The Coldest Blood

29

The Capri sped south across the Fens to the tune of an Estonian folk song while Humph’s fingers, as nimble and slim as his feet, danced on the fluffy steering-wheel cover. Dryden rummaged in the glove compartment and complemented his two pints of Osier’s with a malt whisky. The combination of the alcohol and the stinging cold made his skin hum. The sun, struggling on the western horizon, was a crisp purple disc, the frosted landscape lost in the glare.

‘Tropical fish,’ said Dryden, wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his coat. He glanced at himself in the rear-view mirror, noting that the sub-zero temperatures had only whitened his natural pallor. But his green eyes shone, radiating satisfaction at being in motion again.

‘What about ’em?’ asked Humph, annoyed Dryden had interrupted his language tape.

‘Their eyes bulge if you don’t look after them.’

Humph turned up the volume on the tape deck by way of comment and wriggled down into his seat. ‘You don’t need more pets,’ said the cabbie, and Boudicca yawned, the sudden clamp of her gums closing oddly hollow.

‘She’s yours,’ said Dryden. They sped on, happy to be at cross-purposes.

HMP Wash Camp was not signposted and lay hidden behind a new gas-fired power station on the outskirts of the Fen market town of March. Four plumes of water vapour rose from the power complex’s quartet of squat aluminium chimneys, obscuring the sun and throwing elongated shadows across the Fen. The prison itself was modern, single storey and enclosed by a suspiciously well-kept garden. As Humph trundled the cab forward a single floodlight popped on and an entry barrier, unguarded, rose automatically.

‘Welcome to Devil’s Island,’ said Dryden, as they slid beneath and into a car park.

Dryden got out and followed the signs to reception. His Whitehall telephone call had paid dividends and he had only to sign a request form for a visit. In the box marked ‘purpose of visit’, to be read by the prisoner, he wrote ‘friend of appeal witnesses Joe Petulengo and Declan McIlroy’. Presumably Connor knew his hopes of freedom were over, that the two men were dead, but Dryden was counting on hooking Connor’s curiosity, if not his sympathy. As the form was processed Dryden watched a bus pull in to offload a shambling line of visiting families, clutching bags. Dryden got ahead of them to be decanted through the usual system: a cursory electronic scan and search before admission to the inevitable spartan waiting area. For an hour he sat in the ill-lit room with the others, one toddler riding a tricycle around the chairs, while a no-smoking sign became the object of concerted abuse. As darkness fell the view outside of a featureless brick wall was replaced by the reflections of the waiting families, eyeing themselves belligerently.

Dryden had not seen a uniform since his arrival and the male warder who eventually appeared to shepherd them into the visiting room was, likewise, unaccompanied by the jingle of keys. This room was large and well lit, comfy seats were arranged in little clusters, and the children could play in a brightly painted Wendy house at one end. A trestle table had been set out with winter vegetables, clearly grown by the prisoners, and cleaned and polished to perfection. The inmates sat, some smoking, most leaning back in their chairs, thighs spread, their eyes searching the faces of the visitors who poured into the room.

Dryden let them find each other until only one was left; he stood, one hand on the back of his chair, waiting too. Dryden was surprised by Connor’s height, perhaps an inch below his own six foot two, and the athlete’s build: a white spotless T-shirt drawn across the chest, the leg muscles stretching the cloth on the jeans. The biceps were exposed on the arms and overdeveloped, the occasional vein knotted near the surface.

‘Hi. Chips Connor? My name’s Philip Dryden. Thanks for seeing me. I wanted to talk about Declan and Joe. I’m sorry; you must know they’re dead.’

They shook hands, and Dryden noticed the dampness of sweat, the heat of stress. They sat and Dryden saw that Chips had something in his hand, held lightly.

‘I never knew their names,’ he said, then looked about, distracted. ‘Most times I only see Ruth.’ The voice was unexpectedly light, even gentle, and clashed with the overtly masculine build. He shook his head just once too often, suggesting a conversation with someone within. ‘I don’t like visitors,’ he added, and Dryden was sure he was unaware of the insult. ‘And I never go out, not to see people. I could – but no.’ He shook his head again.

‘Why?’

Connor shrugged. ‘Breaks the routine.’

‘And you like the routine.’

‘I can’t swim, that’s the only problem.’

Dryden nodded. ‘You used to swim a lot, didn’t you? At the Dolphin. You were a lifeguard by the big pool under the clock.’ Dryden remembered the poolside organized games, the Blue Coats extracting limp cheers from crowds of shivering, goose-bumped children.

Chips nodded happily. ‘There’s only the gym here – so I do weights. Sometimes we run, they let us out for that, but only on the Fen. But I’d prefer to swim.’ He rubbed the T-shirt sleeve up to reveal his biceps. ‘Could you ask them if I could swim? Ruth asks every time but we don’t get anywhere.’

