The Coldest Blood

34

Back at the Dolphin Dryden craved sea air to clear his head. Lighthouse Cottage clung to the horizon on a narrow spit of wind-tossed dune grass. Dryden picked his way along the beach between the clumps of marram, retracing Ruth Connor’s brief journey of the night before. It was time, he’d decided, to find out more about the private life of William Nabbs. The path was well-worn, a sandy twisting alley between the overarching sea-thorn. On the beach the tide was piling shards of ice towards the high-water mark, a jumble of miniature icebergs stained with yellow seafoam.

The cottage itself had been partly buried over the decades by the creeping dunes which protected it from the sea, the garden encircled by a dry-stone wall, a barrier which had kept alive a solitary sheltered palm. Dryden clattered the gate and rapped the door. Satisfied Nabbs was out, he peered in through the double-glazed windows. The kitchen was high-tech and stylish, the appliances black, sleek and edged with chrome. To the seaward side there was a sitting room with a large window looking out over the sand and the surf. Before it was a Mastermind-style black leather chair with kick-out foot support. On one wall an eight-foot-square canvas of a wave breaking mirrored the reality beyond the glass. There was a flat-screen TV, a CD and DVD deck. Fitted bookshelves covered the walls, the volumes neat and precise. Dryden couldn’t be sure, but he’d guess they’d be in alphabetical order.

It looked like a bachelor pad, but there was something distinctly feminine about the sofa, covered with a silk throw, and on the coffee table two mugs sat, a copy of a celebrity magazine on the glass top.

On the seaward side a wooden garage stood low in the sand, the roof weighted down with rocks and pebbles from the beach. Through a small glass pane in the door Dryden glimpsed the dull white gleam of a surfboard, its skeg like a shark’s tooth. Further back a machine, covered with a tarpaulin. Black, with dull rust-dotted chrome, and the glazed emblem of a starburst on the petrol tank: a British motorbike, without number plates. He didn’t bother to try the door, which boasted two padlocks and a triple bolt.

‘Did he come back here?’ Dryden asked himself. He imagined the wounded Paul Gedney taking refuge on the night of the robbery, watching the distant blue light of the police patrol car on the coast road to the south, answering Ruth Connor’s call. Had the motorbike lain for three decades untouched? Surely not. Unless someone had wanted to keep it hidden in those first few weeks when the police had been trying to track Gedney down. After that it was perhaps too dangerous to sell, or even risk dumping without the plates.

From the top of the wide garden wall Dryden looked inland across a landscape of brittle frosted seagrass. Half a mile to the south stood one of the huge electricity pylons. High security fencing ran round its four splayed girder feet, while by a gate a blue electricity company van was parked, an amber light pulsing silently on the roof.

By the time Dryden got to the wire the engineer was climbing the encased ladder within to the pylon’s lower gallery. William Nabbs was outside the wire looking up, swaddled in a heavy-duty yellow thermal jacket, charting the climb through binoculars.

‘Hi,’ said Dryden, exhilarated by a sudden squall of hailstones. ‘What’s up?’

‘Snow and ice,’ said Nabbs, not lowering the glasses.

‘I was always terrified of these,’ said Dryden, looking up through the concentric squares of the superstructure to the high ceramic insulators which held the wires nearly 150 feet above. ‘We’d fly kites – down on the beach. They always looked closer to the wires than you’d think. I guess that’s what the fencing’s for, eh?’

‘Four hundred kilovolts,’ said Nabbs. ‘One touch and you’d fry.’ He let the binoculars fall on a chain round his neck, but continued to look up, knocking his gloved fists together for warmth. The engineer was on the first tier of the structure, about 120 feet above them, his harness clipped to a metal rail. He’d a set of tools held on a belt and with a hammer he was dislodging compacted ice which had congealed on some of the transmission gear. The splinters fell, glittering in the air, and smashed into the rock-hard grass below.

‘So. What’s up?’ said Dryden, emphasizing the repetition.

Nabbs straightened. ‘They’re worried. It’s so cold the snow gets compressed and forms ice. There’s enough up there to put a real strain on the girder structure. If we get freezing rain as forecast, that can coat the gear, moisture can seep into the electrics and… bang!’

Dryden jumped. ‘What about the wires?’

They both looked south towards the next pylon half a mile away. The cables looped towards it, each one decorated with occasional icicles. The pylons marched to the horizon, daring the eye to see for ever.

Nabbs shrugged. ‘The wires are high tension – in fact they help hold the pylons up. One of those wires snaps, I’d duck first, then I’d run. One pylon goes, they start crumpling down the line. Especially one like this – its a deviation tower, it’s where the pylon lines change direction. It’s bigger than the others – it has to take the tension in the wires from both directions.’

Dryden tried to imagine it, the wires snaking in the air.

‘Hear that?’ said Nabbs.

Dryden listened and picked out a high electrical buzzing.

‘As the weight of ice builds up the hum changes – the note rises.’

The vibration had an edge, like a wire shorting inside a plug. Dryden thrust his hands deeper into his overcoat pocket. Across the dune grass by the camp’s reception building he could see the staff minibus disgorging the next shift of cleaners, the blue dolphin etched on its side.

Nabbs looked out to sea where the surf was beginning to rise. The grey water buckled, built a black shadow where the wave was rising, and then fell with a blow on the sand.

‘Bit cold for catching a wave,’ said Dryden, reeling him in, trying to get beneath the well-tanned surface.

‘Yeah. Even I’d have second thoughts… I normally go in Christmas Day though – local tradition.’

