‘What was the bloody point?’ he said. ‘We’d sold up, taken their money, and now they wanted us out. If there’s one thing running a boozer teaches you it’s to give up on anything if you think you’re coming second.’
Dryden opened his notebook at the page where he’d listed his eight potential victims, turning it so that Woodruffe could read. ‘We know the victim was average height – five-ten, eleven – something like that. Any of these a lot bigger, or a lot smaller?’
Woodruffe read the list too quickly. ‘Nah. Paul Cobley wasn’t a big lad – but, it’s difficult to tell. And Jimmy Neate looked six foot.’
Dryden closed the notebook. ‘Ellen Woodruffe, your mother. Did I speak to her that last day? Is that possible?’
He stood. ‘Doubt it. Mum didn’t want to go and she didn’t make a secret of it, but she was very ill that summer, and she wasn’t stupid. She knew the army would do what it wanted to do. She’d had a coupla strokes the year before, paralysed her left side, so she knew she was on borrowed time. She wanted to die in Jude’s Ferry; in fact that’s all she wanted. But she didn’t die, that took longer, a lot longer than she wanted. Anyway, she left quietly enough. She’d given up the fight.’
‘I’m sorry – what happened to her?’
‘I got her into a nursing home on the coast. Lowestoft. Cost a fortune, of course, but we’d banked the money when we sold the pub to the army back in the nineties. The price was good, very good. We know why now, of course – so they could chuck us out for good.’
The landlord pulled out a wallet and flicked it open. It was her again, a hand held to ward off the sun, the arcaded front of a Victorian seaside villa behind. In discreet letters above the bay window a sign read ‘Royal Esplanade’.
‘She died in ’97, that winter. But she did come home in a way. I scattered her ashes at St Swithun’s – on the feast day. I didn’t ask. I just did it. So she came home in the end.’
They’ve told me to write a letter, every day, setting down what I have remembered.
But a letter to whom? I know I loved someone once, because I can feel the ring now, cool, solid, and gold, but I’ve forgotten her with almost everything else.
So this is for nobody. A message on a computer screen, tapped out with the fingers of my one good hand, for no one to read.
And this is what I have remembered.
At first there was a place, Jude’s Ferry, lying beneath the two hills, the spotless Georgian windows of a house looking out towards the single brick chimney of an old factory. On one hill the church, on the other a water tower with a wooden painted dovecote.
I was a child then, thrilled by the sight of the two hills glimpsed through the windscreen of a car, bumping along a road without a single turn.
And then, like a gift, there was another name.
Kathryn.
I knew something about Kathryn. I knew she didn’t give me the ring that I wear.
Where do I see her? I see her first sitting with the others at the back of a classroom. No proper wooden desks, just those plastic seats with the flip-over rest. She’s what? Sixteen perhaps, maybe not. There are no uniforms, no clues. Outside a vast concrete playground disfigured by puddles. I see her hair, lustrous black, under the neon light, and the small ripe mouth partly hidden by the hand.
And although I can’t see it I know her body beneath; the long limbs curled effortlessly in mine, the thin white neck arched with pleasure.
What am I to her? I’m outside looking in, a porthole meshed with wire, and then the door opens and I find the desk at the front, sitting on the edge, a lesson begun, while I watch her with peripheral vision.
So we know now what I did. And was this what was wrong?
Now the nurse comes with the painkillers. I can see her through the porthole window, like the one in the classroom door, checking, just as the others have done, waiting for me to finish. To rest.
But there is too much fear for sleep. And I still have work. I must set down what I know now to be true, even as I write it: that Kathryn is dead and guilt, like the dusk, fills my room.
Wednesday, 18 July
14
He took the call on the deck of PK 129 in the early morning rain, his voicemail ringing him back with a message left overnight. The river, cratered with big fat storm drops, gave off the exhilarating aroma of dawn.
A voice echoing in an enclosed space, cars swishing past, a whisper close up. ‘Listen.’ The menace in the word, the cruelty, made his heart freeze for a beat. ‘Jude’s Ferry, you were there. We were there too. We opened the tomb, at St Swithun’s. We’ve taken her bones. If Peyton doesn’t shut down Sealodes Farm – stop the breeding – he’ll never get them back…’
There was the rustling of paper and, approaching, the sound of a light aircraft.
‘Our aim is to inflict economic damage on those who profit from the misery and exploitation of innocent animals…’ he read on, another voice cajoling in the background. A prepared statement, larded with the stilted language of the true fanatic. Then he said it again: if they didn’t shut down Sealodes Farm, announce it in the press, then they’d ditch the bones down a sewer. There was a brief silence in which Dryden could hear the light aircraft returning. ‘We’ve told them. Now we’re telling you. We want it in the paper that they’re closing down the business. Otherwise this is just the start. We gave them a little visit a couple of weeks ago. This time no police, until it’s in the paper. Tell ’em that.’
Dryden timed it – less than thirty seconds. A public call box. He got a notebook and took the call down verbatim in case he lost it from the mobile’s memory. Then he listened to it five times, noting the double return of the aircraft, and the jittery voice, the strain of disguise audible. He wondered what they’d done on their visit to Sealodes Farm, and why they felt they needed to fool him about the voice. Did he know him – or did they think they’d trace a recording? At least he now knew why he should have recognized the name on the tomb. Henry Peyton was a well-known local farmer and owner of a highly controversial business: breeding animals for laboratory experiments.
Humph appeared out of the rain at 8.00am with two fried-egg sandwiches wrapped in foil. Dryden took out the coffees and they watched the dog run through the wet grass. Laura had got herself in her shower seat and dressed by the time they went down for her, lifting her just as far as she couldn’t go herself, into the waiting wheelchair on the deck. The ambulance would call at 10.00am to take her for the regular sessions: physiotherapy, hydrotherapy and speech therapy. Dryden arranged the tarpaulin cover so that she was dry and made sure the laptop and the mobile were within reach.
‘What yer gonna do?’ he said, curling a loop of hair off the nape of her neck.
‘Lines to learn – twenty-three words,’ she said, the tongue still lazy as if she was recovering from a dentist’s needle. Dryden kissed her and refilled the coffee cup at her elbow. Then, making an effort, he knelt by the chair. ‘You can do a reading for me tonight – OK? I’ll play the rest of the cast, you do your stuff.’
He kissed her again and got into the Capri, Humph pulling away immediately, hooting the horn twice before they swung out of sight.
‘Take the Manea road, over the Levels at Welney,’ said Dryden, then he left a message on the news desk answerphone asking Charlie to send Garry to the magistrates’ court in his place. He had a story, a good one, and he’d be back by lunch with it in the bag. It was the kind of message he loved to leave.