The Coldest Blood

by Jim Kelly

  From the top of the wide garden wall Dryden looked inland across a landscape of brittle frosted seagrass. Half a mile to the south stood one of the huge electricity pylons. High security fencing ran round its four splayed girder feet, while by a gate a blue electricity company van was parked, an amber light pulsing silently on the roof.

  By the time Dryden got to the wire the engineer was climbing the encased ladder within to the pylon’s lower gallery. William Nabbs was outside the wire looking up, swaddled in a heavy-duty yellow thermal jacket, charting the climb through binoculars.

  ‘Hi,’ said Dryden, exhilarated by a sudden squall of hailstones. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Snow and ice,’ said Nabbs, not lowering the glasses.

  ‘I was always terrified of these,’ said Dryden, looking up through the concentric squares of the superstructure to the high ceramic insulators which held the wires nearly 150 feet above. ‘We’d fly kites – down on the beach. They always looked closer to the wires than you’d think. I guess that’s what the fencing’s for, eh?’

  ‘Four hundred kilovolts,’ said Nabbs. ‘One touch and you’d fry.’ He let the binoculars fall on a chain round his neck, but continued to look up, knocking his gloved fists together for warmth. The engineer was on the first tier of the structure, about 120 feet above them, his harness clipped to a metal rail. He’d a set of tools held on a belt and with a hammer he was dislodging compacted ice which had congealed on some of the transmission gear. The splinters fell, glittering in the air, and smashed into the rock-hard grass below.

  ‘So. What’s up?’ said Dryden, emphasizing the repetition.

  Nabbs straightened. ‘They’re worried. It’s so cold the snow gets compressed and forms ice. There’s enough up there to put a real strain on the girder structure. If we get freezing rain as forecast, that can coat the gear, moisture can seep into the electrics and… bang!’

  Dryden jumped. ‘What about the wires?’

  They both looked south towards the next pylon half a mile away. The cables looped towards it, each one decorated with occasional icicles. The pylons marched to the horizon, daring the eye to see for ever.

  Nabbs shrugged. ‘The wires are high tension – in fact they help hold the pylons up. One of those wires snaps, I’d duck first, then I’d run. One pylon goes, they start crumpling down the line. Especially one like this – its a deviation tower, it’s where the pylon lines change direction. It’s bigger than the others – it has to take the tension in the wires from both directions.’

  Dryden tried to imagine it, the wires snaking in the air.

  ‘Hear that?’ said Nabbs.

  Dryden listened and picked out a high electrical buzzing.

  ‘As the weight of ice builds up the hum changes – the note rises.’

  The vibration had an edge, like a wire shorting inside a plug. Dryden thrust his hands deeper into his overcoat pocket. Across the dune grass by the camp’s reception building he could see the staff minibus disgorging the next shift of cleaners, the blue dolphin etched on its side.

  Nabbs looked out to sea where the surf was beginning to rise. The grey water buckled, built a black shadow where the wave was rising, and then fell with a blow on the sand.

  ‘Bit cold for catching a wave,’ said Dryden, reeling him in, trying to get beneath the well-tanned surface.

  ‘Yeah. Even I’d have second thoughts… I normally go in Christmas Day though – local tradition.’

  They turned back towards the camp reception. ‘I thought you’d be off when winter came, chasing the sun, chasing the swell.’

  Nabbs ran a hand through the dyed blond streak in his hair. ‘Once, perhaps. And there’s nothing wrong with British winter surf that a decent wetsuit can’t normally cure.’

  Dryden smiled, thinking about the young William Nabbs, arriving in the eighties, becoming part of the world Chips Connor had left behind. He nodded towards Lighthouse Cottage. ‘How long you lived there? It’s quite a spot. The cottage yours?’

  Nabbs nodded. ‘I’ve been here fifteen years – the house is a perk.’

  ‘And Ruth Connor – she lives on the site still? I seem to remember an old house, is that right?’

  Nabbs nodded, running the field glasses along the line of pylons to the west. ‘That was Dolphin House, her dad built it in the fifities. There’s a picture in the bar. It went in the redevelopment – there’s a flat now, above reception. Very swish.’

  Dryden nodded, waiting to see if his witness would incriminate himself. ‘What about the other partner – Russell?’

  ‘A semi on the edge of Sea’s End. He’s got kids, they go to the school at Holbeach. Wife works down in Whittlesea; he’s always lived off the camp.’

  ‘So in winter it’s just you and Ruth Connor on the site.’ Dryden knew he’d hit the wrong note, so he pressed on quickly, making it worse. ‘Ruth Connor. She’s a good looking woman, I wondered… it seems odd… Her husband’s been locked up for three decades, I guess no one would blame her if she’d found someone else.’

  Well, you cocked that up, thought Dryden, as Nabbs’ face hardened.

  ‘That is something you could ask her,’ said Nabbs. ‘If you had the decency and the guts. I’d like to see you try. If they sold tickets I’d buy one. As a point of information, several people live on the site – including a security guard and a caretaker. OK? Otherwise I guess Ruth deserves the same level of privacy the rest of us enjoy. Don’t you?’

  There was nothing quite like pompous self-righteousness to get Dryden fired up. ‘Fancy her, then, do you?’

  Nabbs turned to go, then wheeled back. ‘Anything you’d like to tell me about your life, Mr Dryden? Married? Wife love you? Kids?’

  Dryden shrugged. ‘Difficult to tell. She was in a coma for five years after a car accident. You could ask her – although I can’t get any answers at present. I think she’s becoming suicidal. She’s over there – in the last chalet.’ Dryden pointed, both his voice and his finger trembling slightly.

  Nabbs held up a hand by way of truce, then took a deep breath of the freezing sea air. ‘Look. My private life is discreet, OK, but it’s not a secret. No doubt you’ve been talking to the kind of people who like living other people’s lives for them. It’s a small place, and a lot of people have got small minds. I didn’t have you down as one of them, that’s all.’

  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.

&
nbsp; 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 pas
sed 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.’