The Coldest Blood

14

It was 4.00pm and the day had died. Dryden, within the warm, darkened sanctuary of Humph’s cab, struggled to see through the frosted windscreen. A security lamp on one of the allotment sheds caught the glitter of frost forming on the Leylandii hedges. A car backfired on the Jubilee Estate and a car alarm pulsed. Humph moodily considered the distant convivial glow from the Gardeners’ Arms. Dryden had made him move the Capri back into the shadows near High Park Flats. Here the air was colder still, the ice forming Spirograph patterns on the inside of the windscreen which the cabbie periodically attacked with a chamois leather.

‘You could fetch me back a pint,’ said Humph, shifting in his seat and emitting a thin odour of chicken tikka massala.

Dryden, equally tempted to gatecrash, wound down the window to refresh the air. ‘I’d love to, but – and I’m only guessing here – they don’t do carry-outs. Besides – I’m watching that,’ he said, nodding towards a 4x4 parked up with the rest by the white picket fence near the entrance to the allotments. In the grey world of the dusk they could just see enough of the interior to make out the dog-mesh behind the rear passenger seats. Within, a grey shape flexed and stretched before sinking from view.

The first to leave the wake was a thin man with a whippet, staggering slightly over the uneven ground. He found his car, at the third attempt, and drove off without his lights on, local radio blaring suddenly from the onboard stereo.

John Sley was next out, expertly juggling car keys from left hand to right, and enjoying a sinuous swagger. The donkey jacket lapels were turned up against the night as he unlocked the 4x4. He flicked a switch on the dashboard which lit the ground below the car in fluorescent blue.

‘Now there’s clever,’ said Dryden, his heartbeat rising.

Sley went to the back and flipped up the tailgate. He shouted something, and the uncurling form of the dog subsided. Then he heaved out a mechanic’s trolley which he dropped by the driver’s door, before swinging himself, with surprising agility, down and under the 4x4. Thirty seconds later he was out, the trolley stashed, and pulling away, taking the Jubilee’s sleeping policemen at 50 mph before turning down a drove road into the Great West Fen.

Dryden nudged the cabbie. ‘Go on then. Follow that car.’

Humph licked his lips, fired up the engine and left half an inch of rubber on the tarmac before attempting to vault the very same sleeping policemen: a stunt which dislodged a complete set of nuts and bolts from the Capri’s suspension as the cab briefly took to the air.

As they left the city lights behind darkness swept over the flatlands as if a switch had been thrown. Lights dotted the distant Fen roads, some in ribbons marking the flow of traffic, others cottages and farms. Christmas had brought a now familiar outbreak of the kind of kitsch decoration beloved of smalltown America. As they slipped north they passed a farmhouse topped off with an illuminated Santa and sleigh, complete with two reindeer alternately lit red and green. A mile further on a roadside cottage was beaded with Christmas lights which flashed and appeared to shuffle in an electronic dance. To the east a Christmas tree winked on top of a grain silo half a county away.

After five minutes they spotted Sley’s lights ahead, ploughing on, always in sight along the arrow-straight road.

Dryden rubbed his hand across the windscreen to clear the view and Humph flicked the windscreen wipers. When the glass cleared Sley’s car had gone, the road stretching out before them as empty as a runway, the central row of cats’ eyes as bright as the stars. Humph trundled the Capri up the roadside bank, Dryden got out, slammed the door to cut out the vanity light, and let his eyes acclimatize. At the foot of the dyke a drain ten feet wide was an ice mirror, reflecting the moon rising behind the distant outline of the sugar-beet factory. Looking back he could see Ely, and as he watched the cathedral floodlights came on, picking out the silver leaded lantern tower. On the opposite side of the road was uninterrupted darkness: the next light going east probably a distant village outside Moscow.

He walked twenty yards along the bank and surveyed the scene again. The dyke’s waters were still an unruffled silver to the west, but the darkness to the east had been dispelled by a farmhouse, now glimpsed between high poplars which must have shielded it from Dryden’s original vantage point. It looked welcoming: lights burnt in the four Georgian windows which faced the road, a Christmas tree in one. As he watched a security light came on, followed by another, and he saw Sley’s 4x4 sliding between the trees and round to the rear of the house.

He ran back to the cab where Humph had wound down his window. ‘Wait here. If I’m not back in an hour get Interpol and a helicopter.’

