39
Laura’s room was silent and flooded with light. The COMPASS machine trailed a six-foot tickertape. Dryden knew, sensing the incoherent patterns, but sat by the bed and studied the letters anyway. Half-way down, still lost in the random signals, he took Laura’s hand, knowing it was for his own comfort rather than hers. When he reached the foot of the tickertape he kept his eyes down, folded the tickertape, and kissed her once.
The messages had stopped, he knew that now. He stood by the window in flat, cheerless heat and thought about what it meant for him if she had finally retreated, back into the coma which had engulfed her after the crash in Harrimere Drain. It meant that the nightmare was coming true. A lifetime spent at the foot of a hospital bed pretending to talk to a comatose figure which used to be his wife. A dialogue of self-deception he felt he could neither face nor abandon. As in all true nightmares, escape was beyond his control.
‘If you’re not there, why do I have to be?’ he asked out loud.
He waited for an answer, feeling the anger lift his pulse rate. The silence in The Tower was complete, until he heard the caretaker in the corridor outside.
It was Ravel this time,
‘The whistler,’ said Dryden, and kissed Laura’s hand.
Out in the corridor he heard the sound of a pail of water being slopped on to a floor. Through a door he found his way on to a cast iron spiral stairway. When the door slammed behind him the light fled, leaving him blinded. Looking down through where he imagined the open metal rungs of the steps to be he sensed rather than saw the faint glow of distant, reflected light. Edging down he stumbled repeatedly on the narrow, triangular steps.
The light came from a series of four bulbs strung, like half-hearted illuminations, along fifty yards of cellar corridor. The pools of darkness between were deep and cool, the lights picking out a brutal black and white pattern of shadow along the bare brick walls. Under the far light the caretaker was working, expertly using his weight to push the mop forwards, backwards, and forwards again.
Dryden watched from the shadows. The caretaker was perhaps sixty, tall, but with a spine bent into a curve by years of labour. A minute passed and then a kettle’s whistle blew. He straightened his back, took his mop and pail and disappeared through a doorway. The whistle died. Then the music began. Bruch, the violin concerto, swelled to fill the damp air.
Under cover of the London Symphony Orchestra Dryden walked to the door and looked in. It was a sitting room of sorts. A single table, single chair, and a single bed were the only furniture. A bookcase, made of planks on bricks, filled one wall. On the other narrow, vertical, wooden tape holders. There were hundreds, possibly thousands.
‘Quite a collection,’ said Dryden, in a pause in the Bruch.
The caretaker wheeled round, the tin cup he held shaking instantly. Dryden could only imagine what kind of life had produced a face like that. In the cellar’s half light the deep lines were as sharp as knife wounds, the eyes hooded and cast down. Without looking at Dryden he walked to the tape recorder and hit the stop button, holding his finger on it for a few seconds before speaking. It was the recorder Dryden had bought Maggie. Its predecessor, a moulded 1970s version three times as big, stood beside it still.
The voice was a revelation, pitched high, clear and pleasantly musical. I’m sorry, I thought they’d left it behind. I…’
Dryden held up his hand. ‘Keep it. It’s not important. Was there a tape inside?’
The caretaker looked puzzled. ‘A tape? Yes, yes… I’m sorry. I didn’t think… Again. I’m sorry. So sorry.’ He rummaged amongst the flotsam and jetsam of a kitchen drawer. He held up the tape, the fingers of his hand trembling clearly, and Dryden took it, turning it like a diamond in his hand.
Dryden left and as he climbed the stairs he heard the Bruch swell out again.
Outside, Inspector Newman had parked his Citroen next to Humph’s cab. They were busy ignoring each other as Dryden appeared, flopping into the passenger seat beside the policeman. ‘Anything new?’
The back seat of the car was nearly obscured by Newman’s photographic equipment. He’d clearly been up to the coast in pursuit of the Siberian gull.
‘If you count an ID on the body in the fire house at Mildenhall, yes,’ he said. ‘This is unofficial, OK?’ Dryden nodded. ‘Bob Sutton. Teeth gave it away – military work. We got the X-rays from Singapore. He was a Red Cap. Perfect match. Wife’s upset.’
‘Getaway. Some people, eh?’
Newman refused to take the bait. ‘Which sort of cuts him out as number one suspect for torturing and killing Johnnie Roe.’
‘Why does it rule him out? He had a great motive. His only daughter had been lured into that pillbox, raped, abused. She’d been drugged, and for all he knew at that time murdered as well. He must have thought Johnnie Roe knew where she was. Perhaps he was trying to get it out of him.’
‘So who killed Sutton?’
‘You tell me. But he’s still my call on Roe’s torturer,’ said Dryden, watching Humph tear open a pre-wrapped sandwich.
‘Great,’ said Newman, viewing the cabbie with distaste. ‘Two killers, not one.’
As he got out Dryden tried a last question: ‘The bag in the pillbox. The picture, the food. It was Emmy Kabazo’s?’
‘Yup. Dad identified it for us during questioning before his release on bail. Doesn’t put him in there though, does it? And it’s Bob Sutton’s prints on the knife, anyway. Work that one out.’
