The Coldest Blood

by Jim Kelly

  Vee Hilgay appeared from a side room carrying a thermos of coffee.

  ‘I take it this is professional,’ she said, leading Dryden towards one of the stone seats which bordered the room.

  Dryden accepted a styrofoam cup. ‘Vee. I’m trying to find someone. A Catholic priest – John Martin – I rang the church at Lane End and they thought he might be here.’

  Vee nodded, filled the cup with coffee and disappeared into the throng.

  Martin appeared suddenly, his dog collar discarded for a comfy sweater. But the punctilious neatness was still apparent, the hair Brylcreemed in lines as straight as the pews in the nave.

  He sat in the niche next to Dryden, cradling his own coffee.

  ‘Ecumenical, then?’ said Dryden, already spoiling for a fight.

  Martin nodded. ‘It’s a generous offer. Most of these are off the Fen; we provide the transport, the cathedral provides the heat.’

  ‘I’ve got some good news,’ said Dryden, smiling. ‘Declan McIlroy and Joe Petulengo…’

  Martin stiffened, looking uncomfortable.

  ‘… they’re dead.’

  Dryden looked into the priest’s eyes and realized he’d miscalculated.

  Martin stood. ‘I’ll pray for them.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Dryden, standing too. ‘Please…’ He put a hand on Martin’s sleeve, letting his weight draw the priest down again.

  Martin looked at his coffee. ‘I need a fresh cup,’ he said, disappearing into the crowd, and Dryden was surprised to see him return. ‘How did they die?’ he asked, sitting.

  ‘The cold. That’s what the police believe. Declan had a stiff drink and sat in his armchair while he froze to death with the windows open. Joe had an accident – they think he stumbled into water near his home, fell through the ice; he was found on his own doorstep. I found him, actually…’

  Martin crossed himself and Dryden watched the priest’s lips moving, a devotion Dryden had faked so many times.

  Dryden leant closer. ‘Who exactly would have benefited from the case against St Vincent’s not coming to court?’

  ‘You mean anyone other than myself?’

  Dryden crushed the styrofoam cup. ‘Father. I need your help. I don’t think these men died by accident. They were key to the case against the diocese – both for the civil action, and any subsequent criminal charges. Now they’re dead those actions will – at the very least – be stalled for some time. The whole thing may collapse. So. Who else?’

  Father Martin shrugged, outlining with a finger the blood-red birthmark on his face.

  ‘The diocese, clearly – but that was purely monetary. The action would have entailed substantial damages – but hardly a motive for murder. The police were enjoined to the action as well – for failing to respond adequately to complaints – as were the county council’s social services department. I suppose there may be individuals whose careers were at stake. But…’ He laughed. ‘It seems far-fetched?’

  Dryden considered the divided loyalties of Ed Bardolph – Declan McIlroy’s social worker. But Father Martin was right: finding a suitable motive for murder if the case against St Vincent’s went ahead was a challenge he was failing to meet.

  He tried another tack. ‘Do you remember them? Joe and Declan?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I remember them. They were close – both in John’s I think. They left in the early eighties. At sixteen.’

  Something Marcie Sley had said echoed in Dryden’s mind. ‘Was that unusual – to spend their whole childhoods at St Vincent’s? Declan’s sister said she’d been fostered for a while but then returned to care. So she never got away either… none of them did.’

  Martin reached for his dog-collar to ease the pressure at his throat, forgetting it wasn’t there. ‘Look. I really think this is private…’

  ‘But it was unusual, wasn’t it? There was a reason, wasn’t there? A reason why they stayed in care. What was it, Father?’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Martin, standing. ‘I really can’t. It’s down to her, really. Did you ask her?’

  Dryden couldn’t stop his eyes sliding away from the priest’s. ‘No. But you’re right, it is private. I’m only trying to find the truth, to find out who they were before they died.’

  Martin scanned the room. ‘Ask her. Ask her about the Connor case. But please – we didn’t talk.’

  ‘Connor?’ asked Dryden, but Martin spotted an elderly woman stranded in a plastic seat stretching for a coffee cup on a table just beyond her reach.

