by Jim Kelly
As he walked between the chalets the air was as cold as a butcher’s fridge. A North Norfolk Electricity van was already parked in the staff car park beside two squad cars and a police van. Ruth Connor sat in reception, behind the downlit counter, drinking from an espresso cup. Her pale fingers encircled the thin china, and Dryden expected to see it shatter under the suppressed anxiety which radiated from her like a colour. A WPC sat in one of the foyer’s comfy chairs by the internet café, arms folded, with a stare as blank as a bank teller’s. Dryden let his shoulders sag in the sudden damp heat which seeped into the room from the misty heated pool.
Ruth Connor looked up, looked through him, and turned to the WPC. ‘You don’t have to wait, really…’ She caught Dryden’s eye. ‘There’s work to do here, I’ll be fine now.’
As if to prove it they heard a shout from the indoor pool followed by a splash.
The policewoman checked her watch. ‘No problem – I’ll stick around till your partner gets here. About seven thirty you said?’ Dryden noted that apparently some truths may have been told during the night, if not all.
He pulled a high stool up to the reception counter. ‘You all right?’ he said, wanting to hear her talk, wanting to see her struggle to maintain that remarkable façade. She looked like she hadn’t slept, the hair failing for once to divert attention from the spider’s web of wrinkles by her eyes.
She nodded. ‘William’s out with the engineers, at the pylon. We’re going to take a break away; a few days, when the police are done.’
They both tried identical insincere smiles. The phone rang and she grabbed it, her relief palpable as she became immersed in taking down a booking. Dryden was more convinced than ever that she was hiding something, but other than her discreet relationship with William Nabbs he’d got no closer to finding out what it was.
Tyres crunched over snow outside as the Dolphin’s staff minibus edged up to the foyer. Russell Fleet dashed over the tarmac and in through the automatic doors. He swapped a glance with his boss, a nod with Dryden, and headed for the bar.
She finished the call and before Dryden could resume the questions she stood. ‘Excuse me. Russ phoned earlier – I need to get him up to speed – he’ll be running the place for a few days.’
Dryden sat down opposite the WPC, who continued to examine a spot in the mid-distance. Outside, the minibus idled, waiting for its return passengers to Whittlesea and the surrounding villages. Dryden considered his options: for a day at least the Dolphin would be crowded with police, a team working inside the taped-off scene of crime area by the beach, while a separate search was being carried out by frog teams and foot parties across the saltmarsh. DI Parlour, he knew, planned further interviews, and they’d swapped mobile numbers. And then there was DI Reade. But Dryden calculated that a fresh corpse outranked a thirty-year-old miscarriage of justice. The review of Chips Connor’s conviction would have to await the completion of the inquiry into his murder. Dryden’s role, as witness, victim, amateur detective and, for all he knew, suspect, would be central. He didn’t relish being around when DI Parlour discovered just how many details Dryden had left untold, or having to watch the tussle for power in the investigation.
And there was still one place he wanted to go: one central character in the tawdry tale of Paul Gedney who remained a cipher: Elizabeth Lutton, the pharmacist who had made his crime possible and then slipped away from the scandal of Whittlesea Hospital. She was a crucial link to the real story of Chips Connor. Her successor at the hospital had been circumspect. What Dryden desperately needed was a more immediate witness, someone who could tell him how she had felt, who else might have been entangled in their deception, how she’d lived out the rest of her short life. He logged on to one of the screens in the camp’s internet café and punched in her husband’s name. From the website of his private clinic at Lynn he took up a weblink to Whittlesea District Hospital’s outpatients clinic.
‘Bingo,’ he said, waking up the WPC. George Lutton’s NHS clinic ran every Tuesday and Thursday morning.
He took a decision then, and deserted the warm embrace of the Dolphin’s foyer. The minibus was fugged up, the onboard heater gently cooking the only occupant – the driver. Dryden tapped on the window. ‘Sorry, I know this is a bit cheeky – I need to get into Whittlesea – any chance?’
The driver was a middle-aged woman, big-boned with a moon face and a nylon uniform bearing the Dolphin’s blue motif. ‘Sure. At your own risk, mind – we saw three accidents on the way up, and I don’t normally drive this old tub. And these don’t help…’ The windscreen wipers had locked, and the glass was a web of cut-glass ice, like a Victorian fruit bowl.
