the hacks out in the cold. He had been there too, on Fleet Street, desperate for the story.
When the picture of Laura finally appeared he was stupidly thankful that they had all chosen the most lifelike and appealing of the set he had provided. Laura’s parents, on the first of several flying visits from retirement in Umbria, asked for a copy: a request which strangely disturbed him – perhaps with its hint of family surrender – so that he sank his face into Laura’s pillow and cried for the first and only time at what the accident had done to him.
The newspapers dropped the story relatively quickly after that. Laura had been written out of