  ‘Mrs Edwards… please, let me…’

  He touched Dryden on the shoulder before he went. It was a blessing, and for once Dryden didn’t recoil.

  20

  The day had died and redundant Christmas lights winked in shop windows. High over the cathedral a flock of rooks were a thumbprint on the sky. It was a lost weekend, between Christmas and New Year, and the town centre was empty, a scarab street-cleaner criss-crossing the now deserted Market Square, which echoed to a pre-recorded rendition of ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’. In the butcher’s window a toy dog in tartan did somersaults.

  Dryden stood in the lee of the giant Christmas tree. ‘The Connor case,’ he said out loud, his breath a cloud as tangible as candyfloss. He’d read something about it in the last week – perhaps two. But where? It had to be either one of the quality broadsheets, one of the tabloids, the two local evening newspapers – or The Crow. Unless he’d heard it on the radio. He made his way to the office and let himself in through the print yard door. The building was silent, Jean – the paper’s half-deaf receptionist – having closed the front counter at noon. Dryden put the 1 euro coin in the coffee machine and made his way to the large cupboard that the editor grandly referred to as the paper’s ‘library’. Here Jean pasted up cuttings in thematic folders – crime, weather, churches etc. She also bound copies of the nationals and tabloids for reference.

  Where should he start?

  Quite early in his journalistic career Dryden had developed a useful skill. On his first local newspaper in a small Midland town it had been his job to read the nationals to spot any story which might be followed up locally. After a while he found he could pick the town’s name out of a page of print without having to read it. The word just jumped out, a semantic Belisha beacon flashing ‘story’. For several years after moving to Fleet Street he was still haunted by the word, but he’d adapted the skill to pinpoint other key words, and always let his eye roll over a page before starting to read.

  The nationals. He’d start with them. The story was unlikely to be local – they were rare enough and he’d written half the paper himself anyway. He ran through the broadsheets and the tabloids for the last two weeks. It took him twenty minutes and he found nothing. He felt tired and in need of a more convivial environment than a draughty newspaper office. Jean had not yet found time to bind copies of the local evening papers and The Crow for the last week so he took copies himself, stuffed them in a spare paperboy’s bag and set out for the riverside.

  Out on the water meadows a few skaters circled the course marked out by the wooden posts Ed Bardolph and his fellow volunteers had set out on the two-inch-thick ice the previous day. Reaching the riverbank, Dryden turned north along the town-side towpath. After half a mile he came to a deserted Victorian dock called The Hythe, built to take the imported bricks which had fuelled the expansion of the city’s suburbs in the 1890s. By this miniature docklands the developers had built a pub – the Frog Hall – a riot of ill-judged Victorian taste dominated by ceramic exterior tiles which made it look like a giant public lavatory.

  Dryden nudged open the door, smelt the aroma of stale beer and last night’s cigarette smoke and immediately felt better. The only customer, he took his beer into the tiny snug where a coal fire pulsed with warmth. He thought about his floating home out at Barham’s Dock, beached on ice, and he edged closer to the coals, producing a copy of The Crow from his trench coat pocket.

  He read newspapers backwards. Star
ting with the small ads and personal column and ending with the front-page splash. The best advice he’d ever been given as a reporter was to read your own newspaper: very few did, missing plenty of stories in the small ads and failing to keep up with those written by the rest of the staff. The Crow posed less of a challenge, but the principle held.

  He found a story he wasn’t looking for almost instantly and put a red ring round the tiny item…

  LOST: Buffy, much-loved nervous Labrador, missing since December 24th. Must be found before New Year fireworks. Tel 66689.

  ‘Nice little tale,’ said Dryden, ringing the item with a pen. The barman, a morose Ulsterman, moved further down the bar.

  Half an hour later he’d reached page 5. He picked out ‘Connor’ and reread the item at normal speed. It was a single paragraph in the flight of ‘News in Briefs’ laid out down the side of the page. He could see why he’d missed it: it had been taken off the Press Association wire service and was technically from outside The Crow’s circulation area anyway.

