He lets the figure pass, himself unseen.
Dryden crouches by the banisters on the first floor landing, an old haunt from his childhood, and a memory as vivid as the fear he feels. Below, water flows freely through the house, tumbling down the stone stairs to the cellar.
The minutes pass: one, two, and three… The back door, which has been banging rhythmically in the north wind, stops, missing a beat, then begins again.
He’s in the house.
Another minute trickles by. Dryden sees a black polished leather slip-on shoe stop at the edge of the moonlight circle below, and the silence is full of listening. The newcomer takes a bold step and looks up. Andy Stubbs, framed by the bone-white collar of his shirt, could be ten years older.
He takes the stairs in pairs. Breathless, stressed, but oddly in control. A brief but specific fear freezes Dryden’s heart.
Stubbs slides a hand inside his overcoat and draws out a brown manila file. The cover is stencil printed:
DRYDEN. LAURA – RTA. CLOSED.
Dryden grips it in relief. ‘At last. You’ve read it?’
Stubbs hasn’t taken his eyes off him. ‘Yes. But I knew. Or guessed. That’s why I played for time. I didn’t want the tribunal to know. They might have decided to punish us both.’
Dryden took a step closer. ‘You knew who it was?’
‘Now I have proof.’ He tapped the file with a gloved hand. ‘Your evidence.’
Dryden almost spat it out. ‘My evidence was worthless. If I’d known the driver’s identity we wouldn’t be here. My statement says nothing, nothing but the smell of dogs on old leather and a large blue paper parcel with a silver…’
‘Moon,’ finished Stubbs. ‘A silver, single moon, on a blue paper parcel that I wrapped.’
‘For who?’ Dryden asks, guessing the truth.
Outside a flash of lightning forks to the flood and for a second they see it all through the schoolroom window. The ragged white horses, the tree by the farm gate bent to the water, and the sky in black shreds screaming south.
‘There’s no mistake. I checked. Last Friday of November two years ago. It’s in the station diary. “Retirement of Deputy Chief Constable Bryan Stubbs.” Lunchtime do, nothing sordid. Top brass from Cambridge. Home Office rep. Speeches, buffet, a few drinks. I was on duty but I called in for the speech. We kept up appearances, then. I organized the whip-round, wrapped the present – the water clock. The cronies were drinking half pints and orange juices. Didn’t fool anyone.’
He turned his back on the storm. ‘My father has been an alcoholic for nearly twenty years. My mother left him a decade ago. He used to be violent, now even that emotion is beyond him. He’ll have gone on drinking somewhere; they had bars, people who turned a blind eye. Golf clubs, the nineteenth, ha bloody ha. And then he’d have driven home. Or tried to. That’s when he slewed in front of you beside Harrimere Drain.
‘The coincidence. Your accident, his binge, didn’t go unnoticed. There were rumours. Talk in the station. Alibis quietly made. It has its own stench – a cover-up. I looked the other way with everyone else.’
Stubbs met Dryden’s eyes. ‘He’s never been a physical coward so he deserves some credit for saving you, but he wasn’t thinking clearly, and it showed. Presumption, a great vice in a policeman – as he told me so many times. He presumed you were the only person in the car because you were the only person in the front. He drove you to the Princess of Wales but he couldn’t take you in, not in his state. I’m surprised he got the car that far. And the alcohol would have kept his temperature up, he probably didn’t even think about the cold. Alcohol made him reckless, unthinking, blundering. But not evil. He was that to start with.’
The lightning strikes again. They look out into the darkness and see the bolt cut down the sky and ignite a telegraph pole. It crashes into the water in a plume of steam. Overhead the thunderclap rocks the farmhouse.
‘When you called looking for help after Tommy’s body was found he couldn’t stop himself, he saw it as a way of paying off his debts. And of course he sought vindication for his deceit. He always said Tommy Shepherd was guilty. The fact that he’d fabricated the evidence didn’t mean he was innocent. He wanted you to prove it.’
Dryden presses his forehead to the glass in the schoolroom window. ‘The water clock. Clepsydra.’ He saw again the gurgling glass mechanism and the ornate fretted face of the clock in Stubbs’s conservatory.
‘And the tribunal?’
Stubbs sighs deeply. ‘Busted me down to DC. Wish they’d thrown me out.’
The next sound is not nature’s. The shotgun blast is sharper than the thunder, nearer. When they get to the window they see Billy sprawled in the slush, a dark black, spreading river running from an ugly jagged hole through the thigh of the waders. The shotgun, still uncocked, lies beside him.
The banging back door misses another beat.
‘Who?’ asks Stubbs, but there is no time. There are only seconds now until they must meet Tommy’s killer.
Dryden leads the way into the front bedroom. Stubbs casts his torch beam across the iron bedstead, the wardrobes, the two armchairs coated with melting frost.
In one corner stands a screen Dryden’s mother used to block the draught. A large silvered mirror, blackened at the edges, hangs over the bed. On the window ledge a crow’s carcass twitches in the wind.
‘I need a minute with him,’ Dryden said. ‘Just listen. He thinks I’m alone. Go behind the screen.’
Stubbs hesitates.
‘I asked you to bring a gun.’
The policeman takes a pistol from his jacket pocket. ‘It was his. Shooting club,’ he says, slipping behind the screen.
Dryden plays decoy and settles in the armchair by the window. He counts sixty seconds in which his life does not flash before his eyes. Then he sees a torch’s swaying beam touch the wallpaper in the hallway. Then it dazzles his eyes, and he braces himself for the shot, but knows it will not come. A second’s silence deepens and the doubt blossoms. But then he hears it, the wheezing breath. The torch moves quickly on, checking the screen, the wardrobes, the bedstead and the mirror.
Dryden’s eyes reassemble the greys and blacks to form a picture. Josh Nene stands in the doorway, a shotgun held in the crook of his elbow. His boots glisten with water over the ever-present blue overalls.
‘Dryden.’ A cloud of steaming breath rises and catches a moonbeam. The ice is returning with the night. ‘My congratulations.’
Nene takes a step closer. The barrel of the shotgun shakes and his fingers clench and unclench themselves around the stock.
‘Who was the man outside?’
‘Billy Shepherd. I don’t blame you for not recognizing him. It’s been a long time.’
Nene’s eyes widen, the whites catching the flicker of the lightning outside.
Dryden keeps talking. ‘Surprised? That was one of the keys of course. He was alive because you thought he was in America. No need to kill him when Tommy’s body was found. But if he’d been here you’d have tracked him down. He didn’t know your name, but you couldn’t have risked him finding you if he knew Tommy was dead.’
He cocks the gun. ‘We have very little time, Dryden, but I am intrigued. May I ask how we find ourselves here?’
Dryden hears a footstep slide behind the screen, Nene misses it.
‘We find ourselves here because of Martha Jane Elliott – 1891 to 1976. Or rather because of her gravestone.’
‘My wife’s aunt.’
‘Your wife’s aunt and benefactor. The woman who left a small fortune to your wife, which enabled you to buy the building yard and a business in which, until then, you had been merely a lowly employee.’