The Coldest Blood

24

The Dolphin Holiday Spa

Sunday, 8 January

‘That’s nasty…’ said Ruth Connor, sliding a microchipped keycard across the counter.

Dryden turned his wrist where the jagged scar of the wound was still red, the criss-cross stitches picked out in white across the skin.

‘Accident: DIY. I’m useless.’ They laughed, but Dryden noticed she didn’t let the warmth reach her eyes.

The woman stepped back to punch some details into the PC. ‘Everything seems to be fine, Mr Dryden.’ The pale blue tracksuit she wore was expertly tailored to show off a narrow waist, a model’s tapered legs, and a cantilevered bust. To one side of the panelled reception area a full-length black and white picture, framed in steel, showed a blonde in a bikini with a sash: Miss Holbeach 1970.

As she turned back, Dryden nodded to the poster. ‘That you?’

She laughed again, and Dryden realized for the first time what was so odd about her. Everything was colourless: the bone-blonde hair, the pale skin, the perfectly modulated icecube coloured teeth. Even the lipstick, a bubblegum pink, hinted at ice. Dryden calculated her age quickly. She might be eighteen in the picture – so early fifties now, even if she looked ten years younger. He doubted that Chips Connor looked as good after thirty years in prison for the murder of Paul Gedney, and he doubted even more that Ruth Connor’s long campaign to free her husband had been marked by celibacy.

‘Hard to believe,’ she said, inviting the compliment.

Dryden had done his homework on Ruth Connor. He’d found a feature piece online from the Lynn News a year after her husband’s conviction for the murder of Paul Gedney. She was the daughter of the camp’s founder, John Henry, a local celebrity who’d once earned a living as a stand-up comic. He’d ploughed his life savings into founding the Dolphin in 1952. By the early 1970s he’d been fighting a losing battle against diabetes and his daughter had left school at eighteen to learn the ropes running the office. By the time Dryden had come to stay in 1974 she was the manager, while John Henry limped on to an obscure death in 1980.

‘I stayed here once,’ said Dryden, dropping down on to his haunches so that he could check the neck brace under Laura’s chin. His wife’s brown eyes swam slightly, and he noted again that they were unusually bright, each reflecting the harsh cold sunlight that flooded in through the foyer’s plate-glass windows.

Out at sea waves broke on a distant sandbank the colour of ash, and in mid-channel a red buoy heaved on the swell. On the beach a line of snow marked the extent of high tide.

‘I’m sorry – I don’t recognize…’

Dryden laughed. ‘You’re forgiven. It was in 1974. I was still in short trousers. I’m surprised the old place is still here…’

The eyebrows, thinly pencilled, arched. ‘It isn’t the old place. We’ve invested a lot over the years. New markets now – although it’s still very popular in the summer months – especially in the school holidays. But the rest of the year we don’t take children.’

She seemed excessively pleased with this arrangement and her eyes wandered to the plaque on the wall which indicated that the Dolphin Spa – as it was now called – had been awarded four stars by the English Tourist Board. They watched as an elderly man swaddled in a fluffy bathrobe shuffled across the foyer towards the plate-glass doors to the indoor swimming pool. As they closed behind him a waft of damp, scented air billowed out. One part of the foyer had been converted into an internet café, and three of the latest Apple Macs sat on crisp white desktops. A middle-aged woman in walking gear tapped at one while sipping a small espresso.

‘In winter it’s mainly the health spa market now. And nature lovers, of course…’

Dryden’s eyes widened.

‘Oh no,’ the hand wandering to the throat. ‘Not those kind of nature lovers. Birds, the marsh flowers, the seals out on the point.’ She let a hand touch her breast, briefly outlining the upward curve. ‘There’s a conference hall as well – seats three hundred. So there’s trade all year now.’

As if on cue they heard the distant patter of polite applause.

‘Estate agents,’ she said with a smile straight out of the brochure. Dryden wondered how often she visited her husband in jail. If she dressed like that she’d cause a riot.

He’d found the details for the Dolphin Spa online. The camp had six purpose-built chalets designed with wheelchair access and a bathroom modified for those with mobility problems. They could all double up as ordinary chalets in the height of the season but this was one new ‘market’ Ruth Connor had tactfully avoided mentioning. Extras included a physiotherapist who visited daily, and a hoist at the pool for those unable to descend the steps. That, and a 24-hour chalet-monitoring service had helped bump up the cost, which more than handsomely reflected the facilities and had made Dryden choke. He disengaged the brake on Laura’s wheelchair and turned towards the doors. Ruth Connor grabbed a padded fleece and led the way.