She passed Dryden a can of de-icer and he sprayed the wipers free, before taking the front passenger seat.
‘Philip Dryden,’ he said, as she pulled out onto the coast road and then almost immediately turned south on the long road to Whittlesea. ‘So, if you don’t normally drive, what do you do?’
‘I’m Muriel,’ she said. ‘I run the cleaners, chambermaids.’ She let a silence lengthen that threatened to last the whole journey. ‘Muriel Coverack – it’s Cornish.’
On the dashboard was a bunch of keys attached to a key ring in the form of a small plastic photo frame: two children, teenage girls, leered into the camera, clutching each other.
Dryden tapped it. ‘Yours?’
‘Nope,’ she said. ‘Sister’s. But they come for the hols.’
Dryden nodded, sensing the presence of a lonely life.
She checked the rear-view again. ‘You’re the one with the wife – in the wheelchair. We don’t clean those chalets without a call first – perhaps tomorrow? We’ll be really quick.’
‘Sure. Thanks.’
Another silence in which Dryden imagined sympathy welling up. ‘So, what happened?’ she asked, embarrassed too. ‘There was something on the local radio – we all heard it on the way. Russ said it was Chips – that he’d been found on the beach. That right?’
‘Sure. I found him, actually – someone broke his neck.’ He nodded inappropriately, realizing that the image of Chips’ contorted hand, reaching out from the water, had haunted him since he’d woken that morning. He still felt cold from the night, and began to shiver violently.
Muriel turned up the heating. ‘There’s a rug on the seat behind – use it. You seen a doctor? It might be shock.’
Dryden put the blanket round his shoulders and told her as much as he could, spinning out the story so that he could try and win something back in return. They drove south across the Fens, the thirty miles to Whittlesea like a trek across the Great Plains.
‘Odd place, the Dolphin,’ he said eventually, as they edged over a crossroads where the traffic lights were out. ‘Decent job though?’
She nodded. ‘Might all be over soon.’
Dryden turned in his seat. ‘Why’s that?’
‘They’re gonna sell it, aren’t they? Russ says no when we ask. But last year they had the agents in, and last week they was back. They had guests over Christmas, too – showed them round. They’ll do it this time.’
Dryden nodded, remembering something odd. ‘Russell always catch the bus in, does he? No car?’
She shrugged. ‘Jean drives – I’ve never seen Russ behind the wheel. We pick him up at Sea’s End every morning – six thirty. Hasn’t missed a day in twenty years.’
‘Settled, then?’
‘Yeah – yeah. They’ve been together nearly as long now. The kids are smart – hardly kids, really. Twins – teenagers. Nice family. Everyone has a row now and then though, don’t they?’ she added.
Dryden nodded, thinking of Laura again, thinking how wonderful it would be to have a row. When he’d got back to the chalet he’d caught some sleep in a chair and made breakfast as dawn broke. They’d eaten something together: coffee and a milky cereal. He’d gone to shave and when he got back she’d written something on the COMPASS.
YOU PROMISED. IT’S TIME.
He
’d made so many promises, but he knew all too well which one she wanted him to keep. He’d lit the propane heater, set it on low, just in case the heating failed while he was out. He’d smelt it then, the smell of heated gas, burning innocently. He could have blown the flame out with a kiss, letting the deadly gas fill the chalet.
He looked out of the minibus window through the circular porthole he’d cleared and saw the black peat, a blur to the horizon. ‘So you go back that far, do you – twenty years? Is that when Russ arrived?’
‘Oh no, I can beat that,’ she said, creeping past a police car parked near where a lorry had slewed off the road and into the dyke. The container stuck up at a crazy angle, the cab embedded in the bank.
‘I started work at the Dolphin in ’69. Chambermaid. I worked for Ruth’s father – John Henry. I’m the boss now – twenty staff. I’m running the bus because the driver didn’t make it.’
Dryden swung round in his seat. Other than Ruth Connor she was the first person he’d found who could recall the camp before the murder of Paul Gedney.
‘What was he like – the old man, John Henry?’
‘Nothing like her,’ she said, and realizing she’d said too much, she made a show of concentrating on an L-driver ahead on the icy road.
