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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: Dryden Mysteries
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
As mid-winter temperatures grip the cathedral city of Ely, a man is found frozen to death in his high-rise flat. The police may think that Declan McIlroy killed himself, but journalist Philip Dryden is not convinced, and he begins digging for the truth. All too soon, there's another frozen corpse to consider - that of Declan's best friend. And suddenly a routine suicide gives way to a chilling trail of cruelty and betrayal stretching back thirty years, towards a mystery from Dryden's own childhood.
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THE COLDEST BLOOD
JIM KELLY
For Peggy and Brian, who are together
CONTENTS
The Dolphin Holiday Camp, Sea’s End
Thursday, 29 August 1974
The dagger lay on his naked thigh, its blade as cold as a rock-pool pebble. Lying back in his bunk, he raised the weapon with one hand and played the fingers of the other across the muscle of his upper arm, stretching the suntanned skin taut as a drum. Outside, the water of the saltmarsh slapped against the Curlew’s hull, rocking him on the incoming tide.
He tasted salt on his lips as he bit down on the leather belt in his mouth and pressed the dagger’s V-shaped point into the biceps, wincing at the gritty sound of the metal penetrating the flesh. He knew he mustn’t scream, but his stomach rolled at the thought of what must come next.
The holiday camp was a mile away but he’d seen kids wandering at dusk in the marsh, four of them, torches dancing amongst the reeds. No one must hear. No one must know.
He held his breath and bit down again on the strap, drawing the blade through the skin, revealing a hint of the meat of the inner arm, a single artery exposed, then severed. Blood flowed like poster paint, dripping from his elbow, as the pain – sudden and electric now – jolted his nervous system and made him drop the dagger and cry out, depite himself.
He gagged on the strap, wanting to weep, and spat it out. ‘Two more, ’ he said. A jagged S, like a lightning bolt. Three cuts. But he knew he couldn’t see it through, not then, so he lay flat, matching his breathing to the slow cadence of the sea beyond the dunes, and for comfort placed a hand on the cold metal of the box at his side, a finger outlining the double locks.
If he could just do this, he told himself, it would be perfect. Not for the first time in the twenty-three years of his life he felt God-like, weak with control. Nothing could stop him if he had the courage to finish it; so he felt for the blade again.
But the touch of the metal brought him to the edge of unconsciousness. He reached out for the warm wooden ribs of the old boat: it had been his home for thirteen days now: but he would be rid of it soon enough.
The sounds of the coming night began. The distant jukebox at the camp drifting on the wind, and the tinny loop of metallic tunes from the funfair.
In his mind he danced with her then, beneath the dubious glamour of the glitterball, his thigh gently kissing her crotch with the beat, her lips braiding his hair.
He smiled, for he’d be dead soon, and they’d be together.
CHAPTER ONE
Letter M Farm, near Ely
Tuesday, 27 December
Thirty-one years later
The hoar frost hung in the curved canopy of the magnolia tree, a construction of ice as perfect as coral. The weight of it made the trunk creak in the still, Arctic air. Below it the dewpond was frozen, steaming slightly in the winter sun, a single carp below the powdered surface dying for air.
Joe stood, admiring its gasping beauty, each of his own breaths a plume which drifted briefly, catching the rays of the sunset. Lighting the cigarette he had made indoors, he drew the marijuana deep into his shattered throat. He sat on his bench with a rowan at his back, heavy with blood-red berries.
‘Christmas,’ he said to no one, surveying the circular horizon of the Fen.
He expelled the smoke, and replaced it with a surge of supercooled air, willing it to purge him of the cancer that was destroying him.
The house was fifty yards to the north and the only visible building: Letter M Farm was – he had long admitted – as good a place to die as any.
Inside the four-square Georgian building the lights he’d left on shone into the winter afternoon, and through its double-glazed windows he could see the twin reflections of the open fire within.
He stood, turning to go back, swinging his sticks round to keep him steady. A wave of nausea made him stop, closing his eyes and wishing again he wasn’t alone. With eyes closed he drew deeply on the dope, letting the sweet relief flow like a current through his veins.
When he opened his eyes his wish had come true.
A man was at the house, coming out of the front door, putting something in his pocket. In his free hand he held a black bag, like a doctor’s, and Joe wondered if he’d come from the unit. He tried to shout but his throat failed him. Then he saw that the man’s head was obscured by a hood.
The man walked back towards the road where a small white van Joe hadn’t noticed before was parked amongst the uncut Leylandii. Joe hadn’t heard the vehicle approach and a thought insinuated itself: had it been there all day, waiting?
His eyes swam with the strain of focus. When they’d cleared the man was walking back towards him, a spade in one hand, a bucket in the other, the bag gone. From the way the man swung the pail as he strode over the frozen field Joe knew it was empty.
He shivered, aware that something had been planned, planned without him. He lifted a hand to take the cigarette from his lips knowing that even now, when he knew that death was coming anyway, fear could be a pungent emotion. Feebly he took another step forward, straightening his back and raising his arm in greeting when the man was almost upon him.
But there was no response from the face hidden within the shadowed hood. Joe scanned the fields, but the landscape was empty, a lifeless network of ditches, drains and reeds smoking with the mist of nightfall.
The man’s measured stride did not diminish. The pace of advance was relentless and suddenly Joe saw his eyes: a smoky grey-blue, the whites clear despite the shadow of the hood, the line of the mouth uncertain, a tongue-tip showing.
Joe took a step back but the man had timed his attack precisely. The spade swung out in a practised arc and crashed, the face turned flat, against his knee, which buckled and splintered beneath the wasted skin. He fell, the pain in his leg oddly distant. His cheek lay on the frozen peat, tiny perfect orbs of ice rolling away from the impact of his body. A hand gripped him by the collar and jerked his head round so that a small gold crucifix on a chain spilled out from around his neck and lay on the peat.
