"The Coldest Blood" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly Jim)

From the Lynn News, 10 March 1975

By Angus Murden, courts reporter

Holiday camp killer Chips Connor left his victim to bleed to death, Cambridge Crown Court heard today.

The prosecution allege that Connor killed 22-year-old student nurse Paul Gedney in a rage after surprising him trying to rob the camp safe.

Charles Frederick Connor – known as ‘Chips’ – a 23-year-old Blue Coat at The Dolphin Holiday Camp, Sea’s End, denies the charge of murder.

Today prosecution counsel Mr Robert Asquith, QC, outlined the chain of events which he said led to Gedney’s death on the night of 5 August last year.

He told the jury that Gedney, a nurse at Whittlesea District Hospital, Fenland District, had left his home in the town earlier that day by motorbike, taking with him only cash and a holdall of personal items.

Whittlesea police would confirm, said Mr Asquith, that Gedney was a suspect in an ongoing inquiry into the theft of drugs from the hospital. He had been interviewed three times over allegations he was involved.

Witnesses said Mr Gedney appeared at the camp, 30 miles north of the town, that evening and asked a member of staff where he could find Mrs Ruth Connor, the defendant’s wife, who was the manager of the Dolphin.

The court would hear, said Mr Asquith, that Chips Connor, Ruth Connor and Paul Gedney were well known to each other, all having attended Whittlesea Catholic High School.

Mr Asquith said that Mrs Connor would testify that Gedney pleaded for help, admitting he was on the run. She and her husband reluctantly agreed to let him stay at the camp for one night – evidence the defence accepts.

At 1.25 the next morning police were called to the camp and told by ‘Chips’ Connor that he had discovered Paul Gedney attempting to rob the safe which, ahead of the weekly payday, held in excess of £1,400.

Connor told police he had struck Gedney with a heavy office stapler as he was making off with the money, drawing blood. The stapler would be produced in evidence, said Mr Asquith.

Chips Connor told police he chased Gedney, lost him amongst the chalets, but saw him leaving by motorbike, eastwards on the coast road. Gedney’s description was circulated to police forces in the east of England.

Evidence from police officers who visited the Dolphin that night and the following morning indicated that Connor was suffering from severe symptoms of stress.

They were informed by his wife that he had learning difficulties and was prone to anxiety attacks. A police doctor attended the scene and administered tranquillizers.

The prosecution now alleges that Connor had in fact lied to police; that he had pursued Gedney through the camp to the nearby beach where he had violently assaulted him, dragged his body into one of the camp’s beach huts and left him to die.

Later, said Mr Asquith, Connor disposed of the body and the money – almost certainly at sea. The court would hear that Connor was a keen fisherman and owned a small open boat moored at the camp’s river wharf. Forensic evidence would show that traces of Gedney’s blood, skin and hair were found on the boat.

Six weeks later, on the evening of 15 September, vandals lit a fire beneath one of the beach huts. All the huts were affected by smoke damage and on the morning of 16 September Mrs Connor ordered winter staff to repaint and clean the worst affected.

Mr Jack Cley, a painter, of Sea’s End Lane, unlocked the shutters of Sun Up House – Hut 16 – and saw that the interior was blood-spattered, an empty holdall lay on the mattress, and several items of discarded clothing were scattered on the floor.

Blood had dried on the mattress, and soaked through to the wooden slats beneath. There were also deposits of blood in the sand under the hut.

Forensic evidence would be presented to the court showing beyond doubt that Connor had been present at the scene, said Mr Asquith. His fingerprints were found on a metal bed-frame in the room, while fibres from his clothing were embedded in the dried blood.

The prosecution would suggest that Connor, who held keys to the huts so that he could open them for guests prepared to pay a weekly fee, had planned to make sure the hut in question remained empty for the season.

However, Mr Connor’s plans had been interrupted by illness. On 31 August he was admitted to a private clinic in King’s Lynn suffering from stress. On 16 September he was arrested and charged with the murder of Paul Gedney.

Mr Asquith told the jury that the forensic evidence collected at the scene of the crime was the key to the prosecution case. Experts would testify that the blood on the stapler used as a weapon by Connor – which was the same group as Gedney’s – was identical to that found in the beach hut.

Mr Asquith conceded that the prosecution had not only a duty to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Connor was the killer, but that Paul Gedney was dead, as his body had never been recovered.

He told the jury that medical opinion would be brought before the court to the effect that the blood loss sustained at the scene – in excess of five pints – was undoubtedly fatal.

North Norfolk coastguard had searched for Mr Gedney’s remains, he said, but currents may have taken his body out into the North Sea. There was, further, overriding circumstantial evidence Mr Gedney was dead, he told the jury.

This included a substantial, untouched bank account, and the absence of any known sighting of the victim since the night of the robbery. Evidence from Mr Gedney’s doctor and close friends would be put to the court showing that the victim had no known history of depression, and had never exhibited suicidal tendencies.

The case continues.

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.

25

Fear: it was still the emotion which haunted him despite the seven days which had passed since the fire on board PK 129. If Humph hadn’t tried a social call at midnight with a bottle of malt whisky he’d be a charred corpse on a mortuary slab; dead along with Joe Petulengo and Declan McIlroy. Dryden, recalling the ‘accident’ which had killed Petulengo, and the ‘suicide’ which had ended Declan’s life, didn’t believe in coincidences – and certainly not when they came in threes.

The police had no time for Dryden’s conspiracy theory. The inquest into Petulengo’s death had recorded a verdict of accidental death, dismissing any concern that he might have taken his own life. The victim had died of hypothermia, although his fall into the ice had resulted in particularly severe injuries to his left leg. The detective who had taken a statement after the fire on board PK 129 was dutiful but unconvinced, clearly sensing paranoia and professional opportunism in the reporter’s lurid version of events. The fire brigade examined the scene and a full report would be made: but it looked like an accident due to a poorly maintained generator, with the occupant drunk in his bunk.

So Dryden was on his own. He’d spent a night in hospital while a surgeon expertly stitched his butchered hand. Then, for a week he’d slept at Humph’s council house on the Jubilee Estate, keeping clear of the boat where shipwrights were repairing the fire damage; and clear of The Crow. The editor had agreed a hasty plan: Dryden would take his annual holiday entitlement in one go – giving him time to recuperate, and time to think – a mixed blessing.

One question dominated his thoughts, and was the root of his fear. Had the killer struck because he thought Dryden was a potential witness along with Petulengo and McIlroy in the Connor case, or because the reporter’s inquiries into their abrupt deaths was getting him close to the truth?

To Dryden the first possibility seemed outlandish: he had told no one he was the child in Ed Bardolph’s picture. It was a secret he held in his head. Had someone guessed? If so, Dryden had moved swiftly to try and reassure his assailant. He’d prepared a story making it clear the campaign to free Chips Connor had been derailed by the deaths of the two key witnesses: all hopes of an appeal were lost, unless the elusive witness, the boy known only as ‘Philip’ – could be found. But there was no sign – he had written – of that happening.

The second possibility – that he had stumbled close to the truth – was more likely, and more dangerous. Recuperating at Humph’s house he had kept a low profile, and nothing had appeared in The Crow or the Express to suggest he was still on the case. But he was still on the case. Now that he knew the victims were his childhood friends, and that he too could have joined them, he could hardly walk away from the case now.

There was one other explanation for the arson attack. Declan and Joe had been victims of abuse at St Vincent’s. Could their deaths really be linked to the planned civil action for damages, and the criminal action which might follow? It was true others had come forward with testimony, and more would follow, and Father Martin had admitted as much. Could Dryden’s inquiries have prompted the attempt on his life? Ed Bardolph had said the investigation into abuse was directly linked to what had happened at the Dolphin in 1974. Why were the boys at the camp in 1974, and who had been looking after them?

The only way forward was to go back to the past. His one living link was Marcie Sley, but she and her husband were – according to an unhelpful secretary at JSK – on compassionate leave following her brother’s death. They’d appointed a new foreman to run the kite works in their absence. The office wouldn’t give Dryden a number or an address but he’d found their house anyway – a lonely Fen-edge bungalow which echoed to his knock. They’d be back, but in the meantime he needed answers.

Alone in Humph’s overheated front room he had worked quickly. The cabbie had supplemented his onboard language tapes with an online course in Estonian. Dryden used the broadband link to research the death of Paul Gedney. One thing was clear: if Petulengo and McIlroy had lived to give their evidence in court, Chips Connor would have been a free man. They had seen the victim alive on the night of 30 August – and the next day Chips had left the Dolphin for psychiatric treatment at the clinic near Lynn, where he had stayed until the police had charged him with the murder on 16 September. That left Chips less than twelve hours in which he could have killed Paul Gedney – and completely undermined the prosecution case that he had done it on the night of the robbery. There was no way the original conviction could stand.

So if Chips Connor was innocent, who was guilty? Although his body had never been found, there was little doubt Paul Gedney had died in the beach hut, beaten to death. The problem for the prosecution was that it had happened after 30 August, not on the night of the robbery. So who framed Chips Connor? Clothing, hair, and other exhibits presented at the trial linked him to the murder scene – and linked the victim to Connor’s fishing boat.

And so, inevitably, all roads had led Dryden back to the summer of 1974 and the Dolphin holiday camp. And to leave Ely was no more dangerous than staying behind. He’d already booked their chalet and cleared the details with The Tower when, just 24 hours before their departure, he’d been called into Ely police station by DI Jock Reade.

