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  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE WATER CLOCK

  Praise for Jim Kelly

  ‘A significant new talent’ Sunday Times

  ‘The sense of place is terrific: the fens really brood. Dryden, the central character, is satisfyingly complicated… a good atmospheric read’ Observer

  ‘A sparkling star newly risen in the crime fiction firmament’ Colin Dexter

  ‘Kelly is clearly a name to watch… a compelling read’ Crime Time

  ‘Beautifully written… The climax is chilling. Sometimes a book takes up residence inside my head and just won’t leave. The Water Clock did just that’ Val McDermid

  ‘An atmospheric, intriguing mystery, with a tense denoument’ Susanna Yager, Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Excellent no-frills thriller with real bit. 4 stars’ FHM

  ‘A story that continuously quickens the pulse… makes every nerve tingle. The suspense here is tight and controlled and each character is made to count in a story that engulfs you while it unravels’ Punch

  ‘Kelly’s evocation of the bleak and watery landscapes, provide a powerful backdrop to a wonderful cast of characters’ The Good Book Guide

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jim Kelly is a journalist. He lives in Ely with the writer Midge Gillies and their young daughter. He is the author of five novels: The Skeleton Man, The Coldest Blood, The Moon Tunnel, The Fire Baby and The Water Clock, which was shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey Award for best novel of 2002. He is currently at work on his new mystery, Death Wore White, featuring DI Peter Shaw (who is introduced in The Skeleton Man).

  In 2006 Jim Kelly was awarded the Dagger in the Library by the Crime Writers’ Association for a body of work giving ‘greatest enjoyment to crime fiction readers’.

  To find out more about Jim Kelly and other Penguin crime writers, go to www.penguinmostwanted.co.uk

  The Water Clock

  JIM KELLY

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  For Midge

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published by Michael Joseph 2002

  Published in Penguin Books 2003

  This edition published 2007

  11

  Copyright © Jim Kelly, 2002

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-190642-3

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank Beverley Cousins, my editor, for her skill, determination, and patience in championing The Water Clock, Faith Evans, my agent, for living up to her name, and Martin Bryant for meticulous copy-editing. Dorothy L. Sayers deserves some belated glory for the inspiration provided by The Nine Tailors. I am indebted to Renee Gillies, Donald Gillies, Bridie Pritchard, Eric Boyle and Jenny Burgoyne for helping with the text. I read many accounts of the 1947 floods in Fenland but must thank all those at The Cambridgeshire Collection for their work in the archives.

  The landscape of the Fens is, of course, real but details of geography and history have been altered for the sake of the plot. All characters are, however, entirely fictitious.

  Thursday, 8th November

  The Great West Fen

  Out on the Middle Level midnight sees the rising flood nudge open the doors of the Baptist chapel at Black Bank. Earlier the villagers had gathered for a final service loaded down like Balkan refugees with suitcases and bundles. Now the water spreads across the Victorian red-brick floor; a creeping congregation, lifting the pews which shuffle forward to press against the altar rail. Finally the wooden lectern lifts and tips its painted golden eagle into the chocolate-coloured flood. But no one hears the sound, all are gone. Outside, below the flood banks, fenceposts sucked from the sodden peat pop to the surface. On what is left of the high ground hares scream a chorus from an operatic nightmare.

  The flood spreads under a clear November moon. Cattle, necks breaking for air, swim wall-eyed with the twisting current. At Pollard’s Eau, just after dusk, the Old West River bursts its bank, spilling out over the fields of kale and cabbage. A dozen miles away the lookouts in the lantern tower of Sutton church take the noise for that of a train on the line to King’s Lynn. They wait, fatally, for the fields to reflect the stars, before raising the alarm.

  Burnt Fen Farm, now a ruin, stands on its own shrinking island.

  Philip Dryden climbs the stairs of the farmhouse in which he was born.

  His knees crack, the damp air encouraging the rheumatism which waits in the joints of his six-foot-three-inch frame. He stops on the landing and the moonlight, falling through the rafters, catches a face as expressionless as a stone head on a cathedral wall.

  He leans on the twisted banisters and feels again the anxieties of hischildhood – welcome by comparison with the present and approaching fear.

  Will the killer come?

  Outside the ice creaks on the Old West River. Unheard, small voices of perfect terror rise with the approach of death. Rats dash in synchronized flight to beat the flood, crowding into the steep pyramids of winter beet.

  Shivering, he walks through the hallway and pushes open the slatted door to the attic stairs. He climbs again to the old schoolroom where he was the only pupil. The view from the dormer window frames a snapshot of memory; his father, sat in a pool of midsummer sunlight in a blue-striped deckchair, dozing under a wide-brimmed cherry picker’s hat.

  Outside the wind brings the slow crash of a tree subsiding into the flood. A dying cow bellows and briefly, with a gust of heavenly sound, church bells ring the alarm too late from Littleport. The lightning cuts a gash across the night and Dryden sees the serried rows of waves marching south.