‘Who’s this?’ said the voice, younger than he’d expected, and perfectly modulated, stress-free. Its casual authority told him what he’d begun to suspect: that he might be granted his greatest wish, to die before his illness killed him.
Into his face was thrust a photograph, in a wooden frame, taken from the drawing-room mantelpiece. Four children pictured in the sun, a rolling beach, reeds, and a distant floating buoy in the middle of a channel cut through the sands.
‘This one,’ said the voice again, a gloved finger stabbing the figure of the child on the left. The boy with black hair and the immobile face.
‘We never knew,’ said Joe, desperate to understand. ‘We called him Philip – just Philip.’
Savagely the man let his victim’s head drop to the frozen earth and placed two fingers on his jugular, feeling the strength of his pulse. His assailant stood, surveying the horizon, silently listening.
‘You’re dying,’ he said finally. ‘I can’t wait.’
He took the spade and freed the fish from its icy prison in the pond, filled the bucket with glacial water and poured it carefully over Joe’s body, starting at the waist and working up to the chest and head.
The shock made Joe’s limbs jerk wildly. The second bucket stilled them.
CHAPTER TWO
Ely
Thursday, 29 December
Dryden had been unable to sleep, his propane gas heater failing to stop the frost penetrating the steel hull of his floating home – PK129. Long before dawn he had turned his head and watched as his breath melted the frost on the porthole. He’d gone up on deck in the moonlight and stood, crushed under the weight of stars, looking along the pale sinuous ribbon of the frozen river towards the distant cathedral two miles to the north.
After making a cup of coffee, he wrapped himself in his winter trench coat and sat in the open wheelhouse. The river was white, the swans dark by comparison, lined up exactly in mid-channel to survive the night-time visit of the fox. Across the silent landscape the only sound was the creak of ice, compressing the hull of the moored boat. In the distant miniature city of Ely nothing stirred except for the trundling amber light of a gritter, glimpsed intermittently on the edge of town. A single house, still decked in Christmas lights, blinked back.
For the thousandth time since he’d bought his floating home he ran a gloved hand over the brass plaque above the wheel.
DUNKIRK 1940
It was a romantic touch which had sealed her purchase. He caressed the cold metal once more, feeling history, seeing again in his imagination the boat weaving in the shallows between the flailing, desperate soldiers.
A seagull, the first of the morning, screeched over the cathedral’s Octagon Tower.
Cradling the hot mug Dryden traced with his eyes the outline of the town, west from the cathedral to the Victorian mass of The Tower Hospital. There his wife lay between cool linen sheets, locked still in the coma which had brought both their lives to an abrupt halt: stalling them in this twilight world between the past and the future.
Dryden stood, trying to shake off the depression which always lurked in the hour before dawn, and stepped out over the frozen water to the riverbank. His coarse jet-black hair was already iced white by the frost, a frame around the stonelike geometry of his face. The features were medieval, a Norman brow dominating perfectly symmetrical cool green eyes – a face from one of Chaucer’s tales. He could have passed for thirty-five, but by nightfall he’d look a decade older.
The moon cast a long shadow from his 6’ 2” frame and he paced the riverbank with it, trying not to think of the past. A sound brought relief, the crunch of tyres as a car left the high road and began to zigzag across the Fen towards Barham’s Dock, the long-abandoned inlet where PK129 was moored. He checked his watch: 7.25 a.m. His other life had begun.
The light was greyer now, the stars fading, as a lifeless colour crept into the December landscape. The white blanket of frost held more light than the pre-dawn sky.
He began to prepare the ritual round of coffees, looking forward to the egg sandwich which would be his in return. When he got back on deck Humph had parked the cab half a mile from the dock and was outside, circling it, his only daily exercise. The cabbie was not hard to see, even at that distance. He carried his startling weight lightly on ballerina’s feet, a skipping gyroscope teetering around his beloved Ford Capri, the only two-door taxi on the road.
The third circuit complete, Humph retrieved the greyhound, Boudicca, from the rear seat, taking from the boot the tennis machine Dryden had bought them both for Christmas. The cabbie set it on its tripod feet, putting a fluorescent green ball in the slot, leant back on the Capri’s peeling paintwork and pulled the handle, shooting the ball fifty yards along the riverbank. Boudicca, unleashed, moved like a swallow over the black peat, a graceful thudding icon of speed.
The ball returned, Humph loaded it again, and fired.
Dryden zipped up the green tarpaulin covering the wheel-house and joined them. They drank coffee wordlessly having extracted their egg sandwiches from the foil provided by Humph’s favourite greasy spoon cafe. Humph encompassed his in two bites, the oozing yellow yolk the only colour in the dawn light.
‘How cold is it?’ said Dryden.
‘Search me,’ said Humph, enjoying the dog’s careering run along the floodbank.
Dryden considered his friend’s planetary girth. ‘We don’t have the manpower,’ he said.
Boudicca returned and indecently nuzzled Dryden’s testicles.
‘Another death,’ said the cabbie, nodding towards the Capri. ‘On the radio.’
‘The cold?’
The cabbie nodded. ‘Some poor bastard on the Jubilee. Dead in his flat.’
The Jubilee was Ely’s sink estate, a warren of brick terraced streets enlivened by the occasional outbreak of ill-judged stone-cladding. Humph had a house there, his home since an acrimonious divorce, which he contrived hardly ever to visit, sleeping instead in the cab in a series of convenient lay-bys.
‘What time?’ said Dryden, pulling open the Capri’s passenger door and bracing himself for the familiar screech of rust from its hinges.
Humph let Boudicca into the back seat and then lowered himself into the driver’s seat by holding on to the door and the roof. The Capri listed alarmingly, the suspension twanging underneath.
‘Neighbour found him late last night when he saw the windows open,’ said Humph.
Dryden tried to imagine it. The flat, up in the sky, with frozen air blowing through it.