  NEW WITNESSES IN MURDER CASE

  The wife of holiday-camp killer Chips Connor, who has launched a campaign to win a re-trial 30 years after her husband was jailed for a brutal seaside murder, said today two witnesses had answered her appeal for new information on the case. Connor, born in the Fenland town of Whittlesea, was jailed at Cambridge Crown Court in 1975. Campaigners now plan to petition the High Court to hear an appeal against the life sentence in what has become a celebrated case.

  Dryden checked the Cambridge Evening News and found that it had taken the item earlier that week on the Monday – at the same length – adding a thumbnail description of the victim – Paul Gedney. He folded the paper and looked in the fire. What had the case got to do with Declan McIlroy and Joe Petulengo and their childhoods spent in care?

  Were Declan and Joe, the victims of St Vincent’s, the newly discovered witnesses in the Connor case? Thirty years ago they would have been children, thought Dryden, each with another decade before them at the orphanage. What might they have known that would have set Chips Connor free?

  21

  In the West Tower’s shadow a line of cabs sat, most with their engines dead. The cabbies had congregated in a licensed people-carrier halfway down the queue to save on fuel and conserve heat. A lone shopper, emerging from Argos, struggled across the High Street with a package slightly smaller than a postbox towards the black cab at the head of the rank. Dryden was surprised to see Humph’s Capri at the rear, with the cabbie firmly wedged into the driver’s seat, unsociable to the last. Humph was listening to the football: Ipswich Town versus Luton at Portman Road. He had his club strip on and in his lap a notepad on which he’d set out the team names in their proper formations. As Dryden pulled open the passenger-side door Humph fidgeted with the club scarf which he’d wrapped round one wrist.

  ‘Score?’ asked Dryden, flipping open the glove compartment. His mood lifted as he spotted a catering-sized packet of prawn-flavoured crisps in the footwell.

  Humph flexed his miniature fists. ‘One all. Ten minutes to half time. Good job they invested in that undersoil heating. We could win this.’ The tones were clipped, warning against further conversation.

  They sat in silence until half time, then they said nothing.

  Dryden sipped a malt whisky, wondering where Chips Connor was now. He abandoned the memory. Until he could talk to Marcie Sley – or possibly Ed Bardolph – he could make little progress in trying to understand how the case was linked to Joe Petulengo and Declan McIlroy. He checked his watch: it was still too early to catch Bardolph before the skating began down by the river. And he’d have to leave Declan McIlroy’s sister another day at least before trying a fresh pitch for information.

  ‘The Tower?’ he asked Humph, pulling the seatbelt across his chest.

  Humph pointed forward along the parked-up rank. ‘You’ll have to wait.’

  There was nothing quite as rigid as the etiquette of the taxi driver. They sat listening to the second half as the cabs edged forward until Humph was able to pull away from the head of the queue. By the time The Tower came into sight the day was over, unlike the one-all draw which was limping into its final minute.

  The foyer’s Christmas lights winked expensively in the gloom. The Tower’s heating system, always efficient, was as plush as the carpets. Laura’s room was a few degrees cooler, and Dryden went to the window to watch the last of the light draining from the sky. The sight lifted his spirits and he raised his wife from the bed, hugging her close until he could hear her heartbeat. He felt an echo of what home had been like, finally banishing the anxiety which had been with him since he’d found the footsteps in the snow alongside PK 129.

  He poured wine and lit a cigarette, going back to the window to drop the blinds.

  ‘It’s night now,’ he said, the need for sleep almost overwhelming. ‘You’ve no idea how cold it is out there. The monkey puzzle tree – the big one on the lawn – that’s just crystal, like one of those cheap trinkets we used to buy on the coast. And I can see Humph in the Capri – he’s asleep. He’s been listening to the football – I think the excitement wears him out. He’s got the dog on his lap – or it could be the other way round…’

  He drew deeply on the cigarette, the nicotine bringing tears to his eyes.

  Laura’s auburn hair lay in a fan on the pillowcase. He lay down beside her and ran his fingers through it, smelling the rich natural scent of the oil, as pungent as a child’s.

