The Coldest Blood (6 page)

The priest produced a set of keys and wrestled briefly with a large padlock on the corrugated-iron sheet covering the front door. He swung it back, almost violently, as if airing the place, and then unlocked the door behind, which was studded with nails in mock medieval grandeur. Then he was gone, swallowed by the shadows, without looking back.

By the time Dryden had edged over the threshold the
priest had thrown open a shutter, the light revealing in the gloom of the entrance hall an ugly ironwork candelabra suffocated in cobwebs.

‘I was thirty-one when I arrived here as principal in 1970,’ said Martin, shivering despite himself. ‘I think the diocese knew something was wrong and I was supposed to put things straight. The outsider. And that’s how they treated me.’

Dryden climbed halfway up the stairs to look back down on the priest, noticing the neat natural tonsure of scalp surrounded by the short, oiled hair. The floor was cold stone in a chessboard black and white design. Despite the dereliction two smells still tussled for supremacy, both remembered from Dryden’s childhood: beeswax polish and rotting carpet. The walls too were horribly reminiscent: split by a dado rail between purple below and lemon yellow above.

‘The winter of 1970,’ said Martin, lost now in his own memories.

Dryden nodded, climbing further despite the creaking wood. A bird fluttered somewhere in a loft and some leaves around an open fireplace blew themselves into a tiny whirlwind. On the landing a threadbare carpet ran off into the darkness in both directions: ahead a large stained-glass window looked out into the rear courtyard. Martin overtook him, turned left, and opened a door into one of the rear wings. It was a dormitory, and here the windows were without curtains or blinds and largely intact, bathing the long gallery in a flat, institutional light. Bedsteads had stood here in two lines against both walls, the linoleum still bearing faded stripes where the sunlight had fallen between them.

Martin stood, his large frame twisted slightly. ‘I didn’t know,’ he bowed his head. ‘Not for many years. The teachers had mostly been here for a lifetime – the youngest for twenty years. Several had been boys here. It had been a brutal place,
and I often think the only real mark of their guilt was that they felt they had to hide it from me.’

‘You don’t mind if I find that hard to believe,’ said Dryden, walking the length of the empty room to a shoulder-height wooden partition. Beyond was another bare room, the floor tiled this time, and the walls showing the scars of a row of urinals. ‘It’s medieval,’ he said to no one.

‘Yes,’ said Martin. ‘Yes, it was. There were four dormitories – each a separate school house. Leo, Pius, John, and Paul. A priest ruled each – tiny kingdoms, really. The tradition, I was informed, was that the principal was expected to enter only at the invitation of the priest in charge. I never challenged it. I was expected to live apart, to preserve the authority of the office.’

‘Where?’ said Dryden, running a hand along the ice-cold tiles.

‘In one of the forward wings. There’s a flat. The rest of the staff lived in the other – except those with house responsibilities who lived here.’ He nodded to a single door in the far wall. Dryden tried the handle but it was locked; he rattled it, listening to the echo.

They retraced their steps to the hallway outside, down the half-lit stairs to the tiled lobby and into what had been an office to the side of the main doors.

‘My kingdom,’ said Martin, switching on another bare lightbulb. There was a desk in the middle, grotesquely decorated and on a grand scale, while above it a great picture had hung, its shadow still visible on the scarlet and gold wallpaper.

‘They can’t get the desk out. It was probably made in this very room.’

‘When
did
you know?’ asked Dryden, tired with the contemplation of furnishings.

Martin shrugged, turning out the light. In the sudden shadow he paused and Dryden could see his eyes, and the water that suddenly filled them. ‘It doesn’t happen like that. We aren’t innocent and then suddenly guilty, not when it really matters. We’re corrupted, by degree. It’s how evil works, Mr Dryden, through a series of tiny victories over good. I was institutionalized, and the institution allowed those things to happen, and then suddenly it was too late. I do remember when it was too late.’

‘What happened?’ said Dryden.

‘The school was empty, I can’t recall why. Perhaps a service at the church, or sports day – yes, sports perhaps. I knew I was alone. I was working in my office when I heard this persistent noise. It is very distinctive, the crying of the defeated. I won’t pretend it was the first time I had heard such things. I went upstairs and broke the rule.’