‘Sure,’ said Dryden, eager to push on. ‘But everyone’s more interested in getting you out. You know, for good.’

‘But that’s not gonna happen now, is it?’ There was an edge to the voice, overriding the childlike cadence of the sentence.

Dryden nodded. ‘There’s still a hope, I guess. Perhaps they’ll find the other boy – the one they called Philip.’

Chips let the paper ball in his hand unfurl. It was the application form Dryden had completed at the barrier gate.

A door clattered open and a woman entered with a trolley, metallic and gleaming, hissing with steam. Connor crunched the paper ball again, placed his hand on the coffee table between them and withdrew it quickly, like a card player laying a bet. The ball of paper was left behind, unfurling gently.

‘Do you want a drink, Chips? A biscuit?’

He nodded rapidly. ‘Yes please. Orange juice, no added sugar. They sell wine gums too.’

Dryden fetched a tea for himself and spilt the sweets on the table by the paper ball.

Connor began to eat them, methodically, like a bird pecking at grain.

Dryden studied his face, which was oddly featureless, like Action Man’s. While his body had successfully fought the onset of age his face had taken the burden of the years. He’d been handsome once but the blandness had deepened to the point of being threatening: like a photofit. Over one eye, curving out of the hairline, was an old scar.

‘Do you remember them, Chips – Declan and Joe?’

An almost imperceptible nod.

‘They were in care – I guess you know that. St Vincent’s; it’s a Catholic orphanage.’

‘I don’t wanna leave, anyway,’ said Connor, ignoring him, stretching back in the chair, a yawn cracking his jaw. Dryden was struck again by the odd mix of the juvenile and the adult, an almost adolescent confusion.

‘Why don’t you want to leave?’ said Dryden, caressing the mug of tea.

Connor looked round, trying to find a rational answer. ‘I have a room here,’ he said eventually. ‘TV. No one can get in.’

It was an odd compliment to pay a prison, that its principal attraction was that no one could get in. He could understand now why Ruth Connor had not led or initiated the campaign to free her husband: it was, possibly, the last thing he seemed to want.

‘I used to go to the Dolphin,’ said Dryden, deciding to try and push the boundary back, back thirty years to the summer of 1974. ‘In the seventies. You probably gave me a swimming lesson in that very pool.’

Connor nodded, but didn’t smile, and finishing the sweets he began to sip the orange juice. Around them now some groups were breaking up, moving off through double doors and further into the prison. The woman at reception had told Dryden that if the prisoner wanted he might take him to his room, or to see an exhibition of art in the gym.

Dryden looked at Connor’s hands and noted they were powerful and still, a single wedding band the only jewellery.

‘I’m sorry. I know you answered all these questions before but Declan and Joe were my friends – I want to know who killed them.’

Chips stiffened in his seat, unable to stop the bland features of his face jerking suddenly into something like shock. ‘George, my solicitor, he said there’d been an accident, and a suicide.’

Dryden shook his head. ‘I don’t believe that. So I need to know more, Chips, more about that night of the robbery. You’ve probably told the story a thousand times, but can you tell me what happened? Can you tell it again?’

‘You’re a newspaper reporter, yup?’

‘So?’ Dryden considered how efficiently the Connors kept in touch.

‘So I shouldn’t talk. Ruth called. We speak every day, like I said. There’s no one else to speak to on the phone and I get a card. I have to use it up – I think it’s a rule.’ Again the casual, unconscious slight.

Connor laughed at something private and then leant forward. ‘I swim sometimes, in my head. I can show you.’

He stood and Dryden followed, despite the tea left steaming on the table. As Dryden rose he swept the rubbish and uneaten sweets into a bin but pocketed the ball of paper Connor had left to unfurl.

Beyond the doors a corridor ran round a courtyard, benches arranged in a square with a single dry fountain as a focus. A covered walkway led across lawns, the hallway antiseptic, the lighting brutal. When they got to what appeared to be a residential block they climbed the stairs to a corridor. They could smell ground coffee, and somewhere the trickling notes of Schubert. Connor led the way into his room but left the door open, kicking a wedge into place. In one corner a towel lay over an exercise bike, and several pairs of trainers were lined neatly along the skirting board. The walls were bare except for one which held a large poster of a swimming pool seen from above, the figure of a lone female swimmer in a white swimsuit gliding vertically between the lane markers.

Dryden took the only chair, Connor the bed, then he looked at the poster. ‘It was night time. I was passing the long pool – the one by the clock like you said. I was on the way back to our chalet, Ruth had gone to bed…’

He stopped suddenly, sipping the orange juice carton that he’d brought with him, remembering something.

