The Coldest Blood

by Jim Kelly

  There was a cheer and everyone on the Fen turned to watch two skaters leaving the starting line to test the course, each with an arm held at the back, the other swinging like a pendulum.

  ‘Do you think he committed suicide, then?’

  ‘I guess. But it wasn’t characteristic.’

  Dryden was confused. ‘You said the violence was often directed against himself?’

  ‘Yes. But that was violence. The manifestation was always immediate and pretty brutal. A slash with a broken bottle, a head-butt into concrete, that kind of thing. This was very… passive, I guess. Very controlled. It wasn’t what I would have expected. But then the pressures were new…’

  They walked on, Dryden allowing the silence to acknowledge the fact that Bardolph had led him on.

  ‘The court heard this?’ he asked gently.

  ‘No. It was in reports; the coroner will have read them.’ Bardolph sighed. ‘But they’d have to confirm if you asked – just leave me out of it, OK?’

  Dryden nodded. ‘Of course.’

  ‘The case against St Vincent’s – the Catholic orphanage. Declan was a victim. You know the background, I’ve read your stories in The Crow. That was a pressure in itself. But we’d had to… unearth is the right word, unearth the past. It brought out the issues, you know, the causes of his lack of self-respect. It was a painful time.’

  Dryden saw the mottled face of Father John Martin, the birthmark livid against the cool blue eye.

  ‘He was one of the victims who had just been identified?’

  Bardolph nodded. ‘That’s right, which means the pressures were new.’

  ‘It might not have been suicide,’ said Dryden, turning away, looking back at the cathedral, the West Tower now lost in its own private snowstorm. ‘Declan had a visitor the day he died. A man claiming to be a doctor giving advice on the cold. I don’t think he was there to keep Declan warm.’

  Bardolph shook his head in disbelief, but Dryden left the thought hanging, unresolved. ‘Was anything else on Declan’s mind? Any other worries?’

  Bardolph shook his head again, putting a glove back over his hand, and Dryden knew he’d lied by the flicker of his eyelids and the pinching of his nose.

  Dryden nodded as if he understood. ‘At the very least it deserves investigation.’

  Bardolph nodded, stamping his foot on the ice, impatient to get back to the Eskimo hole.

  ‘Funeral?’ asked Dryden.

  Bardolph pulled his attention back to his former client. ‘Cremation – it’s private. Then they’ll scatter the ashes. He would have liked that. Claustrophobia – worst case I’ve ever come across, actually. He had to be sedated in prison. That all goes back to childhood too…’ Bardolph let his gaze slip away over the ice. ‘Spent most of his time out on that balcony, twelve storeys up.’

  Dryden nodded, as if sharing an old truth. So Buster Timms was right about his next door neighbour’s criminal past. Dryden thought of the doorless flat and the windows thrown open to the night. ‘It’s getting colder,’ he said, his jaw suddenly juddering with a shiver.

  Bardolph grinned, watching the circling pair of speed skaters. ‘I know. Isn’t it wonderful?’

  Dryden walked to the riverbank and found a bench free of snow. The more light he let fall on Declan McIlroy’s life the more the shadows seemed to deepen. He felt the first lethal pangs of depression. The cold was getting to his heart, the chill in his back making his shoulder blades ache. Closing his eyes, he tried to conjure up a warmer memory, an antidote to the cold. It was that last summer again, always that last summer. His parents had sent him away with his uncle and aunt to the coast while they took in the harvest at Burnt Fen Farm: 1974. They were worried: worried he’d been lonely too long, an only child whose life had encompassed little more than the hamlet around the farm. So they’d decided on the break, just beyond the horizon, surrounded by children, at a holiday camp.

  He could feel the warmth now. The hissing white water around his legs where the waves had broken, the sun beating flat down on the footmarked sand, and the glow of the sunburn on his shoulders. He would remember that summer always because of what came next. The return home, the snows of winter, and the floods which took his father away. So it had been his last summer, the last summer of childhood.