A polite request, some news, not good, he was told.

Reade had seen him in his office, silent except for the scratching of the detective’s pen in his notebook, the starlings outside circling the giant mast above. A square of green tartan framed on the wall hinted at Jock’s distant origins.

‘Is this official?’ Dryden had asked, accepting a coffee.

Reade had put his mobile on the desktop, killing the signal. ‘Not at all. Just a chat.’

So Dryden had waited, slurping the coffee. ‘Someone has a grudge, Mr Dryden,’ Reade had admitted, trying a smile. ‘The final report from the brigade,’ he said, tapping a small pile of files on the otherwise empty desktop. ‘They found traces of a rag, soaked in lighter fuel. Its chemical composition is quite different from that of the marine engine fuel, or the oil for the generator. Arson, I’m afraid.

‘And there was this, of course,’ he added. From a briefcase on the floor he retrieved a piece of paper. Dryden recognized the statement he’d made after the theft of the painting from PK 129. ‘You reported an intruder on the boat, on the morning before the fire. A stolen painting.’

‘And the man in Declan McIlroy’s flat,’ said Dryden. ‘Did you check that with the neighbour?’ Reade’s fingers moved towards his computer keyboard, but he managed to stop himself activating the screen.

He pursed his lips. ‘Any enemies, Mr Dryden? Anyone who might have a grudge? I don’t expect being a reporter makes you popular with everyone. There’s this case against St Vincent’s, for example. You’ve been tenacious, I believe. I understand the DPP is looking at the files. Threats, perhaps – anything we should know?’

Dryden pushed his legs out under the interview table. ‘I think they’re all linked,’ he said. ‘The two deaths, the theft, the arson, the intruder. It’s about Chips Connor. I told you that a week ago. A PC came out to the boat.’

The detective slipped out a fresh file and flipped it open. Dryden noted a letter headed with the insignia of the Chief Constable’s Office. He recalled that Chips’ solicitor, George Holme, had been pressing for the case to be reopened, despite the death of the key witnesses and the withdrawal of the appeal.

‘A decision’s been made,’ said DI Reade. Clearly not by him, Dryden noted. ‘The Connor case is to be reviewed. All the original witnesses will be re-interviewed where possible. The victim’s family, colleagues, friends… the lot. Everything double-checked. The CC has asked us here at Ely to take the case; the original investigation was based in Lynn, of course. We’ll be going through the notes with the officers from the 1974 inquiry. The two deaths here – Petulengo and McIlroy – will be reviewed as well. Although frankly…’

He gulped some coffee. ‘Anyway,’ he shrugged, ‘we can provide an independent view. We need to wrap it up.’

He bit his lip then. He’d said too much. The implication was clear: the chief constable wanted the case closed. A perfunctory review, followed by a brief statement, would bury Chips Connor’s case for ever. Dryden doubted Reade had much of a reputation within the force for producing unexpected results. But in the course of the review he’d stamp all over the Dolphin, a show of thorough policing with zero chances of uncovering a long-concealed truth.

Dryden sank his head in his hands. ‘I want to know who tried to kill me,’ he said. ‘I’m going to the Dolphin. A short holiday, with my wife. We leave tomorrow. It’s all booked.’

Reade bristled, dismissing the idea with a laugh. ‘It’s a free country, Mr Dryden, but we couldn’t let you prejudice our inquiries.’

Reade’s eyes darted to the wall rota. Dryden guessed he wasn’t a sucker for overtime. ‘But you’re not starting on Monday morning, right? It’s a thirty-year-old case. Resources must be stretched.’

‘What the CC wants, the CC gets,’ said Reade, not answering the question.

‘Give me a week,’ said Dryden. ‘If I find anything, you’ll know.’ He held up his mobile. ‘It’s what you need. An inside track. You’re not gonna find out anything turning up for an appointment, are you?’

DI Reade shook his head, but licked his lips.

‘And I know something already,’ said Dryden. ‘Something important. You’ll get everything, and you can leave me out.’ He’d push him one more time, then he’d reveal that he was the mystery kid in the photo, the one who’d played with Joe, Declan and Marcie. ‘Just give me some time. Then, when you do go in, you’ll be ahead of the game.’

Reade’s otherwise anodyne features reassembled themselves around an ugly mouth. ‘I don’t like being fucked about, Dryden. I take early retirement in five years and nobody, least of all you, is going to make a mess of my record.’

‘This is just a chat, right?’ said Dryden, putting his elbows on the desk and smiling.

Reade calculated quickly. ‘I will be arriving at the Dolphin with three officers on Tuesday morning. My other team will be calling at precisely the same time at the station at Lynn to take possession of the CID files, original statements and recordings. I will oversee interviews at the camp. That means you’ve got three days. Which means this conversation never took place. You’ll be the first person we interview, at which point I will require you to tell us everything you think pertinent. Is that clear?’

‘No appointment?’ said Dryden, pushing his luck.

‘We don’t need one. I’ll have a warrant. Good enough?’

Dryden stood. ‘Deal,’ he said, but they didn’t shake hands.

A seagull screeched over Dryden’s head, snapping him back to the present. The sea was calm and still, creased only by the tide slipping in towards the creek. He looked at his watch now as he stood on the chalet’s verandah. He didn’t have forty-eight hours any more.

Looking towards the horizon he suppressed an image: the drifting body of Paul Gedney nudging the sandbanks. Who had killed him, and why? If he could overcome his fears, he told himself, he could think more clearly. He swept the glasses east, panning round the camp’s layout: past the fairground, the outdoor pool, the leisure complex and the line of pylons running west. And there they were, the original wooden huts, or at least a dozen rows of them. Ruth Connor’s plans for modernization had yet to sweep them away. Green with moss they stood, rimed with frost, black holes gaping in the bitumen-soaked roofs, and from a verandah post a child’s swimsuit hung in shreds, bleached by a decade of lost summers.

26

Dryden ran his finger round the curved plastic number: grimy now and chipped at the end: 9. The window had long gone and the sill was green and slippery with lichen. Inside the bedframes were rusted, the lino curled at the edges. A dead seagull lay in one corner beside a rusted bucket full of ice placed under a jagged shard of sky in the roof. He felt nothing, but turned to look across at 10. The stoop was still there, sagging under the weight of sand which had drifted in with the winter storms. He could imagine Dex waiting, waiting for the game to begin, the pent-up violence vibrating in his thin, awkward arms. Edging inside, he put a hand on the bedstead and rattled the metal, lifting the detachable headboard away from the main frame and the wire base. A cloud of rust was released, a blood-red shower of oxidized iron.

Outside again he checked his mobile: no messages. He’d left Laura resting with the monitor switched on. Reception had his numbers and the nursing assistant would look in on her every two hours, until he notified them he was back at their chalet. He’d go back soon, take her out on the sands, under the liberating sky.

But for now he walked on between the dilapidated huts, many of them partly submerged by the creeping dunes. A pile of ashes and blackened wood lay by one, evidence of a surreptitious barbecue, but otherwise there was little sign that the huts were ever visited. Snow began to fall, miniature flakes as dry as sand which blew into his eyes.

He ran for shelter through the lines of chalets towards a large building, a box-like two-storey block with tall metal-framed windows which were still intact. From inside he could hear the agonized sound of something metal being wrenched from a wall, followed by the crackle of splintering wood. There were a pair of swing doors unbolted which he pushed open with his back, wheeling round to find himself in the old camp’s dining hall. One wall was still obscured by a giant mural of a desert island, palm trees stretching over white sands, parrots in the tree, and a family playing with Day-Glo red buckets and spades.

The thrill of eating here was with him again. The sheer cacophony of three hundred people at each sitting, the sun glinting off knives and forks, the breakfast plates piled with full English, the pea-green teapots ferried out by the waitresses, reeking of tannin.

A man stood at the far end of the room, trying to prise a radiator from the wall.

‘Hi. Sorry,’ said Dryden, and an echo returned. The hall was empty, a void as cold as the hard rolled ice cream which had been his favourite pudding.

The man stooped and retrieved a set of plans from the floor. He was stocky and powerful, the musculature accentuated by a close-fitting black leather jacket, his shoulder-length brown hair well-cut, streaked with bleached blond and held at the back in a small pigtail. A beard and moustache crept over the heavily tanned skin of his face. As he walked closer Dryden noticed a necklace of thin black leather.

‘Sorry,’ repeated Dryden. ‘My name’s Philip Dryden – I’m staying at the camp.’

The man nodded, producing a packet of Gauloises and knocking out one white-tipped cigarette.

Dryden produced his own Greek equivalent and they lit up together. ‘It’s a holiday village now,’ said the man, the voice older than the bleached hair. ‘This was the camp dining hall.’

‘I know. I came here – as a kid. So what’s happening?’

He shrugged, looking up at the roof. ‘Just trying to work out what it would cost to rip it down – this is part of the problem,’ he said, thudding a boot down on the parquet flooring. ‘This stuff is worth a fortune but it would cost one to rip it up. Built to last, unfortunately. Last time we had people in the old huts was ’98… When did you visit?’

‘Seventies,’ said Dryden.

‘Seventies eh? Before my time.’

Not much before your fucking time, thought Dryden, smiling. He’d have guessed the man was forty, but the voice could have been a decade older.

‘But this place hasn’t been shut down for just seven years, surely?’ asked Dryden.

