The Coldest Blood

23

Flares had been lit on the floodbank, throwing a guttering light across the crowd that had gathered for the races. Dryden, still struggling with the innocent collision of the past and present, left Ed Bardolph with the rest of the volunteers at the boathouse making final preparations for the long-distance skate to Cambridge. He’d found Humph still parked up on the riverbank, the cab resounding to the ritual intonation of the football results being repeated on the local news. He’d rifled half a dozen miniatures from Humph’s glove compartment, grabbed Boudicca’s lead, his skates, and set out for the ice fair.

Railway sleepers had been piled into a makeshift grandstand for the traditional start of the championships: the Flying Mile, four circuits of the oval course Bardolph’s men had earlier marked out. Other spectators were already crowding along the high floodbank, between the flares. Sparklers, sold at the gate, cascaded silver where children stood. Skaters zigzagged between the fairground stalls and the tea bars, one with a hand-held flaming torch which left a wake across Dryden’s eye.

The night sky, clear and crowded, was crushing. Dryden drank one of the bottles from his overcoat pocket, the aroma of the malt sharpened by the frost. Ice was forming in his hair and he took a black woollen hat from his pocket and drew it down over his brow. After buying a ticket, he took a seat on the sleepers at the top. There was a breeze here and he could feel the moisture turning to ice in his eyelashes. The malt made his blood rush, so he had another.

Looking out over the winter scene he tried, once again, to conjure up the heat of that lost summer. He’d met the others on the first day, let loose by his uncle and aunt to wander the camp and find new friends. Taking a book, he’d gone down to the beach and watched the three strange children, the siblings – Dex and the sister – and the brooding presence of the older Smith, with his bleached white hair. And he envied them the familiarity of the triangular world they shared. They’d dammed a stream which crossed the sands, creating a wide deep pool on which Dex sailed a paper boat. Smith had dragged logs from the dunes to reinforce the sand, while Marcie had stood, almost motionless, in the centre of the pool, waiting for the water to rise, as insubstantial as her rippling reflection.

He’d been sitting on a log that Smith wanted. So he’d stuffed the paperback he’d been reading inside the belt of his shorts and helped him haul it down to the sand. Wordlessly he’d followed him up to the dunes to find more. When they’d finished Dex had sailed the boat to him across the newly formed lake, a thrilling act of friendship. After tea in the clattering canteen, in the hour of dusk before bedtime, they’d toured the camp. The boys’ chalet was opposite Philip’s while the sister had one to herself down by the pool, next to the one where the woman she called Grace slept beside a double cot for the baby boys. There was a man, too, Grace’s husband, but he seemed disengaged and never spoke to any of the children, immersed – whenever Philip saw him – in a newspaper, putting red circles round names in the close, dense print of the sports pages. And they’d seen him once, glimpsed through the club door, under the strip-light of a snooker table. Grace was always outside, her florid, intelligent face blighted by anxiety. Philip had never understood, never understood how this disparate family fitted together.

At breakfast on the second day Philip had watched them all, eating at one of the Formica-topped tables in the canteen. He’d told Uncle Roger that he had found some friends to play with, pointed them out, and could still recall the way the man’s cheerful smile had faded. ‘OK, Philip,’ he’d said. ‘That’s fine.’ Fine, nothing more.

They met again in the dunes above the beach, and the intoxicating excitement of belonging had overwhelmed him. Once, he’d seen his uncle by the coastguard’s hut, watching them play. He’d waved, then stepped back beyond the horizon.

Dryden closed his eyes and tried to squeeze meaning out of the idyllic memories he had: the Gothic sandcastles, the tide sweeping in the paper boats, Smith and his kite. And the game after dark – Smith’s brilliant idea. Of course it had been easy for them, the boys in their chalet, and the sister too. But for Philip the game held an edge, for he alone was taking a real risk of discovery and punishment.

