The Coldest Blood (27 page)

Dryden turned. ‘The two witnesses, the kids who saw Paul Gedney that night in 1974, before someone spilt five pints of his blood in the sand. You know what I’m talking about, yeah?’

Nabbs was suddenly wary. ‘Sure.’ The hum of the transmission lines above shifted up a note.

‘They’re dead, like it said in the paper. They were friends of mine, in a roundabout sort of way. I think someone killed them. Someone who didn’t want Chips Connor to come home.’

Nabbs coloured visibly, despite the cold. ‘Jesus. You’re mad. It’s 2005, not 1805. Do you think anyone – least of all Chips – thinks he’s coming home to the loving wife he left thirty years ago? Look, that marriage was over long before they took Chips away, OK? Christ – she’s visited him every week for three decades. He’s pretty happy in a room six by eight. I don’t think dealing with the wide open world is really on any more, do you? It’s not about whether he can get out of an institution – it’s about which institution he’s going to spend the rest of his life in.’

‘So he knows, does he?’

They heard the tap-tap of the engineer’s hammer on the metal superstructure of the iced pylon.

‘It’s not part of his life any more, Dryden, OK?’

‘But if he came home – what about the business?’

Nabbs shook his head, laughing, exasperated. ‘You don’t give up, do you? Ruth and Russell run the business. If Chips ever gets out he’ll be rich thanks to the work they’ve done. What would he have done differently if he’d been here? Plenty. But I doubt he’s bothered, do you?’ But he looked away then, hoping perhaps that Dryden didn’t have an answer.

Dryden squinted, watching a small fishing boat crossing the sea in the mid-distance. ‘Just to give you the picture: Declan McIlroy, one of the witnesses who was going to get Chips free, the killer got him drunk, then they left him to die of the cold. Hypothermia. The police found him frozen to death in an armchair. The guy had no life to speak of – alcoholic, depressive, a childhood in care. But they took it away anyway.’

‘I’m sorry about your friends.’

‘Thanks,’ said Dryden. ‘But I’m more interested in Paul Gedney’s friends. What does Ruth Connor think happened? She must have discussed it. Pillow talk,’ he added, trying to make him angry again.

But the interview was nearly over. ‘Gedney was low-life, all right? They’d been friends at school, the three of them. Chips was popular, a gateway to other friends. Ruth was going to be rich one day – at least by standards around here. He used them: he used everyone. Then he did a runner, but Ruth always thought there were others involved. She said it wasn’t his thing – crime – that he was subtler than that. But he needed the money, perhaps he helped himself to more than his share, so some other specimen tracked him down and beat him to death. It’s what low-life is all about.’

They’d reached reception and Nabbs turned to look back at the pylon. ‘I think about him sometimes – Gedney – when I’m out on the surfboard. I think about his bones – what’s left, you know – rolling over each other on the sea bed. Cheers me up.’

He smiled at last, while above them a wire hummed, as taut as a drawn bow.

35

Marcie Sley looked out to sea, her green eyes reflecting the surface of the water. Her husband stood six feet behind her on the beach, a precisely calibrated distance which seemed designed to let her remember alone, but to offer the consolation of company. Dryden watched them from the verandah of the chalet for several minutes as the physiotherapist worked inside, massaging Laura’s back, oiling the skin and filling the small room with the sleepy aroma of almonds. The handheld COMPASS lay on the bed, the tickertape still blank.

It was a break, he knew that. And just in time. DI Reade would be there in the morning, but first he had a chance to talk to the one witness he was certain could tell him so much that he didn’t know. What exactly had the children seen that night through the single porthole? And why had they been sent home in disgrace, while he had been spared?

Out on the sand the wind was rising and John Sley wrapped himself tighter in his black donkey jacket. Dryden briefly spoke to the physio, organizing another trip to the pool, then slipped out on to the verandah, jumped down on to the sand below and walked towards the distant couple, trying to imagine what Marcie was seeing through unseeing eyes: her brother Dex perhaps, unpicking the string on one of Smith’s homemade kites, or the young Philip, staggering down the sides of the sun-splashed dunes with logs for the dam the children had built.

John Sley saw him first, and a word passed between the couple, the cigarette smoke dripping out of his mouth. In
his other hand he held a key with a solid brass dolphin attached.

