‘Then what?’
‘I ran.’
‘And then what?’
‘It went off. Straight at the crowd. Pure fluke. Total accident. One in a million, etcetera.’
Dryden closed his notebook and Barnett breathed easier. He considered offering Dryden a drink but thought better of it.
‘A word about Tommy Shepherd.’
The rest of the guests had moved off to see the climax of the display outside. Dryden attacked the drinks table. He mixed some vodka, blackcurrant, Pernod and lemonade. The resulting drink glowed with a sickly incandescence like an indoor firework.
Barnett watched uneasily. He considered his answer as he looked out at the last of the fireworks breaking over the cathedral. They fell, lighting his face alternatively green, gold, red, and blue.
‘I’ve been expecting someone to ask.’
‘Why?’
The mayor grabbed a bottle of malt whisky and poured a three-inch slug. Then he mixed it, to Dryden’s horror, with an equal measure of R White’s lemonade. Some things, if not many, were sacred.
‘Why d’you think?’
‘Because he had an affair with your wife – which you probably knew about at the time. Because someone threw him off the top of the West Tower and killed him. Because someone knew his body was going to be found last Thursday, someone with links to either the cathedral or the council, or both.’
‘You’re way ahead of me. I knew all right – about Tommy and Liz. The marriage wasn’t in very good shape then. She wasn’t the only one shopping around. I just didn’t appreciate her choice. A bloody gypsy, for Christ’s sake.’ He looked disgusted still, after more than thirty years.
‘Who do you think killed Tommy?’
Barnett laughed and gulped some whisky. ‘Not me. I could have done, cheerfully. I probably came as close as I ever will. But I wouldn’t have pushed him off a two-hundred-foot tower. I’d have strangled the little shit with my own hands. And nobody would ever have found the body – I can promise you that.’
Dryden could see the logic in Barnett’s answers, a logic that seemed too readily at hand.
‘I wanted to know what Tommy was like. Did you ever meet him?’
‘Once. The first time we went out to Belsar’s Hill with the council. He was a kid. Good looking. Gabby. Bright.’ Barnett looked out at a dying firework: ‘Innocent.’
‘So you don’t think he was at the Crossways?’
‘I don’t think so. If he was he had nothing to do with injuring that woman. I thought he was a bit of a coward. He wouldn’t face me. I went out again, to Belsar’s Hill. This was shortly after they – after it – began. I knew he was there but they sent out his brother – Billy. Same stock. Bit older. He brought his dog with him. I brought a shotgun. But what could I do?’
The last fireworks exploded: a necklace of brilliant chrysanthemums strung across the night sky.
‘Gladstone Roberts, owner of Cathedral Motors – you’re old friends I believe?’ Dryden knew that Roberts and Barnett were business partners. The mayor’s newsagents had found outlets at Roberts’s garages. Roberts also provided the van fleet for Barnett’s deliveries.
‘Yes. Why?’
‘Good business.’ Dryden let his face set in stone.
Barnett cast around for escape.
Dryden persisted. ‘How’d he get started?’
‘Long time ago. I think at the start there was another partner in the business – a silent partner. The late sixties. That’s where the money came from, and the town council gave him a grant to clear the ground – it used to be a landfill site, toxic waste, chemicals, mainly from the beet factory. It was a ratepayers’ liability. So we gave him some money to make it safe and then he got the land for a decent price. All above board, it’s called planning gain.’
Dryden didn’t move a single muscle.
‘And I didn’t take part in the debate – if that’s what you’re thinking.’
Gary raced up with impeccable bad timing. He’d brought the office antique camera.
Dryden clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Just in time. Perhaps my colleague could take a picture of you with the children.’
On his way back to the cab Dryden met Humph puffing down the path. ‘Next stop, the Tower,’ said Dryden, walking briskly the other way.
Humph looked skywards. It had taken him twenty minutes to get out of the cab.
While Dryden waited for him he fished out the Ordnance Survey map from the glove compartment. Belsar’s Hill was marked as an historic site, a stippled circle with the lettering in a Gothic typeface. He’d need to go, to see the gypsies. Which meant dogs.
‘Dogs,’ he said, out loud. But it didn’t help.
As soon as they got to the Tower, Dryden knew Laura had moved again. He was ushered into a consulting room and given the regulation pea-green teacup. It was the consultant with the horse’s face again: Mr Horatio Bloom. He looked mildly excited as he bustled in with a clipboard. He wore a silver-grey suit and polka-dot bow-tie. Standard registrar’s uniform.
‘Good news,’ he said, addressing Form 1A on the first day of term.
Dryden tilted his head to one side. He was irritated at being sidelined on to Bloom’s territory and away from Laura.
‘The sensors picked it up at 2.07 this morning.’ Bloom checked the clipboard to make sure he had the time right. ‘We didn’t call you at the time – I wanted to check the equipment and make sure there was no mistake. And we’ve done tests.’
‘And?’
‘And she moved. There’s no doubt. It’s very encouraging. Some movement both of the…’ The clipboard again. ‘Upper right arm and lower right leg and a slight tilting of the cranium. That’s very good news. Spinal articulation.’
‘But nobody actually saw her move?’
‘No. That’s what the sensors are for.’ Bloom removed his glasses as though preparing for a long explanation to the village idiot.
Dryden got in first. ‘But presumably the sensors are simply that, electronic pads which detect movement. Fit them to a clock on the wall and they’d detect movement – that doesn’t mean the clock’s alive, let alone conscious. Surely the key question is whether Laura moved, or someone moved her?’
The consultant gave him a long hard look designed to intimidate. Dryden returned it with topspin.
‘Are you suggesting that a member of the medical staff here is so incompetent…?’
‘No. Although a little more scepticism might not go amiss. I’m suggesting that before you invite me to dance a jig at the news I think all the other possibilities should be discounted. False hope, doctor, is something I can live without. I’m asking you to humour a sceptic. So: what next, Doc?’
Bloom reddened. ‘It’s Mr actually. Mr Bloom. I’m a surgeon.’
Dryden contrived to look like someone who had just forgotten the one thing they have been told to remember at all costs.
Bloom placed his fingers together in a neat lattice. ‘Too early. We must wait for the results of some of the tests. So far we have nothing dramatic. Some extra brain activity, perhaps.’
‘What are we looking for?’
‘Clear evidence of biological changes in muscle and nervous tissue. We would expect the occasional large limb movement to be accompanied by many more micro-movements within the muscle and tissue system; that’s what we’re looking for. And continued higher brain activity’
‘And that’s what we haven’t found?’
‘So far we have found no such evidence. It’s my opinion that we will.’
Dryden ended the interview. ‘I’d like to see my wife. Alone.’
Bloom’s eyes glazed over. It was like being eyeballed by a dead fish.
Laura’s body had been rearranged. She lay absolutely straight in the bed with her head raised slightly on two shallow pillows. The bedclothes had been smoothed flat and perfectly replaced. He sat beside her, watching the very slight rising, and falling, of the chest.