Nene adjusted the lapels of the smart blue overalls. ‘Private company, Dryden. Private information. But we do all right.’
‘We?’
‘My wife – Elizabeth – we own all the equity.’
‘I see.’ But Dryden didn’t. He thought money was supposed to make you happy. Nene’s face had thirty years of misery written over it in capital letters.
‘It’s difficult to believe that Tommy Shepherd’s body could stay up here for thirty-five years without being found.’
Nene lit up and began to wheeze as he smoked. Dryden sensed his witness had become hostile.
‘Why? There’s plenty of spots on the roof that can’t be seen easily from here or the Octagon. We do visual checks each year but most of the survey work is done from the ground by theodolite.’
‘And that’s your responsibility, is it?’
The bells stopped suddenly at St Mary’s and they heard the mechanism of the West Tower’s clock turning below them as it began to strike the quarter-hour.
‘No. That’s down to the diocese – the Master of the Fabric. They employ a firm of surveyors as well. But they’re looking for structural weakness, movement and cracking. We rely on their reports to frame the restoration programme which the Dean and Chapter then have to pass.’
Snow began to fall and Dryden turned his face up to meet the flakes. He felt a warm trickle of blood set out from the bandage down the inside of his neck. He fingered the blood and examined it cooly.
Nene gave him a look reserved for runaway lunatics.
‘Gunshot. Someone tried to kill me.’ Dryden had always wanted to say that. He contrived a shrug which indicated this happened almost every day.
He had, at last, got Nene’s full attention. ‘Wha…?’
‘What about aerial photography?’ Dryden enjoyed cutting Nene off, he wasn’t as imperturbable as he liked to think.
Nene hastily lit a fresh cigarette. He took three attempts to light it. ‘As I said t’other evening we get regular requests to overfly from commercial aircraft – the RAF boys and the Americans are banned from flight paths which go straight over the top. Not that you’d think it if you watch them line up to come into Mildenhall. Still, that’s the official line.
‘Most are for reproduction and sale. You know the kind of thing, aerial pictures of pubs and people’s backgardens to stick on the wall. They don’t have the kind of detail you’d need to spot a body from five hundred feet, not one mostly obscured by stonework. I’ve looked through a few we’ve got in the office and you can’t see a thing without a magnifying glass, and then only what looks like a pile of leaves.’
Through his bones Dryden felt the deep vibration of the cathedral organ signalling the start of a service below. Out to the east they turned to a noise – the sound of a giant blanket being snapped in the wind. Instead they saw a vast flock of Canada geese rise from the reserve at Wicken Fen and head south.
‘It seemed quite easy to get out on the roof where the body was found…’
‘’Tis now. The door was rusted in. Hadn’t been opened in a lifetime. I crowbarred it open when I got out there Friday afternoon.’
Nene had relaxed again and rearranged his scarf against the cold. ‘Thing is if you go out on the structure you don’t see much – you’re too close. The water outflow is measured to make sure the gutters are free. Modern survey work is based on precise measurements taken from the ground; the exact position of the pinnacle that shielded that poor sod from view will have been mapped to within a centimetre a hundred times. There’s no need to go up there.’
‘So why did you go up there?’
Nene eyed him flatly. ‘Better ask the surveyors. Their decision.’
‘So if it had been down to you nobody would have gone up to the south-west transept roof this year?’
‘That’s right. They said the gutters were blocked with leaves. I’d leave ‘em. The leaves rot – the water forces its way through eventually. It’s not like a domestic roof – there’s a dozen outfalls on the south-west transept roof alone. We were below the roof last year, and we would have been back in five under the current programme of works. But they said it was an issue of public safety. Ask me someone scared ‘em. Told ‘em a big freeze would bring down the stonework. Rubbish.’
Dryden shut the notebook. ‘Thanks very much, Mr Nene. You have been very helpful, very helpful indeed.’ That always gave them the jitters, Dryden thought happily.
Nene looked at him through rheumy eyes. His lips had shaded to a pale lifeless red. Dryden decided he had a bad heart. He should chuck it in while he still could.
Dryden descended with shaking legs and made his way to a bench on Palace Green. It had a brass plaque: In Memoriam: Canon John Virtue Gillies. 1883-1960.
‘Good age,’ said Dryden of the long-dead canon, and rubbed his ear.
Two Japanese tourists took pictures of each other in the snow and a ginger tom wandered by, picking its way through Dryden’s footprints. The cathedral’s doors were shut against the cold but the sound of hymns seeped out.
Besides being shot the night before, he had woken up that morning in bed on PK 122 to find Kathy’s naked body beside him. It was a narrow bunk bed and their bodies were folded neatly together in a frictionless union of knees, crotches, elbows and breasts. A brief echo had come to Dryden of the Lark victim – the cold body crushed and distorted like meat in a can. But it was only an echo – Kathy’s body was as warm as a radiator and a lot better designed. He had bathed in the heat and, equally as palpable, the guilt.
The fiery Ulsterwoman had been waiting in her car when Humph had dropped him home from the hospital at four that morning. She’d driven straight back to Ely from her night shift on Fleet Street.
She was wide awake by the time she’d seen the cathedral on the horizon. She’d planned a stroll on the river bank by PK 122. She knew Dryden was a poor sleeper – perhaps she’d cadge a coffee, or more.
She’d taken over the patient and Humph, exhausted, had slipped into the night. Dryden had undressed and showered in the tiny bathroom in the bow while she’d made soup and poured the whiskies. He hadn’t jumped when he felt her hand on his back, gently smoothing the soapsuds in lazy circles. It was a master stroke of seduction, taking them both beyond the point where his guilt lay, beyond logical abstraction and considerations of betrayal. They’d come to sex without passing any moral barriers. He hadn’t thought of Laura until it was all over. Or not quite. He’d thought of her for that moment of release as he had in his dreams.
He smiled now in the icy morning air and blew out a plume of steam. The cloud of condensation hung around him in the still air. ‘My wife,’ he said soundlessly.
He had already begun to construct the layers of defence. Like a child he rubbed the wound on his head as if it alone were excuse enough. He winced as the pain brought water to his eyes, which he left to swell into tears.
‘Self-pity,’ he said, again to no one.
If she came out of the coma he would tell her everything.
He stood quickly, his knees cracking in the cold. He looked at the cathedral’s blue and gold clock and saw that the hands were almost on eleven. Soon the bell would toll. He told himself that when it had finished he would never think of the night again. It was a childhood game which had never worked. Anxieties clung to him despite the passing of time. The bell tolled ahead of the hour. Then came the first tenor stroke of eleven o’clock.
Kathy had agreed. She’d sensed the guilt and left quickly, pulling on clothes and declining a cup of coffee.
He’d waved from the deck of the PK 122 but she’d not looked back. The tyres of the red MG had squealed through the frosty gravel.
The last tenor stroke of eleven o’clock boomed out. Before the echo returned he’d thought of her again.