By the time Dryden was beside Marcie she was smiling. He felt again the urge to touch the skin, to be closer to the dense black hair.

Instead he stood, looking out to sea as well. ‘So you’re staying? First time back?’

Her hand rose, seeking her husband’s. ‘Yes. The phone call – you’ve got news?’

Dryden checked his watch, ignoring the question. ‘You came quickly. Thank you. We don’t have much time.’

‘I wanted to come.’

They listened to a gang of seagulls fighting over a fishtail in the shallows. ‘There was a boat – in the marshes, that summer. Can we see if it’s still there?’ she said. He nodded and took her arm, noting the deliberate use of the metaphor of sight.

They walked round the chalets and down towards the old camp. Dryden could almost feel the presence of the ten-year-old girl who’d held his hand within the covered boat, and he wondered if she too felt anything of the past.

John Sley had yet to speak, the cigarette still held in his shattered teeth.

There was a small bridge now over the ten-foot drain they had once jumped. They edged across it until they stood by the old sluice, rusted shut, while an ugly electric pump stood in its place in the dunes, humming.

‘We’re at a sluice,’ said Dryden, his voice in neutral.

‘We met here each night – the children,’ said Marcie, bringing her shoulders up towards her ears like a child treasuring a memory. ‘The boys were always late, and too excited. I could hear them coming through the dunes, it’s a very boyish thing – that mixture of fear and bravado.’

Dryden turned south as the north wind brought in a flurry of snowflakes.

‘Who was bravest?’ he said. ‘Smith? He would have been the oldest.’

‘Yes, always,’ she said, looking at him intensely now, the eyes shining. ‘Declan could live with the fear because Smith was there. And Philip was there because he was too scared to say no – he never looked scared but I knew he was. There was a kind of electricity, a shell of anxiety.’

She looked around her, smiling. Dryden felt the pain of recognizing himself, not just then, but now.

‘So we played the game,’ she said. ‘Sardines. Smith adapted it for the saltmarsh. One would hide, the others would spread out to find them. If you found the one who was hiding then you squeezed in and waited for the rest. It was ideal – the maximum injection of fear and excitement. There were only a dozen possible places, really – unless you took your chance in the reeds – so we always had time to finish. That night it was Philip who went first. It should have been Declan but there was a fight, and so we chose Philip instead. We gave him 100, then we killed the torches and spread out…’ she said, taking a step towards the edge of the drain.

Dryden took her arm before her husband could, and she gripped his hand as if to tell him something. ‘Which way?’ he forced himself to ask. A seagull screeched overhead.

‘The boat was to the south,’ she said.

For half a mile they wove between the channels of the liquid maze, where the last high tide had left little crystal palaces of ice, paper-thin canopies hanging in the freezing air, abandoned by the retreating seawater.

At first Dryden thought the old boat was gone. Thirty years of wet rot and the sluicing of the tidal water must have slowly rubbed it out, an artist’s mistake gently erased
from a watery canvas. But as they stood on the bank he saw in the wet sand revealed by the tide the low-pitched roof of the
Curlew
, the seawater edging down her side to reveal the first graceful curve of the porthole, the glass as murky as a jellyfish.

Marcie’s husband had hung back, his great fists loose by his sides, reluctant to share the past.

‘There’s a boat just here,’ said Dryden. ‘A porthole’s showing.’

She nodded, living the memory within. ‘We’d been searching for ten minutes, perhaps a bit more. Then we all heard it, a cry. It seemed very close, and very real. Within a minute we were there – everyone except Philip because he was hiding – and there was a boat moored in the reeds, the porthole lit, so we crept forward to look inside.’

Dryden imagined himself listening too, still hidden beneath the green tarpaulin.

‘We didn’t normally go that far – down to the river. There were boats passing sometimes, and a path. So Smith had said no, right from the start, that it was out of bounds for the game. But I crept forward anyway, and the others followed. The water was gurgling out with the tide and the fair was on at the camp so there was plenty of noise to cover us.’

Dryden slipped a hand through her arm and she shifted her weight so that they leant together.

‘Paul Gedney was inside,’ she said. She touched each eyelid with her fingertips. ‘Smith and Declan saw him too. He had this mousy hair, cut short, and his shirt was off and he was well built, sort of marbled with muscle, grotesque really.’

