‘A badly paid, exploited and abused employee.’ Nene takes another step forward into the light. Despite the cold Dryden can see a sheen of sweat on his forehead.
‘The churchyard at St John’s at Little Ouse tells a different story. Martha died a pauper. She had no money to leave. I checked with the Registrar of Wills to make sure. That was a mistake, vandalizing the headstones.’
Nene’s eyes flicker, calculating. ‘One mistake. I left the stone. There was no hurry. But things got out of hand. I had to act quickly’
‘You were there that night I visited John Tavanter?’
Nene studies the room and makes no answer.
Dryden keeps talking. ‘Did Reg have to die? You’d ruined his life of course, but was he the killing type? But then he wanted to die anyway, he’d tried enough times. Perhaps he would have come after you, or gone to the police. That’s more likely. A confession would have been fatal for you. You’d have lost everything. And you’d risked so much to keep it.
‘And he’d never guessed. No one had. Pretending your wife inherited the money was a masterstroke. And you waited ten years. That’s impressive. A decade of patience. Perhaps you were Gladstone Roberts’s silent partner in Cathedral Motors? Good return, no doubt. And silence guaranteed.’
Nene laughs but his calculations are running too fast now, out of control.
‘What did you tell your wife?’
Nene humours him with an explanation. ‘That Aunt Martha had left her a fortune. I got a friendly solicitor to produce a will. That way she didn’t have to lie.’
‘But you paid a price. More than thirty years waiting for Tommy’s body to be found. Bad heart?’
‘I don’t have a heart, Dryden.’
Nene backtracks to the landing and glances down to the hallway below. Nothing. He checks the view from the dormer window, then the gun, and reloads the empty barrel.
Dryden lives by words. Now he needs them to stay alive.
‘I looked back over the council minutes. Every year you added your little bit of wisdom, just enough to postpone any work on the south-west transept roof. Removing the body was tricky and dangerous, but one day you could have done it. So why rush?
‘One mystery. How did you find out Tommy’s secret signal?’
Nene smiled, reliving the past. ‘Broke his fingers. He was never very brave.’
‘And the postcards?’
‘We do work in the States. Heritage stuff. It was Boston that year. I sent the cards over with the shipment of stone and asked for them to be sent back.’
They smiled together.
Dryden pushed on. ‘But this year it backfired, emergency work was needed and you had twenty-four hours to do something about it. So you sent a note to Reg.’
Nene shivers. ‘Reg bit all right. Pathetic really’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘Said Tommy had been back in touch, wanted to repay some of the money. Restored Reg’s faith in human nature it did. I think he wanted to believe it. Believe something, anything. It got him there. That’s all that mattered.’
Lightning torches across the sky outside the dormer window and the crash follows almost instantly.
‘Did you push Tommy? I imagine you’d envisaged a private killing. Time to get the body out, or perhaps find a place in the walls? You were in every day on restoration work. But instead you had to push him…’
Nene sneers. ‘Wrong again. He was always unreliable. He jumped.’
‘What’d you have – a knife? Did he have a choice?’
Nene shrugs, checks his watch. Dryden’s life is ticking away.
‘After Tommy fell you must have looked round the base of the tower and found he’d fallen into the high gutter. But it wasn’t that much of a problem in the short term. If the body was found it would look like suicide and you’d tell the others you hadn’t met him and they could have their money back. But then he wasn’t found, and you thought he might never be, or at least when he was Reg might have left town, moved on. And Billy was set on the States. So you kept the money, banked it, and waited.
‘There were the winnings as well – how’d you get them off him before he jumped?’
‘He wanted to count it out. With the cash from Crossways. See how rich he was.’
Dryden draws his legs up under him. ‘Crossways. Amy Ward did recognize you of course, or thought she did. You’d done the building work at the garage the year before. Fitted the strongroom.
‘What was the plan after you killed Reg? You got George Warren to steal the car. My guess was, you were the driver on the night. You were heading for the new marina at Feltwell Anchor. I presume the caretaker owes you some favours. He told you I was moving the boat there.
‘And those pits dug for the bridge piles are ready-made graves. But they’re flooded – which is why you weighted the body. You missed the turning and ended up in the Lark. You were lucky to get out with a bad cold.’
But Nene doesn’t laugh. Dryden’s time is up.
‘And Laura. That was Gladstone Roberts of course. Applying some pressure. But you checked it out first. The lie of the land. That’s when we spotted you and followed you to Stretham Engine. Why there?’
‘I had a gun there.’
Dryden feels his blood freeze. Nene might have killed him then, if he’d been alone.
Nene is bored now. Dryden has nothing new to tell him. Now, he thinks. For God’s sake do it now, Stubbs.
Nene raises the gun and aims expertly from the hip.
There are three simultaneous loud bangs, the sound of the screen being thrown back, and two shots. A brutal red light captures Stubbs halfway across the room – like an overexposed photograph. The blast catches him in the shoulder and flings him back with terrifying force against the wall. In the second that the red light bathes the room he seems to hang there, pinioned like a butterfly.
The scene seems to freeze then with the soundtrack a buzzing painful echo. Only Nene is moving. Walking towards him with the shotgun raised. Something is coming out of his mouth. Black and thick it rolls over his chin and spatters his overalls. A spurt jumps from his neck and he lifts a hand to staunch the flow. His eyes are startled and white, but fixed and unblinking.
Dryden rushes him, throwing him back against the mirror, and then dives for the open door. But Nene catches his arm with an almost mechanical force. Dryden wheels to face him and the blood spurts again, blinding him. He smashes a fist into Nene’s face and the grip instantly releases as he tumbles to the ground. Then the thread breaks – the thin line of sanity that had brought him to Burnt Fen snaps. He senses the water outside, encircling, and the panic rises with the flood.
Half-blind, Dryden scrambles down the stairs. The water is knee-deep in the hallway below. Frantically he wades to the front door and throws it open as the lightning comes again. The world outside is a riot of water. Ice, cracked and floating past, gathers against the farmhouse walls. He backtracks down the hall and hears upstairs Nene’s stumbling footfalls.
The panic buzzes in his spine and lifts the hairs on his head. He runs across the yard as the thunder crashes again and, passing Billy’s body, rounds the barn. Here, in his childhood, he fished in the pond which stretched to the road. In the darkness he does not know he is on it until his feet slip on the surface. The still deep water, in the long shadow of the barn, has kept its carapace of ice.
He skates for a few seconds and then falls, breaking through, and the water goes over his head. The shock almost stops his heart and he sinks, blindly struggling now, out of the light.
And back. Slowly back, as he falls into the darkness and the pain begins to fade. The panic has obliterated the present. He leapfrogs the years to his childhood, past Laura, past Fleet Street, past school. A newsreel of his life in reverse.
And then it’s Boxing Day again. So he closes his body into a ball so that he can reach the skates. The Christmas skates. It’s his nightmare and he’s living it again. He finds the laces and releases them and the weights fall away.