  Waiting for a killer on Burnt Fen. A single, double, killer, coming.

  On the horizon occasional car lights thread to Quanea. Locals, quitting at the nicely judged last moment, speed to the high ground. One stops, the headlights swing round, and the car idles beside the Eighteen Foot Drain. A false alarm: it executes a three-point turn, a dance of light from yellow to red, leaving Dry den’s heartbeat rattling. He shivers now in judders which make it difficult to hold the torch.

  Another car on the fen. So quickly is it there his eyes struggle to focus on the headlights as they snake nearer. He’s come from the south, along the drove. He’s almost here and Dryden’s underestimated hi
m. Threading through the fields along the narrow banks of the lodes.

  Half a mile away the car stops. The headlights die.

  They sit and wait. A trickling minute passes. Then five. Sitting, watching, water rising. He’s answered a message from a dead man. Dryden examines the roar of the flood for other, lethal, noises.

  The moon finds a cloud, the wind drops, and in the sudden suffocating silence a car door closes without a slam.

  He’s coming.

  Thursday, 1st November

  seven days earlier

  1

  Humphrey H. Holt’s licensed minicab crept across the fen like the model motorcar on a giant Monopoly board. The Ford Capri was an icon – from the fluffy toy dice hanging from the rear-view mirror to the beaded seat covers. The back window was stacked with dog-eared children’s books hoarded by his daughter – who had fitted the red plastic nose to the radiator and the Jolly Roger to the aerial. Emblazoned with a triple H motif the cab was, not surprisingly, rarely in great demand for weddings. It had once made up the numbers in a funeral cortège – and the family had had the presence of mind amidst their grief to ask for their money back.

  Philip Dryden shifted in the passenger seat as they cleared the railway crossings at Queen Adelaide, and turning up the collar of his giant black greatcoat he eyed the cab’s meter. He coughed, drawing in the damp which was already creeping out of the fields. The meter read £2.95. It always read £2.95. He could see the frayed wires hanging loose below the dashboard. The cab hit a bump and the exhaust struck the tarmac with a clang like a cow bell.

  Humph wriggled in his seat, setting off concentric rings of wave-like motion in his seventeen-stone torso which he had snugly slipped into his nylon Ipswich Town tracksuit top. Somewhere, deep inside, a large length of gut cavorted.

  Another bump on the drove road put the car briefly into flight before it returned to earth with a bone-shaking thud. The suspension, a matrix of rusted steel, was not so much shot as dead and buried.

  The jolt dislodged the passenger side vanity mirror which dropped neatly in front of Dryden’s face. He stared at himself in irritation: his imagination was romantic and he found his own face a dramatic disappointment, which was odd, as most people, and almost all women, found it striking if not handsome. But self-knowledge was not one of his virtues. The bone structure was medieval, the face apparently the result of several blows of a Norman mason’s chisel into a single limestone block. Jet black hair followed the architectural design – cropped and severe. It was the kind of face that should have been illuminating an Anglo-Saxon chronicle.

  He flipped up the vanity mirror and smudged a porthole in the condensation of the window. 4.10 p.m. A lead expanse of chill cloud over the fen, occasionally lit by the red and green of half-hearted fireworks. The temperature had not risen above freezing all day and now, as the light bled away, a mist crept out of the roadside ditches to claw at the cab’s passing tyres.

  Dryden checked his watch. ‘We could do with being there,’ he said. Like most reporters he’d learnt the hard way that patience is a vice.

  Humph adopted an urgent posture which produced no discernible increase in speed. The cab swept on while beside them a flock of Canada geese, just airborne, began its long slow ascent into the sky.

  Two miles ahead a blue emergency light blinked – a lighthouse in the dusk. A mile away to the east the fairy lights of a pub twinkled in the gloom.

  ‘Tesco trolleys,’ said Dryden, searching his coat pockets for a pen. Instead he produced a miniature pork pie, the remnants of a quarter-pound of button mushrooms, and an untouched half-pound of wine gums.

  Humph adjusted the rear-view mirror by way of answer. He’d known Dryden for two years now, since the accident which had put Dryden’s wife, Laura, in a coma. Humph had ferried him to the hospital through those first critical weeks. In that time he’d learnt to let Dryden finish his own sentences. If you can have a conversation entirely based on rhetoric then they did.

  Dryden kicked his feet out, irritated that the cab afforded no more leg room than the average car. Had Humph answered? He was unsure.

  ‘I bet you. Three sodding Tesco trolleys and a hubcap. If we’re lucky. Brace yourself: another Pulitzer Prize.’ Dryden stretched scepticism to breaking point: it was often, wrongly, seen as cynicism.

  They came to the sudden T-junction. They were common in the Fens, abrupt full-stops in the usually uninterrupted arrow-flight of the drove roads. Death traps. Over-confident drivers, lulled by seven miles of tarmac runway, suddenly found themselves confronted by a bank, and then a ditch with ten feet of iced water in the bottom.