  13

  Humph was waiting on Waterside, the Capri a bubble of vanity light emitting the bass notes of an Estonian folk song. Dryden didn’t realize how cold he’d become until he bent his six-foot two-inch frame and folded it into the passenger seat.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said, his knee-joints popping like champagne corks. Reaching for the glove compartment, he cracked the top off a bottle of malt whisky – a Glenfiddich – as Humph studied the thermometer he’d hung out the door on a short piece of string.

  ‘Minus 8,’ he said, the little bow of his doll-like mouth drawing together to produce a tuneful whistle.

  Dryden checked his watch: 3.15pm. By dusk the temperature would be even lower, with every chance that the skies would stay clear. The Capri’s heating rattled, churning out warm air which reeked of barbecued motor oil.

  Tipping the miniature bottle back, Dryden finished the malt, feeling the heat burning down into his chest. Humph produced an identical bottle and passed it over, while he turned the ignition and choked the engine into life.

  ‘Where?’ he said.

  Did Dryden care if Declan McIlroy had been murdered? He could go back to the office, polish off a pile of wedding reports and gut some council minutes before hitting the pub with Garry and the subs for the ritual Friday tea-time piss-up – a celebration only marginally less riotous than the press-day binge. McIlroy’s case was going nowhere. He checked his mobile but there was still nothing and he wondered if Marcie Sley had really passed on his number to the elusive Joe. Why had Declan’s only close friend suddenly stopped visiting the flat? Did he know Declan was dead?

  ‘Misadventure’ was a verdict which covered several sins, but was unlikely to prompt the police to invest any more time in checking out the bogus doctor. But then he thought again about McIlroy’s final hours, sitting alone as the killing Arctic wind tore through the flat. He thought of the cold enamel washbasins in the dormitory at St Vincent’s, and a life disfigured by casual abuse.

  Had he committed suicide after all? It was possible, Dryden admitted to himself, familiar with the subtle horrors of an aimless life.

  He jerked the seatbelt across his chest. ‘High Park Flats. The allotments.’

  As they drove north the snow began to fall again, a shower of half-hearted confetti, blurring the windscreen and adding an element of outright chance to Humph’s normally erratic driving style.

  The allotments looked deserted, although a clutch of vehicles stood frosted by the entrance, like sugar-dusted chocolates. Through the picket fence Dryden discovered that the Dobermann was off duty – which lifted his mood dangerously higher – as he wandered between the stiff winter vegetable tops. Then, from out of the silence, he heard voices. The Gardeners’ Arms was clearly open for business. Instinctively Dryden kept himself out of view behind a large water butt. The door of the shed with the stove pipe opened, the sound of voices swelled, and a figure was admitted to what sounded like a party. A wake perhaps, for Declan McIlroy?

  Dryden had not, as far as he could tell, been seen. He slipped away towards the perimeter Leylandii hedge, moving in a series of zigzags, using the dotted sheds and makeshift cabins as cover. At the back of the allotments was a dumping area for garden refuse fed by a narrow track which ran behind the hedge. Despite the icy air the aroma of rotting vegetables and manure was astringent.

  The sound of voices swelled and, looking towards the stove-pipe shed, Dryden saw John Sley slipping out. Dryden slid sideways and found a new viewpoint, between two tree trunks. He watched Sley, vulture’s head forward, shoulders hunched under his donkey jacket. Marcie’s husband was bareheaded, the cruelly shorn grey hair barely covering the bones of his skull, cigarette smoke trailin
g from a butt held between his lips.

  Sley approached a large hut at the back of the allotments, checked the lock and turned to retrace his steps to the Gardeners’ Arms. Thinking twice, he stopped himself, slipped a key in the lock and moved inside the hut, leaving the door open. A light came on, and in the dim twilight an amber wedge illuminated the frosted ground outside the door.

  But no light showed at what Dryden had taken to be a line of PVC sheets set in the roof. Why build a shed with no windows or skylights? Dryden took a further step back into the shadows.

  Then the orange light on the grass turned red. The shift in colour was striking, the red tinged with yellow like a burning ball of sodium. Then the light turned blue, not the pale dying blue of the sky but a cold neon blue, this time tinged with the blacker shades of iodine. There was a brief return to red, and then the orange light returned. Sley reappeared, closing the door behind him and double checking the lock. He stood for a second, patting something in his overcoat chest pocket, and then returned towards the Gardeners’ Arms.

