The Coldest Blood (25 page)

At the far end they descended damp brick steps under a sign marked DISPENSARY. At the bottom was a windowless room with some plastic seats and a matching pot plant. A counter behind meshed glass took up one side of the room, the service hatch was open and deserted except for a single tea cup and saucer. It was even hotter here and Dryden could feel through the soles of his feet the hum of a boiler somewhere in the basement.

Dryden’s guide smacked the counter with the palm of his hand: ‘Shop! Marina, shop!’

His guide retreated, leaving Dryden to wait alone. He paced the room, reading posters on the walls, many of which looked like they’d been printed up for the launch of
the NHS in the forties – a diagram of a dissected eye, a list of do’s and don’ts for diabetics and a gruesome set of pictures showing the progress of malignant melanomas. He checked his watch: Laura was in the pool at the camp doing hydrotherapy, but he felt the gentle tug of guilt.

‘Yes?’ The woman was black, a kind of red-mahogany colour, and Dryden guessed the genes were Cameroonian. There was something imperious about the long, graceful neck and the precise angle at which she held her elegant head, the hair cut short and grey. Dryden estimated she was sixty.

‘I’m sorry to bother you – you must be busy. I was looking for someone who might remember a nurse who worked here in the seventies. My name’s Dryden – Philip Dryden. I am a journalist, with a local paper in Ely.’ He let that sink in and, when she didn’t throw him out, carried on. ‘It’s about a nurse called Paul Gedney. The police were after him – something to do with stealing drugs? He was here then – in the summer of ’74.’

She picked up the tea and came round the counter, sitting elegantly on one of the plastic chairs, expertly balancing the cup in its saucer. ‘It’s a long time ago.’

‘But you remember him?’

She shook her head as if trying to dislodge a persistent image. ‘What’s this about?’ she asked, fiddling with a long amber earring.

Dryden told her about Chips Connor’s case, and the hunt for witnesses to free the convicted man. He said he didn’t have much time, and he checked his watch to prove it. But it seemed she’d decided to talk anyway, because she cut in before Dryden had finished his pitch.

‘Paul – I remember Paul, yes. I’d just qualified, so I was a few years older, but we got on well. There was something very odd about him, you see.’

She paused, waiting for Dryden to invite the disclosure. ‘Which was?’

‘Unlike the rest of the population, he was not a racist.’

Dryden didn’t need this, and he suppressed an urge to pick up the point. He wondered if she’d mixed up racial discrimination with the innate Fen antipathy to newcomers of all colours. In the mid-1970s they probably hanged people with ginger hair in Whittlesea.

‘Right. But what was he like?’

‘An outsider, like me. He would have been eighteen or nineteen years old, I think, when he first came here. Very self-contained, you know, almost arrogant really. He always made it plain that he’d chosen to be a nurse, that it wasn’t second best to being a doctor, which was a bit disingenuous because while he was certainly smart he’d missed out on a formal education. He was that type: a kind of undisciplined intelligence. I think he resented that lost opportunity.’

‘Did he resent anything else?’

She sipped the tea. ‘People who got in his way. There was something slightly malevolent about him, you see. I got the feeling he’d do anything, you know, if he’d judged the outcome as correct. He was one of those people with their own moral compass – he decided what was right and wrong.’

‘And he stole drugs? He’d decided that was right, had he?’

‘Yes,’ she said, tilting her chin. ‘Yes he had. He was very close to his family – his mother, actually. She was ill, and had been for many years – diabetes, I think, but I could be wrong. Anyway, she needed support and help at home. He tried to manipulate the bureaucracy, the red tape, to get her extra cash and visits. But it didn’t work. I think he stole to
finance a carer, the medical treatment. She had private care at a clinic, I think, which didn’t come cheap.’

‘Regular Robin Hood, then. What kind of drugs?’

‘Anything he could sell. Tranquillizers. Painkillers. It was very cleverly done – just small amounts, but regular as clockwork so that the system could factor in the losses.’

‘Is that possible? Surely everything is balanced up – drugs in, drugs out?’

Her hand went to her graceful throat.

‘Yes. Good point.’ She tried a smile but gave up. ‘The books showed no discrepancy.’

Dryden nodded to fill the silence. ‘Who kept the books?’

‘My predecessor – the senior pharmacist.’

‘And what happened to him?’

‘
She
took early retirement – medical grounds. Parkinson’s.’