‘No, no. The new chalets are largely self-catering. We do meals but on a much smaller scale. This place served its last Sunday roast in the late eighties.’

Dryden sniffed the air but the only aroma was rotting wood. ‘I’m a newspaper reporter,’ he said, trying to provoke a mutual introduction, aware there was little time for subtler inquiries. ‘The Crow, Ely. I’ve been following Chips Connor’s appeal. But I guess that’s all before your time too, then…’

The man held out a hand. ‘William Nabbs. Estate manager. So this is a business visit?’

Dryden shrugged. ‘How long have you worked here?’

Nabbs kept smiling but Dryden could see he was angry not to get an answer. ‘Mid-eighties,’ he said eventually. ‘Summer job in the university vac. Came for the surf.’

Dryden nodded, noting now that he was standing closer the regulation blue eyes to go with the bleached hair. ‘North Sea have any surf?’

‘Sure. Plenty,’ said Nabbs, trying a Beach Boy smile.

‘I covered the championships once – at Newquay,’ said Dryden. ‘Nice little summer job for a mate on the sports desk. I tried it, but I was crap. Couldn’t stand up to save my life.’

Nabbs’ shoulders relaxed visibly. ‘It is tricky. I went down a few years in the nineties. Never really got anywhere. But I could stand up.’ He laughed, clearly amused by Dryden’s lack of basic skills on a surfboard.

‘So you stayed here. Must like the place.’

‘Yeah. I did business studies – so I stuck around when they started to expand, modernize. It’s quite a going concern now – and they’ve got bigger plans, a marina is the next phase, then an environmental centre – you know, something like the Eden Project in Cornwall.’

Dryden shivered as they watched a trickle of snowflakes dropping slowly from a hole in the roof.

‘I’ve got to write a feature for the paper on the case, now the appeal has collapsed. I’m just looking for some basic info.’

‘You should talk to Mrs Connor,’ said Nabbs, collecting a toolbox from a trestle table under the dining hall clock, which had long stopped, its hands frozen over the image of a blue dolphin.

‘I will. She seemed busy right now, I’ll catch her later. So she’s the boss, right? But who owns the place?’

Nabbs slipped an elastic band around the plans and squared his shoulders defensively. ‘Technically speaking, the majority stakeholder is Chips Connor. But you know, it’s a private company.’

‘Technically?’ said Dryden, picking out the word and ignoring the warning.

Nabbs laughed as if it was all too obvious for words. ‘It’s pretty difficult running a business from inside a prison, even a low-security one. Calls are monitored, no access to a bank account, correspondence is restricted to prison notepaper – not a particularly encouraging addition to the brand image.’

‘Sorry, I’m lost. I thought Ruth Connor inherited the business from her father – how does Chips end up as the owner?’

‘When they married Ruth split her holdings fifty-fifty with her husband. But she’s got power of attorney so it’s all pretty academic…’ He ditched the stub of the Gauloise.

‘So they both hold a half share?’

Nabbs sighed: ‘No – there’s another partner: Russell Fleet, the assistant manager – he bought out half of Ruth’s holding back in the early eighties. But as I say, Ruth’s the boss, talk to her. OK? All clear?’

Dryden laughed. ‘Sorry. Inquisitive mind.’

Nabbs stooped, expertly working a chisel between two bits of the parquet flooring and lifting out a single block. ‘Look at that. Oak. Breaks your heart.’

‘What’s she like – Ruth? Efficient, I guess. She must have been young when she took over here – what, mid-twenties?’

Nabbs laughed at a private joke, then slipped on some thermal gloves and made for the door.

‘From what she’s said it wasn’t her choice, Mr Dryden. The old man was ill, couldn’t do the day-to-day stuff, so there was no alternative. And she’s got a gift for it. Think this place would still be running on the kiss-me-quick brand on the windswept north coast of the Fens when you can fly to Spain for twenty quid? I don’t think so.’

‘So when did you say you’d arrived exactly?’ asked Dryden.

Nabbs led the way out, pushing open the double doors with his back. ‘I didn’t.’

Dryden nodded, as if he’d got an answer. ‘So,’ he smiled, ‘did he do it? Chips. Did he kill Paul Gedney down in the beach hut? What do the locals say?’

‘Chips? Ruth’s always said he was innocent, Mr Dryden, and that is more than good enough for me. But you can always judge for yourself.’

Dryden looked around. ‘Don’t tell me – he’s in hut 19?’

‘Not quite. Her Majesty’s Prison Wash Camp, it’s only twenty-five miles. Go if you like. He enjoys visitors apparently, although I’ve never been.’

Outside the giant snowflakes had begun to fall again now the wind had dropped. They walked between the huts towards the beach, the sky above suddenly clearing to reveal a winter blue. ‘Does she visit?’

Nabbs nodded. ‘Most weeks. She’s stood by him for thirty years, which says something, I guess.’

They’d reached the crest of the dunes and looked out over the mirror-flat sea. ‘Still surf?’ asked Dryden, trying for flattery.

‘Sure, sure. Most days in the summer when there’s a swell. I take a class on the beach as well – I enjoy it.’

Dryden could just imagine it: the bleached hair tied back, the high-maintenance tan.

‘So if Chips is innocent, who do they reckon killed Paul Gedney? There must be gossip.’

Nabbs took out a mobile and began to enter a text message. ‘Gedney was involved in some kind of petty theft – drugs, I think. I guess someone from his past caught up with him. It’s not a pretty business, is it?’

‘I guess not. I was here that summer – ’74. Should I remember Chips?’

Nabbs looked off into the middle distance. ‘One Blue Coat’s much the same as the next. He was a good swimmer, Chips, a lifeguard and everything. Good looking lad too, like I said. There’s some pictures in the bar – Ruth’s never taken them down. Bit of a heartthrob. But if you were here you’d have seen him for sure – he did a lot of the entertainment apparently – the poolside stuff, you know… games, competitions.’

‘Spent a lot of time with the kids then?’

‘Part of the job.’

‘All very straightforward in those days, I guess. No Criminal Records Bureau vetting, no vetting full stop.’

They’d reached the beach and Nabbs turned west. ‘Sorry, Mr Dryden, is that meant to mean something?’ His mobile trilled and he stopped to read a text. ‘I better go,’ he said. ‘The Grid are here to look at the pylons. The ice is building up – and this storm’s still forecast. Could be a problem for us. I better get back to the office. Good to meet you.’

They shook hands and Nabbs set off, not back to the central complex, but along the beach, over the single graceful arch of the footbridge across Morton’s Leam and out towards the cottage by the blackened stump of a distant disused lighthouse.

Dryden looked inland towards the village of Sea’s End. A single wooden spire rose from the Norman church, a dogtooth pattern of lead tiles catching the light.

He flicked out his mobile and searched the address book for Father Martin’s number.

Just one ring: ‘Father Martin. St Vincent’s Presbytery.’

‘Father. It’s Philip Dryden. I’m sorry to crash in on your time. I’m at the Dolphin.’

Silence.

‘That’s –’

‘I know, Mr Dryden. How can I help?’

‘Just a couple of details. I just wondered. It’s Joe and Declan’s holiday here in 1974, I just want to be clear about a few things. Did other children come to the camp from St Vincent’s in those years, and if they did, who looked after them and footed the bills?’

‘Well, we paid the bills, Dryden, but the costs were minimal thanks to a charitable donation from the management at the camp. Yes, other children had been. Several, in fact, most years from the late sixties onwards.’

Dryden sensed he was still dealing with a hostile witness. ‘And who looked after them here, Father? Who was responsible, in loco parentis?’

‘Well, most years I sent one of the priests, who gave up their annual leave, by the way, to attend. It worked well, actually; it was used within St Vincent’s as a kind of reward, for the children at least. We sent between two and six each year depending on availability at the camp.’

‘And there were never any problems with these trips?’

‘None. They were entirely beneficial for everyone involved, I think.’

‘But in 1974 it was different, wasn’t it – there was no priest?’

‘No. It was a slightly unusual arrangement, but for the best motives. We sent Declan and Joe in the care of Marcie’s foster mother – a woman called Grace Elliot. Things had been going very well with Marcie, and there was even hope that they would take Declan, perhaps even Joe. She was looking after baby boys, I recall, as well – but that was short term. Joe and Declan were inseparable. Grace Elliot wanted to see all the children together. There might have been a happy ending for them all.’

‘Father, are any of the allegations of abuse against St Vincent’s related to these trips?’

Dryden could hear the hall clock ticking in the presbytery. ‘I recall my lawyer’s advice again, Mr Dryden. I suspect this conversation is not entirely off the record, unlike our earlier one. You’ll forgive me if I get back to work.’

But he didn’t put the phone down. Dryden could hear him breathing at the other end of the line, waiting to be released.

Dryden almost whispered it. ‘Goodbye, Father.’

27

AIR

The single word was on the printout of Laura’s portable COMPASS machine. The nurse had checked on her and moved her to a lounger by the window, adjusting the head supports so that she could see out across the sands. The tide was rising quickly, leaving a thin-stretched world of sand and grass beneath a stormy sky, black clouds torn apart by a high-altitude jetstream. A container ship lay ten miles off shore, white water breaking at the bow. Visibility in the icy air was astonishing and Dryden half expected to see a distant iceberg to the north, drifting in the cold light.

