Ely is a small town, deep in the Cambridgeshire Fens. It's situated near low lying marshes and the canals that formed the trading routes of old. Current day Ely is slow and quiet. It's also deeply shrouded in heavy smog – part mist / part smoke from the local dump. The dump is a huge pile that's ...
In the Water Clock Jim Kelly has produced a `comfortable' crime story which implies that any murder happens out of sight with no violence.... Not true, but the style of writing and the wry sense of humour that accompanies it somehow gives a warmer feel . Philip Dryden a newspaper writer whose wif...
A week before the accident that put her in a persistent vegetative state, Dryden's wife gave him a key. Now, four years after their accident, Laura is waking up. Kind of: she responds occasionally to questions and has been provided with a machine which she can type out words if she wants. It's a ...
Originally it had led from the portico of Holkham Hall down through the woods to the dunes and the beach beyond. Victorian picnic parties would have ridden down in carriages to eat out on tartan rugs. Somewhere in the pine woods it was said the royal family had had a beach hut. Now it led to a ca...
Not just a right-angled corner, an acute-angled corner, like New York’s Flatiron building, like a ship’s prow. The restaurant had plate-glass windows which had been curved to accommodate the narrow angle and had miraculously survived a decade of Saturday night drunks leaving The Merry Monk next d...
The Isle of Ely rose up from the fens ahead, the cathedral trailing a pennant of low cloud, all that remained of the morning’s leaden sky. He wondered what it was like not to have a memory. A blessing, perhaps. Laura’s coma had been marked by a complete absence of any recall of their accident. Th...
With its infamous tilt of six degrees off the vertical it was down-at-heel Lynn’s answer to Pisa. Briefly famous thanks to the BBC’s Restoration series, the tower’s principal role was now to offer a home to the town’s pigeons. The birds tended to cluster on Warren’s windowsill, shuffling and scra...
In High Park Flats a single bathroom light shone coldly out, joined only by a solitary string of Christmas lights trailing from a window ledge. Sley parked the 4x4 by the entrance to the allotments and killed the engine, checking his watch.‘Two minutes past closing time precisely,’ he said. ‘I ne...
More than twelve hours after the moment he’d stepped into the burnt-out lock-up it was still there when he got home to the boat. He arrived at dawn; the mist gone, a wide barge carrying gravel slipping past on the river towards Cambridge. Laura made him shower in the narrowboat and bagged his clo...
Work went with him on the journey home via a hands’ free headset. He parked the Porsche at Old Hunstanton, on the sandy lane that curved down to the lifeboat house and the beach beyond. Unclipping his earpiece, he slipped into the RNLI store to change into his kit to run the mile to Surf!. For th...