The Coldest Blood (30 page)

She couldn’t fault the logic. ‘Bring your drink,’ she said,
standing. They went behind the bar and down a short corridor with panelled walls to the foot of a narrow staircase which led up a single flight to a landing.

Ruth Connor struggled with a double lock to the only door. ‘This is daft. I can see that man as clearly as I can see you. It’s just his name… I think it was Jack – but that’s not much good on its own, is it?’

The office was spacious and modern – the 1930s art deco ceiling design obscured by a thick coat of white paint. Two PCs and a laser printer hummed on a desk suite. A TV monitor in the corner showed the bar, and Russell Fleet still bent over the post. One wall was covered with a staff rota; framed sunshine publicity shots covered the rest: minor celebrities pictured hugging total strangers.

‘Is this the original office?’ asked Dryden.

‘Yes. Indeed. But there’s not much left from the old days, I’m afraid – it didn’t have the
charm
of the bar,’ she said, laughing. Dryden, distrusting the sudden upbeat mood, failed to return the smile.

‘The safe?’ he asked, knowing it was the right question.

She laughed again, but this time Dryden sensed she was playing for time. ‘When was the last time you saw someone pay for a holiday with cash?’

Dryden nodded, recognizing that he hadn’t got an answer.

‘Here. Staff wage records.’ She swung a drawer out from a filing cabinet and put a ledger on the table, beginning to flick back through the large pages covered in copperplate. ‘I don’t think he was ever on the database. I’ll know the name when I see it.’

Dryden stood waiting, wondering if it really took this long. He studied the pictures on the wall and his eye was drawn to one: Ruth Connor had mentioned an outward bound
course for young offenders and here they were, a group of six, arms thrown around necks, posing on the windswept sands, and in the background one of the course leaders – Ed Bardolph, Declan McIlroy’s social worker.

‘Here…’ she said, stabbing a finger on the page. ‘Potts. Francis Peter. That was him – Frank Potts. Told you it was Jack! Dad took him on, but he was good, absolutely straight as a die.’

‘Remember anything about him?’ asked Dryden, wondering about Bardolph, trying to concentrate on Frank Potts, feeling again the unnatural caress of coincidence.

Outside they heard the wind drop, the gritty patter of the falling hail suddenly silent.

She smiled, putting the book back. ‘I do, actually. He liked being a security guard so much he decided to make a career out of it. He became a policeman. You might still be able to find him.’

‘Any idea where I could start?’ asked Dryden.

She let the file drawer close with a crash. ‘I think we got a card at Christmas for a few years. New Zealand, Australia? Yes – Melbourne, or Sydney. Somewhere like that.’

The internal telephone bleeped from the desk and Ruth Connor hit a button. A loud static-scarred voice filled the room. ‘Mrs Connor? You asked me to let you know. Mr Nabbs phoned in, he’ll be with you in ten minutes.’

‘Kate, thanks. Can you send him straight up to the office – and we’ll have a pot of coffee.’

Ruth Connor didn’t bother with a smile this time. ‘If you’ll excuse us, Mr Dryden. An evening’s work, I’m afraid.’

‘Right. I’ll get on the track of Frank Potts, then. Just about anywhere in the southern hemisphere, right?’

But she wasn’t listening any more, or even pretending she was. Dryden saw himself out and went back to the bar,
where he sat on a stool for ten minutes, thinking about where you would hide a safe. He saw William Nabbs arrive and head for the office, walking quickly, carrying a single holdall, unmarked, and obviously heavy.

39

From the verandah of the chalet it looked as if the sea had deserted the coast for good. Moonlit sand stretched to the horizon, where a glimmering white chalk line hinted at breaking surf a mile offshore. The air was still, the wind blown out for now. According to teletext on the chalet TV the ice storm was still twelve hours offshore, wheeling in with a deep anticyclone.

He’d sat with Laura for an hour until he knew she was asleep; waited another, sipping malt.

The bedside radio beeped the hours and the incantation of the shipping forecast began. In nine hours DI Reade would be at the camp with his team, and the following morning he would have to take Laura back to The Tower. Dryden would make his statement, then step into the background. The detective would play it by the book, tie up any loose ends left by the original inquiry, test out Declan and Joe’s story. But Dryden knew now that the heart of the mystery was still impenetrable, and would certainly defeat the half-hearted inquiry DI Reade was determined to conduct. Dryden had failed, failed the friends who had refused to fail him.

