Her hand twitched again at the brooch. ‘We imagined you’d like a picture as well.’ She touched a brown envelope stiffened with cardboard on the table between them. Inside was a large black and white print of a man at the wheel of a pleasure cruiser. He had a shock of corn-blond hair and the slightly ruddy skin of someone who has spent a lifetime out of doors. Dryden suppressed the image of the body of the Lark victim, and the blood-dripped corn-blond head which had looked out with a fish-dead eye.
‘Thank you. I am really very sorry to be butting in just now, it must have been a shock.’
She fiddled absentmindedly with the brooch. ‘No. No. I wouldn’t have said a shock. Murder we didn’t expect of course… I’d rather you didn’t put this in the paper…’
Dryden hoped the tabloids didn’t get to her, they’d eat her alive.
‘Reg had been unhappy for several years and had, well, tried to take his own life as a result. It’s not nice but there it is. I think failing to succeed, even in that, made it even worse. The last attempt was quite serious and we were all rather fearful of the future. He was a determined man.’
Dryden looked suitably confused.
‘Debts,’ she said.
Money, thought Dryden, but said: ‘I thought he inherited the boatyard from his father? It’s a well-established business…’
‘It could be a thriving one. But Reg mortgaged it in 1980. My husband could run a boatyard, Mr Dryden, but he couldn’t run a business. I’m afraid he panicked. We needed money rather quickly you see. Our first son, Paul, had leukaemia as a baby and the doctors said he’d have a much better chance going to a specialist at a London clinic – the Princess Grace. Rather expensive even then. A fortune in fact, and no credit accepted, at least not the kind we could offer.
‘Reg had friends, rather bad friends as it turned out, and he went to one of them to organize everything. He was duped: quite blatantly in fact. There’s no way that this business will ever make enough money to meet the repayments. But then we have our son. So who can say if he made that much of a hash of things. I think Reg thought he had failed his family, not just us, but his parents and grandparents. The boatyard was his inheritance and he felt that all he was leaving for Paul and James was a burden.’
Dryden leant forward in the old armchair, his knees cracking loudly in the silent parlour. ‘Can I ask you a question about your husband’s past? About the time before he met you?’
Was that fear in her eyes? ‘Yes. Yes, of course. There were no secrets you know, not between us. Reg had rather a wild youth – letting off steam. He was very lucky: he was the only child and the business was very lucrative. He went to a private school in Cambridge, foreign holidays, everything he wanted really. I often think he felt he lived the rest of his life in penance for having wasted such opportunities. He had no need. But there it is.’
‘You met?’
‘In 1968. Our first date was at the Picture Palace. A Man For All Seasons. It had won an Oscar.’
Dryden cut the reminiscences. ‘Did he ever mention friends from his past – Tommy Shepherd?’
‘That was the man they found on the cathedral roof, wasn’t it?’ She took silence for yes. ‘He knew Tommy I think. Reg was a modest teenage rebeclass="underline" Mods and Rockers, that kind of thing. There was a whole crowd of them. I think Reg’s money helped – otherwise I don’t think they would have given him the time of day. I got the impression that they did a lot of betting, horse racing. Reg got an allowance but when he was in trouble, which was pretty often, it was stopped. That’s when he needed another source of income. It was all over by the time we met, but I think it had been a bit of a, well, passion.’
She blushed. Perhaps not the only passion.
‘Reg was, in some ways, quite a weak person. Easily led is too trite – but it can’t be far from the truth. Perhaps they went a bit far. Anyway he dropped them, all the old crowd. He said he wanted to start again – that was good enough for me. His father paid off his debts. It was a difficult time for both of them – but it was a new beginning.
‘His reputation wasn’t good though. My parents tried to stop the marriage. I met Reg at night school – at the college. I was doing teacher training. Your mother was a lecturer in fact. Reg was doing business accounting, trying to show his father that he was serious about taking on the yard.’
‘Have you any idea who killed your husband, Mrs Camm?’
She shook her head and stood.
‘You said there were no secrets, Mrs Camm, none at all do you think? Tommy was involved in a robbery before he disappeared. Could your husband have got involved in that?’
‘I think… I believe, that my husband told me everything. Nothing he told me would warrant his murder. That is enough for me.’
Within thirty seconds Dryden was standing on the doorstep. Would she, he wondered, have married someone involved in the Crossways robbery? If she found out, what would have been her reaction? Betrayal perhaps. Anger.
He paused on the doorstep. ‘Was Mr Camm insured, Mrs Camm?’
She didn’t miss a heartbeat. ‘I think that’s a family matter, Mr Dryden. Will you drop the photograph back?’
‘Of course. Thank you.’
He was talking to a closed door.
19
Belsar’s Hill – the travellers’ site that had been the home of Tommy Shepherd at the time of the Crossways robbery – had been an encampment for more than a thousand years. A ten-foot-high earthwork in a perfect circle surrounded a hollow corral. Through the site ran an old drove road, cutting in half a landscape already a thousand years old when the Normans landed at Hastings. The earth couldn’t be farmed, and the site couldn’t be levelled, because of its status as an Ancient Monument. The rampart provided natural protection from the elements and for animals – with wide gates closing off both ends of the drove road after dark. In the sixties the county council had put in a waterpipe and a toilet block on the basis that a gypsy site at Belsar’s Hill was in very few people’s backyards. Protests from the few local farms had been vociferous, then bitter, then resigned and now folklore.
As Humph’s Capri clattered through the open gate the dull percussion of barking dogs rose to greet them. An unruly pack strained from a set of leashes tied to an iron stake in the centre of the clearing. Half a dozen shiny aluminium caravan trailers stood neatly in the lee of the western half of the ramparts. The snow was dotted with dogshit and paw prints.
Dryden put a leg outside the car. He dangled it as if fishing for a Dobermann pinscher. He caught an Alsatian instead, which came bounding out from beneath one of the caravans and left four feet of bubbling slobber along the nearside cab window.
A caravan door opened and Joe Smith appeared.
Why am I not surprised? thought Dryden. And he’s got that bloody wrench again.
Humph switched his latest language tape back on and closed his eyes. The sound of the sea filled the cab as Manuel described a day on the beach at Tarragona.
‘Thanks. A friend in need,’ said Dryden.
Smith ambled up to the car with the calm assurance of ownership. The dogs orbited the vehicle like satellites. He wore a heavy quilted jacket against the cold, the empty left arm pinned up across the chest. Dryden inched the window down and fed a brown envelope through the crack. It held large photographic prints of the circus winterground’s fire. Smith examined them slowly, nodding.
‘Coincidence, you here,’ offered Dryden, looking around the encampment as if for the first time. ‘I was looking for Billy Shepherd. Tommy’s brother.’
Smith crouched down on his haunches. ‘You’ve seen him, Mister.’
Dryden noted that the accent was stronger, more streetwise, less forgiving. He wasn’t surprised by the answer but he contrived to look it. Smith bore so little resemblance to the one picture Dryden had seen of Tommy that it was difficult to believe they shared a mother, let alone that they had been born less than a year apart. Only the cobalt blue-black hair provided a link across four decades.