Outside, despite the sunshine, the wind was bitter. Dryden re-zipped Laura into a thermal one-piece suit. Her face was slightly blushed with the cold, and one eye was watering as the wind blew in from the north, but she looked more alive than Dryden could remember since the crash six years earlier.

‘That’s the buoy we used to swim out to,’ he said, pointing.

Ruth Connor nodded, before realizing that Dryden had been talking to his wife. ‘The huts were over there…’ He pointed west, beyond the new indoor swimming pool and the leisure complex which had supplanted the old prefab offices. A white van, emblazoned with a blue dolphin, pulled up and a posse of chambermaids alighted, giggling.

A mobile trilled and Ruth Connor located it efficiently in her tracksuit pocket. She registered the number. ‘Oh. Will you excuse me? One minute.’ She took a few steps away, colour flooding back into her face as she listened to a crackling voice.

‘Good. Good. That’s wonderful, love. It’s what I want and it’s best…’ She stepped away a few more feet and Dryden lost the thread of the conversation. It sounded like she was talking to a child, the tone vaguely patronizing, the concern intense.

He cupped a hand under Laura’s chin. ‘I loved this place, right from the start,’ he said, kneeling down so he could speak into her ear. ‘When we drove into the car park that first morning I could see the sea. It was high tide, and all the children were crammed into the last few yards of dry sand, and they’d run – you know – back and forth with the waves as they swept in, and we had the windows open in the car so I could hear the sound. There’s nothing like it, the sound of a beach in summer.’

Ruth Connor walked back into earshot as she finished the call. ‘Now, will you do that for me?’ she said, then smiled at the reply and cut the mobile off, the face instantly realigning itself for business.

They set out again as she produced a stylish woollen ski hat which she pulled down low over her hair. ‘The sea keeps the temperature up, actually,’ she said, answering a question that hadn’t been asked. ‘Although the wind doesn’t help. The chalet’s got storage heaters – and some hot air blowers if it needs a boost. They’re double-glazed, very snug,’ she said, wriggling her neck down into the thermal collar.

Dryden held his overcoat lapels to his chin. The north wind was still freezing, and the danger of an ice storm still hung over the Fens and its coast. Emergency services and the power companies were on constant alert, and councils had stockpiled grit and salt to keep the roads open. Looking along the coast westwards Dryden could see the diminishing line of massive electricity pylons linking the national grid to the outlying communities of The Wash. Each one glinted silver-white in the sunshine, the connecting cables hung with decorative ice.

An elderly woman in running shorts jogged past, her legs a livid red, the flesh juddering with each blow of foot against gravel.

They walked down towards the beach between lines of chalets, brick now rather than clapboard, with modern plastic windows and doors, and set within neatly trimmed lawns scorched by frost. White picket fences separated each plot from its neighbour, potted fir trees and brass carriage lamps adding a further suburban touch. Each had a tarmac parking space and several cars were on the site – mostly expensive 4x4s or people carriers. Through one window Dryden could see a couple on a wicker sofa, both fast asleep, a flat-screen TV showing indoor bowls.

Down by the beach there was evidence that the Dolphin’s traditional attractions had not been entirely abandoned. The summer fairground was mothballed: a helter-skelter swaddled in stiff tarpaulins. A blackthorn hedge still enclosed the outdoor swimming pool, an Olympian stretch of 1930s artdeco concrete, now empty except for a kidney-shaped slick of ice on the base and a beached pedalo full of accumulated hailstones.

The eastern perimeter of the camp was marked by Morton’s Leam, a tidal channel which ran inland through high sandbanks, a single fishing boat keeled over in the sluggish water of low tide. A footbridge crossed the water where the coastal path met the creek: a graceful curve of timber with double handrails, which took the path east. But Ruth Connor led them west to a line of chalets built on wooden stilts in the sand dunes. Dryden pushed Laura up a ramp and over the specially widened threshold. Connor gave him a brief professional tour of the facilities, then left. He positioned Laura’s chair by the window, carefully wiring up the portable COMPASS they had purchased for the trip so that Laura could speak. Then he used the hoist to transfer his wife to a lounger, put a talking book on the tape deck provided, and went out to the verandah with his binoculars. He swept the glasses east and found Humph’s Capri easily, parked up beyond the footbridge beside a clump of wind-torn pine trees, with a clear view of the chalet.

A glint of cold reflected light came from the driver’s side of the cab. He guessed that they were swapping telescopic images and he raised his hand in greeting. Two miniature fountains of water leapt out like whiskers from either side of the Capri’s bonnet and the windscreen wipers swished once in reply.