They turned back towards the camp reception. ‘I thought you’d be off when winter came, chasing the sun, chasing the swell.’

Nabbs ran a hand through the dyed blond streak in his hair. ‘Once, perhaps. And there’s nothing wrong with British winter surf that a decent wetsuit can’t normally cure.’

Dryden smiled, thinking about the young William Nabbs, arriving in the eighties, becoming part of the world Chips Connor had left behind. He nodded towards Lighthouse Cottage. ‘How long you lived there? It’s quite a spot. The cottage yours?’

Nabbs nodded. ‘I’ve been here fifteen years – the house is a perk.’

‘And Ruth Connor – she lives on the site still? I seem to remember an old house, is that right?’

Nabbs nodded, running the field glasses along the line of pylons to the west. ‘That was Dolphin House, her dad built it in the fifities. There’s a picture in the bar. It went in the redevelopment – there’s a flat now, above reception. Very swish.’

Dryden nodded, waiting to see if his witness would incriminate himself. ‘What about the other partner – Russell?’

‘A semi on the edge of Sea’s End. He’s got kids, they go to the school at Holbeach. Wife works down in Whittlesea; he’s always lived off the camp.’

‘So in winter it’s just you and Ruth Connor on the site.’ Dryden knew he’d hit the wrong note, so he pressed on quickly, making it worse. ‘Ruth Connor. She’s a good looking woman, I wondered… it seems odd… Her husband’s been locked up for three decades, I guess no one would blame her if she’d found someone else.’

Well, you cocked that up, thought Dryden, as Nabbs’ face hardened.

‘That is something you could ask her,’ said Nabbs. ‘If you had the decency and the guts. I’d like to see you try. If they sold tickets I’d buy one. As a point of information, several people live on the site – including a security guard and a caretaker. OK? Otherwise I guess Ruth deserves the same level of privacy the rest of us enjoy. Don’t you?’

There was nothing quite like pompous self-righteousness to get Dryden fired up. ‘Fancy her, then, do you?’

Nabbs turned to go, then wheeled back. ‘Anything you’d like to tell me about your life, Mr Dryden? Married? Wife love you? Kids?’

Dryden shrugged. ‘Difficult to tell. She was in a coma for five years after a car accident. You could ask her – although I can’t get any answers at present. I think she’s becoming suicidal. She’s over there – in the last chalet.’ Dryden pointed, both his voice and his finger trembling slightly.

Nabbs held up a hand by way of truce, then took a deep breath of the freezing sea air. ‘Look. My private life is discreet, OK, but it’s not a secret. No doubt you’ve been talking to the kind of people who like living other people’s lives for them. It’s a small place, and a lot of people have got small minds. I didn’t have you down as one of them, that’s all.’

Dryden turned. ‘The two witnesses, the kids who saw Paul Gedney that night in 1974, before someone spilt five pints of his blood in the sand. You know what I’m talking about, yeah?’

Nabbs was suddenly wary. ‘Sure.’ The hum of the transmission lines above shifted up a note.

‘They’re dead, like it said in the paper. They were friends of mine, in a roundabout sort of way. I think someone killed them. Someone who didn’t want Chips Connor to come home.’

Nabbs coloured visibly, despite the cold. ‘Jesus. You’re mad. It’s 2005, not 1805. Do you think anyone – least of all Chips – thinks he’s coming home to the loving wife he left thirty years ago? Look, that marriage was over long before they took Chips away, OK? Christ – she’s visited him every week for three decades. He’s pretty happy in a room six by eight. I don’t think dealing with the wide open world is really on any more, do you? It’s not about whether he can get out of an institution – it’s about which institution he’s going to spend the rest of his life in.’

‘So he knows, does he?’

They heard the tap-tap of the engineer’s hammer on the metal superstructure of the iced pylon.

‘It’s not part of his life any more, Dryden, OK?’

‘But if he came home – what about the business?’

Nabbs shook his head, laughing, exasperated. ‘You don’t give up, do you? Ruth and Russell run the business. If Chips ever gets out he’ll be rich thanks to the work they’ve done. What would he have done differently if he’d been here? Plenty. But I doubt he’s bothered, do you?’ But he looked away then, hoping perhaps that Dryden didn’t have an answer.

Dryden squinted, watching a small fishing boat crossing the sea in the mid-distance. ‘Just to give you the picture: Declan McIlroy, one of the witnesses who was going to get Chips free, the killer got him drunk, then they left him to die of the cold. Hypothermia. The police found him frozen to death in an armchair. The guy had no life to speak of – alcoholic, depressive, a childhood in care. But they took it away anyway.’

‘I’m sorry about your friends.’

‘Thanks,’ said Dryden. ‘But I’m more interested in Paul Gedney’s friends. What does Ruth Connor think happened? She must have discussed it. Pillow talk,’ he added, trying to make him angry again.

But the interview was nearly over. ‘Gedney was low-life, all right? They’d been friends at school, the three of them. Chips was popular, a gateway to other friends. Ruth was going to be rich one day – at least by standards around here. He used them: he used everyone. Then he did a runner, but Ruth always thought there were others involved. She said it wasn’t his thing – crime – that he was subtler than that. But he needed the money, perhaps he helped himself to more than his share, so some other specimen tracked him down and beat him to death. It’s what low-life is all about.’

They’d reached reception and Nabbs turned to look back at the pylon. ‘I think about him sometimes – Gedney – when I’m out on the surfboard. I think about his bones – what’s left, you know – rolling over each other on the sea bed. Cheers me up.’

He smiled at last, while above them a wire hummed, as taut as a drawn bow.