‘What did you find?’ asked Dryden. They were by the main door again, in front of a large hall mirror built into the wall in which the silver had begun to blacken in ugly blotches.

‘Beyond the wash basins were toilet cubicles. In Pius. The boy was in one. He said he’d been there for several days. He’d been given a Bible, I remember, and a cup to drink the water from the cistern. He was naked, crushed in many ways. I tried to get him to leave but he reiterated the punishments which awaited him if he dared. It was hard to believe, but there was no doubting his sincerity.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Nothing. It was too late. I knew it had been happening, I had been protected from the knowledge by the rules. I said something ineffectual, to salve my conscience, and we carried on.’

He looked at Martin in the mirror, the face more sinister now that left and right had been transposed.

Outside, the sky was cloudless, the visibility icicle-sharp. They walked back towards the church along the old track which had been the drive, Dryden annoyed that the priest had succeeded in saying so much without making anything clearer.

They stopped at a low stone wall which edged a small graveyard.

‘As I said, two more victims have been identified,’ said Dryden, trying to inveigle the priest into specifics, into confronting the reality of the police investigation.

The priest opened the graveyard gate. ‘Yes. They are contacting others, I believe – Hugh Appleyard is a good man. Many more will come forward, I’m sure. Some will embellish the truth, some will invent it – but there is enough shame in a hundredth of what they say to damn the guilty.’

Again, effortlessly, he had distanced himself from the children who were in his care.

‘The priests in charge. What of their stories?’ said Dryden, encouraging him to implicate others.

Martin laughed then, and Dryden sensed the corrosive cynicism which had been his punishment for those decades of responsibility.

‘Ask them,’ he said, spreading his arms wide. ‘They’re all here. Remember, I was thirty-one when I arrived. The youngest priest was twenty years older. The last died two years ago.’

Dryden rubbed the lichen from the nearest grave and saw that each stone bore a simple cross and the diocesan crest.

Father Martin looked at the sky. ‘That is my sentence, Mr Dryden. To be left alone amongst the accused.’

Or your salvation, thought Dryden, filling his lungs with the frosted air.

8

Dryden slept happily in Humph’s Capri, his dreams refusing to take flight thanks to the ballast provided by six pints of Isle of Ely Ale and a four-star curry which had given him hiccoughs. The session in The Fenman bar had been particularly lively, culminating in Garry’s ill-fated attempt to dance a Highland reel in anticipation of New Year.

When Dryden finally awoke the moon was up and ice covered the Capri’s bonnet. He stretched, aware that a hangover hovered, and cleared a porthole in the condensation of the window. Outside, against the stars, the black outline of The Tower Hospital loomed like an exam.

Humph was listening to one of his Estonian language tapes, repeating with care a long list of pastry delicacies available only in Tallinn, while flicking through his bilingual dictionary, unnaturally excited by the section devoted to pies. Each year he applied himself to some obscure language, in the almost certain knowledge there was little danger he would ever need to speak it in Ely. Then each Christmas he would flee the unspeakable horrors of the festive season by flying out to some forsaken European capital for a few days to try out his new vocabulary. He had just returned from Zagreb, having spent the previous year mastering Serbo-Croat menus.

He flipped open the glove compartment to extract a miniature bottle of Croatian hooch he’d bought at the airport. It was purple and tasted of lighter fuel.

Dryden peered out again at the lit foyer of The Tower.
A former workhouse, the building had become a lunatic asylum throughout Victoria’s reign. It boasted a single turret, complete with an interior-lit clock and fake battlements, the whole encircled by grounds full of institutional trees.

Laura Dryden, thanks to the continued support of the Mid-Anglian Mutual Insurance Company, was one of fifty paying ‘guests’ in the private hospital. It was a situation Dryden knew could not last for ever. One day the insurers would politely point out that their responsibilities were close to an end, and suggest a less expensive regimen of care involving what they called ‘home’ – a concept with which Dryden would have struggled if he had allowed himself to think about it at all.

He pushed open the cab door before he had time to reconsider his decision to begin his ritual daily visit. The rust in the hinges screeched, as he knew it would, and he slammed the door closed without saying a word.