He used the hoist to get Laura out of the lounger and back into the wheelchair, doing it twice before he’d worked out how to position the thermal suit so that he could zip her in once she was seated.

Finished, he touched the sweat under his hairline, realizing once again the physical effort needed to take care of Laura’s basic everyday needs. He made some tea in the kitchenette and filled a flask, sending Humph a text message at the same time. Then he rang the Home Office press desk in Whitehall to get the numbers for HMP Wash Camp – a category-D open male prison. Visiting time was daily between 5pm and 8pm, and he called in an old Whitehall favour to bypass the written application normally required to see a prisoner. With less than two days before DI Reade and his team arrived at the Dolphin, Dryden couldn’t afford to wait.

Outside the wind had picked up at sea, whipping the spray off the crests of white horses as they ran into shore. ‘Where shall we go?’ he asked Laura, but the COMPASS was disconnected.

A gust made the picture window flex, turning a whirlwind of dry snow in the lee of the chalet.

‘OK. Brace yourself.’ He pushed her out onto the ramp and down to the hard sand of the beach below the high-water mark. The sand was slightly crisp underfoot where the seawater was freezing. He left a footprint and watched a thin film of ice form across the flooded mark.

They went east towards the mouth of the river and then over the bridge in the tracks of William Nabbs. Dryden paused at the top to get his breath and looked out to sea: the container ship had slipped across the horizon and was now nosing in towards an invisible coastline to the far west, but another had taken its place.

On the far side of the river the coast swung north-east in a long, shallow arc towards the lighthouse a mile away. In the mid-distance Dryden could see the Capri, parked up in the marram grass, with Humph leaning on the bonnet in his giant insulated Ipswich Town tracksuit. Boudicca skittered around him in wide, ecstatic circles.

Humph tiptoed over the sand, leaving footprints a foot deep. ‘Hi,’ he said to Laura, in a voice Dryden hadn’t heard before.

‘Shit,’ said Dryden. ‘I’m sorry – you’ve not met.’ He’d known Humph five years but he’d never taken the cabbie inside The Tower. ‘Laura – this is Humph.’

The cabbie tried a wave, then plunged the hand deep inside a pocket.

‘Humph, this is Laura,’ he said, completing the introductions. ‘And she’s as bloody cold as I am.’

Humph trained a pair of military binoculars on the chalets by the beachfront.

‘Clear?’ asked Dryden.

The cabbie nodded, his tiny mouth forming a perfect bow. ‘No problem.’

‘Thanks again,’ he said.

‘’S OK,’ said Humph, turning abruptly to scan the horizon. ‘It’s a holiday, really.’

‘You OK to sleep in the cab? It must be bloody freezing.’

Humph nodded: ‘I keep the heater going – long as I don’t run out of petrol I’m fine. Dog’s hot.’

Dryden suppressed an image of them cuddled up together under the tartan rug.

‘There’s this,’ said Humph, producing a rolled-up newspaper from his pocket. It was Saturday’s Lynn News. The page-three lead ran under the headline:

TRAGIC DEATHS END APPEAL HOPES FOR JAILED HOLIDAY CAMP KILLER By Alf Walker for the Press Association

The family of convicted murderer ‘Chips’ Connor has abandoned a campaign to have his case heard by the Court of Appeal following the sudden deaths of two vital new witnesses in the 30-year-old case.

Connor, a seaside children’s entertainer and lifeguard at the Dolphin holiday camp at Sea’s End, was jailed in 1975 for the brutal murder of Paul Gedney.

Ruth Connor, manager of the Dolphin Holiday Spa, said recently that she was certain her husband would be freed once the new evidence had been heard.

Today she was too upset to talk about the case but a statement issued by George Holme, the family solicitor, confirmed that the file had been withdrawn and no leave to appeal would now be sought.

‘It is a tragedy that Chips Connor is now likely to see out the rest of his life in custody because of the unrelated deaths of these two witnesses.’

He said that the police had been notified in both cases, but that there were not thought to be suspicious circumstances in either of them.

The names of the two men are not being released to the press.

Mr Holme said that while both men had made statements outlining their evidence the advice of legal experts was that this would not prove sufficient for the Court of Appeal.

‘All evidence in such cases must be open to cross-examination,’ said Mr Holme. ‘Clearly in this case that will now not be possible. We have reluctantly withdrawn our action.

‘Strenuous efforts have been made to contact another potential witness without success,’ he added. ‘We will always be ready to take up Chips Connor’s case, but for now the family would ask to be left in peace.’

The two witnesses, believed to be from the Ely area, came forward after the Lynn News ran the original story launching the appeal for fresh information to mark the 30th anniversary of the court case.

Mr Holme said that the contents of the statements made by the two witnesses had been passed to the police and he was hopeful that detectives would at least review the files.

‘I have written to the Chief Constable urging him to take a fresh look at this case in the interests of justice,’ said Mr Holme. ‘But for now we have to accept that we no longer have the evidence to force an appeal.’

‘Excellent,’ said Dryden. The story made it plain that the elusive third witness had not been found. He watched Boudicca pounding along the waterline, white water trailing her through the shallows.

‘Any progress?’ asked Humph, producing a paper bag crammed with sticky buns. The cabbie looked at his watch.

‘A bit. I’ve found two people who could have a good reason for keeping Chips inside – his wife and a junior partner. If Chips got out he could call the shots – if he really wanted to. He holds a 50 per cent share, which makes him the senior partner in my book. I wonder what he thinks of all this…’

Dryden nodded towards the distant dome of the leisure complex.

‘His wife?’ asked Humph. ‘His wife’s got a good reason for keeping him inside? That would be the woman who’s been running a campaign to get him out, yup?’

Dryden intercepted the tennis ball and threw it again for the dog, the ball bouncing once before dropping into the oncoming surf. ‘I said I’d made a bit of progress, not a lot.’

28

The Eel’s Foot lay embedded in the bank of Blue Gowt Drain, a mile south of the marshland village of Sea’s End. The long silver line of the frozen dyke cut the landscape in half, running impossibly straight, its ends unseen. The pub, built to feed and water the Dutch prisoners of war who had dug the ditch more than 300 years before, was low-beamed and dark, the windows looking away from the water and across the black expanse of peat which ran south to Ely.

Alf Walker sat in a window seat nursing a half pint of fresh orange juice and a copy of The Complete Birdwatcher.

‘I hate pubs,’ he said, as Dryden sat, having already drained three inches of his pint of Osier’s Ale.

Outside, the Capri stood alone in the car park, the cabbie inside asleep with his language tape headphones firmly clamped over his ears.

‘Sorry,’ said Dryden. ‘It’s a bit tricky meeting at the camp.’

Alf took a file from a rucksack on the seat beside him. Inside was the cutting Humph had ripped out of the Lynn News. ‘Thanks for this,’ said Alf. ‘Most of the local evenings took it – and The Crow, of course. I presume that’s why you stipulated a Friday embargo?’

Dryden nodded. He might be on leave but he wasn’t in the business of scooping his own paper. He’d spent many a dreary afternoon in Alf ’s company on the press bench at the magistrates’ court in Ely. Alf was the wireman for the Press Association in eastern England and had a daunting patch: from Lincoln Cathedral to the Thames Barrier, from Luton Airport to Southwold Pier. Alf had held on to his job for twenty-five years, despite stiff competition, by carefully avoiding vices such as alcohol. His passion was birds, and if the court case was dull he’d fill his neat shorthand notebook with immaculate sketches of wrens and sparrowhawks, swallows and marsh waders.

Dryden drained his glass. ‘’Scuse me.’ He ferried out a double all-day breakfast to Humph and returned with a fresh pint for himself.

Alf ’s pre-ordered salad sandwich arrived with an offending handful of crisps, which he cordoned off with a delicate shuffle of his napkin.

‘So,’ said Dryden, spilling nuts across the table. ‘I need help, Alf, and I haven’t got much time. I need to know about the first story – the one that started all this off, about the appeal being launched for fresh information. When was that – last summer? Did the PA run it – or did it start with the Lynn News?’

‘Started local,’ said Alf, folding a leaf of lettuce neatly into his mouth.

‘And Ruth Connor just rang ’em – or was it Holme, the solicitor?’

‘Neither. Far as I know, the first story had very little to do with the family. It was silly season – you know how it is – there was nothing much happening anywhere. So they did what you and I have done a thousand times, they went through the files looking for an anniversary. Anything: triplets born ten years ago, a child missing a year, a National Lottery winner five years ago. Then you just go back and do an update. So they latched on to the thirtieth anniversary of the Connor case – the sentencing, anyway; the murder was actually the year before, of course. Connor had always said he was innocent so they rang the family and said they were going to run an appeal for people to come forward with any information which might help spark an appeal – there’d been none at the time so legally they still have the option. Then they got a quote off the wife backing the campaign, and that was that.’

‘Until…’

‘Right. Until someone came forward with fresh evidence. Frankly, they were amazed. They thought they’d get a coupla stories out if it, tops. Then the lawyer rings and says two reliable witnesses had come forward and there were high hopes the original verdict would be called into question.’

‘And Holme was clear – I take it. That the witnesses had seen the newspaper story and then come forward?’

‘Right. Either that or they’d seen one of the posters.’

‘Posters? Why’d they print posters if the story was just a run-up to fill space?’