  Dryden made his way to the hut Sley had visited, and circled it. Up close he realized he had underestimated its size. It had to be a good twenty-five feet long and ten wide. Not a single pinpoint view was open to the inside. The lock was a Yale, new and shiny. At the far end was a water butt, with a pipe cut out to enter the wooden panelling through a sealed port. Dryden swung himself up onto the top of the butt and tried to peer in through the roof. Nothing. Plywood boards were secured under each pane of the transparent ribbed PVC.

  The sound of laughter drifted across the allotments, the light of the stove flared within the Gardeners’ Arms, and Dryden thought now that he knew, at least in part, the secret they shared within.

  14

  It was 4.00pm and the day had died. Dryden, within the warm, darkened sanctuary of Humph’s cab, struggled to see through the frosted windscreen. A security lamp on one of the allotment sheds caught the glitter of frost forming on the Leylandii hedges. A car backfired on the Jubilee Estate and a car alarm pulsed. Humph moodily considered the distant convivial glow from the Gardeners’ Arms. Dryden had made him move the Capri back into the shadows near High Park Flats. Here the air was colder still, the ice forming Spirograph patterns on the inside of the windscreen which the cabbie periodically attacked with a chamois leather.

  ‘You could fetch me back a pint,’ said Humph, shifting in his seat and emitting a thin odour of chicken tikka massala.

  Dryden, equally tempted to gatecrash, wound down the window to refresh the air. ‘I’d love to, but – and I’m only guessing here – they don’t do carry-outs. Besides – I’m watching that,’ he said, nodding towards a 4x4 parked up with the rest by the white picket fence near the entrance to the allotments. In the grey world of the dusk they could just see enough of the interior to make out the dog-mesh behind the rear passenger seats. Within, a grey shape flexed and stretched before sinking from view.

  The first to leave the wake was a thin man with a whippet, staggering slightly over the uneven ground. He found his car, at the third attempt, and drove off without his lights on, local radio blaring suddenly from the onboard stereo.

  John Sley was next out, expertly juggling car keys from left hand to right, and enjoying a sinuous swagger. The donkey jacket lapels were turned up against the night as he unlocked the 4x4. He flicked a switch on the dashboard which lit the ground below the car in fluorescent blue.

  ‘Now there’s clever,’ said Dryden, his heartbeat rising.

  Sley went to the back and flipped up the tailgate. He shouted something, and the uncurling form of the dog subsided. Then he heaved out a mechanic’s trolley which he dropped by the driver’s door, before swinging himself, with surprising agility, down and under the 4x4. Thirty seconds later he was out, the trolley stashed, and pulling away, taking the Jubilee’s sleeping policemen at 50 mph before turning down a drove road into the Great West Fen.

  Dryden nudged the cabbie. ‘Go on then. Follow that car.’

  Humph licked his lips, fired up the engine and left half an inch of rubber on the tarmac before attempting to vault the very same sleeping policemen: a stunt which dislodged a complete set of nuts and bolts from the Capri’s suspension as the cab briefly took to the air.

  As they left the city lights behind darkness swept over the flatlands as if a switch had been thrown. Lights dotted the distant Fen roads, some in ribbons marking the flow of traffic, others cottages and farms. Christmas had brought a now familiar outbreak of the kind of kitsch decoration beloved of smalltown America. As they slipped north they passed a farmhouse topped off with an illuminated Santa and sleigh, complete with two reindeer alternately lit red and green. A mile further on a roadside cottage was beaded with Christmas lights which flashed and appeared to shuffle in an electronic dance. To the east a Christmas tree winked on top of a grain silo half a county away.

  After five minutes they spotted Sley’s lights ahead, ploughing on, always in sight along the arrow-straight road.