‘She’s a cool customer,’ said Dryden, as lightly as he could. ‘It was ’75, wasn’t it – when Chips was jailed? I’ve been in to see him – nice guy. What did people think?’
She checked the rear-view again. ‘Russ said you were a reporter.’
Dryden looked out of the window. ‘That’s right. But I’m off duty. You know there were two witnesses who could have got Chips freed – kids at the camp in ’74. They were friends of mine. I was here too that summer. I was just a kid.’
‘Thanks. Now I feel ancient.’
‘Sorry,’ said Dryden, smiling into the rear-view. His eyes were tired, and his shock of black hair flattened on one side where he’d slept heavily back at the chalet.
‘It’s just that I’d like to find out what happened to them. I think someone killed them to stop them coming forward.’
‘Russ said.’
‘And I think they tried to kill me.’
She looked at him then, the car stationary in a queue tailing back from a flashing police light by the main bridge into Whittlesea. ‘Russ said the police didn’t think there was anything suspicious – that they’d died naturally. One of them was an alky?’
Dryden thought Russ had done a lot of talking. ‘So what did people think – at the time, about Chips?’
She turned off the ignition and they sat in sudden silence in the unmoving queue. ‘Chips and Ruth went back a long way, yup? To school. Sweethearts, married at eighteen. And they were happy, you could see that. Then she took over at the camp when John Henry fell ill. Chips was brilliant with kids, a natural. A few years went by, there were no kids. People talk, like they do.’
She bit her lip, sensing the irony. ‘She’s always been odd with kids. Brittle. Then Chips had the accident. I was in the camp that day, we all came running because they had an alarm by the pool and someone set it off. There was this slick in the water, you know – like from his head.’ She turned to Dryden and he could sense the frisson of horror even after thirty years.
‘When he got back from the hospital, he was a mess. He was just scared of everything, really jumpy, but he couldn’t tell you what was wrong – just like a child.’ She blushed suddenly. ‘I don’t have any, so what do I know – but that’s what they say, isn’t it?’
Dryden nodded.
‘He used to do the poolside duty and the locking up and stuff but anything else, like with people, was too much. He’d end up in the dunes somewhere, and they’d have to send the security guards out to find him.’
‘But they stayed together… him and Ruth?’ said Dryden.
‘Sure. But he was ill, and they decided to get some treatment, see if they could do anything. So they took him away. Course, looking back, they said it was the stress – that he’d killed that bloke, beat him to death, and he’d dumped the body out at sea.’
Dryden nodded. ‘I’ve read all about the trial. About Paul Gedney turning up and asking them for help.’
Muriel licked her lips. ‘Read about Lizzie Sykes?’
She had a smile on her face now and Dryden sensed the kind of communal thrill that comes from shared malicious gossip. ‘Nope.’
She fired up the ignition and they crawled forward again. ‘After Gedney went missing the police put out his picture, right? He didn’t have a face you could forget. Those eyes. Anyway, this Lizzie Sykes recognized him straight off. She was a bit simple, actually, but I don’t think she had the wit to lie. Big girl, but slow. Anyway, she was from Whittlesea too – not like the rest of us, we’re all from Lynn – and she’d seen him in the park. This was a bit back, the late sixties, when they were all at school.’
Dryden looked across in the silence and saw that Muriel was smiling, her tongue pushing out her cheek.
‘He was sat on a park bench with Ruth Henry – as she was – kissing. Well, the way she told it, more than kissing. Lizzie liked that story. She told it enough.’
Dryden saw the scene differently then, Paul Gedney arriving at the Dolphin by motorbike on a summer’s night.
‘Did she, Lizzie, tell the police?’
‘She told the court. Didn’t do her any good though. The other thing about Lizzie was she had light fingers. Petty theft, but then she wasn’t the only one. If you knew what they paid chambermaids at a place like the Dolphin, it makes the minimum wage look like a lottery win.’
Dryden had read all the news copy from the trial and there’d been no mention of her testimony, but he knew from experience that newspaper reports were at best a summary, and incidental witnesses were often left out entirely. ‘So?’
‘They brought it all up in court. Apparently Ruth had caught her once the previous season and docked her wages. Lizzie went round telling everyone she’d get her own back – settle the score. They dragged it all into the court – so the judge said the jury should forget what she said. Ruth denied it flat anyway. But it didn’t help Chips, did it? I think a few of us felt he’d clumped Gedney to get even.’
