The Coldest Blood

12

Dryden walked down towards the river from Market Square. He wrapped his oversized black coat around him, the buttons and buttonholes overlapping across his narrow chest. Across the Fen a snow squall smudged the black horizon like an artist’s finger, while in the foreground skaters criss-crossed the frozen watermeadows watched by a scattered crowd lifted wholesale from a Brueghel landscape.

At the foot of the hill lay the district of Waterside, a collection of warehouses and cottages which had grown up alongside the river’s wharves. Beyond that lay the frozen river. Dryden noted that the ice here was patchy and floated in rafts, unlike the solid white crust that had encircled PK 129 upriver. But even here, despite the tidal ebb and flow provided by the sluice gates downstream, thicker pack ice was creeping out from the banks. By dusk the ice would be solid from shore to shore.

Dryden crossed the river by a steel footbridge as a single rower passed beneath, swaddled in jumpers, heading quickly for the sanctuary of a boathouse, the skiff’s hull nudging aside miniature icebergs. On the far bank lay Quanea Fen, a skaters’ paradise, lit by a low sun just now breaking through a bank of clouds. The temperature had fallen below minus 6 degrees centigrade for three consecutive nights – the official stipulation before a championship skating event could be held in safety. Sympathetic farmers had opened the field sluices to flood the Fen, preparing the vast arena for the event. Ice already covered the two-inch-deep man-made mere, creating the perfect venue for the championship – a solid steel-grey surface several times bigger than any Olympic rink.

Wooden blocks with flags were being set out along the oval of a 400-metre speed-skating course. On the track itself volunteers worked with wide brushes to clear away the tiny stipples on the ice left by the flurries of hail and snow. Around the arena an ice fair clustered; a couple of burger bars and a tea and coffee stall were already doing brisk business. A small travelling fair, usually mothballed for the winter, had been hustled out of hibernation to make the most of the expected crowds. A coconut shy and a child’s roundabout were already up and running. Duckboards had been laid down for those not on skates and a troop of council workmen in fluorescent yellow jackets were stringing lights from posts sunk in the ground.

It was a scene in silver, grey and black, except for a single blazing brazier set on wooden blocks, a glimmer of cold orange like a blackbird’s beak in a winter landscape. Then, suddenly, a half mile of multi-coloured lights flickered on between their posts, then flickered out after the test was judged a success.

Ed Bardolph, the social worker who had been a witness at Declan McIlroy’s inquest, was chairman of the Fen Skating Committee, the official body which alone had the power to convene the championships and regulate the races. Dryden knew the FSC was due to meet here, on the ice, to make its final decision. In the distance he could see a knot of men clustered around the brazier beside a brace of Land Rovers and a skidoo. As Dryden approached, moving gingerly over the ice and wishing he’d brought his skates, the group formed a circle around a hole in the ice beside the fire, like Eskimo fishers.

Dryden spotted Bardolph crouching, examining a plate of ice they’d levered up from the grass. Bardolph was also the local spokesman for the public-sector workers’ union Unison, as well as a self-confessed skating fanatic – two pastimes which had brought him into regular contact with the local press. He was heavily built, with navvy’s arms and a lumpy, bucolic face, and easy to underestimate.

‘Hi,’ he said as Dryden approached, standing and holding out an ungloved hand. He transmitted a smile which was not entirely cynical, for he enjoyed Dryden’s company and whenever they’d crossed paths in the courts he’d been impressed by the reporter’s work, which combined accuracy with an understated sensitivity.

‘Sorry,’ said Dryden, turning to walk away from the group and secure some privacy. Bardolph left his companions cutting a second circular plate of ice from the ground fifty yards nearer the river.

Dryden blew a theatrical plume of breath. ‘It’s about Declan McIlroy – I missed the inquest. It must have been slipped onto the list. We’re doing a feature on the dangers of the cold snap, I wanted some background…’

Bardolph nodded, clearly struggling to concentrate on anything but ice and the exhilarating probability of a race. They heard a mechanical screech of chains over gears and looked to the river where a crane down by the marina was lifting one of the white boats – a floating tourists’ gin palace – from the black water up onto a safe mooring.

‘So, misadventure?’ asked Dryden, turning back.

Bardolph shrugged. ‘What else? There was no note and you know what they’re like these days – suicide’s a rare verdict; there’s too many legal pitfalls.’

Dryden tried to imagine the scene in the small crowded coroner’s court. ‘The sister came, yeah?’ Bardolph nodded, clearly wary of Dryden’s questions. Irrationally wary, Dryden thought, but said instead, ‘Why were you a witness?’

Bardolph examined his boots. ‘I can’t say, you know. He was a client, a client for many years, and our relationship is still confidental – even if he is dead.’

