The Coldest Blood

The Dolphin Holiday Camp

Friday, 30 August 1974

Tonight, the last they would play the game, Philip lay still, willing his pulse to slow. Around him, in the other chalets, he knew the children slept. Soon he’d hear the footsteps on the wooden walkway that ran between the huts. Then the face would appear at the window, the quick professional look sliding over his bed, before the Bluecoat moved on to complete the round.

Then it would be time.

He listened to the sounds of the adult night: a jukebox in the bar played ‘When Will I See You Again’ for the third time and a wave of laughter rolled out from the camp’s club, down the long avenue between the chalets, and broke with a whisper no louder than the swish of the sea beyond the dunes. A klaxon sounded at the funfair and screams marked the descent of the big dipper.

Philip gripped the sheet at his chin and pressed his eyes shut, willing the game to begin.

An amplified voice, distorted beyond coherence, interrupted the music as the floorshow began. He’d seen them often in his head: his uncle and aunt, in the darkened audience now, their heads thrown back with the rest, cigarette smoke trailing like clouds at sea. Through the door to the next room, in the half-light, he saw their beds, waiting, crisply made.

Outside, through the gap he’d had made in the curtains, the stretchedblue sky of a summer’s day had already turned to mauve. A seagull called, dashing across his field of vision, and a bell tolled twice from the floating buoy which marked the deep-cut channel through the sands.

And then he did hear the footsteps. The pattern familiar: the crunch of sand and the gritty shuffle of deck shoes on wood, the metallic stutter of the master keys clanking against the brass dolphin. Then the window, left just open, creaked wider, and the curtain rings clicked.

A second passed, lengthened impossibly by the tension of the moment, and then the Bluecoat was gone, whistling tunelessly with the Three Degrees.

Philip swung his legs down onto the bare boards, pulled on shorts and T-shirt, and bundled his pyjamas, a beach bag and ball under the sheet. He walked soundlessly to the door and turned the handle and the Yale key simultaneously. Clicking up the catch, he looked out at the chalet opposite, the one with the metal numerals screwed to its blue painted door: 10.

Dex was there, standing too, scared by the secret they shared, twisting a length of kite string in his hands. Philip felt the now familiar sense of belonging, an only child suddenly enveloped in the wordless rituals of a family. The game was about to begin for the last time. But for a second they paused, holding a look across the twilight of a summer’s evening neither would ever forget.