‘Right. So Paul Gedney gets to face the full weight of the law and does a runner while the chemist gets to flick through the time-share brochures?’

She held out her hands, palms up, and Dryden noticed how pale the skin there was. ‘I don’t think anything could be proved in that respect, at least not beyond doubt. And the pharmacist was ill, although the disease was at a very early stage. Bringing a criminal action against a clinician or a professional within the service is very difficult. But Paul had been seen selling the drugs – on several occasions. There was a dossier on him, pictures, statements.’

‘Is the pharmacist still alive?’

‘She died. Her husband was a doctor – an eye specialist – and we see him sometimes. But they separated soon after she left the NHS. He’s based at the Royal in Lynn, but there’s a visiting clinic here.’

Dryden stood. ‘What was her name – your predecessor?’

She stood too, again the tea cup and saucer beautifully
poised. ‘Lutton. Elizabeth Lutton. Actually, I can show you…’

Leading the way, she quickly climbed the stairs to the main corridor above. She took him to an echoing Victorian entrance hall dominated by a Grecian bust, which was dusty and unnamed. On the wall there was a framed colour photograph of a man in a suit cutting a ribbon.

‘The day they opened the day clinic, it’s out the back across the car park. A Portakabin. That’s her.’

She pointed at a woman amongst the dignitaries gathered in the background. She was younger than Dryden expected, perhaps thirty-five, an unsatisfied smile lighting up a broad face, framed in buttery-yellow blonde hair. Something about the hair conjured up a memory for Dryden: two pale bodies moving together in the dappled sunshine of the dunes.

‘And the husband?’ he asked.

‘Dr George Lutton. Not pictured. I doubt if he’ll talk, Mr Dryden.’

‘Any of the family left – Gedney’s mother?’

She shook her head. ‘She died. Very soon after Paul’s disappearance. There was a funeral, I remember that, at the Catholic church. The family was a sprawling one – there was another brother, and two or three sisters, I think. All of them – except the other brother – were younger than Paul and the father couldn’t hack it so they all went back into care. It was dreadful to see.’

The hair on Dryden’s neck prickled. ‘Back into care? These children were fostered by the Gedneys?’

A minibus arrived outside the main doors and a group of elderly patients began to bustle through, filling the marble hall with voices.

‘Yes. She was a foster mother, although I think the illness
made it difficult in the last few years. That was why Paul was so determined to try and support her. There was a lot at stake. He’d come to her when he was pretty young, I think. Before that he’d been in care – not locally – more your part of the Fens, I think – Ely.’

33

Humph pulled the Capri over into a lay-by on the edge of town. Beside the road a dyke lay frozen, smoking in the midday sun, a starburst of cracks where someone had lobbed a lump of concrete onto the surface. To the southeast the Fen stretched, iced furrows and the occasional wind-cowed hawthorn the only features on a landscape rolled flat by a heavy sky. Dryden’s trained eye skipped along the spirit-level of the horizon until he found the distinctive double bump of Ely Cathedral – the Octagon and West Towers visible from twenty-five miles, and as familiar as Humph’s lugubrious profile.

Dryden nibbled the pastry edge of a pork pie while Humph rummaged in chip paper. He rang the number for the Dolphin and got the daytime receptionist: Laura was still in the pool and would then be taken back to the chalet for a rest and sleep. Then he retrieved a text message from the mobile.

DRYDEN. WE’LL BE THERE 9.00AM TOMORROW. BE AVAILABLE. READE

‘Shit,’ said Dryden.

He turned to Humph. ‘You said you’d seen someone on the beach last night?’

‘Yup. The woman who runs the place, with the blonde hair. She walked along the beach about 11.30 after the lights went out at reception. Met a bloke on the sands – compact, black leather jacket, pony tail. They went back to the cottage by the lighthouse. Lights on downstairs, then upstairs, then
just upstairs. She reappeared this morning – sevenish. Different jacket, different jogging pants.’

‘Bravo,’ said Dryden. ‘You could do divorces – pays well.’

Humph licked the chip paper as Dryden considered the implications of Ruth Connor’s nocturnal stroll along the beach. He was hardly surprised she’d found solace somewhere, perhaps anywhere, after thirty years of virtual widowhood, but he wondered how much Chips Connor had been told.