‘Sure. I just thought you might have said something in court. I’m just trying to catch up…’ Dryden was playing a practised game, inviting his source to merely confirm what was already in the public domain, while leading him towards its boundaries.

‘Declan had some severe social problems which stemmed from a very unhappy childhood. He was in care, an orphanage. He was actually very bright, which didn’t help, of course. I put him in touch with a therapist, and he had some treatment. There was a friend, Joe, who had a house out on the Fen, and he spent some time there – but it was a temporary respite. Declan painted too, and I think he was gifted in some ways, even if the work was self-indulgent. He took courses – correspondence courses – hundreds of them, in fact: electrical engineering, IT, computer maintenance, stuff like that, as well as history of art.

‘But as I say the problems were chronic. There were always unresolved frustrations which resulted in periodic outbursts of anger. Violence – sometimes against the nearest person to hand, often against himself.’

There was a cheer and everyone on the Fen turned to watch two skaters leaving the starting line to test the course, each with an arm held at the back, the other swinging like a pendulum.

‘Do you think he committed suicide, then?’

‘I guess. But it wasn’t characteristic.’

Dryden was confused. ‘You said the violence was often directed against himself?’

‘Yes. But that was violence. The manifestation was always immediate and pretty brutal. A slash with a broken bottle, a head-butt into concrete, that kind of thing. This was very… passive, I guess. Very controlled. It wasn’t what I would have expected. But then the pressures were new…’

They walked on, Dryden allowing the silence to acknowledge the fact that Bardolph had led him on.

‘The court heard this?’ he asked gently.

‘No. It was in reports; the coroner will have read them.’ Bardolph sighed. ‘But they’d have to confirm if you asked – just leave me out of it, OK?’

Dryden nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘The case against St Vincent’s – the Catholic orphanage. Declan was a victim. You know the background, I’ve read your stories in The Crow. That was a pressure in itself. But we’d had to… unearth is the right word, unearth the past. It brought out the issues, you know, the causes of his lack of self-respect. It was a painful time.’

Dryden saw the mottled face of Father John Martin, the birthmark livid against the cool blue eye.

‘He was one of the victims who had just been identified?’

Bardolph nodded. ‘That’s right, which means the pressures were new.’

‘It might not have been suicide,’ said Dryden, turning away, looking back at the cathedral, the West Tower now lost in its own private snowstorm. ‘Declan had a visitor the day he died. A man claiming to be a doctor giving advice on the cold. I don’t think he was there to keep Declan warm.’

Bardolph shook his head in disbelief, but Dryden left the thought hanging, unresolved. ‘Was anything else on Declan’s mind? Any other worries?’

Bardolph shook his head again, putting a glove back over his hand, and Dryden knew he’d lied by the flicker of his eyelids and the pinching of his nose.

Dryden nodded as if he understood. ‘At the very least it deserves investigation.’

Bardolph nodded, stamping his foot on the ice, impatient to get back to the Eskimo hole.

‘Funeral?’ asked Dryden.

Bardolph pulled his attention back to his former client. ‘Cremation – it’s private. Then they’ll scatter the ashes. He would have liked that. Claustrophobia – worst case I’ve ever come across, actually. He had to be sedated in prison. That all goes back to childhood too…’ Bardolph let his gaze slip away over the ice. ‘Spent most of his time out on that balcony, twelve storeys up.’

Dryden nodded, as if sharing an old truth. So Buster Timms was right about his next door neighbour’s criminal past. Dryden thought of the doorless flat and the windows thrown open to the night. ‘It’s getting colder,’ he said, his jaw suddenly juddering with a shiver.

Bardolph grinned, watching the circling pair of speed skaters. ‘I know. Isn’t it wonderful?’

Dryden walked to the riverbank and found a bench free of snow. The more light he let fall on Declan McIlroy’s life the more the shadows seemed to deepen. He felt the first lethal pangs of depression. The cold was getting to his heart, the chill in his back making his shoulder blades ache. Closing his eyes, he tried to conjure up a warmer memory, an antidote to the cold. It was that last summer again, always that last summer. His parents had sent him away with his uncle and aunt to the coast while they took in the harvest at Burnt Fen Farm: 1974. They were worried: worried he’d been lonely too long, an only child whose life had encompassed little more than the hamlet around the farm. So they’d decided on the break, just beyond the horizon, surrounded by children, at a holiday camp.

He could feel the warmth now. The hissing white water around his legs where the waves had broken, the sun beating flat down on the footmarked sand, and the glow of the sunburn on his shoulders. He would remember that summer always because of what came next. The return home, the snows of winter, and the floods which took his father away. So it had been his last summer, the last summer of childhood.