Humph grunted, wound the window up, and closed his eyes.

Dryden walked down the centre of the road in the Capri’s headlights until he was level with the farm track. As he walked away from the main road and the comforting lights of the cab he was aware for the first time that the temperature had dropped further – into unknown territory. Pressing a finger to his cheek he felt the skin, hard and numb, and a dull pain had begun to grip his throat. The farmland around him was open and featureless under the moon, except for a single magnolia, unseen from the road, bent over an oval of starlit pond. Soon he was amongst the poplars skirting the house, and he could see the 4x4 parked amongst farm buildings to the rear. By a security light Dryden could see Sley on his back on the trolley again, retrieving whatever he’d stashed beneath the car.

This was the moment Dryden always dreaded: the tipping point between his life as an objective recorder and the less familiar role of active participant. Life for him often seemed to be something to watch. But now he knew he would learn nothing more unless he took an active role himself. The thought made his guts twist.

He was within six feet of the 4x4 when the sound of his footfalls alerted Sley to his presence.

‘Joe?’ said the voice under the car, untroubled.

‘Don’t think so,’ said Dryden, dropping down on his haunches.

Sley slid out without a smile, turning an oily rag in his hands like a garrotte.

Dryden, aware he might have made an error of heroic proportions, glanced back at the main road where he feared Humph would now be sleeping soundly. He regretted the Interpol joke, like almost all his jokes.

‘Sorry. It’s me again. We were passing and I saw your 4x4. I’ve seen it before.’

He’d said it quickly, crossing the line before he had a chance to retreat. Sley stood, one huge hand holding a metal box retrieved from under the chassis, which he folded into a green baize cloth he held in the other. Dryden was struck by the odd contrast, between the bony mass of the man’s hands and the deft, almost delicate, precision of the fingers. Silence was clearly a medium he was happy with so Dryden carried on. ‘On police CCTV. Someone’s been peddling cannabis to the kids. How’s the dog?’ he asked, nodding at the meshed interior of the rear of the vehicle.

‘Hungry,’ said Sley, glancing at the house still lit up in the darkness. The lights on the Christmas tree in the window seemed to tremble. ‘Look…’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I’ve got no idea what this is about…’

But Dryden knew he was lying. He’d have thrown him out if this didn’t make sense.

‘You grow it in the long shed at the allotments. Force it, I guess – then plant it out in the summer? That’d be it. I saw the red light – that’s sodium. And the blue? Mercury-iodide. There was case up in crown court last year. Very sophisticated. I’m just kinda interested in why, that’s all. To kids. How much you make?’

Sley twisted the cloth again. ‘Look, I’ve got to get on…’

Dryden turned again and with relief saw that Humph was out of the cab, standing in the headlights firing the tennis machine ball down the deserted lane for Boudicca to fetch.

‘That’s my oppo. He knows why I’m here. The police have the film, and we know where the stuff was grown. If you’re planning on bluffing I think that’s a big mistake.’

Sley opened one of his huge hands and revealed the metal box. ‘I need to get this to Joe.’

‘Joe,’ said Dryden. ‘Declan’s mate, right? Another customer? A bit mature for your market, surely, he must be fifty if he’s a day.’

Sley stepped a foot closer. ‘He’s forty-one. But he won’t make forty-two. Cancer – larynx. You should hear him talk.’

Dryden shrugged. ‘I was looking forward to it. Marcie said she’d pass on my number. But no go, eh?’

‘We left messages,’ said Sley. ‘But the illness is bad right now.’

‘What’s that to me?’ asked Dryden, sensing that he’d been expertly hooked into the trap of empathy.

‘That’s why we grew the cannabis,’ he said, getting out a packet of Marlboro and lighting one up. The ash at the end, after the first deep draw, was the same colour as his hair.

‘Joe started it on the allotment, when he knew the pain was coming. But the supply never stretched through that first winter. That really scared him, and he was too ill to plant again in spring, and he’d bought this place. So I took over the shed: it’s not difficult stuff to grow if you get the gear, and there’s guides on the net. He needs the supply, he needs to know it’s there. This year was good – you know, the wet spring, the clear summer. There’s a surplus so… it got sold.’

He slammed the door of the 4x4 and the echo ran round the Fen, bouncing back off a brick-built pumping station half a mile to the east. A dog barked four times, rhythmically, and was quiet.