  Dryden rubbed his hand across the windscreen to clear the view and Humph flicked the windscreen wipers. When the glass cleared Sley’s car had gone, the road stretching out before them as empty as a runway, the central row of cats’ eyes as bright as the stars. Humph trundled the Capri up the roadside bank, Dryden got out, slammed the door to cut out the vanity light, and let his eyes acclimatize. At the foot of the dyke a drain ten feet wide was an ice mirror, reflecting the moon rising behind the distant outline of the sugar-beet factory. Looking back he could see Ely, and as he watched the cathedral floodlights came on, picking out the silver leaded lantern tower. On the opposite side of the road was uninterrupted darkness: the next light going east probably a distant village outside Moscow.

  He walked twenty yards along the bank and surveyed the scene again. The dyke’s waters were still an unruffled silver to the west, but the darkness to the east had been dispelled by a farmhouse, now glimpsed between high poplars which must have shielded it from Dryden’s original vantage point. It looked welcoming: lights burnt in the four Georgian windows which faced the road, a Christmas tree in one. As he watched a security light came on, followed by another, and he saw Sley’s 4x4 sliding between the trees and round to the rear of the house.

  He ran back to the cab where Humph had wound down his window. ‘Wait here. If I’m not back in an hour get Interpol and a helicopter.’

  Humph grunted, wound the window up, and closed his eyes.

  Dryden walked down the centre of the road in the Capri’s headlights until he was level with the farm track. As he walked away from the main road and the comforting lights of the cab he was aware for the first time that the temperature had dropped further – into unknown territory. Pressing a finger to his cheek he felt the skin, hard and numb, and a dull pain had begun to grip his throat. The farmland around him was open and featureless under the moon, except for a single magnolia, unseen from the road, bent over an oval of starlit pond. Soon he was amongst the poplars skirting the house, and he could see the 4x4 parked amongst farm buildings to the rear. By a security light Dryden could see Sley on his back on the trolley again, retrieving whatever he’d stashed beneath the car.

  This was the moment Dryden always dreaded: the tipping point between his life as an objective recorder and the less familiar role of active participant. Life for him often seemed to be something to watch. But now he knew he would learn nothing more unless he took an active role himself. The thought made his guts twist.

  He was within six feet of the 4x4 when the sound of his footfalls alerted Sley to his presence.

  ‘Joe?’ said the voice under the car, untroubled.

  ‘Don’t think so,’ said Dryden, dropping down on his haunches.

  Sley slid out without a smile, turning an oily rag in his hands like a garrotte.

  Dryden, aware he might have made an error of heroic proportions, glanced back at the main road where he feared Humph would now be sleeping soundly. He regretted the Interpol joke, like almost
all his jokes.

  ‘Sorry. It’s me again. We were passing and I saw your 4x4. I’ve seen it before.’

  He’d said it quickly, crossing the line before he had a chance to retreat. Sley stood, one huge hand holding a metal box retrieved from under the chassis, which he folded into a green baize cloth he held in the other. Dryden was struck by the odd contrast, between the bony mass of the man’s hands and the deft, almost delicate, precision of the fingers. Silence was clearly a medium he was happy with so Dryden carried on. ‘On police CCTV. Someone’s been peddling cannabis to the kids. How’s the dog?’ he asked, nodding at the meshed interior of the rear of the vehicle.

  ‘Hungry,’ said Sley, glancing at the house still lit up in the darkness. The lights on the Christmas tree in the window seemed to tremble. ‘Look…’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I’ve got no idea what this is about…’

  But Dryden knew he was lying. He’d have thrown him out if this didn’t make sense.

  ‘You grow it in the long shed at the allotments. Force it, I guess – then plant it out in the summer? That’d be it. I saw the red light – that’s sodium. And the blue? Mercury-iodide. There was case up in crown court last year. Very sophisticated. I’m just kinda interested in why, that’s all. To kids. How much you make?’

  Sley twisted the cloth again. ‘Look, I’ve got to get on…’

  Dryden turned again and with relief saw that Humph was out of the cab, standing in the headlights firing the tennis machine ball down the deserted lane for Boudicca to fetch.

  ‘That’s my oppo. He knows why I’m here. The police have the film, and we know where the stuff was grown. If you’re planning on bluffing I think that’s a big mistake.’

  Sley opened one of his huge hands and revealed the metal box. ‘I need to get this to Joe.’