‘They have a monthly campaign – a poster each time. It’s just for advertising, really; there’s a different sponsor for every one. Missing people, mainly, appeals for witnesses at crash sites, that kinda thing. So that month it was the Chips Connor case.’

Alf rummaged in the rucksack. ‘Here,’ he said, unfolding the poster, which they spread out on the table.

The picture Dryden had seen in the Lynn News had been a thumbnail, and he’d wondered at the time how anyone could have come forward on the strength of such an indistinct image. But the poster was quite different: pin-sharp and in colour. Paul Gedney had thick brown hair cut stylishly for the seventies, a powerful muscular neck and clear taut skin. But it was the eyes that were extraordinary, and dominated the face completely.

‘Bloody hell…’ said Dryden. ‘You’d think he was the killer, not the victim. Talk about mad staring eyes.’

Alf nodded. ‘It’s called exophthalmia. If you’d ever kept tropical fish you’d know all about it. “Pop eye” is the common term; you have to put stuff in their feed to stop it.’

‘Well they didn’t put it in his,’ said Dryden, holding the picture up to the light. The whites of the eyes clearly encircled each of the blue pupils, the centre of the eye protruding, the sockets round and full. The flashbulb of the photographer had caught the fluid in both.

‘He wouldn’t have made much as a door-to-door salesman, would he?’ said Dryden. ‘He’d frighten the kids.’

‘Yeah. Perhaps. My daughter reckons he’s a dish.’

‘What?’

‘Well, she’s a teenager. The haircut’s back in style. The eyes are a bit mad but some women like that, you know, a sense of danger. And his face is distinctive: there’s a strong jawline, lean features. Anyway, that’s what she said when I showed her. The benefits of a daughter’s-eye view, Dryden.’

Dryden nodded. ‘Maybe you’re right.’ He noted that Alf ’s plate was clean and the juice drunk, so he stood. Neither of them had time to waste. ‘I might have something else soon – on the case. I’ll ring you first – OK?’

Alf smiled. ‘Sure. How’s Laura?’

Dryden lied, swiftly and proficiently. ‘Good. It’s her first trip out, so yeah, good.’

The truth was different. When he’d got her back to the chalet after the walk on the beach he’d fixed up the portable COMPASS and tried to get her to talk. But there’d been nothing: a well of silence, several feet of blank ticker tape. Which meant one of three things: she was in what her doctors liked to call a ‘blank state’ – a temporary return to complete coma; she didn’t want to talk; or she was too depressed to try.

Dryden checked his watch. ‘I’d better get going. Appointment. Can I take this with me?’ He held the poster at arm’s length.

‘It’s not a face you’d forget,’ said Alf, nodding. ‘However hard you tried.’

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.

30

Dryden sat in the dark with Laura, the view beyond the picture window lit by a moon which had just risen from the sea. Ghostly white lines of surf ran into the beach below them, while further out a green light momentarily obscured a red one: ships eclipsing each other in the night. Despite the chalet’s double glazing Dryden could sense the coolness of the glass, a hint of the Arctic temperatures beyond.

Laura looked out, the hand-operated extension to the portable COMPASS machine lying unused in her hand. Dryden had hung a PEG-feed bag above the chair for her evening meal and he’d talked as the nutrient levels fell: a rambling dissertation on the mystery of Chips Connor which had elicited no response. He’d tried to hold the swimming brown eyes for a second: ‘If you’re unhappy here – tell me. We don’t have to do this.’ Nothing. They’d been at the Dolphin for twelve hours and she’d said nothing except the single word AIR.

Finally, he stood. ‘I’ll leave the lights off so you can see the view. There’s some videos up at reception. Art-club stuff as well as the usual – I’ll get something you’ll like. We can watch it later before bed. I’ll be ten…’ He flipped on the monitor by the bed, checked the PEG-feed, and double-locked the door on the way out.

On the step he looked east towards the dunes where he knew Humph was watching. He took a torch and flashed it three times, the immediate response a precise triple reflection. On the ghostly white beach he saw Boudicca, a sudden flash of jet-black shadow.

He looked up at the moon. A day had gone, but he felt further from the truth, unsure even if there was a truth. DI Reade’s arrival would destroy any chance he had of finding out what lay beneath the placid surface of the little community which was the Dolphin. It was up to him, but he felt he was failing, floundering amongst half-truths and lies.

A gravel path led inland, each pebble welded to its neighbour with a tiny coating of ice. Dryden picked his way past the camp’s new chalets, the deep sense of silence eerily complete. At reception the lights were on but the desk deserted, airport Muzak polluting the silence. He took a seat in the internet café and logged on, calling up from memory the website for Companies House. He was enough of a journalist to know that there were certain facts worth checking with official sources. He paid a £3 fee online by credit card and called up the last annual return for the Dolphin Holiday Spa.

‘Now that I didn’t expect,’ he said.

Two owners listed: Charles Frederick Connor – 50 per cent, Ruth Josephine Mary Connor – 50 per cent.

So much for Surfer Joe’s degree in business studies, thought Dryden. Three quid and he could have checked for himself. Either that or he had a decent reason to lie.

Dryden walked out through a carpeted lounge which smelt of synthetic lavender and followed the sign to the bar.

It was a shock, seeing it again, after thirty years: the polished dark wood panels, the art deco lights and wall fittings, the deep semicircular sofas, the polished parquet ballroom floor. He could still see his uncle and aunt sat on the high stools, as clear now in his memory as a family snapshot. It was an adult world, shadowy and darkened by the polished wood, infused with the aroma of beer, perfume and cigarettes, and splashed with evening sunlight. He’d never been inside, seeing it all from the garden beyond the French windows, with a glass of squash and a packet of crisps; a pre-dinner ritual which had briefly separated him from his newfound friends on the beach – a separation he had endured with grace, coveting the secret of the game to come.

In his memory something timeless played, but tonight the bar was silent. On one stool sat the only customer: Ruth Connor. Behind the bar was a man in a crisp white shirt, open at the neck, who had been leaning in close to share a private conversation and straightened as Dryden approached, rubbing his hands with a bar towel.

But Dryden had heard the last words he’d said, and they weren’t a whisper: ‘There’s no way he will – relax. OK – just relax.’ The tone had been angry, the emotion largely suppressed, the words spat out.

‘Mr Dryden,’ said Ruth Connor, recovering quickly. ‘Our very own roving reporter…’ She was still in the tracksuit, but the perfectly brushed blonde hair was unruffled by exercise, although Dryden noticed two blotches of red skin at her neck.

‘I’ve missed the rush then,’ said Dryden, looking round, wondering if Nabbs had told her he was from The Crow, or if she’d known all along.

‘Our estate agents are out for the night. Coach, into Lynn,’ she said.

‘Lets hope they get charged 5 per cent commission upfront,’ said Dryden. ‘And then find out they’ve been gazumped for a table.’

She smiled, the teeth revealed catching the light.

‘This is the old bar, isn’t it – from the camp? It’s nice – opulent. It’s got character.’

Ruth Connor laughed. ‘Yes. In other words the rest of the camp hasn’t. It’s the Floral Bar. It’s the only bit of the 1930s original buildings, along with the offices above. The rest is gone, history now.’

There was an awkward silence. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘This is Russell. Russell Fleet. He runs all this with me. We’re just catching up – Russ has been on holiday. Now I can relax a bit. He makes great cocktails,’ she said, jiggling the glass. ‘If you’re nice to him he might even make one for you.’

They shook hands, the assistant manager’s flesh flabby and moist. Russell was a stone overweight but still powerful: middle aged, medium height, with the kind of limpid blue eyes usually reserved for people in recent receipt of a telegram from the queen. His skin was blotchy and overheated, discoloured by liver spots. His head was shaven in the modern style: a mistake as the stubble was prematurely grey and the cranium revealed was shallow, lacking the high dome which can make the skull noble. One eye was inflamed, an infection edging the eyelids in red.

Dryden knew a picture of health when he saw one.

‘How about a White Lady?’ asked Fleet.

Dryden nodded, wondering if he was missing a private joke. ‘Sure.’ He turned back to Ruth Connor as Fleet fussed with the cocktail shaker, brushing aside an offer of help from a young barman who had appeared from a back office.

‘You’ve been talking to William Nabbs,’ said Dryden.

‘Yes. He mentioned your – interests. Can I take it your visit is partly professional?… I’m sorry – perhaps I should have recognized the name. George Holme, Chips’ solicitor, sends us the cuttings. It’s been a great help, the support of the press. Thank you – I don’t get the chance to say that very often to a reporter in person. There was a story today, I think – in the Lynn News, but that wasn’t you?’

Dryden shook his head, impervious to the flattery. He’d written one story about Chips Connor and he doubted she’d even noticed his name. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I saw it too. So the appeal is off? The lawyers seem to think there’s no hope now.’

‘What do you think, Mr Dryden?’ said Fleet, setting the drinks on the bar. ‘Ruth’s lost hope too – it’s been cruel these last few weeks. She thought Chips was coming home.’

Dryden could sense the electricity in the air, a conversation hidden within another. He picked up the cocktail. ‘To estate agents – the only profession the British public distrusts more than journalism.’

Ruth Connor coloured slightly and took a gulp, glancing at a framed picture on the polished wooden panel beside the bar. Dryden stood, taking a closer look, letting the alcoholic thud of the cocktail take effect. It was Chips, a teenager, posing on the edge of the pool in trunks, the sunshine catching his natural summer tan.

