The Coldest Blood

36

Humph swung the cab off the coast road and up on to the sandy verge, the exhaust pipe whacking the grass with a dull thud. A flock of seagulls circled the Capri and Dryden guessed the cabbie had been jettisoning food at regular intervals from the driver’s side window.

‘I was asleep,’ said Humph, brushing crumbs from his Ipswich Town top with a delicate hand.

He’d said nothing more when Dryden had rung twenty minutes earlier to ask for the pickup.

‘Back to the Eel’s Foot,’ said Dryden, checking his watch. Flipping open his mobile he found another text message from DI Reade – another reminder to be available for interview the next morning. What he needed first was to hear the rest of Marcie Sley’s story, to take it beyond the point where his childhood self had left the other children that summer’s night.

They drove on in silence, the black, peat-black winter fields so featureless there was a powerful illusion they were standing still. The chimneys of the Eel’s Foot came into view along the floodbank. He was at the bar when he heard the tyres of John Sley’s 4x4 on the car park gravel. Dryden met Marcie at the door and found a table in a corner. Marcie’s husband left them, sitting at the bar nursing a pint of beer and a local paper.

‘Thanks,’ said Marcie. ‘I needed to warm up – and John’s worried about me. Bronchitis, it comes and goes.’ She turned her head towards the fireplace where the logs crackled, the source of the radiating heat.

Dryden lowered his voice. ‘You said that you know for sure that Paul Gedney recognized you that night – how?’

Marcie patted the seat beside her, an unconscious effort to find her husband’s hand. ‘It’s best if I just tell you what happened, all of it. In retrospect – now – we can see why it happened. But then, it was just baffling for us – for all of us. We were only children.’

The eyes had filled and Dryden was startled to find the question had brought her to an emotional edge. He wanted to hold her, to tell her quickly who he was, but the promise of the story to come held him back.

She pushed the base of her wineglass a few inches across the table top and Dryden guessed she didn’t trust herself to lift it.

‘I was woken up by Grace Elliot, my foster mother. It was just before seven on the morning after we’d run away from the boat. I can remember leaning over and reading the alarm clock, and then remembering two things, two really dreadful things: I remembered the night before, and then that it was the day we were going home. And then I was afraid, because she’d never knocked on the door before. Grace had two other kids – boys, toddlers, and they’d slept next door with her and Jack, her husband. Anyway, I got up and there was this man there on the stoop outside, a security guard.’

‘What did you think?’

‘I thought they knew – you know, that we’d been out at night.’ She went for the wineglass and it tipped alarmingly as she took a sip. ‘Anyway, he asked Grace if they could look under the chalet.’

‘They?’

‘There was a Blue Coat there too. He didn’t say a word. But the security guard said there’d been a complaint about us – he didn’t mean the whole family, he spelt it out – he meant us…’

‘You, Dex and Smith…’ said Dryden.

‘Yes,’ she said, suddenly smiling again, that secret smile. ‘He said there’d been a spate of thefts in the camp and that they’d had information – that’s exactly what he said: “information” – that it was us. That someone had seen us, after dark, out amongst the huts.’

Dryden leant back and drained his pint.

‘He said they didn’t want to call the police. I can remember the relief even now – pathetic, really; I should have just gone on saying we were innocent. He said it was probably all a misunderstanding, but they needed to look under the huts. So Grace said they could.’

She laughed. ‘It was underneath, of course. We’d got a string bag, for the beach things. It was usually stuffed under the steps. But they found it buried, full: biscuits and sweets, some cash – I remember a five-pound note – a couple of watches, and a single ring – a gold wedding ring. He laid it all out on the bed, on my bed. I just looked at it and Mum looked at me.’

Dryden refilled their glasses at the bar and checked that Humph was still happy, the cab gently vibrating to an Estonian nursery rhyme.

‘Grace left the kids with Jack and took me to the office. Smith and Declan were already there and on the table was another bag – Declan’s bag from St Vincent’s, I remember the purple crest. And there was more stuff: a fountain pen, a hip flask, a musical box with a silver lock, just a magpie’s haul really. The kind of stuff kids love.’

‘No police?’ asked Dryden.

She shook her head. ‘No. Not even then. They said they didn’t want the publicity. Declan said thank you. He was crying, and Smith held him. The security guard was different this time. I guess he was the one in charge. He said they couldn’t just forget it. They had to do something, just to make sure we never came back, in case the police did get involved. So he wrote a letter, setting out what had happened, and he put a statement with it from the Blue Coat as well. Then they copied them on a machine, three copies, and gave Grace two.’

‘What did she do?’

‘She drove us all home – that morning. We went back to the chalets and packed. Grace had got most of it all sorted anyway the night before. We just got our stuff into the car and piled in. I can’t remember much…’

She looked towards the wineglass. ‘She drove to St Vincent’s first and dropped the boys off. We all saw it. She gave the letter to the priest. Declan looked so fragile, Smith was better. He was strong enough for both of them, otherwise I really don’t believe my brother would have got through it.

‘Then she took us home. Nothing happened for a week. I didn’t ask, but I knew. She’d been talking about taking Declan as well, so we could be together. But I knew that wouldn’t happen now. And then the next weekend – on the Saturday night – we heard this row downstairs. It was her and Jack shouting, and it was a real shock because they never argued. Then the next day she just told me to pack, that I was going back to the council home. I’d been with her three months, which was the trial period, but they’d decorated my room, and we’d talked about holidays for the next summer. I’d have stayed, I know that. But it changed everything. She said she’d never see me again, and she hasn’t. She might be dead now and I wouldn’t know, she wasn’t that strong.’

She covered her mouth and lifted the wineglass, so Dryden looked away. ‘You told them you didn’t steal those things?’ he asked.

‘We did. But only once, that first morning. After that it wasn’t the most important thing. The most important thing was avoiding the police, getting away from there. And we didn’t want to say where we were – out in the marshes. That would just have been admitting we were not in the chalets, that we could have been out thieving. We couldn’t talk together so we didn’t know what we’d said. It happened so quickly I don’t think any of us had the wit to see the link – between what we’d seen the night before and what had happened the next morning. But it’s clear now, isn’t it? That they’d done it to get us away, before we could go back to the boat. If we’d told someone, they wouldn’t have believed us – and there’s no way Gedney would still have been there – not that day, not that morning.

‘So we just went along with it, their version of what we’d done. Except for one thing. They asked who the other boy was. But we never told them that.’

Dryden felt that sense of loss again, for the children who had refused to betray him. ‘And the Blue Coat?’

‘Well – yes. An irony. It was Chips Connor. Mum had paid for swimming lessons, so we knew him. We were terrified, of course, so I can’t remember much, but like I said, they gave him a kind of statement to sign – you know, just setting out that he’d gone to look under the huts and that he’d found the bags and what had been inside. And we all watched, and his hand just shook, like a leaf, shook so much he could hardly hold the pen.’