He checked his watch again. The Crow’s deadline was still hours away, but it was press day and the journalist in him needed a decent tale.
‘Let’s take a look,’ he said, and their moods lifted, buoyed up by the mutual relief that they had somewhere to go.
CHAPTER THREE
At the foot of the stairwell of High Park Flats a puddle of urine had frozen solid. There was another puddle in the lift, frozen too, but the colour of no known bodily fluid.
Dryden pressed the button marked 12 but the lift didn’t move. The doors did a shimmy, closed once, and then retreated. Out on the tarmac he could see Humph in the Capri, smirking.
Dryden trudged up the first flight of stairs, the walls a maze of graffiti except for a Day-Glo yellow poster offering help for the aged during the cold snap. Twenty-four flights of stairs later Dryden arrived on Frobisher, the level where Declan McIlroy had lived until the early hours of that day. There was a wind up here, and it took another five degrees off the temperature. Dryden’s breath billowed, and the air made his throat ache. The cold snap had lasted a week now, a dry blast of Arctic air bringing clear skies and showers of oversized snowflakes.
Dryden wrapped his greatcoat around himself and felt the ice in his hair.
On the drive into town he’d rung the station at Ely for the bare details: a neighbour had come onto the landing to rescue his wailing cat, stranded outside by a frozen flap. He’d noticed that the landing window of McIlroy’s flat was open, unusual itself at 2 in the morning, but alarming given the freezer-like conditions. The neighbour found the door unlocked and entered to find McIlroy dead in an armchair in the living room, the TV on, a cup of coffee frozen in the mug beside him. All the room’s windows were open. Death by hypothermia had been the doctor’s call. There’d be an inquest, but McIlroy had a long history of mental illness, and had attempted suicide twice before: both times using a knife.
Dryden peered over the edge of the lift-shaft wall down at the car park as a seagull flew below him. High Park Flats had been built in the 1960s and was the centrepiece of the Jubilee Estate. Fifteen storeys high it tussled, controversially, with the cathedral’s West Tower to dominate the horizon. Each floor had an external walkway linking the front doors of each flat. McIlroy’s was No. 126, a corner flat, the last on the gangway.
Dryden walked to the door and tried the handle: locked. He was surprised to find the police and emergency services had already left the scene. There was no sign anyone had died here, let alone lived. He knocked once, twice, and waited, looking south towards the city centre and beyond. The rush hour had begun and headlights in a long necklace stretched out east across the Fen towards Newmarket.
Dryden looked through the window but could see little in the gloom – the dull glint of unpolished taps, orange Formica kitchen units and a rusted gas-fired boiler.
‘He’s not there,’ said a voice.
Dryden turned to find an elderly man, perhaps seventy years of age, wrapped in a tartan dressing gown over a jumper and jogging pants, and clutching a mug of tea.
‘I heard – about what happened,’ said Dryden, taking a step back. ‘My name’s Dryden, from The Crow.’
‘Tell him to fuck off,’ said a woman’s voice from the half-open doorway behind the neighbour.
Dryden nodded towards the flat. ‘Duchess of Kent visiting, is she?’
The neighbour grinned, nodding. ‘Don’t mind her. Her eyes are bad – shingles,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘Buster. Buster Timms. I’m the one what found him.’ He nodded at No. 126, and continued to nod. Wanna look?’ he asked.
‘The police?’ said Dryden, but Buster was already unlocking the door.
‘They ain’t bothered. I’ve been in and out all night with tea. They’ve gone now – told me to keep an eye on the place …’ He clicked his dental plate with practised ease.
‘What was he like – McIlroy?’ asked Dryden, as Buster led the way down a short corridor into the living room. It had two picture windows, one looking out east, the other north. There was a small balcony beyond a French window on which stood a single wooden chair, an ashtray beneath was full of ice. The sun up, the room was flooded with light.
Buster ignored his question. ‘I found him there – in the chair. Stiff as a board – honest.’ Buster beamed. ‘Tragic. He wasn’t forty.’
‘Right – but what was he like?’
‘Declan? Mad, I guess. You know. Mental – problems all along really. We’re just neighbours you know, there’s no point getting involved.’
Dryden nodded. ‘There’s no doors,’ he said.
Buster looked round, running his finger down a door jamb to where the hinges had been. ‘He took ’em off. They’re in the spare. Don’t ask me – but I can guess.’ He winked, clicking the plate of his false teeth up to reveal a sudden glimpse of cherry-red gum. Dryden’s stomach flipped the egg sandwich. ‘Reckon he’d been inside, you know. But he never said.’
Dryden walked into the kitchen. On a Formica-topped table a bunch of carrots lay, the roots still entangled with clay. On the draining board some newspaper was spread under a cauliflower.
‘Liked his veg then,’ said Dryden, opening the fridge, which was switched off and empty.
‘Eats nothing else. He had an allotment – down there.’
They looked out of the greasy window, away from town towards the distant gash of the railway line. Sheds and huts dotted a landscape of bean poles and serried frostbitten greens, a far-flung shanty town of rotting wood and plastic sheeting.
Dryden opened the cupboard over the sink. This was where he’d kept his tea – Darjeeling, Earl Grey, Peppermint, Camomile.
‘Blimey,’ said Dryden, examining one of the packets, which was almost empty.
Buster leered, and Dryden felt a rare emotion stirring: acute dislike.
‘What’s funny?’ he said, making Buster take a step back.
‘He drank,’ said Buster. ‘Booze. The tea kept him going when he was outta cash.’
Dryden picked up a single glass tumbler on the draining board and wafted it under his nose: it had been rinsed but the aroma of whisky clung to it like the scent of apples.
Buster’s teeth were beginning to rattle.
They went into the hall. There was an electricity meter and Dryden noted that the black enamel dial showed it was nearly full: £22.50.