  A signpost stood at an angle beside the road: FIVE MILES FROM ANYWHERE CORNER. Dryden laughed, mainly because it wasn’t a joke.

  Across their path lay the bank of the River Lark, a tributary of the Great Ouse – the Fens’ central artery. They parked up, short of a yellow and black scene-of-crime tape.

  As Dryden reached the top of the bank an industrial arc lamp thudded into life, picking out a circular spotlight on the ice. Cue Torvill and Dean, he thought.

  In the dusk the bright circle of light hurt his eyes. The Canada geese, having caught them up, flew startled through the arc lamp’s beam like bombers picked out in the searchlights of the Blitz. They attempted a landing on ice downriver – a disaster of flailing webbed feet shrouded in gloom.

  Dryden started listing hardware in his notebook – a sure sign he knew he might be short of facts to pad out a story. Eight vehicles were drawn up along the foot of Lark Bank. Two local police patrol cars – blue stripes down the side of Ford Fiestas, the county police force’s diving unit in a smart purple-striped Cavalier with trailer, the fire brigade’s special rescue vehicle, a Three Rivers Water Authority Ford van, and an unmarked blue Rover which might as well have had CID in neon letters flashing from its number plate.

  Out on the river four frogmen were trying to break through the ice to attach cables to something just below the surface. One called for oxyacetylene torches and soon the diamond-blue flames hissed, generating vertical mushroom clouds of steam in the frozen air.

  What Dryden needed was a story line: and for that he needed a talking head. What he didn’t have was time. The Crow’s last deadline was 5 p.m.

  He scanned the small crowd. He ruled out the senior fireman – politely known as ‘media unfriendly’ – and ditto the water authority PR who was even now smoothing down a shiny silver suit under a full-length cashmere coat.

  With relief he recognized a plain-clothed detective on the far bank. Detective Sergeant Andy Stubbs was married to one of the nurses who cared for his wife. They’d met occasionally at the hospital, both keeping a professional distance. Dryden decided businesslike was best: ‘Detective Sergeant.’ It was nearly a question – but not quite. An invitation to chat.

  Detective Sergeant Stubbs turned it down. ‘Dryden.’ He zipped up an emergency services luminous orange jacket. The body language shouted suspicion.

  Dryden looked out over the floodlit river with an air of enthusiasm more suited to the terraces at Old Trafford. He grinned, rubbing his hands together with excitement, then he made his pitch. ‘What’s all this about then, Mr Stubbs?’ A mixture of deference and jollity which Dryden judged the perfect combination. The jollity was more than a front. He suffered from the opposite of clinical depression – a kind of irrational exuberance.

  ‘County has put a stop on all information, Dryden. We’re not quite sure what we’ve got. We’ve been out here three hours. Give me ten minutes and if nothing has come up I’ll give you a statement.’

  ‘I need to file in twenty minutes to make copy’

  DS Stubbs nodded happily. He didn’t give a damn.

  In the distance Dryden could see Humph’s cab. The internal light was on and dimly he could see the taxi driver gesticulating wildly. Humph was at conversational level in four European languages which he had learnt from tapes. This year it was Catalan. In December, to avoid Christmas, he would
take two weeks holiday in Barcelona – alone and blissfully talkative. Typically he sought fluency in any language other than his own.

  Stubbs appeared to have the same problem.

  Dryden tried again. ‘Car then – under the ice.’ He beamed in the silence that followed as if he’d got an answer.

  Out on the frosted river the frogmen were attaching four metal cables to the car roof at its strongest points, having melted the surface ice with hand-held blowtorches fed by gas lines running back to the fire brigade’s accident unit. The steel cables ran to the county police force’s portable winch, which in turn was connected by cable to the fire engine’s generator. An industrial pump was churning out hot water in a steaming gush from the bank, gradually producing a pond of slush which bubbled around the divers. Beside the single arc lamp uniformed police officers were setting up scene-of-crime lights along the bank. One of the firemen was filming the scene with a hand-held video camera. There was enough hardware for the climax of a Hollywood disaster movie – on ice.

  Dryden had seen it all before. The emergency services could never pass up an opportunity to wheel out their toys and put in some real-time training. He half expected the force helicopter to thwup-thwup-thwup into earshot.

  ‘Quite a show, Mr Stubbs.’

  Stubbs looked right through him. The effect was oddly unthreatening. Dryden felt better and grinned back.

  For a detective sergeant of the Mid-Cambridgeshire Constabulary Andy Stubbs managed to radiate an almost complete absence of authority. His face was so undistinguished it could have been included in a thousand identity parades, and his eyes were an equally forgettable grey. His hair was short and fair, echoing the talcum-powdered dryness of his skin. He reeked of Old Spice.

  Dryden fingered his collar. Stubbs’s colourless coolness always made him uncomfortable. He put on his desperate face: one down from suicidal and one across from murderous. He stepped closer. ‘Any ideas? I’m a bit pushed for time.’