  ‘Why do you think some kids never get adopted? They spend their whole lives in foster homes, or care. I guess it’s like animals – people always want the perfect one, the youngest one, the one they can mould themselves. They don’t want a history, they don’t want issues.’ That word again.

  The COMPASS jumped into life, the roll of paper clattering as it fed out of the computer printer.

  HOLIDAY PLEASE.

  She never said please. Dryden sensed that she felt the word was too much; a symbol of dependency and need.

  ‘Of course. I’m sorry. It’s just so cold, and we can’t go far. A cottage, perhaps – the coast, like we said? How about one with an Aga?’

  There was silence then, and he knew this was a reproach, for making her plead, and for failing to disguise his reluctance – a reluctance which sprang not from any rational fear, but from anxiety about what might happen if he took his wife away from The Tower. The leaving in itself would be good for them both, even if it suggested the possibility of not returning.

  22

  Humph dropped him on the riverbank, where the ice was now thick and pitted with the tracks of pebbles and stones pitched across its surface. A pair of ungainly swans strolled in midstream like cowboys. Dryden walked south past the Maltings and the Cutter Inn to a terrace of Victorian houses which looked out over the watermeadows. At the end of the row was a boathouse, the temporary HQ of the Fen Skating Association. The ground floor had originally housed the boats, while upstairs there was a balcony outside a function room behind a single picture window. Here Dryden had watched the Cambridge crew in training the previous year during a press event before the annual Varsity boat race, a memory clouded by six large glasses of Pimm’s No. 1 sucked through a straw.

  The wooden doors which ran the entire length of the boat-house frontage were shut, leaving a small wicket gate as the only entry point. Inside, trestle tables had been set up between the low-hanging boats, piled high with skater registration forms. The space was crowded with men in Christmas sweaters and other assorted festive knitwear. Fluorescent yellow stewards’ jackets hung in lines, above a rank of metal lanterns. There was a small kitchen at the rear and soup was being decanted into thermos flasks. Dryden found Ed Bardolph unwrapping loudhailers from a packing case.

  Dryden shook his hand. ‘Ed.’

  Bardolph’s face was flushed with the cold and adrenaline, and the room buzzed with childlike excitement.

  ‘The river’s nearly solid,’ said Dryden.

  Bar
dolph nodded, checking a small oven crammed with heating pies. ‘Should be safe by 8.00pm we reckon. We might try and rerun the long-distance race to Cambridge. They did it in ’63.’

  ‘Time?’

  ‘Late. Maybe midnight. We could wait a day but the forecast is not 100 per cent – there’s warm air up there, if it touches ground level we could lose the lot and freezing rain would ruin the ice.’

  ‘I’m sorry…’ said Dryden, stepping closer. ‘I’ve got some bad news that you may not have heard yet. Can we talk… in private?’

  They climbed the stairs. Bardolph had clearly been dividing his time between his real job and his passion, and had set up an impromptu office on the bar in the function room complete with fax, laptop, mobile charger, and file case.

  ‘I can work pretty much anywhere,’ he said, as if trying to convince himself. ‘And we only get the weather once in a blue moon.’

  They went out on to the balcony. The view across the frozen Fen was breathtaking, a living Dutch masterpiece of gliding figures.

  ‘It’s Joe Petulengo, Declan’s friend. He’s dead.’

  ‘What?’ Bardolph leaned back against the low balcony rail.

  ‘An accident, probably. Out at his farm. He fell, into water, and froze to death.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Bardolph. ‘That’s dreadful. You know the link…’

  Dryden nodded. ‘Petulengo was one of the victims of abuse at St Vincent’s – like Declan. They grew up together, in care. Did you meet him?’

  ‘No – never. I didn’t talk to Declan about the case either – except right at the start. It’s difficult. I work for the social services department and they were likely to end up in the dock too over St Vincent’s… but Declan was my client. I advised him to see a third party before agreeing to give evidence against the diocese – a colleague from outside the county. We played it by the book.’

  ‘I didn’t say you didn’t,’ said Dryden. ‘So what’s Chips Connor got to do with it?’