The first door off the corridor was a single bedroom, a sleeping bag on top of a mattress, no carpet. Next was the spare, or rather it had been used as the spare, but had been intended as the master bedroom. Tea crates held an assortment of wiring and electrical circuitry. By the wall were two old TV sets and a video recorder. There was a sturdy wooden table – the only decent furniture in the flat – set out as a workbench and covered in newspaper. Four of the flat’s five internal doors stood against the far wall.
‘He could fix anything,’ volunteered Buster, crowding in by Dryden’s shoulder. ‘Mostly for thems that lives in the flats. He was cheap.’
‘And this?’ Dryden pulled an easel from the wall, below it a sheet spattered with several colours of paint.
Buster shrugged. Back in the hall, Dryden filled his lungs with the damp air. There was a storage cupboard, but when Dryden tried the handle it was locked.
‘Key?’
Buster shook his head: ‘I only had the front. We swapped the spares. The police didn’t seem bothered.’
‘Short of money a lot, was he?’ Dryden asked, heading back into the living room.
‘Yeah. But he got benefit – for the illness.’
‘Sick?’
‘Coughing. TB, he said. That’s when I knew something was wrong last night – I listened, but there was no coughing. He always coughs in his sleep. Drives her mad,’ he added, nodding towards the partition wall.
‘But you didn’t check?’
Buster clutched the dressing-gown cord. ‘He liked his privacy.’
Over the tiled fireplace hung a framed picture, two men on a bench by a magnolia tree. The wide Fen stretched behind them, a pond in the foreground. Dryden touched the frame.
‘That’s his mate – Joe,’ said Buster. ‘Haven’t seen him much. Declan said he had throat cancer, that he couldn’t travel no more. He’s got a place out there …’ He nodded to the window that faced north towards the open Fen.
Dryden studied the faces: Joe, white close-cropped hair, expensive, quality shirt and shoes, a cigarette trailing smoke in the summer air. And Declan, slight by comparison, shoulders turned forward, chest sunken, wrists narrow and frail.
Despite the friendship Dryden could sense the loneliness in the flat. ‘Any other friends? Christmas, whenever?’
Buster shook his head, but Dryden was pretty sure he’d missed the question, so he asked again.
‘A sister. Marcie. She brings him some food, checks on him. She came yesterday.’
There was a cheap pine sideboard in the lounge. On it was a bowl of nuts, the only festive touch in the flat. Inside, Dryden found glasses: odd wine goblets, dimpled pint mugs and a single cracked Champagne flute. Each one sat upside-down, precisely over a dust-free circle. All except one: a whisky tumbler.
CHAPTER FOUR
Dryden sat at his desk, looking down into Market Street through the motif of The Crow etched in the frosted glass of the newsroom window. Below the strutting bird ran the paper’s motto since its foundation in 1882: Bene agendo nunquam defessus (Never weary of doing good).
‘That’s me,’ said Dryden, searching under the desktop clutter for his mug.
He retrieved a 1 euro coin from the plastic tub under the coffee machine and let it drop through the slot. The machine hissed, the steam puffing out into the nipped air. The cathedral’s bell tolled 9.00 a.m. and the radiators began to reverberate as the near-freezing water ran to the shuddering boiler.
Cradling the cup, Dryden looked out again into the street. Sunshine cut down the pavements from the east, and the rooftops opposite steamed. Icicles hung from The Crow’s gutters, but none of them dripped, while a single snowflake, an inch wide, fell like a feather.
He sat and booted up his PC. This is how he liked offices: empty.
But it wouldn’t be empty for long. It was press day and, though The Crow rarely buzzed, it was nevertheless likely to hum by lunchtime. Each of the three journalists’ desks was obscured by creeping glaciers of paper through which punched the occasional metal spike. A subs’ bench ran along one wall complete with two cumbersome layout computers which predated the flat-screen era and were three feet thick.
Two ashtrays sat between the PCs and were on the same scale, being slightly too small to double up as hubcaps. The room held little of the romantic appeal of newspapers which had made Dryden choose his trade more than a decade before. That had been on Fleet Street, and the office had shuddered every time the presses ran in the basement. But now the smell of printer’s ink was just a memory, like yesterday’s headlines.
On Dryden’s lap the office cat, Splash, slept on its back, its pink paw pads extended. He stroked her, envying the independence as much as the fur coat.
His phone rang, making them both jump.
‘Got five?’ He knew the voice, feminine and forceful, and could almost smell the acrid scent of the builder’s tea in the big no-nonsense mug.
‘Vee?’
‘Pop over,’ she said. ‘I’ve got something you’d like.’
He slipped out the back of The Crow’s offices into the old print yard and around into Market Street, then down a treacherously iced alleyway to High Street. Vee’s office was over one of the town centre’s myriad charity shops, this one by the Sacrist’s Gate, the Norman gateway into the cathedral grounds. A Gothic shadow had left this darkened archway in permafrost since the cold snap had brought even the noontime temperatures below freezing. Beneath the cobbles here Dryden recalled that builders in the sixties had found the skulls of the cathedral’s monastic community, stacked in a charnel house. He shivered, wrapping his great black trench coat more closely to his thin frame.
In the charity shop a pensioner was trying on hats. A two-bar electric fire provided the shop assistant, who was asleep, with some warmth. Before her on the counter lay an offertory plate sprinkled with silver and copper coins. Up a spiral stone staircase Dryden found Vee’s office. Even here, amongst the damp cardboard boxes and the unstripped floorboards, Vee was patently top-drawer, a real-life living remnant of old money and radical liberal politics. She was a pocket battleship amongst pensioners: compact, with sinewy hands and an outdoor tan. One of her eyes had been blinded in youth, and the pupil was now a single white moon, which watered slightly. She rented the office, headquarters of the Hypothermia Action Trust, which she had founded, and a single bedroom above. That, and a £1m bank balance, was all anyone needed to know about Vee Hilgay.