He flicked on the bedside monitor and stepped outside: flashing the torch three times into the darkness. Carefully descending the ice-covered steps he set out along the beach towards the high bank of marram grass where he knew Humph lurked in the Capri. It was time to send the cabbie home.

Dryden stood on the high-water mark amongst fractured
sheets of ice left by the receding sea. The beach was a landscape revealed, a foreign country normally hidden beneath the North Sea. The power and swiftness of the falling tide had left the wide sands incised deeply with miniature valleys, channels, coves and hills, a country of black shadow and gentle curves as seductive as a desert. The red buoy, which at high water rode out the waves in the middle of the bay, lay on its side in a trickling brook. There was a single island, a sandy outcrop in the shape of a teardrop topped with grass. Here, in the summer, the lifeguards flew their flags. Tonight a red flag lay frozen to the staff.

A dog barked and, turning west, Dryden saw Boudicca, briefly cresting a moonlit sandhill before falling again into a lightless hollow. Humph hove into view, as substantial as the beached buoy in the channel below.

Dryden joined him, his footsteps up the incline marked by deep shadow-filled footprints.

‘A ball?’ said Humph, when he joined him, pointing inland.

They were above the stream that was all that was left of Morton’s Leam at low tide. Trundling down the brook was a round glass fisherman’s float – colourless in the moonlight, held within a rope harness. It bobbed as it weaved along the sinuous line of the S-bends, catching occasionally on the sand, before bolting on towards the sea.

‘Any progress?’ asked Humph, taking the tennis ball from Boudicca’s jaws and sending it skittering off downhill again.

‘A bit, but not enough. There may be a motive – or two. Scratch a place like this there’s all sorts of hidden stories just beneath the surface. I can think of several reasons why someone would want to keep Chips Connor inside, but when it comes to finding who killed Paul Gedney the cupboard is virtually bare. There is only one person in the camp who was here that summer – and that’s Ruth Connor. She’s lying
about something, and her husband was a burden to her, but for the life of me I can’t think she had a decent motive for murder.’

‘There’s you,’ said Humph. ‘You were here that summer.’

‘Right. So I did it? Thanks.’ He shivered, sensing the temperature falling beneath a clear sky. Looking inland he saw something else following the float down to the sea. ‘That’s odd,’ he said. It was two things, something round like another float, but behind it something smaller, pointing up out of the water. The two bobbed together, a few feet apart, clearly tied beneath the surface.

‘Come on,’ said Dryden, dropping quickly down the face of the bank to the stream’s edge.

Whatever it was, it was in midstream, moving swiftly with the icy water. Just below the point where the stream cut through the dunes the channel widened into a pool, and here the objects circled, waiting for the stream to nudge them out into the final stretch to the sea.

Dryden edged out in the water, feeling the icy coldness at his toes. It looked like the float was wreathed in weed, but the other smaller object was suddenly clearer and Dryden’s heart missed a beat upon recognition: it was a glove, grey-green in the moonlight, the fingers vertical.

‘Humph!’ he shouted, wading out, the water stingingly cold. He tracked it now as it swung past, and the glove, leading, caught an incline of hidden sand which slowed it, bringing the float towards the bank in a graceful arc.

He was six feet away now and he saw the weed-encrusted fisherman’s buoy for what it was: a human head. Between skull and hand an expanse of black material spread, just submerged. The head, the weeds revealed as matted hair, was face down. Humph was at his side, the rasp of breath painful.

‘Shit,’ said the cabbie. He trudged in, grabbed the arm beneath the glove, and hauled the body round and half out on the sand. The water ran out of the clothes and an eel zigzagged back towards the safety of the black pool. The body was clad in a thermal tracksuit, Dryden saw now, dark blue with fashionable piping.

The corpse was splayed like a starfish: the head wasn’t turned down as Dryden had thought but ricked violently to the left, the face obscured by the hair and weeds. The left arm was flung back like the right but at the elbow bent back again, the hand turned up as the rigor contorted the limbs. Between the thermal glove and the tracksuit sleeve a chunky sportsman’s wristwatch showed.

