Not bad for an hour’s work – even if it had been at one in the morning.
Loaded down with enough cholesterol to block the Channel Tunnel he headed for the office. The front counter was open taking ads but the rest of the building was empty. Henry had a flat above the offices on the third floor but enjoyed a private entrance from the backyard to his flat. At weekends the only indication of his existence was the occasional creaking board and the strains of Radio Three. Jean, the bellowing deaf telephonist, had Saturdays off. A long line of temps dealt patiently with enquiries from readers who all seemed to like shouting.
Dryden checked his answerphone.
‘Dryden?’ He recognized the languid tones immediately. He imagined the Reverend John Tavanter at the payphone mounted in the hallway of the retreat at St John’s. ‘Bad news I’m afraid. The vandals returned last night after we’d left. Persistent, aren’t they? They attacked the stones again and crushed the pieces nearly to rubble. Dreadful mess. No one heard anything of course. I thought you might want to know… I’m at home Sunday evening if you need to ask any further questions. You mentioned a picture. If the photographer rings me at the centre in Cambridge I can meet him there any time Sunday afternoon. Cambridge 666345. Goodbye, Dryden.’
However hard Dryden tried he could never imagine Tavanter saying: ‘God bless’.
A second message: ‘Andy Stubbs here. Swansea have come up with the name of our man on the roof.’
Dryden cursed loudly; he’d hoped it would take them longer. This way the dailies got a crack at the story before his next deadline. It was another favour from Stubbs – and a useless one.
‘It’s Thomas Shepherd, no middle name. Shepherd spelt S.H.E.P.H.E.R.D. Official address given as Belsar’s Hill – that’s a gypsy site out on the Great West Fen. We’ve checked the files and at the time of his disappearance in the summer of 1966 he was a suspect in a robbery and attempted murder investigation. The robbery took place at…’
Stubbs’s notebook crackled.
‘The Crossways garage on the A10 on July 30th – you may have a file on that if The Crow was published. Our file is pretty pathetic. His finger…’ Dryden’s tape cut out.
Third message: ‘Sorry. As I was saying – his fingerprints were found at the scene. He went to ground immediately after the robbery. His family claimed he was in Ireland. He was never seen again by a reliable witness. He was nineteen. On the run, clear evidence which would have put him inside for fifteen years at least, and half the force looking for him – looks like a reasonable scenario for suicide to me. There were two other members of the gang, never identified. The inquiry was closed down in 1968 but had made very little progress once Shepherd had disappeared. Hope that helps.’
There was one more message. It was Stubbs again.
‘Hi – sorry, you asked about cause of death. That far back it’s impossible to make even an educated guess. Coroner likely to go for death by misadventure and leave it at that. He’s already released the body for burial. The pathologist says both thighs were broken and one leg – the right I think – had broken in so many places it was virtually powder. The right arm was also badly broken. Looks like he fell on that side. Left arm and leg are intact. One oddity. All the fingers on the right hand are broken just above the middle knuckle.
‘Anyway, he must have hit the roof with a hell of a crash, probably near the apex, and then slid into the gutter. Our blokes say that with injuries like that he couldn’t have lasted more than a few minutes – especially on a cold night. I didn’t tell you any of that. Everything is non-attributable. Bye.’
Stubbs was clearly trying hard to win Dryden’s help in publishing the photo fit story. There must be a good chance they were going to demote him. Embarrassing at the best of times, but even more so for the son of a former deputy chief constable.
The Crow had been published every Friday since the beginning of 1946. Before that it had come out on Thursday – market day. In 1982 Henry had launched The Express, a down-market tabloid for Tuesday. It was designed to protect The Crow’s Friday circulation by deterring free newspapers.
Paper copies of The Crow were too unwieldy to store, but the library had them on microfiche. Dryden inhaled a cup of coffee from the machine and wrapped himself in the greatcoat. The library was a brutal sixties block nicely situated right outside the cathedral. The cold snap had kept the borrowers at home. Dryden headed straight for the records room in the basement.
He found the first report on the robbery in early August – the Friday following the raid. There was an update each week and plenty of coverage throughout the summer’s so-called silly season when news was scarce. The location of the Crossways filling station on the main route north to the coast helped keep the story topical throughout the school break. The condition of Mrs Ward also kept the story going. She was on the critical list for four weeks and did not finally return home until Christmas.
According to the cuttings, the Crossways was a very different place from the one she had left in an ambulance on 30 July. Her husband had sold out to Shell and the café had closed. An interview with the couple in February 1968 said they had decided to keep the bungalow and run the garage on a franchise. The mechanic, the other witness in the robbery, left to work in King’s Lynn.
Dryden read and reread the reports. The evidence against Thomas Shepherd was conclusive: his fingerprints at the scene and the description given by the motorist who stopped for petrol were good enough. But his decision to flee the police hunt was just as eloquent of guilt.
Had Shepherd been on the run for years before his death on the cathedral roof? Or did he jump within hours of seeing the injuries to Amy Ward at the Crossways and hearing the radio news that the police were on his track?
One thing made Dryden uneasy – it was a fact rather than a question. The identity of the police officer who had first led the hunt for the A10 robbers before Scotland Yard had been called in to take over the investigation in early 1967: Detective Inspector Bryan Stubbs, then at the start of a career that would take him to the giddy heights of Deputy Chief Constable. A fine career in detection that he must have then hoped would be carried on by his son, Andrew.
Dryden got back to the office via the High Street butchers where he bought a hot steak and kidney pie and three sausage rolls. No point in dying of hunger.
He looked Stubbs Senior up in the directory. It was a Newmarket number. Dryden was surprised it wasn’t ex-directory – most ex-coppers were. A rare display of public accountability? Or arrogance?
Stubbs Senior answered on the tenth ring. After a brief introduction Dryden said what he wanted. He reckoned he had less than a one in fifty chance of getting anything out of him – and even that was certain to be background only.
‘It’s about a case you investigated in 1966. The papers called it the World Cup Robbery…’
Dryden left silence as a question.
‘Yes. Yes, of course, I remember it well.’
‘There’s been a development.’
If the former deputy chief constable made a reply it was lost in the chimes of what sounded like a shopful of clocks. Dryden checked his wristwatch: 11 a.m. precisely.
Stubbs Senior didn’t bother to explain. ‘Don’t tell me that gypsy kid has finally turned up?’
Dryden wondered how close the Stubbs family was. Had they talked that morning?
‘You could say that. Could we meet, briefly? It would only take a few moments.’
There followed a pause worthy of a deputy chief constable. ‘Dryden, you said? Philip Dryden?’
Dryden decided this needed no answer.
‘I live at Manor Farm – on the Newmarket to Lidgate road. Any time after four would be fine.’ He repeated the address and put the phone down.