‘What was he doing?’

She shrugged. ‘I think he’d passed out. He was lying in a bunk. There were loads of books, and food – biscuits, crisps,
fruit. There was a generator running, and a single light, and clothes scattered about, and one of those plastic drinking barrels with a tap. And this box…’

Dryden led her down the bank towards the boat which, inch by inch, was emerging from the black water as the tide ebbed.

‘What kind of box?’

‘It was metal – aluminium perhaps: that white, blanched colour. It was ribbed and patterned on the outside, and it had a lid with two locks, about the size of one of those coolboxes you take on the beach. Perhaps that was it. His hand lay on it as if it was precious.’

She stood still, rebuilding the memory. ‘Where’s the boat?’she asked suddenly.

Dryden led her along the sand, crisp underfoot with ice. The
Curlew
had tipped to port over the years, lifting its starboard rail above the riverside bank. Dryden took her hand and put it on the frozen wood, edged with frost. On the stretch of exposed deck black crabs scuttled across the ice.

She gripped the rail. ‘He was just lying there, but the sleeve of his shirt was rolled up and the arm was covered in blood, dripping down. There was a clean open wound – two inches, perhaps three.’ She licked her lips and looked back, as if sensing her husband’s presence against the skyline. ‘The boys went back then, to find Philip – there were only a couple of places we hadn’t checked. But while they were away it happened again…’

She brought her other hand up beside the first. ‘He opened his eyes and he took the knife. The porthole was to his side, very close, but he was looking ahead or to the side where he’d strung up the light from the cabin roof. He cleaned his arm with a dressing – a medical dressing – and I could see the fresh wound still oozing the blood, and
beside it another wound, still raw but not bleeding. The two wounds made a V-shape pattern on the muscle. Then he took the knife, put the point to the end of the fresh wound and drew it across his arm, again a few inches, opening up a third cut. Here…’ She touched her upper left arm just below the joint with the shoulder. ‘For a second the wound just gapped, and then it filled with blood, and he cried out again, that dreadful cry.’

Dryden heard the scream in his memory, with its hint of triumph. A zigzag wound, thought Dryden, and he saw another memory from that summer, of the subtle urgent rocking of white bodies in the sand.

‘I heard the boys coming back then,’ said Marcie. ‘Behind me, but I just couldn’t stop watching. Gedney’s eyes were closed, but the pain made him jerk his head to one side, and when he opened them he was looking at us. That’s why we remembered the face, and the eyes. It’s what Declan said when he saw that poster the newspaper printed: “I’ll never forget the eyes.”

‘We panicked then, and ran back through the marsh to the chalets. I was terrified, I think we all were – even Smith. We heard footsteps behind us, I think Declan always did.’

Dryden nodded and looked seawards, where a bank of black cloud stood on the horizon like a mountain range. ‘Do you think he knew who you were – that night, I mean? Do you think Paul Gedney could have known who you were?’

‘I know he did,’ she said, breathing in the air, heavy now with damp as the ice storm finally edged towards the coast. ‘Because of what happened the next day.’

36

Humph swung the cab off the coast road and up on to the sandy verge, the exhaust pipe whacking the grass with a dull thud. A flock of seagulls circled the Capri and Dryden guessed the cabbie had been jettisoning food at regular intervals from the driver’s side window.

‘I was asleep,’ said Humph, brushing crumbs from his Ipswich Town top with a delicate hand.

He’d said nothing more when Dryden had rung twenty minutes earlier to ask for the pickup.

‘Back to the Eel’s Foot,’ said Dryden, checking his watch. Flipping open his mobile he found another text message from DI Reade – another reminder to be available for interview the next morning. What he needed first was to hear the rest of Marcie Sley’s story, to take it beyond the point where his childhood self had left the other children that summer’s night.

They drove on in silence, the black, peat-black winter fields so featureless there was a powerful illusion they were standing still. The chimneys of the Eel’s Foot came into view along the floodbank. He was at the bar when he heard the tyres of John Sley’s 4x4 on the car park gravel. Dryden met Marcie at the door and found a table in a corner. Marcie’s husband left them, sitting at the bar nursing a pint of beer and a local paper.