Inside, beyond the overheated and over-lit reception, the carpeted corridors muffled his steps. There was an expensive silence, in which high-technology machinery hummed, spoilt by a solitary cry from a patient’s dream.

Dryden knocked on Laura’s door, a little ceremony which marked out her right to privacy despite the certainty that she would not answer, would almost certainly never answer. He had not heard his wife’s voice for six years: since the night their car had been forced off a wintry Fen road by the oncoming headlights of a drunk driver, and down into the black water of Harrimere Drain. Dryden had escaped but Laura, trapped on the back seat, had been left in a diminishing pocket of air for three hours: three hours in which she must have struggled with the fact of her abandonment, three hours in which the horror of reality had forced her to retreat into a protective coma, a retreat from which she
was only painfully emerging. For this was no ordinary coma. Fate had reserved another twist of the knife.

Locked In Syndrome (LIS) was still a little-understood condition, but medical experts were at least now agreed that it existed. Victims usually entered the coma under extreme trauma; however, the peculiarities of LIS were connected not to the outward symptoms, but to the inward realities. Sufferers exhibited no signs of mental or physical activity, but those who had emerged from LIS reported varying degrees of consciousness – from fleeting dreamlike visions to a state very close to normality. Those able to move a finger – or more often an eyelid – were able to communicate using the latest technology. After three years of immobility Laura had managed to move the small finger on her right hand and had learnt to communicate using a machine – the COMPASS – which had been installed by her bed. It constantly displayed a grid of letters and by flicking a switch placed in the palm of her hand Laura was able to select them. As her slow recovery continued she had mastered the COMPASS using a suck-and-blow pipe which could be placed between her lips. Her messages were often fluent and rational, but interspersed with prolonged periods of either silence or a dreamlike surrealism.

Dryden entered the room, turning the dial on the dimmer to illuminate the figure on the bed draped in a single white sheet.

The COMPASS jumped instantly into life, a spool of paper trickling out of a printer like ticker-tape.

One of the refinements Laura had learnt was to prepare a sentence on screen and then activate the print key as her husband entered the room.

HI. LOVE YOU.

It was a ritualistic greeting, but welcome none the less.
Dryden’s spirits rose, and he edged on to the bed, insinuated an arm under Laura’s neck, and raised her head higher on the pillows. Her hair was an exuberant pile of auburn, which he noted had been freshly brushed. The nurses, who maintained an optimism about their patient which Dryden struggled to match, often applied some make-up as well, adding colour to the Latin tan which had paled so visibly over the years.

Laura’s eyes, a liquid brown, swam slightly as she fought to focus on his face. He felt a surge of optimism and clutched her tighter. The year had been marked by a steady improvement in her health, and the first spasmodic movements of muscles in her right arm and foot. They’d been enthusiastic about the suggestion from the consultant that she might leave The Tower – a brief excursion into the outside world, a weekend perhaps, or more, but somewhere close to medical care if her condition caused alarm.

Dryden turned her head gently towards the window. ‘It’s so warm in here,’ he said. ‘You’ve no idea. Outside it’s minus 10 or something. The river’s freezing up by the Maltings, the boat’s locked in.’

While he held her there was no way she could operate the COMPASS, an enforced silence he knew Laura enjoyed. He spilled out news of the rest of the day, making sure he included the kind of details she loved: Humph’s diet, the minutiae of
The Crow
’s eccentric personalities, and – most difficult of all – how he felt.

But more often he escaped by telling her what he’d done.

‘I got the splash again,’ he said. It was one of their jokes. On Fleet Street, on the
News
, he’d fought every day to get the lead story. Once, perhaps twice, a month he’d land the honour. On
The Crow
it was his by default.

‘Guy, in his late thirties, froze to death in his armchair at
home. Twelfth floor of a block of council flats, with all the windows open. I guess he didn’t care if he lived or died but I can think of easier ways to end it.’

He stopped, sensing he’d strayed on to forbidden territory, and tried to fill the silence by uncorking the wine bottle he’d opened the night before. This was one of their small ceremonies: the shared glass of wine. As Laura’s condition had improved she was able to take liquids through a drinking funnel.