Dryden turned. ‘Could have been a film star, eh?’

She nodded, turning her chin to catch the light on what Dryden imagined was her best side.

Dryden threw some money on the bar and bought a round, excluding Fleet, who had been cradling an orange juice anyway. Ruth Connor’s assistant manager moved off down the bar with a sheaf of paperwork once he’d conjured up two more of the lethal concoctions.

‘I visited him today,’ said Dryden, still watching for a reaction.

She didn’t miss a beat. ‘I know. We talk most evenings when I can’t get over. If this is a working holiday, Mr Dryden, there seems to be very little holiday involved.’

Dryden shrugged as if it were a decision made by others. ‘It’s handy – having the prison up the road,’ he said. ‘So – do you think he’s resigned to seeing out the sentence? What’s that – another five years? He seems like a model prisoner, but no remission?’

She siphoned up some more cocktail and Dryden thought there was suddenly something desperate about her, a tension which made her hand vibrate as she shuffled an errant hair from her cheek: ‘It’s been obvious to anyone who’s talked to Chips for the last thirty years that he’s an innocent man. But the judge stipulated that he should serve the sentence. And, frankly, he is not interested in going in front of a parole board. All we want is for the verdict to be quashed – which would be as much justice as he could hope for. After that, who knows what will happen? There’s money, he can choose.’

Dryden sipped his White Lady. ‘I’m sorry – can I ask a personal question?’

‘You can try.’ The tone was as hard as the old ballroom floor.

‘The newspaper reports that I’ve read said Chips had learning difficulties. Today – well, it’s clear that he has some problems. Were those problems as marked when you were married?’

She smiled the clinical smile again and retrieved a handbag from the bar. A Filofax, businesslike, held a snapshot wallet. Out of it she took a colour picture, a couple dancing, both faces together for the camera.

‘Our wedding day,’ she said. ‘August 31st, 1971. We were eighteen.’

Dryden recognized the face but everything else was different. She danced with arms thrown free at her side, her hair turning and rising, both feet just clear of the ballroom floor.

‘It’s here,’ he said, tapping his shoe on the wooden polished boards.

She nodded, reaching out to reclaim the image.

Fleet appeared with the third round of cocktails and she took an inch off the top. ‘I don’t think anyone approved – but Chips was good looking, great fun. He loved the camp, wanted to make a go of it too. We’d been at school together, so there was nothing of the whirlwind about it, quite the opposite. I was very lucky, actually, and very happy.

‘But there was an accident.’ She touched her forehead at the precise spot Dryden had noted the scar on her husband’s forehead. ‘He was diving – in the main pool. We had a high board then…’

Dryden nodded, remembering the falling bodies, the thrill of danger.

‘A child, just toddling, pushed one of the pedalos on the poolside into the water. It drifted under the board – Chips didn’t see it until he was falling. There was a lot of blood…’ Dryden thought how pale she always was. ‘The skull was split, there was some damage to the brain where it had been crushed up against the serrated bones behind the forehead – it’s a common feature of car-crash injuries. He came back quickly enough, that was Christmas ’73, and in many ways he seemed unhurt. The good humour was there, but there was something childlike after that… and there were childlike fears. He seemed to find people very frightening, especially close up, and he was genuinely terrified by emotions. There was a loss of something. He’d always been so good with people… but now, he was very cold. It was like he couldn’t imagine how anyone else felt.’

She lifted the crease of the perfectly laundered tracksuit bottoms.

‘There were panic attacks, crises of anxiety which just swept over him for no apparent reason. We’d find he was gone, and we’d search the camp – which was embarrassing in season – and then they’d find him, usually in the dunes, as far away from the crowds as he could get. It wasn’t just the people – it was the unpredictability, the not knowing if he’d have to meet someone new.

‘Anyway. We carried on, hoping it would get better. He still enjoyed the pool work – I think that was because he was in control, and he was with the children. And he was very good at some things – in fact he’d got better at some things. He had an amazing recall for names, which is a real plus in this work. And we put him in charge of the beach huts because it was mainly paperwork, and he was meticulous, really. But I didn’t know what to do… he was still very afraid of the world.’

‘He doesn’t want to leave prison,’ said Dryden, sensing at last some real emotion. ‘Why try to get him out?’

‘I’ve said. There’s a difference between innocence and freedom. I’d like to see the record straight – and so would he.’

‘Mrs Connor, if your husband didn’t kill Paul Gedney, who did? You must have thought about that.’

Outside they heard a coach returning, the babble of corporate voices heading towards them. She shuffled the glasses and collected the mats. Then she stopped and looked Dryden in the eyes. ‘If you’d met Paul, I don’t think you would have asked that question, Mr Dryden.’ She’d raised her voice, and Dryden detected the edge of suppressed anger beneath. ‘He collected enemies for a hobby, he had a level of natural arrogance which most people found repellent, and he’d do anything to get what he wanted. It’s a volatile cocktail,’ she said, draining her glass.

‘He’d fallen in with some dangerous people. It’s obvious that he ended up hiding in the marshes, in the Curlew. Clearly, someone found him.’ She stood. ‘I’m sorry. Russell will need a hand. This time of night we’re short of staff – and there’s some illness about, flu and suchlike. We’re a bit stretched.’

Dryden stood too. One more question. ‘I understand the Dolphin paid most of the cost of having the children from St Vincent’s for the holiday. Kids like Joe Petulengo and Declan McIlroy. That was very generous.’

‘Yes. It was. Anything else?’

‘Chips wrote this…’ said Dryden.

He put the piece of paper on the table, spreading it out.

I DIDN’T KNOW.

‘Didn’t know what, do you think?’

She shook her head, but she didn’t move. Dryden watched the estate agents heading in for nightcaps. ‘What do you think Chips would think if he walked through that door right now?’ asked Dryden.

It was a random question, but Dryden could see it had hit home. She couldn’t stop herself looking across the dance floor. ‘I think he’d be angry, angry that he’d lost thirty years of his life, and I think this room would remind him of that. Angry, Mr Dryden, very, very angry.’

31

He held Laura’s head to his chest and, propped up on the pillows in bed beside her, looked out to sea. The moon was high now and the sea an unruffled field of silver. On the beach towards Lighthouse Cottage a figure Dryden couldn’t recognize stood, pitching stones. The dune grass where Humph’s cab was parked up was dark except for a hint of the Capri’s vanity light amongst the reeds. Dryden felt his wife’s breath on his neck, and, leaning back, allowed her head to drop to his shoulder, her lips to edge closer to his skin.

‘What do I know?’ he asked.

The ritual pause.

‘I know that Ruth Connor is one tough customer. But then it’s been a tough life. She marries golden boy Chips Connor, the rippling lifeguard, and within two years he’s suffered an accident which has left him with brain damage – not enough damage, to be cynical, to consign him to a hospital or a home, but enough to turn him into an emotional iceberg. There she is, the blushing bride, with a life ahead spent with a selfish child.’

Dryden looked at Laura, her head turned from his, the COMPASS switch held lightly, and realized it was too late to change the subject.

‘But murder? It’s bizarre – to pick off Paul Gedney as a victim just to get Chips out of her life. There were so many better ways. Divorce, desertion, subterfuge. She’d given him half the business by then, but even in the best of health Chips wasn’t a mover and shaker. She was still in control, she didn’t have to do anything stupid.’

Dryden shook his head. ‘It’s much more likely Paul Gedney was killed by someone from his past, someone involved in his sordid little racket, stealing drugs from the hospital dispensary. I need to know more about Gedney if I’m going to find out who killed him. The hospital’s at Whittlesea – it’s a run – but I’ve got Humph. I’d be away a few hours, no more.’

A seagull, ghostly white, fluttered against the window, confused by the reflection.

‘All that presumes Gedney is dead, of course, but the forensic evidence was, is, overwhelming – he’d lost enough blood to satisfy a Halal butcher and even Chips Connor’s defence lawyers in the trial didn’t try to argue that no murder had been committed.

‘And the night he fled to the Dolphin he told both Chips and Ruth Connor someone was after him – and the someone he had in mind didn’t wear a blue uniform. I think whoever it was caught up with him – tracked him down to that boat in the marshes and beat him to death. Perhaps he ran, and they caught him on the beach. Who knows?’

Dryden threw his head back in frustration. ‘More to the point, how the hell do I find out? I’m thirty years too late and I’m running out of time.’

He knelt beside Laura’s chair and rested his head on her knee. ‘Perhaps I’m worried about the wrong crime. Smith and Dex didn’t die thirty years ago – ten days ago they were both alive. Did Paul Gedney’s murderer kill them? Or is someone else desperate to keep Chips Connor in jail?’

Dryden watched the sea crease as a wave came in from the north, and he stretched out, sensing Laura had slipped into sleep.

The day had multiplied the questions, but provided few answers. He knew more, but understood less. So there was only one thing left to do. Slipping from under the duvet he dressed quickly and grabbed his overcoat and mobile, edging out the door to the verandah. The air was totally still, but cold enough to instantly freeze the hair on his hands as he fumbled with the phone. Looking down he could see that the receding tide was freezing on the sands, ridges of ice forming in waves.

He rang directory inquiries and got George Holme’s office number. He waited a full minute when he got through until the answer phone clicked in: ‘This is the office of G. W. Holme amp; Sons, solicitors. Our office hours are 9.00am to 5.15pm Monday to Friday. If your call is urgent, please leave a message.’

