Liz Barnett was also ferociously street-wise and had realized early the power wielded by the press. Her friendship for Dryden had been – at first – entirely manipulative. There was now a grain of genuine respect as well.
‘Your wife?’ she asked, nodding to the barman to repeat the malt whisky and Dryden’s concoction.
Dryden could never answer this particular question without feeling that he was lying in some way, keeping back some part of the truth.
‘The same. No better, no worse. What can I say?’
She was enough of a professional not to apologize for the question. She stepped a foot closer. Dryden appeared to be having one of those days. It was a tribute to the mayoress that she could produce such effects at such a tender age. Her husband was holding forth on the other side of the room to a captive audience that looked as though it had been injected with concrete. His face was mottled crimson with a dash of what could only be called cardiac blue.
She leaned in close as the noise in the room rose with the consumption of free sherry.
‘You will have seen the planning and resources committee’s agenda on the request for extra funds for the cathedral restoration?’
It was a rhetorical question. Liz Barnett was one of his best contacts.
She pressed on. ‘Frankly they’ve got a bit of a cheek. It’s virtually a demand for a £30,000 contribution because they’ve discovered, at the very last moment, that they need to put up scaffolding around one of the transepts to reach the high gutters.’
She broke off to kiss a passing councillor who got her name wrong and then staggered away. ‘Anyway, apparently they needed to clear gutters ahead of a thaw. If the water collects and freezes, then cracks the stonework – it’s gargoyles crashing to the ground, plagues of frogs, that sort of thing.’
‘What’s the problem?’ Dryden could feel the effects of the alcohol as it stole over his modest intellect. He burped and ordered a fresh round of drinks.
‘The point is, why wasn’t this eventuality foreseen – cold weather in winter not being a totally unexpected development.’ She tossed her hair. ‘Apparently there’s some argybargy between the diocesan authorities and the contractors. You’ll need to put the questions. But it’s a bit of a shambles if you ask me.’
Dryden looked hopeful.
‘Although if you did, I would, naturally, be unable to comment at this time.’
Kathy appeared at Dryden’s elbow and ordered another round of drinks. The mayoress declined and drifted off to rescue a tray of alcohol from her husband’s embrace.
Dryden felt the room sway and was acutely aware of Kathy’s lips which had begun to whisper in his ear. He struggled briefly with an amorphous feeling of guilt. But the room was on the move and it seemed sensible to hold on to something. Their bodies touched in several places – in fact an increasing number of places.
Suddenly a woman screamed in that theatrical fashion usually reserved for amateur-night productions of The Mousetrap. Dryden thought two things very quickly. First that he was late visiting Laura. Second that he had somehow caused the scream.
But Roy Barnett had caused the scream by the simple expedient of collapsing to the floor – courageously holding on to his pint glass. He was now in the arms of two rather startled WRVS women who had been listening to his anecdotes for the last half hour. It looked like a modern-day re-enactment of the Death of Nelson. Liz Barnett was calmly calling an ambulance on her mobile. She hadn’t spilt her drink – and she was ordering another.
Dryden called Humph’s mobile and woke him up in a lay-by. The ambulance beat the cab to the Maltings by thirty seconds.
‘Follow that ambulance,’ said Dryden, enjoying himself. Humph happily handed Dryden a miniature bottle of Campari from the glove-compartment bar and slammed his foot down on the accelerator, but they had to imagine the screech of tyres.
Kathy watched them streak off into the night. She would recall little about the evening the next morning but the memory of the kiss lingered like a hangover.
3
The Tower Hospital had begun life as a workhouse in 1788: decorative stonework failed to offset the mean windows and the poor gothic humour of the single belltower. Standing on the edge of town it shared the high ground with a great railway-brick water tower of monumental ugliness. The hill and the rough common around it were known as The Ropes – a reference to the fact that it was once the site of the common gallows.
Here, in 1812, a group of seven luckless land labourers were hanged before a hungry crowd in broad summer sunshine. The so-called Littleport Rioters had made the mistake of drinking a large quantity of beer on starving stomachs and then embarking on two days of spectacular lawlessness. They were left for a month on the gibbet, like slaughtered crows on a line.
The workhouse closed without sorrow half a century later. With awful predictability it limped into the next century as an asylum: residency of the Tower being a local euphemism for anything from mild eccentricity to stark lunacy. By the 1950s the interior was a scandaclass="underline" cracked tiled walls, Victorian plumbing, and unshaded light bulbs. It finally closed after a fire gutted the building and brought down the roof of the great hall, the scene of thousands of joyless communal meals.
What was left was bought by the Steeple Trust, private health care specialists, who fitted it out in the kind of unclinical luxury that would make any patient reach for their wallet. The Trust produced a glossy brochure boasting a heated swimming pool, saunas, and gym. It held a maximum of fifty ‘guests’. But the £2 million spent on the rebuilding completely failed to obscure the building’s innate malevolence. It stood against the night like the Victorian horror-house it had once been.
Roy Barnett had been detained overnight after being discharged from the local hospital’s accident and emergency department. His condition was described as comfortable. This was hardly surprising as he had had at least twice as much to drink as Dryden, who didn’t know what day it was.
There was a suggestion, however, that a mild heart attack had joined forces with the alcohol to produce the collapse. Dryden would check his condition in the morning. Next time he had a chance he would also ask the mayor, chairman of the local Labour party’s public services pressure group, exactly why the NHS wasn’t good enough for him.
Liz Barnett didn’t bother to visit. Roy slept soundly and unloved.
Laura Dryden was in ‘Flat 8’ on the ground floor of the Tower – a suite comprising a bedroom, bathroom, WC, and visitor’s room. It cost the insurance company £360 a week, a fact Dryden hardly appreciated given his complete disdain for the management of risk. Laura had taken out the accident insurance policy without his knowledge and lodged it with their solicitor, alongside, as it turned out, a batch of policies covering Dryden and her parents, all paid for by the proceeds from the TV soap opera Clyde Circus through which she had become a minor celebrity.
The bedroom, nearly two years after the accident, was almost free of medical equipment. A small computer screen showed Laura’s pulse and other vital data against a soothing corporate blue background. A clutch of multi-coloured plastic pipes at her wrist brought in liquid food. Others, discreetly hidden, ferried out the waste. The room struggled to look non-utilitarian. But the institutional cleanliness, and the precise neatness, made it appear like an exhibit in a museum of modern life – ‘Contemporary Bedroom’. Personal effects were arranged on the table and a single shelf in that self-conscious way typical of a house opened to the public. It could have been a room inside a glass paperweight.
There were two bedside tables. One held fruit and some fresh bread rolls, broken, with a glass of Italian sparkling white wine. The other, hairbrushes, make-up, and a small picture of Laura’s parents marked ‘At home – Torino, 1958’. There was a picture of Laura with Dryden – ‘Honeymoon, 1990, Rome’. They looked criminally confident.