Dryden made a show of checking his mobile for messages, but he took the time to try and think things through. When the phone trilled it made him jump. It was a text message from DI Reade.
RING. NOW.
Dryden checked the incoming call details. The call was timed at 8.48am, Reade was still in Ely, and the rest of his inquiry team was presumably kicking their heels with him. All of which would make a nasty mess of the staff rota.
Dryden decided not to reply and turned to Muriel. ‘So, do you think Ruth was two-timing Chips after they were married?’
‘I don’t think anyone could have blamed her, although we all did. Chips was popular, yeah? He was drop-dead gorgeous for a start and then after the accident kind of pathetic too, a big kid. Whereas we all thought she was a callous cow. And a rich one, of course – that didn’t help.’
‘And then along came William Nabbs,’ said Dryden.
‘Yeah – but he wasn’t the first. That’s the school…’ she said, nodding to the side of the road where a set of iron railings ran beside a playground. ‘Whittlesea Catholic High School. That’s where they all met.’
Dryden was surprised the school was open. Children played, wrapped in scarves and hats. One enterprising teenager was sledging down a frozen grass slope onto the tarmac. As a bell rang he imagined the three of them, a group apart, their heads together, planning.
42
The entrance to Whittlesea District Hospital was an echoing cavern of Victorian marble marred by ill-disguised wiring and a large poster exhorting patients to save your local hospital. The Grecian bust still stood, eyes blank, and dust-covered. On one wall the faded colour picture of Elizabeth Lutton hung, the smile still wavering. Dryden dwelt on the white blonde hair, thinking of the bodies entwined in the mor
ning sunlight of the dunes thirty summers earlier. Today the bitter cold had seeped into the hall and somewhere Dryden could hear the trickling of a burst pipe. The WRVS had a stall selling tea and biscuits and he asked for directions to the weekly clinic. Out through A&E, where a single elderly patient sat holding a bloody home-made bandage to his ear, he followed a broken path of sand across the tarmac to a Portakabin. By the ramp up to its doors stood a board.
WHITTLESEA CLINIC.
Clinics morning: 9.15am to 12.15pm. Clinics afternoon: 1.15pm to 3.15pm.
TODAY: Cataract Clinic: Mr Lutton. Medical photography: appointment only. Blood Donors Clinic – all day (Caxton Road Site).
Inside the Portakabin three rows of plastic seats stood empty. In the two far corners paraffin heaters had been lit, scenting the air. The sound of the door closing brought a nurse out from behind a partition.
‘Mr Lutton?’ asked Dryden. She took Dryden into a consulting room which was also empty.
‘Mr Lutton’s just at the pharmacy – he’ll be five minutes. Take a seat.’
Dryden examined the wall, covered with medical information posters. He winced at the sight of a set of photos illustrating the onset of cataracts. In the final one a blanched retina swam in an eyeball marbled with tiny blood vessels.
Dryden considered what he’d learnt about the human triangle which had been Ruth Henry, Chips Connor and Paul Gedney. Childhood friends in a small Fen town. Ruth leaves school and goes to work in her father’s business, and as his final illness deepens, she takes over the day-to-day management of the Dolphin. Chips Connor, handsome, cheerful, and in love, follows her out to the coast. Perhaps they were happy, but somewhere in the background is an unfinished affair with Paul Gedney. Then comes Chips’ accident, and his retreat into childhood and manic insecurity. For the young Ruth Henry – a beauty queen and an heiress – it must have been an almost insupportable blow – to be chained for life to a man she would have struggled not to despise.
Dryden covered his eyes and let the cool palms heal the soreness beneath.
A phone rang on Lutton’s desk and Dryden jumped. He considered the coming interview without relish. What did he know about Mr George Lutton, consultant ophthalmic surgeon? Paul Gedney’s drug-pilfering scam relied on falsified records. Elizabeth Lutton had been the pharmacist at the time Gedney had committed his crimes. The police had gone after Gedney, but she’d been allowed to take early retirement. If Gedney had been found, would his testimony have implicated others? Was it a good enough reason to see him dead? When, and how, had Elizabeth Lutton died?