‘Hi. This is a message for George Holme. My name’s Dryden, from The Crow. It’s the Chips Connor case. I wanted to let you know that I can help. There were four witnesses that night the children found Paul Gedney in the Curlew. Joe Petulengo, Declan McIlroy, Marcie Sley, and a boy called Philip. They never saw Philip again, and there were no records left to trace him when the appeal got under way. Joe and Declan are dead, Marcie can never be a credible witness. But I know where you can find Philip. I’m at the Dolphin now – but you can ring me on this mobile: 07965 4545445. Goodbye.’ He checked in his notebook and found the office number for JSK, the company founded by Joe Petulengo. He left a similar message for John and Marcie Sley. ‘If you’re back, and feeling up to it, I’d really like to talk again.’

Then he buttoned the trench coat up to his neck and looked eastwards to the lighthouse. The single figure on the beach was no longer alone. A couple stood, their arms locked, watching the falling tide.

The Dolphin Holiday Camp

Saturday, 31 August 1974

With the light of dawn Philip slept, to be woken by a voice opposite. ‘Just get dressed quickly, boys.’ Philip looked at his Timex: 7.35am. He crept to the window. On the stoop stood Grace Elliot’s husband, his back to the open door, with one of the Blue Coats and a security guard. They said nothing, avoiding each other’s eyes.

The Blue Coat stayed behind. He had one of the poolside swimming poles and he sank to his knees and worked it under the wooden chalet, in the sandy shadows, pulling something out of the cool dark space: a canvas bag, knotted with the blue rope the fishermen used. He should have taken it away then, Philip had sensed that, but instead he’d tugged the neck loose and pulled out a box. He could see it was of dark wood, polished, with a brass plate where a key had once gone. The Blue Coat had opened it and Philip could still hear the tiny, metallic tune: ‘Greensleeves’.

They were missing at breakfast. An empty table by the window where the family had always sat. He ate quickly with his uncle and aunt and returned to the chalet. His aunt said she’d pack and he could have half an hour: a last half hour, but that he couldn’t go on the beach because of his shoes, his jelly-moulds already swapped for school brogues.

He’d run then, down towards the sluice, hoping they’d be there. He wanted to know what the man had found, and why he’d found it, and what they’d seen the night before and if they’d been seen, but most of all he wanted to say goodbye. He’d rehearsed this last morning many times: an only child struggling with the manners of friendship. Would they come again next year? Would it be the same two weeks? In a schizophrenic, oddly adult way he knew that it would probably never happen, that hoped-for repeat of the summer, but he was young enough to crave, desperately, the possibility that it might. Fuel enough for a year of dreams.

But the marshes were empty. He ran to the poolside, deserted on changeover day despite the sunshine. In the distant car park families were loading up, cases being strapped to roof racks. By reception the first newcomer had arrived, a small child in shorts running ahead of a man with two suitcases. Just inside the doors there was an amusement arcade, they’d come here once with Smith, bringing coins they’d found on the beach. Philip slipped in and stood alone on the plush blue carpet, the machines winking silently, unplayed.

He heard Smith’s voice first, oddly muted. ‘Don’t push.’

Philip stepped between the machines and stood behind a cabinet where a mechanical crane fished for prizes. Through the glass he saw the children outside in a single line led by Grace Elliot: Sis, Dex and Smith, with one of the camp’s security guards, a different one this time, at the back. Philip padded behind, aware that the rigid formation was part of some wider punishment. They’d been seen the night before, recognized. But had the man who’d seen them seen him? There’d been no early knock at his chalet. But what had the children said? Had they betrayed him now?

Philip inched out into the sunshine of the car park, skirting a line of cars, mostly black and already humming with heat. The three children stood by a Morris Minor Traveller. Grace Elliot talked with the security guard, shaking his hand, crying, her face red and wet. Inside the car her husband sat at the wheel, a map spread out concertina-style.

Philip edged closer, seeing them through the windows of a VW camper. He caught Sis’s eye, but she shook her head: just once, but he could see the plea, the urgency of the signal to keep away. Dex clung to her, Smith stood apart, his shoulders rigid with the fear he was hiding.

Then, released by a command he did not hear, the children bundled into the back seat of the car. Windows down, they joined a queue at the gates. Dryden watched them go, willing them to acknowledge he was there, afraid they would. But their heads never turned, not once, to look back at the sea, or to look back at him.

32

Monday, 9 January

The façade of Whittlesea District Hospital boasted a brace of Palladian pillars and a portico complete with a carved heraldic shield. But if the front hinted at grand ambitions the rear shouted poverty. Steam gushed from a vent, rising up the blackened brickwork and melting the snow in the guttering above. A skip marked ‘clinical waste’ tumbled soiled paper onto the tarmac and a gang of seagulls launched sporadic raids on a tumbled rubbish bin. By a pair of plastic swing doors a male medical orderly sat swaddled in a shell suit smoking a cigarette like an addict. The insistent hum of extractor fans provided a constant soundtrack to complement the crackle of the radio from beyond the steamed windows of a laundry.

A pair of female nurses stood arm-in-arm on the doorstep engaged on separate mobile phone calls. Dryden, extracting one of his Greek cigarettes, stood close to the orderly and lit up.

It took five seconds for the orderly to speak. ‘Visiting?’ He was in his twenties, unshaven, his eyes haunted by lack of sleep and overindulgence in something liquid.

Dryden shook his head. ‘Looking for the union rep – Unison. Any idea?’

‘Not on site. This place is closing – not enough patients to justify the staff, not enough staff to justify the funding. Lynn’s got the nearest full-time rep.’

‘I was after a bit of history, actually – someone who used to work here as a nurse. Anyone still around?’

‘Yeah. Loads – that’s the problem. Nurse, you said?’

‘Yeah – male, a trainee. With access to the dispensary. This would be ’74, perhaps a bit earlier.’

He whistled, as if Dryden had asked to speak to Queen Victoria. ‘That’s going back a bit.’ He ground the stub of the cigarette out on the tarmac. ‘Come on.’

The change in temperature was astonishing: the heated fug of the hospital interior settling instantly on Dryden’s frosted skin. The smell turned his stomach, the memory of custard weaving round that of urine and floor scourer. They picked their way through a hallway strewn with dirty linen and out into one of the hospital’s main corridors. Sixty yards ahead of them an overweight nurse pushed a patient into the distance on a trolley: otherwise the long vista was empty, the dully polished floor reflecting noise from the wards at each side. A TV buzzed a sports commentary, while somewhere a tap gushed into a bath, the plumbing banging as it dealt with the rush of hot water.

At the far end they descended damp brick steps under a sign marked DISPENSARY. At the bottom was a windowless room with some plastic seats and a matching pot plant. A counter behind meshed glass took up one side of the room, the service hatch was open and deserted except for a single tea cup and saucer. It was even hotter here and Dryden could feel through the soles of his feet the hum of a boiler somewhere in the basement.

Dryden’s guide smacked the counter with the palm of his hand: ‘Shop! Marina, shop!’

His guide retreated, leaving Dryden to wait alone. He paced the room, reading posters on the walls, many of which looked like they’d been printed up for the launch of the NHS in the forties – a diagram of a dissected eye, a list of do’s and don’ts for diabetics and a gruesome set of pictures showing the progress of malignant melanomas. He checked his watch: Laura was in the pool at the camp doing hydrotherapy, but he felt the gentle tug of guilt.

‘Yes?’ The woman was black, a kind of red-mahogany colour, and Dryden guessed the genes were Cameroonian. There was something imperious about the long, graceful neck and the precise angle at which she held her elegant head, the hair cut short and grey. Dryden estimated she was sixty.

‘I’m sorry to bother you – you must be busy. I was looking for someone who might remember a nurse who worked here in the seventies. My name’s Dryden – Philip Dryden. I am a journalist, with a local paper in Ely.’ He let that sink in and, when she didn’t throw him out, carried on. ‘It’s about a nurse called Paul Gedney. The police were after him – something to do with stealing drugs? He was here then – in the summer of ’74.’

She picked up the tea and came round the counter, sitting elegantly on one of the plastic chairs, expertly balancing the cup in its saucer. ‘It’s a long time ago.’

‘But you remember him?’

She shook her head as if trying to dislodge a persistent image. ‘What’s this about?’ she asked, fiddling with a long amber earring.

Dryden told her about Chips Connor’s case, and the hunt for witnesses to free the convicted man. He said he didn’t have much time, and he checked his watch to prove it. But it seemed she’d decided to talk anyway, because she cut in before Dryden had finished his pitch.

‘Paul – I remember Paul, yes. I’d just qualified, so I was a few years older, but we got on well. There was something very odd about him, you see.’

She paused, waiting for Dryden to invite the disclosure. ‘Which was?’

‘Unlike the rest of the population, he was not a racist.’

Dryden didn’t need this, and he suppressed an urge to pick up the point. He wondered if she’d mixed up racial discrimination with the innate Fen antipathy to newcomers of all colours. In the mid-1970s they probably hanged people with ginger hair in Whittlesea.

‘Right. But what was he like?’

‘An outsider, like me. He would have been eighteen or nineteen years old, I think, when he first came here. Very self-contained, you know, almost arrogant really. He always made it plain that he’d chosen to be a nurse, that it wasn’t second best to being a doctor, which was a bit disingenuous because while he was certainly smart he’d missed out on a formal education. He was that type: a kind of undisciplined intelligence. I think he resented that lost opportunity.’