‘Another one this morning,’ she said as Dryden came in, folding himself into a wobbly captain’s chair.
‘I know. I’ve been out – to High Park.’
She nodded. ‘That’s the eighth in a week,’ she said, setting down a pint mug of tea decorated with a picture of Tony Benn. She poured Dryden a cup from the brown pot on her desk. Then she went to a narrow lancet window set in the stone wall, opened it and retrieved a thermometer.
‘Minus 3 degrees centigrade. The average for the month is minus 2 – that’s the lowest since ’47. Last night it fell to minus 10 out at Mildenhall. This could be a disaster; someone else will die today, and tomorrow …’
Dryden made a small indecipherable mark in his notebook to help him remember the quote. ‘What do you want me to say?’
‘Look at this one,’ she said, dropping a file on the table. Dryden opened it, bracing himself for emotional blackmail. There was a picture of an elderly woman, white hair recently set in a geriatric helmet, the skull just showing through.
‘Millie Thompson. Eighty-six. Found dead in bed at Manea three days ago,’ said Vee. ‘On the mat three cheques from the social security and her pension. She was too cold to go out and she had a fault in the gas boiler – she’d rung the board but told them not to bother to rush out. She went to bed instead – that was ten days ago. Ten days without hot food, or heat. The cottage was damp. When they found her she was frozen between the blankets.’
Dryden took the head and shoulders picture. ‘I can do something – wrap it up with this morning’s.’
Vee smiled, knowing that Dryden’s career as a journalist had been severely hampered by a conscience. She checked her notes. ‘Declan McIlroy. Psychiatric patient – so, confused, or desperate?’
Dryden slurped his tea. ‘I guess …’ He held Vee’s good eye for just a moment too long.
She caressed the Tony Benn mug. ‘You don’t think the cold did it?’
‘Didn’t say that, Vee. Just think the police are a bit quick to tie up the paperwork on deaths like this … I mean, if I was a murderer I’d grab my chance. You’d never get spotted. It’s like the Blitz. You can’t tell me a few scores didn’t get settled on the bomb sites …’
‘And Millie too?’ she said, tapping the file.
‘I didn’t say that. It’s McIlroy I’m talking about – just McIlroy.’
Vee let the silence stretch. Dryden looked out the window, the West Tower of the cathedral dominated the view, frozen water glistening like slug trails down the Norman stonework. Another giant snowflake fell.
‘Neighbour says he’s broke most of the time. He does part-time electrical work – but it’s smalltime stuff. He’s on sickness benefit. But the meter’s jammed with coins – more than twenty quid’s worth. Most people wait till the coin drops and the lights go out …’
‘But he’s confused …’
‘I guess. And he drinks. So perhaps he stuffed his benefit in the meter to make sure it didn’t get spent at the offy. And …’
‘Would you like it to be murder?’ asked Vee astutely.
Dryden bridled. ‘No. Not really.’ He stood. ‘I’ll run something – with the usual advice and emergency numbers. It’s all I can do …’ Dryden was less than enthused by the cold-snap story, partly because the whole of eastern England was hit so there was little unusual in the situation in the Fens, and partly because The Crow’s readership shared a deep-rooted, immoral disregard for anyone who wasn’t a star in Neighbours.
Back at The Crow the A team had arrived. The editor, Septimus Henry Kew, was installed behind his glass partition checking the proofs. The news editor, Charlie Bracken, was at his desk, sweating into a blue shirt he’d had on all week. There was an aroma of stale alcohol in the air, which emanated from Charlie’s skin and the half-open deep drawer in his desk where he kept an emergency bottle of Bell’s.
Dryden brought his screen to life with a single touch of the keyboard and began, instantly, to type:
An Ely man was today found frozen to death in his armchair – the latest victim of the cold snap which has claimed the lives of eight vulnerable, frail or elderly victims in a single week.
Dryden tapped on as Garry Pymoor, The Crow’s junior reporter, arrived enveloped in his habitual full-length black leather coat. Garry’s balance was poor, having suffered from meningitis as a child, so as he threw himself into his chair he nearly missed.
‘Got a goody,’ he said to Dryden, trying to knock a cigarette out of a packet with one hand while clipping his phone headset over his head with the other.
Dryden braced himself. Garry’s news judgement was as sound as his semicircular canals.
‘They’ve issued a warning to parents that there’s a dope supplier targeting kids. The schoolgate market. Cheap cannabis for young teenagers – twelve-to fifteen-year-olds mainly. They reckon someone is growing locally and flogging it cut-price. Probably a farmer. What d’ya reckon?’
Dryden nodded. ‘OK. Get a quote from the NFU. Tell Charlie – it’s got to be worth the front.’
Dryden put his story on hold and hit calls: the last round of checks with the emergency services before the final deadline of The Crow. There was an RTA on the bypass and a small house fire at a village near the edge of town. And one item worth a par at least – a warning from the police for householders to watch out for bogus plumbers touting for work on burst pipes. A pair of conmen had already made off with one customer’s life savings.
‘What’s the splash?’ Dryden asked the room.
Charlie jerked in his seat, realising it was supposed to be his job to have an answer to this question.
‘I guess it’s this bloke in the flats – and the rest of the cold stuff. Wrap it all up in five hundred words. And you’d better read this insider on St Vincent’s … Henry’s had the lawyer make some changes.’
Dryden tapped a key on his PC which brought up Charlie’s news list. The news editor’s judgement was often suspect, especially this close to opening time. Dryden scrolled down the list, checking that he’d called the right story as the splash – otherwise he’d be overruled by the editor at the last minute and Dryden would have to slash his copy and bump up a rival candidate.
* News Schedule: The Crow – Thursday December 29 2005
Front.
Mayor’s charity raises £2,000 for Christmas Appeal –
PIX. Pymoor
Three injured as car ditches in Thirty Foot Drain – PIX.