But first he had some more questions for Father John Martin. Urgent questions: and this time he wasn’t going to let him dodge those questions down a telephone line. ‘Let’s go home for a bit,’ said Dryden. ‘St Vincent’s – Lane End.’

Paul Gedney’s foster mother had been buried a Catholic and her fostered son had been in care in Ely sometime in the sixties. It seemed that St Vincent’s might be more central to the story of Chips Connor than Dryden could ever have guessed. He wondered what else Father Martin had seen fit to keep from the reporter, on the convenient pretext of protecting other people’s interests.

They sped south, a miniature motorcar on a giant Monopoly board, untroubled by any variation in height or direction, across the reclaimed miles of the Great Soak, a journey calibrated by the passing shells of forgotten windmills. At one point they passed a sign on the roadside: ‘Cabbage 20 miles’– the kind of detail that made Dryden revel in the landscape. Ten miles from the edge of the city Humph swung the cab out to overtake a tractor and, untroubled, stayed in the middle of the road for a mile, whistling tunelessly.

Dryden’s mobile rang, and noting that the number was unknown he flipped it open.

‘Mr Dryden? This is Mr Holme’s secretary – I’ll put you through.’

Dryden heard an old-fashioned purp-purp of a desk phone ringing. ‘Mr Dryden? I’m glad I’ve caught you. Thank you for your message. Can you talk?’

Dryden looked out on the limitless expanse of black peat, calculating swiftly what he should say. ‘Sure.’

‘You have our witness, I understand. Clearly I need to interview him, perhaps informally at the first meeting. Can we do that?’

‘I think so, yes. I need to talk to him, of course – but I can’t see a problem. Can I ask if you’ve told anyone else about my call?’

‘Er. Well, my client, of course, is Chips Connor, but I don’t feel it would be appropriate just now – the fact that we were forced to drop the petition to appeal was a great disappointment. He’s a fragile character – as I understand you may appreciate. A visit, I’m told.’

‘Yes. I see. Not Chips. But his wife, then. You’ve told her?’

‘Indeed. I think that’s best for now.’ Dryden had banked on the news filtering out; if the killer was close he needed to flush him – or her – into open country.

He looked out of the cab’s passenger window at the limitless horizon. ‘I’ll get back to you,’ he said. ‘You’ll want him to come to the office, I take it?’

‘Ideally. But we could come to him, if that’s an issue.’

Dryden said he’d ring and killed the signal, shivering. They’d arrived: Lane End was deserted, the only movement a sluggish line of black smoke trickling out of a chimney pot in the single crescent of council semis. Three children, hands linked, skated on shoes down the drain which ran beside the road.

The presbytery door was opened by the novice with the purple and gold football scarf. ‘He’s not in,’ he said, before Dryden had spoken.

‘Tell him I’ve come about Paul Gedney. He’d be really pissed off to miss me.’ Dryden noted that the profanity brought some colour to the young priest’s face, and an unattractive hardening to his eyes. Dryden hoped his first parish would be poor and violent, somewhere so bad nobody could believe the statistics.

Dryden stood on the step, daring the novice to shut the door in his face. They heard a light footfall in the hall beyond and Father Martin appeared, dabbing his mouth with a linen serviette by way of apology. ‘Daniel didn’t know I was in my room. Come in, come in…’

The hallway was familiar to Dryden: identikit Catholic interior decor from the seventies. A cold tiled floor was scrubbed clean, an ugly telephone sat on an MFI table, a hatstand hung heavy with overcoats. On the wall Christ exposed his Sacred Heart, and a landscape shot of the Connemara Mountains hung in a heavy dark wood frame, the colour leached out by light. The house reeked of Pledge edged with incense. There was also a strong aroma of stewed tea, the tannin obscuring something less wholesome, something a lifetime past its sell-by date.

‘Please…’ They climbed the stairs and crossed a landing creaking with lino, to a study bedroom. The bed was a single, neat as a prayer, and made up by someone who did it for a living. The desk faced the window looking towards the ruin of St Vincent’s. On the leather blotter stood a glass of milk and what looked like a cheese sandwich made, Dryden guessed, by the same professional hands which had produced the bed’s crisp hospital corners.

Father Martin turned the captain’s chair around, resting the milk and sandwich plate on his knee, the heavy grey sky behind him. Dryden took the one other seat, a straight-backed dining chair as uncomfortable as any pew. There
were books, but not too many, a single Gaelic football banner over a black and white picture of some boys in shorts.