‘Why don’t you come with me?’ said Sley, walking off towards the house. ‘Meet the customer.’

Dryden had sat through too many gloomy inquests on the bleak deaths of lonely drug addicts to see anything in Sley’s crime but callous greed. But he hesitated now, knowing that to meet the dying Joe would complicate the simple balance of good against evil. Could he leave the cancer victim out of the equation? And other questions remained: had reliving his time at St Vincent’s orphanage really driven Declan McIlroy to self-destruction? Was he part of the criminal circle which had grown and peddled the dope? Had he, perhaps, encroached on a market where someone else had enjoyed a monopoly? And why hadn’t Declan eased his own pain, and his final hours, with a home-grown joint? Dryden had wanted to talk to Joe all along, and now he had the chance. He, better than anyone, would know if his friend had any enemies who might have shortened his brutal life.

The farmhouse was foursquare, a late-Georgian landmark with elaborate lead guttering and sash windows. A crack ran through the brickwork indicating that the house stood on the unstable drying peat.

Sley was peering into a half-lit hallway at the side of the house.

‘It’s odd,’ he said, when Dryden caught him up. ‘He normally comes out when he hears the car.’ He tapped a gold ring on the window and a cat – jet black – leapt to the sill.

‘Let’s try the back.’ There was a kitchen door, almost all glass, but all frosted. Inside they could see a light over a work surface and the glow of an oven. Sley flipped up the letterbox and shouted for Joe. Dryden was six feet away but caught the warm smell of roasted meat from within.

Sley stood, rattling the knob. He looked out across the Fen. ‘He can’t be far.’

‘Is there another door?’ asked Dryden, the cold beginning to slink between his shoulders.

He followed Sley round to what had been the main doorway of the old house. It had a series of three semicircular steps leading up to the door itself, which had a fanlight above.

Sley stiffened, and Dryden caught him up, walking past and looking around in the splash of electric orange which illuminated the porch. He saw the corpse almost immediately, knowing he was looking at death in the same instant that he recognized the curled form as human. The sleet and snow had accumulated, creating a shroud which covered most of the exposed flesh of the face and one hand, which had tried to cover the eyes but had slipped to reveal one socket, now itself full of marbled ice. Rigor mortis and the cold had drawn up the lips, revealing teeth disfigured by nicotine.

But it was the colour Dryden would remember, or the lack of it. The skin was white, as was the hair, but so were the lips, all coated in frost. The hand that had fallen from covering the eyes was scratched and caked with earth, but where the nails showed they too were white, without a blush of pink to signal life.

They hadn’t said a word. Sley tried the door and found that it too was locked. Dryden peered into the front room. A fire had burned in the grate but was ashes now.

Sley produced a mobile. ‘I’ll get the police. Ambulance.’

‘It’s an odd way to die,’ said Dryden, his eye for the first time picking out across the frosted gravel the scuffed furrow which led to the body from the direction of the distant magnolia tree. He recalled a picture on Declan McIlroy’s wall, the two friends on a bench, the distant horizon of the Fen a shimmering line of summer heat.

He saw an image then, the dying man pulling himself along the frozen ground towards the warmth and light of his home. How could the door be locked? An accident? But that was the problem with tragic deaths, thought Dryden; they were inherently unbelievable. There was something about the curled, catlike form on the step which spoke of resignation, rather than desperation.

Dryden pressed his nose against the window again. There was a flat-screen TV in front of which a single armchair had been pulled up. In front of that was a small table from a nest, upon which was a knife, fork, and heatproof mat.

‘Dinner alone,’ said Dryden to himself.

He made a mental inventory of the room’s personal effects. The walls were bare but for a framed map of Ireland, a mirror – the only object of any age – and one richly framed canvas. He recognized one of Declan’s landscapes, the black peat tinged with an angry purple.

On a sideboard a wooden gypsy caravan stood, and before the fire a cat’s basket with a wool fleece inside. On the mantle there was a gold-framed picture of a woman: fifty perhaps, the smile as smart and sharp as the executive hair, a dark business jacket boasting a cameo brooch. The smile had lost any warmth it might have once had, like the ashes in the grate below.

Something about the picture, its precise alignment, its central position, signalled remembrance. Joe had lived alone. But did he die alone?