‘Ever go back to the old house, your father’s?’
‘Occasionally. The exercises utilize all the pro -perties.’
It was an oddly cold remark, Dryden thought.
‘What about the last night?’
Broderick looked through him. ‘I visited in the morning, I think, then got back to Ely. I was on the transport, like I said – a big job.’
They had their backs to the windows and they both turned as the wind, picking up suddenly, rustled the pines ahead of them and threw rain in their faces. They found themselves looking in on a long room. At one end there was a TV showing horse racing, and at a table four men played cards. In one corner there was a patient in a wheelchair. It was Jason Imber, the neatly cut hair framing the handsome face and the well-bred jawline. Laura Dryden was in her wheelchair too, holding his hand, watching tears run freely over the expensively tanned skin.
26
Humph was waiting for him in the Capri, a piece of surgical gauze held to his arm by a small plaster. The cabbie was listening to his language tape but still managed to exude a sense of painful self-sacrifice, one hand fluttering, but never quite touching, the wound.
Dryden got in and kicked out his long legs.
Humph disconnected the earphones and flipped down the glove compartment, retrieving two bottles of sambuca, cracking the tops of both and offering one to the reporter.
‘Lunch,’ he said, adding a packet of BBQ-flavoured crisps. ‘How’s Laura?’ he asked.
Dryden flipped down the vanity mirror and looked at his bottle-green eyes. How was Laura? It was a question he seemed, suddenly, least qualified to answer. He’d seen her briefly while Major Broderick had visited Jason Imber. She’d asked him then, again, about the bruising on his face, holding his head in her hands, and he’d told her about Thieves Bridge, the animal rights activists and the woman’s bones recovered from the Peyton grave, the ribs chipped by a blade. He talked about being afraid, and about not showing it.
‘You should tell me about these things,’ she said, her lips touching his ear. ‘We talk about what you do, but we don’t talk about you and how you feel.’
Dryden knew she was right, but he went on talking about what he did.
‘There’s this copper on the case, called Shaw, Peter Shaw. He’s kind of weird really. Young, driven, knows his stuff on the science, a real high flyer too, but then his dad was a DCI so everyone probably thinks he’s had it easy. But I don’t think so – Dad got chucked off the force a decade ago for fabricating evidence. I think it’s chewing him up, driving him on. It’s frightening you know, being around someone that focused.’
They’d laughed then and he’d taken the opportun ity to tell her what he really feared. ‘Don’t get too close to Jason Imber, Laura – we don’t know what happened to him. Help, there’s nothing wrong with that. But remember he can’t – he doesn’t know what he did, who he was. That could be a shock when he does find out.’
She shrugged, but Dryden could sense the irritation. ‘I just listen. I read the messages he sends,’ she said, touching her laptop. ‘He reads mine. I tell him about us, about your stories. It helps. He’s got nothing else to think about but missing memories, Philip.’
She closed her eyes, seeing that Dryden’s antagonism was undiminished. ‘Please, my neck.’
He’d massaged her shoulders then, knowing the long silence was a reproach.
Dryden rummaged in the glove compartment for a refill. Laura’s relationship with a man who might be a murderer disturbed him. What he couldn’t admit was that what really troubled him was that she had a relationship with someone else at all.
He rang DI Shaw on the mobile.
‘Tell me you’ve caught the other one,’ said Dryden before the detective could speak.
‘We still think he’s on his way to Coventry. He got the National Coach out of Cambridge yesterday for Nottingham, he’s on the CCTV. We’ve lost him at the other end, but he’s getting close. We know where he’s going, we just have to wait.’
Dryden inhaled some more alcohol. ‘Anything breaking I need to know about on the Skeleton Man?’
‘We’ve got a match on the gravel we found in the cellar…’
‘Orchard House, right?’ said Dryden. ‘Jason Imber’s home.’
‘Indeed. But it isn’t good enough for a courtroom – we’d be laughed out. It just helps if we get something else that puts him at the scene. And we’ll be interviewing Imber again once he’s recovered from the wounds to his hand. Forty-eight hours, perhaps a bit longer. He’s not going anywhere in the meantime.’
‘Charges?’
Shaw laughed and Dryden could hear him tapping a computer screen. ‘Imber’s keeping a secret. But the doctors say he’s genuine about the memory loss. We can’t push it, not now. Even if he did it we’re still short of a few crucial elements in our case, don’t you think – like a motive, the identity of the victim, the names of his accomplices, and any rationale at all which puts him in the river.’
‘Anything else on forensics?’
But Shaw did not intend to be pushed any further. Dryden’s deadline had gone, and with it some of his purchasing power. ‘I’m not aware I have a duty to update you in real time, Dryden – let’s have a chat after the weekend, OK?’
Dryden cut him off, angry that their deal had left him with one story he couldn’t print and another which made little sense. But the anger worked, as it often did, fusing two images in his memory – the gently turning bones of the Skeleton Man on his hook in the cellar and Humph, running a finger around the patch on his arm where the blood had been taken.
Dryden snapped his fingers, knowing just how much it annoyed the cabbie.
‘Surgical gauze,’ he said. ‘The Skeleton Man had a patch of surgical gauze on his arm.’
‘So – that’s narrowed it down, has it?’ asked Humph. ‘We’re looking for a blood donor. Is Tony Hancock the victim?’
‘Jabs,’ said Dryden. ‘When are you likely to need an injection as an adult?’
Humph tipped a packet of crisps back so that the last grains of monosodium glutamate could trickle down his throat.
‘Inoculation – a trip abroad?’
‘Correct. George Tudor was about to emigrate to Australia, so was Peter Tholy.’ Dryden recalled the tape they’d listened to on the riverside. Tudor had said he’d got a reference from the vicar of St Swithun’s – Fred Lake.
Dryden fished out the telephone number he’d dug from Crockford’s directory and rang on the mobile, letting a minute pass as he imagined the phone echoing in an empty house. Then a child answered, confident and clear, running to fetch Fred Lake. While he waited Dryden thought of the voice on the tape he’d played on the riverbank, and the more distant memory of meeting him on that final day. He recalled a disdain for tradition and the fabric of the old church, and a mildly trendy upbeat emphasis on community, and the treacly remains of that South African accent.
Dryden tried to conjure up his face from that last day in Jude’s Ferry, but the image was elusive, overshadowed by more potent images – an old woman crying on her doorstep, the men on the bench outside the almshouses watching the army clear the cottages along The Dring.
Footsteps clipped across an institutional floor. ‘Sorry,’ said Lake quickly, out of breath. ‘Summer holidays. We run a club. I shouldn’t say it, but it’s hell. Believe me, I should know, it’s my job.’
They both laughed. The accent was flatter, less distinct after seventeen years, diluted by the estuary English of King’s Lynn’s overspill estates. Dryden did his pitch, nearly perfect. He was writing a feature to run with the latest news on the body found at Jude’s Ferry. He needed a ten-minute chat, nothing personal, just a feel for the place and those last few hours in the life of a community. Community: the key word.
‘Sure. The police have called too – I’m seeing a detective in the morning at St Bartholomew’s – perhaps they’re expecting a confession.’ Dryden didn’t know if he was joking so he said nothing. ‘But like I said, we’ve got forty kids here and we’re off to the beach… packed lunches, I’m afraid, no room for a proper Cape barbie.’