‘And I was just doing the last round, checking the kids. Some of the parents were still in the bar so I had one or two left in the huts by the dunes. Two: Taylor and Atkinson. Girls – June and Rosie.’

Dryden nodded, remembering the ritual of the twitching curtain. ‘That’s a good memory.’

Chips looked at him again. ‘I remember everything. When I got to the office the light was on and the door was open when I tried it – which was wrong. I always locked it – even when someone was inside who should have been inside. He’d got the safe open when I came to the door, they said at the station he’d lifted the office keys out of Ruth’s bag in the bar, but they couldn’t explain how he’d opened the safe. He had the notes in little piles – ones, fives, tens, twenties. I thought he’d run, but he didn’t. He put the money in one of those boxes you clip on to the back of a motorbike – like panniers. Then he just kind of walked past me… like I wasn’t there, like I didn’t count. He didn’t think I’d do it, you see. Didn’t think I was capable of it.’

Dryden nodded. ‘Capable of what?’

Connor cracked his knuckles. ‘In the office we had a desk stapler – big thing, with a solid wooden base. So I picked it up and I hit him, from behind. Hard.’

The prisoner was breathing faster now. ‘That’s why there was blood there when the police arrived – and the splashes on the path outside, and the skin and hair on the stapler…’

‘Did you like Paul, Chips? You were at school together, yeah?’

‘I liked Paul. He could talk to the girls, but I couldn’t. They said he looked like a pop star.’ Chips was silent, a smile surfacing slowly.

Dryden tried to imagine the scene at the holiday camp on the night of the robbery, playing back in Connor’s memory. The warm night, the distant laughter from the bar and the casual cruelty of being ignored.

Connor ran a tongue along dry lips. ‘He ran after I hit him. I followed for a bit but he cut between the huts, towards the car park. He had a motorbike. I heard the engine and saw the tail-lights on the coast road… So I ran to our chalet and told Ruth and we called the police. That’s what I told them happened, because that’s what happened.’

The last sentence lacked emotion, a pro forma recital.

‘Why do you think he came back, Chips? Why did he end up on the boat in the marsh?’

‘The Curlew,’ he said.

‘The Curlew? Was that what it was called?’

He nodded. ‘Ruth’s dad owned it, John Henry. We were gonna rent it out but it needed a lot of work. She shipped water, and she was well stuck in the mud. Big job, that, so we left it a season. She’s still down there, Ruth says – but she’s gone to rot now.’

‘But why did he come back, Chips?’

A gentle buzz came from a device on the ceiling by the grille for the hot-air system. Connor looked up. ‘That’s the timer. You’ve got ten minutes. Never more, they trust us.’

Dryden leant forward. ‘The newspaper story said you talked to Paul Gedney earlier that night, didn’t you – with Ruth. That he needed somewhere to stay. Did you think he was afraid of anyone? Because if you didn’t kill him, Chips – someone else did.’

Connor was agitated now and Dryden could see a disturbingly ordered line of sweat drops along his brow, just below the hairline.

He fingered the arc-like scar which crossed his forehead. ‘He said he thought someone would get him, someone who’d helped him steal the drugs. He said he’d got involved with people, that he’d got in too far and that was why he needed to get away, make a fresh start. So we let him stay that night.’

‘Did he name names?’

‘He said they’d find him. So he couldn’t stay longer.’

Dryden nodded, even though he hadn’t got an answer, while outside in the corridor a family went by, several conversations networked into one.

‘Can you think of anyone who would want to keep you in here, someone who would want to stop you coming home?’

He grinned then, an adult’s cynical smile. ‘What about me?’

‘Don’t you want to be free? See your wife?’

‘I see her every week. I saw her yesterday. I’m looking forward to seeing her soon.’ His eyes widened. ‘Really soon.’

Dryden found it hard to believe the simplicity of Connor’s emotional life. He sensed a keener intelligence hidden inside the child. ‘What about the life you’ve missed, Chips? Children – don’t you regret that? You were good with children, weren’t you, Chips?’

‘Ruth couldn’t. We tried those first years,’ he said, suddenly standing and looking at a heavy-duty diver’s wristwatch. ‘They said we should adopt and we talked about it, but then…’ He looked out of his window at the night, studded with institutional lights, touching the scar again.

They didn’t shake hands but Chips did look him in the eyes for the only time. ‘Thanks for coming. I’m sorry about your friends.’

Later, outside, in the cold but reviving air, Dryden leant on the cab’s frosted roof and retrieved the ball of paper from his pocket. Connor hadn’t touched the application form, but he’d written on the blank side, in capitals, each stroke of the pen incised into the paper, overrunning its prescribed length.

I DIDN’T KNOW.