A bell rang, breaking the trance. A man skated across the ice below, ringing a bell and clearing the ice for the race. Four men slowly traversed the course pushing a home-made wooden snow plough which brushed clear the loose snow and ice, flattening out the stipples left by the frozen rain. At the start a dozen skaters straddled the line, then a klaxon set them free, the crowd cheering as they wheeled past, completing a circuit before they were able to break from their prescribed lanes. Boudicca stood, barking at the unnatural sight of men sweeping past, arms like metronomes. The biting cold had reduced the crowd, but perhaps 400 had come, the steam of their collective breath drifting across the track. The floodlights were harsh, the scene entirely coloured in white, silver and the chilliest of blues.

He watched three races, then, tiring of the people around him, he climbed down and through the tunnel under the railway line back to the riverside. A makeshift set of halogen floodlights lit the frozen surface where a line had been scoured across from bank to bank. Clearly the 17-mile dash to Cambridge was on – for the first time in more than forty years. A blackboard by the footbridge announced the start would be at 10.30pm – and that all competitors had to register at the boathouse. Dryden found Humph parked on the far side of the river, his lower body obscured by a giant bag of chips. Dryden decanted the dog into the rear seat and took a handful of chips, using the mobile to ring Mitch Mackintosh, The Crow’s staff photographer. The paper could use some pictures of the start – and Mitch could alert the Cambridge Evening News to get some snaps of the skaters finishing along The Backs by King’s College.

‘I’m gonna skate home,’ said Dryden. ‘I want to think.’

Humph took the slight with good grace, embracing the chip bag for warmth as Dryden laced up his skates.

Dinner finished, Humph produced the Cambridge Evening News late football edition and, using a delicate pair of nail scissors extracted from the Tardis-like glove compartment, he snipped out the report on Town’s match against Luton, and the new league table, carefully adding it to a scrapbook he kept in the driver’s side door pocket.

Dryden watched the cabbie reading the now eviscerated newspaper, recalling the cuttings on Joe Petulengo’s kitchen noticeboard. Had the killer snipped a version of the Connor case story out of the Lynn News? With the holiday camp bang in the middle of its circulation area there was every chance it would have been a substantial one, not like the paragraph The Crow had run. Had Joe’s killer decided to remove it from the scene, only to realize that it could have come from one of the old copies of the paper in the recycling bin, leaving a tell-tale hole for a diligent detective to spot? Was that why all the newspapers had gone?

By now the starting line was obscured by a crowd of skaters a hundred strong. They steamed like cattle, jostling for position. Behind them half a dozen of the organizers were out on skates too, each holding a burning red flare. Mitch arrived and fussed, setting up two cameras on tripods which he could activate automatically to catch the off. He was decked out with the latest gear, including four further cameras strung round his neck, and Dryden advised him not to go on the ice or he might go through it. A klaxon brought the skaters to toe the line, a second marked the off, accompanied by a cheer. Mitch’s cameras all flashed at the same moment, a blinding intervention which reduced the first fifty yards of the race to a chaotic muddle of stumbling half-blind competitors.

Dryden lost himself briefly in the crowd of spectators watching the skaters make their way down the long straight cut, dug out of the peat by the Normans nearly a thousand years before. Then the field swung east past the Cutter Inn and was gone.

A three-quarters moon had just risen as Dryden followed, skating south. Away from the harsh yellow lights of the riverside his eyes switched to night vision and he saw before him the sinuous track of the white river, and nothing beyond the black shadows of the floodbanks until, a mile downstream, he was able to turn and see the cathedral’s Octagon Tower, a construction of ice itself in white sodium light. Ahead, on another long man-made straight of the river, he glimpsed a flare-holder marking the tail-end of the race. Then it flickered out, and he was alone.

Overhead the constellations wheeled. He thought about Dex and Smith and for the first time felt a personal sense of loss, a realization that they had been his friends, and that he’d lost part of his childhood when they’d died.

He skated for twenty minutes until he knew he was close to home, then he stopped again and looked back at the city. The Octagon Tower disappeared as the time switch cut the power to the floodlights, and across the silent landscape Dryden heard a bell toll eleven times.