Dryden pulled the body up by the shoulder, fully into the moonlight and lifted the hair clear of the face. The pallor was purple-white, like a beached jellyfish. There was some ugly black bruising at the neck, below the ear, and across one cheekbone, but it was clear enough who it was, or who it had been. The last time Dryden had seen that face it had been peering dreamily into a make-believe swimming pool, where a woman in a white swimsuit swam languid lengths. Chips Connor had come home.

The Dolphin Holiday Camp

Saturday, 31 August 1974

Philip ran to the dunes and climbed them to a place he knew where a bowl of sand like a seat looked out over the sea. Here he’d often sat after breakfast waiting for the other children to come, whooping, out from the chalets and down onto the beach. He sat this last time, letting the minutes of summer tick away as the waves swept in across the empty morning beach. Soon he’d be home on the Fen, with a new horizon, home for winter, and this world would not be his again. He knew that now, but dug his hands down into the sand, as if clinging to the surface of the earth, and felt the coolness beneath.

The cry, when it came, reminded him of the night before: the pain, with pleasure in the release. It was close, in the dry grass, and the voices were so low that they seemed to be inside his head. He edged forward, careful not to breast the crest of the dunes where he could be seen against the sky, until he saw below a miniature valley in the sand, blown out by the winds, an amphitheatre unseen from the beach. In the centre were the ashes of a fire. There was a rug of green, a bedspread, and two bodies intertwined as one, seen through the dry grass.

He heard her first, the words in a rhythm as if kneading dough. ‘I told you, they’re gone. Relax now.’

She sat up on his waist, her hair in a red scarf, wisps of blonde hanging free, her face turned away. Philip didn’t understand the way they moved, the man’s hand played on the sun-splashed skin. But only one hand. The other lay beside him curled, the fat bicep turned outwards so that Philip could see the jagged angry thunderbolt of the scar.

Then he ran.

40

Tuesday, 10 January

Within the hour the sea had spilled back into the pool, edging up towards the sand dunes. Dryden and Humph dragged Chips Connor’s body to the high-water mark, pulling it through the broken ice and flotsam onto the sandy path beyond. A police squad car, answering Dryden’s mobile call, edged down through the seagrass, its tyres crunching in the frost. The moonlight shone into Connor’s open and unblinking eyes. The black body bag, stiff with ice, cracked as they zipped it up. In his memory Dryden saw another corpse, curled on a doorstep, shrouded in ice.

The wind, blustery now, threw spray over the pathologist, whose examination was cursory. Chips Connor’s pale hand, reclaimed from the frozen glove, seemed to call the tide inland. Lighthouse Cottage was requisitioned as a temporary morgue, and Dryden told to wait there for the arrival of the duty inspector from Lynn, while Humph was allowed to retreat with Boudicca to the privacy of the Capri. Dryden left them there, hugging each other.

Lighthouse Cottage bustled with discreet activity and the edgy electronic static of police radios. William Nabbs gave Dryden coffee and threw driftwood on an open fire set quickly beneath a brushed aluminium hood in the kitchen: the clock above read 1.30am. Chips Connor’s body had been taken inside first, through to the front room. Outside, a group of uniformed PCs, conducting a fingertip search of
the beach, dunes and riverbank in relay teams, made periodic appearances for hot drinks and shelter.

Nabbs drank coffee too. His hair was matted and wet, the blond dyed streaks in stripes through the natural brown. By the door stood a sea rod and tackle, while on the deal table lay a brace of cod glistening in the flickering light, more life in their iridescent scales than in their dead eyes. Dryden, vaguely aware that Nabbs had put something strong in the coffee, watched in fascination as blood dripped from the open mouths to the quarry-tiled floor beneath.

‘You OK?’ said Nabbs, fussing with the wood.

Dryden nodded. ‘Fine. I like midnight walks, I deserve what I get.’

A DI arrived, a raincoat stiff with ice plastered to his legs. He was young – mid-thirties – and would have been keen if he hadn’t just worked forty hours straight. He had weak eyes, close together, in a face which looked worried at rest. He introduced himself as Detective Inspector John Parlour of King’s Lynn CID, and tried to suck some nicotine from a packet of low-tar menthol cigarettes.

‘Where is she?’ asked Nabbs, giving the detective coffee too, complete with whisky.