‘Ma,’ said Dryden, eyeing the dog. The reporter was a physical coward of commanding range and a fear of dogs was up there with his fear of heights. He tried not to watch as the dog dribbled over its exposed teeth.
Ma ignored Dryden and turned to the suit. ‘You are kidding me?’ The accent belied her looks. There was a distinct edge of upper-class elocution, and the confidence of money.
The man looked at the clipboard, which Dryden noted was bereft of paper. ‘No. I’m afraid not, Mrs Trunch. Public access to the site will have to be suspended while we take a closer look. This…’ and he indicated a rising cloud of poisonous-looking steam literally billowing out of the side of the landfill, ‘This,’ he repeated, ‘is a cause of legitimate concern, you’d have to agree.’
Garry was listening intently and taking notes, a sure sign he had no idea what was going on. His mouth hung open like the back of a ro-ro ferry and his spots glowed.
‘Jesus,’ said Ma, turning to Dryden. ‘What do you want?’
‘Just checking,’ he said by way of defence.
‘And there are other irregularities,’ said the suit.
‘Irregularities,’ said Garry slowly, taking time on the shorthand outline. He turned to Dryden. ‘The inspector found them while checking the site for the sources of pollution…’
‘Found what?’ said Dryden, forever surprised at Garry’s ability to miss key facts.
Garry pointed to the edge of the flat platform where a green tarpaulin lay over what looked like a pallet of sandbags. Dryden flipped the edge back, then the whole sheet. There were three dogs, all Alsatians, with identical collars. Death is always ugly, but in this case it had excelled itself. Dried blood had trickled from the mouths of two of the dogs, and all three were tangled in tortured knots, teeth exposed in agony.
‘Dump-truck driver says he didn’t see the dogs in the rest of the refuse and didn’t look down after he’d dropped the load,’ said Garry. ‘They reckon they were dumped in one of the household waste skips. What ya reckon?’
Dryden shrugged. ‘Guard dogs?’ he asked the PC. ‘Alsatians. Identical collars. What time did the site close last night?’
The PC tried to pretend he’d thought of this and walked off to radio the station in Ely.
‘Eight,’ said Ma, reining in the greyhound which had picked up the scent of the dogs.
‘Poison is my guess,’ said Dryden. ‘Ma?’
She nodded sadly, patting the greyhound’s long, equine head.
‘Bit odd,’ added Dryden. ‘If you wanted to knock out the dogs to get in somewhere – why not leave the dogs on site?’
Ma, watching a short line of cars making its way across the fen towards the household skips to dump their rubbish, heaved her massive shoulders. ‘Some people are bastards. Perhaps someone won the pools and decided they didn’t want the dogs any more. People are like that sometimes – callous. Working dogs don’t get redundancy.’
Redundancy. That was another ugly word. The dump-site workers in their reflective jackets shifted uneasily on their feet.
‘OK,’ said Ma, ‘let’s close her down.’
4
Humph’s cab stood in the thickening mist, a grey cutout of a Ford Capri, emitting the perfectly enunciated vowels of a Polish peasant. Dryden opened the door, put one knee on the passenger seat and rested an elbow on the roof, cradling his mobile in the other hand.
He got through to Jean first time. ‘Fudge Box,’ he said.
‘Righto,’ yelled Jean, and he heard her typing swiftly as he dictated.
‘The corpses of three Alsatian dogs were discovered at Ely’s Dunkirk refuse site late yesterday (Thursday). Police are investigating the possibility that the animals were poisoned and dumped by burglars. All three animals wore ID collars which have been removed by police for investigation. They carried code numbers, not names, and the single word RINGFENCE. Any member of the public with information should ring Ely 66616.’
Jean read it back. ‘OK, thanks. Put me through to the desk.’ The Fudge Box was a survivor from the days when newspapers were newspapers – a blank space on the front page into which late news could be stencilled. Most evening newspapers used it for the truly sensational. The Crow was quite capable of using it for flower-show results.
Charlie picked up the phone and burped. Dryden could smell the stale ale, even down the line.
‘Hi. Look – they’ve closed the dump site. You’ll have to go into the inside story and tinker a bit – and rewrite the intro on the splash – OK?’
‘Sure. No problem,’ he said. ‘Can you do it?’ Dryden could hear the electricity of panic buzzing on the line.
Dryden looked at his watch. ‘Jesus. All right. Give us ten.’ The radio crackled to life as the BBC pips marked two o’clock. The Crow’s deadline was past by fifteen minutes, but the printers were friendly and flexible.
‘The Crow,’ said Dryden, buttoning the black great coat high to his neck and fiddling ineffectually with the Capri’s heating system.
Market Street was empty but for the damp queue at the bus-stop and a single boy racer, parked up on the taxi rank, his stereo blasting out a bass beat which made the nearest shop window flex. The market on the square was packing up already, the smog having sent people home early. Steam from the mobile burger bar added to the fug, burnt onions complementing the tang of soap.
Jean smiled, displaying budget dentures, as Dryden bounded in and thudded up the wooden stairs to the newsroom. A dedicated spinster, she had taken on the role of Dryden’s moral guardian since the crash which had put Laura in a coma. In her mind their tragedy had only one happy ending: a miracle recovery and a return to the life they had lost. In the meantime she was determined to keep Dryden’s life chaste and otherwise spotless.
Dryden did not resent his unbidden chaperone, sharing with her as he did the dream that one day his life would be as it had been before that damp, misty, evening five years earlier. Jean’s best smile, reserved for Dryden, compressed a lifetime of sympathy into a single facial expression.
After ten years in the echoing chaos of the News’s offices on Fleet Street The Crow’s version always gave Dryden a pang of childish comfort – it was like going to work in a doll’s house. Six workstations had been crammed into the room, part of which had been partitioned off with opaque glass to protect the privacy of the editor: Septimus Henry Kew. Spikes bristled on each desktop, weighed down with press releases and discarded council agenda papers, and Splash – the office cat – was curled up on the bare boards of the floor where the hot-water pipe ran to the boiler. An air of barely suppressed panic gripped the room, which was full, and strewn with the detritus of press day – polystyrene coffee cups, two overflowing ashtrays on the subs’ bench and a discarded portion of fish ’n’ chips.
Dryden had left Garry at Dunkirk to complete a short feature on what the closure meant for the company and its workforce. Dryden’s desk sported a ‘laptop’ PC which the editor had snapped up in a sale. It was portable only in the sense that you could move it around with a block and tackle. The newspaper’s editorial operations were entirely accommodated within the one room – in one corner of which was an acoustic hood, salvaged from the demolition site when they’d knocked down the old post office, from which Dryden was officially sanctioned to phone over any breaking big news story to the Press Association in London, a source of extra income which boosted all their wages by £5 a week. Dryden picked a press release off his spike and drop-kicked it over the screen and into a distant wastepaper bin, a childish routine which gave him huge satisfaction.