Dryden
Row over late licence for town club on New Year’s Eve.
Pymoor
Cold snap claims fresh victim: wrap up on the big freeze. X-ref pix inside. Staff and PA wire copy.
Page 2.
LEAD: New victims come forward in child abuse probe at St Vincent’s. Dryden
Village school hit by Christmas arson. £12,000 worth of damage. PIX. Pymoor
Dog which bit baby put down. Dryden
Eight drunk and disorderly cases dealt with by magistrates. ‘Binge culture’ attacked. Pymoor
Page 3.
LEAD: TV star to open bingo hall revamp – PIX.
Pymoor
Littleport man ‘made life misery’ for whole street. PA court copy
Fen Skating Committee meets on go-ahead for race … file PIC.
My View: bishop writes blah blah …
Class Snap: Little Downham Church School 1923.
Page 5.
LEAD: Chittering man convicted of bigamy – again.
File pix of all three weddings. Pymoor
Ice buckles sluice gates at Denver – PIX. Dryden
Lantern School tops county league tables – PIX. Dryden
Page 7.
News In Brief
Insurers reclassify Fenland properties after survey shows flooding would inundate 100,000 homes, (lift from nationals)
Christmas burglaries round-up. Pymoor
Courts may reopen 30-year-old murder case – PA
Bolting horse destroys greenhouse at Manea. Dryden
OAP heated tea mornings – listing for the week: includes cathedral Lady Chapel.
Dryden filed the list away. ‘Bloody hell. It’s a bit thin.’ He noted in particular that any story tagged ‘TV star’ clearly involved a nonentity as they hadn’t used the real name. Ely typically attracted those who had never made the A-list, but would one day see the Z-list. What was worse, the news editor had missed a good story. The magistrates warning over binge drinking could have been run up into a bigger story ahead of New Year and spliced in with the row over late opening. He sent Charlie an internal e-mail suggesting the change.
Then he called up the story he’d written on St Vincent’s, the latest wriggle in a long-running saga surrounding a local orphanage. The intro had been significantly altered from the original by the lawyers – toning down the drama. Dryden cut out his own byline and put in a generic replacement. If they wanted to butcher his copy he’d rather it didn’t carry his name.
By Our Own Staff
Lawyers probing abuse of children at a Catholic orphanage in Ely have uncovered evidence from two further potential victims who were at the home in the 1970s.
A spokesman said yesterday that they were now dealing with five separate cases of mistreatment of children aged 9-15 involving beatings, solitary confinement, and withholding food and bedding.
‘We feel the weight of evidence is now such that these complaints must be addressed in court,’ said Hugh Appleyard, of Appleyard & Co., solicitors for the alleged victims. A civil action is planned which would seek substantial damages against the Catholic Diocese of East
Cambridgeshire, which ran the Orphanage of St Vincent de Barfleur.
The orphanage, at Lane End, Ely, closed in 1989, although the nearby church is still open.
Fr Ignatius O’Halloran, a spokesman for the diocese, said: ‘We are co-operating with the authorities and will do everything we can to ascertain the facts of each of these cases.’
Ely police said they were in touch with the diocese and the county council’s social services department over the cases, and that a file may be submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service. Criminal charges may follow.
The priest in charge of St Vincent’s during the time when it is alleged most of the abuse took place has not been officially named, and has declined to make any comment.
‘The lawyer’s chucked a lot of the good stuff,’ said Dryden, rolling his cursor down through the 6ooword story. Garry booed ritualistically. ‘And ditched the priest’s name.’
Charlie tugged at the collar of his blue shirt and Dryden guessed he’d cut it – rather than the lawyers – just to make sure the story was doubly safe.
Dryden filed the story back into the production basket, failing to suppress a surge of indignation on behalf of the victims of St Vincent’s. His own Catholic education had been largely benign, but there had been enough random violence and institutionalised cruelty to allow him some level of empathy with the abused.
He refilled his coffee, recycling the 1 euro coin which could be extracted from the rear of the vending machine, and then bashed out the rest of the splash, taking in 200 words from the Press Association on the weather, including reports of freak snowflakes due to the exceptional cold but dry conditions. A meteorologist was quoted as predicting that the world record – a flake fifteen inches by eight inches which fell in Montana in 1887 – was unlikely to be beaten.
Then Dryden rewrote Garry’s story on the cannabis supplier so that it made sense. Garry, pathetically grateful, offered to buy him a drink at The Fenman bar opposite now that the press-day lunchtime had officially arrived: it was 11.30 a.m.
But Dryden was still haunted by the claustrophobic Declan McIlroy. He shared with him that oppressive fear of the locked door, and was still intrigued by the scent of freshly imbibed whisky. What kind of man has a final drink and then washes up? And whose was the other glass, stashed carefully back in the sideboard?
‘A walk first,’ said Dryden, standing. ‘Come on,’ he added to Garry. They headed for the door, both of them showing their mobile phones to Charlie. ‘Any questions, we’re news gathering.’ The news editor smiled, dreaming of his first pint.
CHAPTER FIVE
The long shadow of High Park Flats fell just short of the allotments Dryden had seen from Declan McIlroy’s front room: the vast penumbra lay instead across wasteland, the centrepiece of which was the rusted chassis of an abandoned car – the make unrecognisable now – blotched with fire marks around the wheel arches and empty windows. Two boys in peaked US-style caps threw stones at the metalwork from a pitcher’s mound made of a pile of discarded wooden pallets. Schoolchildren, bored by the holiday and ejected from the warmth of the flats, had lit a fire in an oil drum and were poking it with sticks. A smaller child, just toddling, its skin chilled red under skimpy clothing, played with a plastic playroom oven.
Dryden and Garry crossed quickly into the weak sunlight beyond. Here a picket fence had once marked the boundary of the allotments and remnants of the whitewashed wood remained, interspersed with planks and flotsam, and a vicious spiral of razor wire.
