‘A fiver each to win.’
Reardon whistled. ‘Five hundred and ten pounds – including the stake back. Not bad. Not bad at all.’
‘A fortune,’ said Dryden, noting the speed of the jockey’s mental arithmetic. The picture of Tommy as a luckless suicide looked less substantial by the minute.
‘That’s a win,’ he said, winking.
It is, thought Dryden. But you’re still not getting a tip. Then he thought again. Perhaps an afternoon in the Bay Horse might give him a half-day lead on the police investigation. He gave him a fiver and told him not to drink too much.
Dryden walked briskly back to the car counting en route the number of remarkably small men he passed on the street. It was like a day out in Lilliput.
Humph was juggling with a pair of large fluffy dice – the kind usually reserved for the front window of the Ford Capri. Luck was a subject of fascination to the cab driver – or in his case, the lack of it. The cab was fitted out with an array of rabbit’s feet, and a horseshoe had been fastened above the rear-view mirror. It obscured just enough of the rear view to invite an accident.
Dryden banged the dashboard. ‘Lidgate. Chop chop.’
They set out through the plush villages in the hills above the town, villages in marked contrast to the damp-soaked drabness of the Fen towns. Clear of the peat of the Fens medieval buildings had survived the centuries. Whitewashed stones bordered trim village greens.
They were at Stubbs Senior’s country house at 3.50 p.m. Humph, exercising discretion, parked the decrepit Capri round the corner. Dryden walked in, round the camomile lawn and the magnolia tree, and up a sweeping gravel drive. The house was an old manor farm. To one side were stables topped off with a clock tower.
Who says crime doesn’t pay, he thought.
A small fish pond was frozen solid. A large off-colour goldfish was lying belly-up just below the surface.
An elderly man appeared from the side of the house, two red setters at his heels, a third appearing from the lilac bushes.
Stubbs Senior stood his ground and waited for Dryden. Distinguished was the word. And tweed was the material. He had a head like a cannonball and no neck. His eyes were as dead cold as any in an identikit. He looked nothing like his son – except for the antiseptic cleanliness. Dryden guessed he was seventy – perhaps older.
‘Mr Dryden?’
Stubbs carried two sticks but Dryden noticed he took both off the ground to point out the distant gallops on Newmarket Heath. Most surprising, in an ex-deputy chief constable, were the extravagant laughter lines around the eyes. His handshake was enthusiastic too, even warm. If this was an act, thought Dryden, it was the result of a lifetime’s practice.
They sat in the conservatory amongst orchids, a vine, and a spreading fig tree. A grandfather clock ticked in one corner and the interior wall of the house supported thirty timepieces, mostly antique.
‘Hobby?’ said Dryden.
The former deputy chief constable looked through him. ‘Was.’
On a marble table an intricate glass mechanism gurgled with flowing water. An elegant glass bowl fed water down a pipe to power a tiny gold mechanism which, through a series of flywheels and gears, turned the hands on a filigree clock face. Dryden examined the carved teak base. An engraved silver plaque said: ‘To Deputy Chief Constable Bryan Stubbs on the occasion of his retirement. From his colleagues in the Cambridgeshire force.’
‘Clepsydra,’ said Stubbs. ‘A water clock. The Egyptians had them.’
The heating was generous and all the ice and snow had melted from the roof and windows. The furniture was wicker with comfy cushions, striking unfortunate echoes of an old people’s home. A woman, who remained nameless and unintroduced, brought tea and biscuits for Dryden, a small glass bucket of whisky for Stubbs.
‘How can I help, Mr Dryden?’
Dryden eyed the whisky furtively. The curiosity he had heard in Stubbs’s voice on the phone had evaporated. Some of the bonhomie of the introductions had evaporated too. He felt like an intruder on borrowed time. And the trickling water clock reminded him of the two pints of bitter he’d bolted down at Newmarket. He shifted uneasily in his chair.
As always in times of supreme insecurity he decided to attack, but Stubbs got there first. ‘Where did they find the gypsy boy?’
Dryden sipped his tea, he was damned if he was going to be intimidated by an ex-copper. The clocks chimed four and he glanced at the water clock. The elegant face read four o’clock precisely. He saw now that the fretted metalwork picked out a picture. Dogs running with hounds.
‘His body was found yesterday afternoon on the roof of the cathedral. It had probably been there since the summer of 1966. There wasn’t much left but it appears he jumped from the West Tower. The detective leading the case…’
‘My son.’ Stubbs blinked slowly, blankly. Dryden read disappointment in the look, almost antipathy. He decided to fill the silence rather than let it be.
‘What did you think had happened to Tommy Shepherd?’
‘At that time we felt certain he was being protected by someone, someone able to send him away, or someone able to keep him hidden. Looks like we were wrong…’
‘Yes. If it was suicide. Or it could be murder. Another member of the gang?’
Stubbs swallowed an inch of his neat malt whisky. ‘Possible, but unlikely. In my experience the gang members would have separated after the robbery and kept well away from each other. They would have been in a state of panic anyway – they’d seen the injuries to that poor woman…’
Panic. Dryden looked at the old man’s hands. One lay dead on the arm of the chair, the other gripped the whisky with easy practice. Stubbs gazed out into his garden. ‘They, the robbers, must have presumed she would die of those injuries. At first, of course, they wouldn’t have known that Tommy Shepherd had left his prints inside the Crossways. The plan would have been to split the money right after the robbery, possibly as they drove away. One of them would have had to keep the cups of course – but that could wait in the circumstances.’
For a crime that had happened more than thirty years ago his recall of the details was remarkably clear.
Then they would have dumped the car and gone back to whatever alibis they had concocted – if they’d bothered at all. When we let the press know we wanted to interview Tommy Shepherd he might have tried to contact the rest of the gang, but they’d hardly be likely to welcome such an approach. They must have had some arrangement for keeping in touch, possibly a meeting place, and a prearranged time. My guess is that would have been several weeks later. In the meantime we felt he was holed up somewhere, and fed and clothed by someone.’
‘You don’t think he could have lived rough on the Fen?’
‘A bit John Buchan, don’t you think? We looked hard for Shepherd for nearly six months, right into the winter. There’s no way he could have survived out there, let alone coped with the boredom. He wasn’t the type to curl up with a good book, you know. He would have tried his luck at some point and made a break for it.’
‘What about the rest of the camp at Belsar’s Hill? Surely they could have hidden him. Got him out?’
Stubbs paused and inspected the contents of his glass. ‘What exactly is the status of this interview, Mr Dryden?’
‘Your ball game. Off the record – all for background.’
‘You can have the information by all means – this is a case I would particularly like to see tied up. The reasons are my own but entirely professional. But nothing traceable, please. That’s clear?’
‘Yes. It is.’
Stubbs pressed a buzzer beside his chair. The unknown woman returned to refill the whisky bucket. This took a few minutes during which no word was spoken. Stubbs seemed to be in a world of his own, one apparently run on alcohol. As the woman filled the glass a sneer lingered on the former deputy chief constable’s puffy face.