And something else, the scrape of a skate on ice, the echo bouncing along the frozen river’s surface. He looked along the glimmering ice but it was clear, criss-crossed only by the marks of the skaters who had gone before. He stood, wondering if he was alone, at the centre of a vast landscape which seemed empty of life. Overhead a goose flew, creaking, heading east towards the reserve at Wicken.

He skated on, waiting for Barham’s Dock to open up to his right. As he came level he saw PK 129, its bilge pump spluttering and keeping the ice from locking round the hull. He skated into the dock to a wooden staithe – all that remained of the dockside where vegetables from the fields had once been loaded directly into barges. The moon was up now, the landscape lit, and he regretted not asking Humph back for a drink. The boat, his home, looked cold and antiseptic: icicles like bunting on the hawsers to the short mast.

Dryden peeled back the tarpaulin over the wheelhouse, cracking the stiff frost from the green material. Dropping into the cabin, he fired the electric generator into life and felt the vibration through the steel hull. The propane heater he’d lit before going out that morning had kept the frost out of the cabin, but only just. Now he switched it on to high and held his fingers to the orange flames while the kettle boiled.

He thought of Laura and wished he could slip into bed beside her now, feeling the warmth of her skin and the welcome of her breath. Looking up from the flames he caught the reflection of his face: the short black hair white with frost, the skin immobile, the eyes as cool as glacier ice.

He made coffee and added the last of Humph’s miniatures. Above the small writing table against the bulkhead hung the picture taken by his uncle on the last day of the holiday in 1974. It hung, Dryden failed to notice, precisely at the horizontal, unlike all the other pictures, maps, and framed cuttings on the wall which had – over time – come to list with the boat. In the picture he clutched his aunt’s hand, which lay too lightly on his shoulder.

Something caught in his throat making him retch, so he finished the coffee and flipped open the drinks cupboard, lifting a bottle of Talisker clear of the wire rail which held it securely in place. His glass was in the galley and he spilt in two inches of the peaty liquid, drained half, killed the lights and slumped on the bunk, resting the glass on his chest so that the moonlight caught the liquid like an amber stone.

He slept, perhaps for a minute. When he woke he knew, almost instantly, that it might be too late. Smoke filled both his lungs and as he tried to draw in air he knew he wouldn’t find it. His body hinged at the waist in a convulsion and as his head came up he gripped the edge of the porthole and looked out: on the ice, a figure stood, checking a wristwatch.

Then he fell to the deck. Here the air was worse, thin wisps of smoke rose up through the boards, and he felt a dull pain behind his eyes which had begun to blur his sight. He crawled towards the stepladder to the wheelhouse, found the step by touch, and dragged himself up.

Below, somewhere, he heard the unmistakable crackle of fire, and briefly, through a crack, saw the tell-tale yellow-blue hint of a flame.

He sat for a second, knowing that to lift the double covers to the wheelhouse took two precise manoeuvres: the sharp drawing back of the heavy brass bolt and a well-judged upward blow with the shoulder. He’d done both a thousand times, and if he could do it again he knew he’d live through the night. So he waited a precious extra second, focusing on the bolt, drew it back, then rose from the knees, putting his full weight behind his shoulder. The doors didn’t move.

He fell backwards into the cabin and lay looking at the polished wooden decking above. Smoke filled the air and he felt warmth at his back. His mistake was obvious now: he should have smashed through the heavy porthole glass while he had the strength.

Focused on his consciousness, he lay still. Outside, unseen, he heard the professional sharp hiss of an ice-skate turning on its heel, and he imagined the figure gliding away, a single arm swinging like a metronome.

A minute passed, then three. The lights of a car swung through the darkness, the beams sweeping over the interior of the boat. The pain had stopped now but the moving lights reminded Dryden that he wanted to live. Inside his pocket he could feel his keys, so he made a fist with them, rolled over, pulled himself up by one of the brass guide rails on the bunk and drove his hand through the glass porthole. For some reason there was silence still, and he watched as a wound on his hand opened to reveal the white knuckle of the bone.

He heard a dog bark once, and remembered nothing more.