‘What we looking for?’ said Garry, fingering his spots.
‘Let’s see if we can find someone. Anyone,’ said Dryden, ignoring the question and looking for signs of life. A scarecrow decorated with a child’s beach windmills caught his eye – a few sails turning in a sudden breeze – but otherwise the landscape was still.
Dryden crashed a foot down on the earth, managing only to dislodge a few crumbs of the hard-frozen soil.
‘Jeez,’ said Garry, looking out over the broken-down bean poles, the clumps of iced pampas grass and the dotted huts and sheds.
They walked down a central path. Most plots were empty now, the heavy clay of the Isle of Ely dusted white while a few carrot tops and gone-to-seed vegetables stood out – burnt black by days of sub-zero temperatures. The only colour came from the random plastic water butts.
In the far corner of the allotments there was a narrow gap in a hedge, beyond which a lazy line of smoke rose into the sky like a twisted gut. They stood at the opening, looking in, but hesitating to break a spell which seemed to hang over the spot. The plots beyond were better kept, with neat, rubbish-free drills, the wide enclave surrounded by a high hedge. Two poles had been erected at either side of the entrance and from a rope hung between them a row of dead crows dangled, together with a fox and a desiccated cat.
‘Guess they couldn’t afford a welcome mat,’ said Dryden.
A shed at the centre of the field was larger than the rest and boasted a stovepipe, from which the smoke was churning, occasional black mixed with orange-tinged white. The windows of the hut were misted, but inside Dryden could see figures moving.
‘Carrot City,’ said Dryden, as Garry fumbled for a cigarette in the pockets of his oversized leather coat.
Then Dryden saw the dog. It was chained to a ring slipped through a spike in the ground. It was a regulation Dobermann, with regulation retractable lips. Dryden, a physical coward of considerable range, took a step backwards. Dogs – other than Boudicca – were just one of the things he was afraid of. But they were one of the things he was afraid of most.
The guard dog hadn’t barked, always – in Dryden’s experience – a very bad sign. It stood, waiting to see if the intruders would persevere. Dryden tried to gauge the length of the chain, drawing a virtual circle across the allotment’s shanty-town geography.
He edged forward, aware that his most terrifying nightmare was to be seen as a coward, and that dogs can smell fear. The Dobermann was up and running in a terrifyingly short second. Dryden, rooted, felt his guts heave and his pulse rate hit 120 before the hound was six feet away, where the chain snapped rigid and wrenched at the dog’s throat, tumbling it back in a heap. It rose, dazed, and exposed rosy pink gums and a set of textbook canines.
‘Back and sit.’ It was a woman’s voice, resonant but not masculine. The dog folded itself down, sphinx-like, and rested its chin on its giant paws.
She was standing outside the hut with what looked to Dryden’s tutored eye like a pint of beer – even from fifty yards. Garry pushed him in the back and they edged past the dog, Dryden’s eyes fixed firmly on the stovepipe smoke in the sky.
They passed two ‘PRIVATE – MEMBERS ONLY’ signs en route to the shed and an auxiliary notice which read: ‘BEWARE – POISONS USED’.
‘Can I help?’ said the woman when they were up close, in the tone of voice which means the opposite.
Her face was extraordinary – or rather her skin was. Dryden guessed she was in her late thirties or early forties, but in many ways her calendar age was irrelevant: she just looked weatherbeaten. Her tan was that specific shade of ochre which is the result of exposure to wind and rain as well as sun, the face patterned by systems of small lines – especially around the eyes, which were wet and a vivid green. In many ways she was beautiful: the thick black hair sucking in the light, the skin, Dryden imagined, carrying the exhilarating scent of sea salt. It was a face that had spent a lifetime under an open sky.
But the eyes held him. There was something mesmeric about the eyes. Why was she looking over Dryden’s shoulder? He looked behind. High Park Flats stood like a gravestone on the near-horizon, a single Christmas tree lit in a dark window.
Suddenly he remembered she’d asked a question. ‘Yes. Sorry. My name’s Dryden – I work for The Crow – it’s about Declan McIlroy.’
A man appeared at her shoulder, wrapped in a donkey jacket. He had a narrow jutting head like a vulture, held forward and low between his shoulders, and his hair was shorn to a grey stubble. He put his arm around the woman’s waist and rocked her so that she leant against him.
‘It’s OK,’ she said, touching his free hand, and turning back to Dryden. ‘You can come in. We know about Declan.’
She went first, reaching out with both hands to touch the sides of the door frame, the fingertips fumbling slightly to find the wooden edges. Which is when Dryden realised she was blind, that the green eyes which reflected everything saw nothing.
Inside it was hot. The stovepipe didn’t rise directly through the ceiling but crossed the shed in a diagonal to reach the external chimney. It radiated the heat, and around it on various chairs and wooden crates sat half a dozen men. In the corner stood a large plastic barrel and the heavy air was scented with a perfume Dryden knew well: home brew.
‘Welcome to the Gardeners’ Arms,’ said the woman, with a tired smile. ‘I’m Marcie, Marcie Sley.’
Dryden couldn’t stop himself glancing at the barrel. ‘Who’s the brewer?’
‘It’s a co-op,’ said the man in the donkey jacket who’d stood by Marcie. He held out a hand like the bucket on a mechanical digger. ‘John Sley.’ Dryden noted the grey stubble on his chin and guessed he was a decade older than his wife. Sley took a swig of beer, and Dryden glimpsed wrecked teeth. ‘There’s an association – of allotment holders. This is the clubhouse, if you like. We do tea as well …’
Garry beamed. ‘Beer’s fine.’
Two more glasses were found and filled. The beer came flat, but tasted malty and Dryden sensed the alcoholic kick. ‘Strong?’
‘Six point five per cent,’ said Sley, and Garry whistled happily.
Dryden nodded. ‘I’m sorry – you’re Declan’s sister?’ Marcie sat down suddenly, letting the silence say yes. ‘I just wanted to know a bit more about him. I know it’s very soon – too soon – but the health people are keen to flag up the dangers of the cold for the elderly … the vulnerable. It’s a terrible accident. What do you think happened?’
Marcie fingered something at her throat. A crucifix, Dryden noted.
‘Declan wasn’t well,’ she said, sipping the beer. ‘He’d been confused and he drank – drank too much. Sometimes he’d open the windows to ease the anxiety of being inside.’
Dryden let the silence lengthen, knowing that the less he pushed the more they’d talk.
‘What did the police say?’ said Marcie eventually. ‘I rang this morning, when we heard … I’ll have to clear the flat.’ Her voice caught, and her husband refilled glasses to give her time to recover. Then he sat next to her, one of his bony hands gently massaging her neck.
‘Not much. They think it’s an accident too. But Declan had a drink with someone last night,’ said Dryden. ‘Perhaps yesterday afternoon. Anyone visit?’ he asked, letting them think the police might have their suspicions too.
Marcie stood and flipped open the cast-iron door on the stove with a length of kindling. The sudden flare of red flame cast half her face into shadow. ‘I popped in with his lunch, but we didn’t have a drink. Why did they say that?’
Dryden could sense the atmosphere tipping towards antagonistic, so he ignored the question. ‘How was he?’ he said, sipping the beer and guessing that John Sley’s estimate of the alcoholic content was wrong by a factor of two.
It was Marcie who answered; all the other heads were down, examining the beer. ‘Declan’s been low, we all knew he had problems. The winters were always worse – nothing to do down here.’
Dryden nodded. ‘He liked it then – being outside? I saw the flat – there’s no doors …’
‘Claustrophobia,’ said Marcie. ‘He wanted to be outside all the time really. But the TB was bad … he’s had it since childhood. We had to make him stay in over the cold snap. I should have popped back …’
John Sley shook his head. ‘You couldn’t have done anything. If he’d decided—’ He stopped the thought there and the silence was profound, marked by the cooing of a wood pigeon.
‘He’d tried to kill himself before, hadn’t he?’ asked Dryden, happier now the subject had been broached. ‘The windows of the flat were thrown open when they found him. Did you, any of you, ever think he’d try to take his own life?’
Marcie Sley’s hand went to her throat. One man, thin, with a small, silent dog held by a rope lead, lit a roll-up cigarette.
‘Like you said, he’d tried before,’ said Marcie. ‘But when I saw him I thought he was well – almost happy. He hadn’t been drinking – I know that.’
Dryden thought about the electricity meter stuffed with cash, and the malt whisky.
‘There was a friend in particular, wasn’t there – Joe, was it?’
Several heads nodded. ‘I’d really like to talk to him – you know, some more background, Perhaps he visited him?’
‘Joe likes his privacy,’ said John Sley. ‘We could pass a message.’
Dryden jotted his mobile number down on his card. ‘He can ring any time. What did you say his surname was?’
‘We didn’t,’ said Sley, seeing them to the door, where he called the dog to heel.
‘Thanks for the beers,’ said Dryden as they edged out. ‘Security’s good round here. Kids nick the veg, do they?’
‘If they do, they don’t do it twice,’ he said, shutting the door in Dryden’s face. Beyond the frosted glass he saw Sley’s back retreat towards the convivial glow of the fire; but for them the Gardeners’ Arms was closed.
CHAPTER SIX
Charlie, The Crow’s lightly soused news editor, rang Dryden before they’d got off the Jubilee Estate.
‘That you?’ Dryden noted the edge of panic and the subtle background noise that could only be the bar of the Fenman. He heard glasses kiss in a toast and the sickly notes of the Christmas number one.
It sounded warm and friendly – but he wasn’t going there.
‘Henry’s read the piece on the child-abuse claims – it’s all fine,’ said Charlie, taking a slurp. ‘But the lawyers sent him an e-mail. They wanted to know – you did put this stuff to the priest, yeah? You said no comment in the copy – but was that no comment after he’d heard what we were going to say or no comment because you couldn’t get to him?’
‘The latter,’ said Dryden, as Garry danced on his toes, eager to join the ritual Fenman session.
‘Shit,’ said Charlie, aware that he should have asked the question sooner.
‘But we didn’t name him,’ said Dryden.
‘The lawyers say that might not be good enough. Anyone who knew the set-up at St Vincent’s knows who we are talking about. Henry says can you get round there and have another go – if you can’t get through, drop in a note with the details on it and tell him to get back asap if he wants to make a comment. That way we’re covered. Well, we’re better off than if we don’t do it, anyway. OK?’
Dryden felt the beginnings of a headache, and the cold was penetrating between his shoulder blades, inserting a sharp pain like a knife wound.
‘It’s pointless,’ he said, clicking the phone off. ‘Arse coverer.’
Dryden rang Humph and set Garry free, the junior reporter heading off towards town. The cabbie picked Dryden up at the bottom of the steps that led to Declan McIlroy’s flat. The Capri’s interior was now heated to Humph’s preferred temperature: 82°F. There was a smell of warm plastic, bacon and dog. Boudicca lay on the back seat, the greyhound’s great head the only part of her body on the tartan rug.
‘She was sleeping,’ said Humph, reproaching Dryden for the call.
‘Sorry. It may have escaped your notice, but I have to work for a living. Lane End. Chop-chop.’ Dryden ran a hand through his thick black hair, letting the fingers stick like a comb. This was the kind of useless errand he’d become a journalist to avoid. If the priest objected to anything in the story it was entirely academic as the paper had already gone. The presses were turning, there was no going back.
He looked at his face in the rear-view mirror: the green eyes dimmed, the immobile medieval face set on precisely geometric lines beneath the shock of black hair: he ran a hand through it again and tried to relax.