‘Did he resent anything else?’

She sipped the tea. ‘People who got in his way. There was something slightly malevolent about him, you see. I got the feeling he’d do anything, you know, if he’d judged the outcome as correct. He was one of those people with their own moral compass – he decided what was right and wrong.’

‘And he stole drugs? He’d decided that was right, had he?’

‘Yes,’ she said, tilting her chin. ‘Yes he had. He was very close to his family – his mother, actually. She was ill, and had been for many years – diabetes, I think, but I could be wrong. Anyway, she needed support and help at home. He tried to manipulate the bureaucracy, the red tape, to get her extra cash and visits. But it didn’t work. I think he stole to finance a carer, the medical treatment. She had private care at a clinic, I think, which didn’t come cheap.’

‘Regular Robin Hood, then. What kind of drugs?’

‘Anything he could sell. Tranquillizers. Painkillers. It was very cleverly done – just small amounts, but regular as clockwork so that the system could factor in the losses.’

‘Is that possible? Surely everything is balanced up – drugs in, drugs out?’

Her hand went to her graceful throat.

‘Yes. Good point.’ She tried a smile but gave up. ‘The books showed no discrepancy.’

Dryden nodded to fill the silence. ‘Who kept the books?’

‘My predecessor – the senior pharmacist.’

‘And what happened to him?’

‘ She took early retirement – medical grounds. Parkinson’s.’

‘Right. So Paul Gedney gets to face the full weight of the law and does a runner while the chemist gets to flick through the time-share brochures?’

She held out her hands, palms up, and Dryden noticed how pale the skin there was. ‘I don’t think anything could be proved in that respect, at least not beyond doubt. And the pharmacist was ill, although the disease was at a very early stage. Bringing a criminal action against a clinician or a professional within the service is very difficult. But Paul had been seen selling the drugs – on several occasions. There was a dossier on him, pictures, statements.’

‘Is the pharmacist still alive?’

‘She died. Her husband was a doctor – an eye specialist – and we see him sometimes. But they separated soon after she left the NHS. He’s based at the Royal in Lynn, but there’s a visiting clinic here.’

Dryden stood. ‘What was her name – your predecessor?’

She stood too, again the tea cup and saucer beautifully poised. ‘Lutton. Elizabeth Lutton. Actually, I can show you…’

Leading the way, she quickly climbed the stairs to the main corridor above. She took him to an echoing Victorian entrance hall dominated by a Grecian bust, which was dusty and unnamed. On the wall there was a framed colour photograph of a man in a suit cutting a ribbon.

‘The day they opened the day clinic, it’s out the back across the car park. A Portakabin. That’s her.’

She pointed at a woman amongst the dignitaries gathered in the background. She was younger than Dryden expected, perhaps thirty-five, an unsatisfied smile lighting up a broad face, framed in buttery-yellow blonde hair. Something about the hair conjured up a memory for Dryden: two pale bodies moving together in the dappled sunshine of the dunes.

‘And the husband?’ he asked.

‘Dr George Lutton. Not pictured. I doubt if he’ll talk, Mr Dryden.’

‘Any of the family left – Gedney’s mother?’

She shook her head. ‘She died. Very soon after Paul’s disappearance. There was a funeral, I remember that, at the Catholic church. The family was a sprawling one – there was another brother, and two or three sisters, I think. All of them – except the other brother – were younger than Paul and the father couldn’t hack it so they all went back into care. It was dreadful to see.’

The hair on Dryden’s neck prickled. ‘Back into care? These children were fostered by the Gedneys?’

A minibus arrived outside the main doors and a group of elderly patients began to bustle through, filling the marble hall with voices.

‘Yes. She was a foster mother, although I think the illness made it difficult in the last few years. That was why Paul was so determined to try and support her. There was a lot at stake. He’d come to her when he was pretty young, I think. Before that he’d been in care – not locally – more your part of the Fens, I think – Ely.’

33

Humph pulled the Capri over into a lay-by on the edge of town. Beside the road a dyke lay frozen, smoking in the midday sun, a starburst of cracks where someone had lobbed a lump of concrete onto the surface. To the southeast the Fen stretched, iced furrows and the occasional wind-cowed hawthorn the only features on a landscape rolled flat by a heavy sky. Dryden’s trained eye skipped along the spirit-level of the horizon until he found the distinctive double bump of Ely Cathedral – the Octagon and West Towers visible from twenty-five miles, and as familiar as Humph’s lugubrious profile.

Dryden nibbled the pastry edge of a pork pie while Humph rummaged in chip paper. He rang the number for the Dolphin and got the daytime receptionist: Laura was still in the pool and would then be taken back to the chalet for a rest and sleep. Then he retrieved a text message from the mobile.

DRYDEN. WE’LL BE THERE 9.00AM TOMORROW. BE AVAILABLE. READE

‘Shit,’ said Dryden.

He turned to Humph. ‘You said you’d seen someone on the beach last night?’

‘Yup. The woman who runs the place, with the blonde hair. She walked along the beach about 11.30 after the lights went out at reception. Met a bloke on the sands – compact, black leather jacket, pony tail. They went back to the cottage by the lighthouse. Lights on downstairs, then upstairs, then just upstairs. She reappeared this morning – sevenish. Different jacket, different jogging pants.’

‘Bravo,’ said Dryden. ‘You could do divorces – pays well.’

Humph licked the chip paper as Dryden considered the implications of Ruth Connor’s nocturnal stroll along the beach. He was hardly surprised she’d found solace somewhere, perhaps anywhere, after thirty years of virtual widowhood, but he wondered how much Chips Connor had been told.

But first he had some more questions for Father John Martin. Urgent questions: and this time he wasn’t going to let him dodge those questions down a telephone line. ‘Let’s go home for a bit,’ said Dryden. ‘St Vincent’s – Lane End.’

Paul Gedney’s foster mother had been buried a Catholic and her fostered son had been in care in Ely sometime in the sixties. It seemed that St Vincent’s might be more central to the story of Chips Connor than Dryden could ever have guessed. He wondered what else Father Martin had seen fit to keep from the reporter, on the convenient pretext of protecting other people’s interests.

They sped south, a miniature motorcar on a giant Monopoly board, untroubled by any variation in height or direction, across the reclaimed miles of the Great Soak, a journey calibrated by the passing shells of forgotten windmills. At one point they passed a sign on the roadside: ‘Cabbage 20 miles’– the kind of detail that made Dryden revel in the landscape. Ten miles from the edge of the city Humph swung the cab out to overtake a tractor and, untroubled, stayed in the middle of the road for a mile, whistling tunelessly.

Dryden’s mobile rang, and noting that the number was unknown he flipped it open.

‘Mr Dryden? This is Mr Holme’s secretary – I’ll put you through.’

Dryden heard an old-fashioned purp-purp of a desk phone ringing. ‘Mr Dryden? I’m glad I’ve caught you. Thank you for your message. Can you talk?’

Dryden looked out on the limitless expanse of black peat, calculating swiftly what he should say. ‘Sure.’

‘You have our witness, I understand. Clearly I need to interview him, perhaps informally at the first meeting. Can we do that?’

‘I think so, yes. I need to talk to him, of course – but I can’t see a problem. Can I ask if you’ve told anyone else about my call?’

‘Er. Well, my client, of course, is Chips Connor, but I don’t feel it would be appropriate just now – the fact that we were forced to drop the petition to appeal was a great disappointment. He’s a fragile character – as I understand you may appreciate. A visit, I’m told.’

‘Yes. I see. Not Chips. But his wife, then. You’ve told her?’

‘Indeed. I think that’s best for now.’ Dryden had banked on the news filtering out; if the killer was close he needed to flush him – or her – into open country.

He looked out of the cab’s passenger window at the limitless horizon. ‘I’ll get back to you,’ he said. ‘You’ll want him to come to the office, I take it?’

‘Ideally. But we could come to him, if that’s an issue.’

Dryden said he’d ring and killed the signal, shivering. They’d arrived: Lane End was deserted, the only movement a sluggish line of black smoke trickling out of a chimney pot in the single crescent of council semis. Three children, hands linked, skated on shoes down the drain which ran beside the road.

The presbytery door was opened by the novice with the purple and gold football scarf. ‘He’s not in,’ he said, before Dryden had spoken.

‘Tell him I’ve come about Paul Gedney. He’d be really pissed off to miss me.’ Dryden noted that the profanity brought some colour to the young priest’s face, and an unattractive hardening to his eyes. Dryden hoped his first parish would be poor and violent, somewhere so bad nobody could believe the statistics.

Dryden stood on the step, daring the novice to shut the door in his face. They heard a light footfall in the hall beyond and Father Martin appeared, dabbing his mouth with a linen serviette by way of apology. ‘Daniel didn’t know I was in my room. Come in, come in…’

The hallway was familiar to Dryden: identikit Catholic interior decor from the seventies. A cold tiled floor was scrubbed clean, an ugly telephone sat on an MFI table, a hatstand hung heavy with overcoats. On the wall Christ exposed his Sacred Heart, and a landscape shot of the Connemara Mountains hung in a heavy dark wood frame, the colour leached out by light. The house reeked of Pledge edged with incense. There was also a strong aroma of stewed tea, the tannin obscuring something less wholesome, something a lifetime past its sell-by date.

‘Please…’ They climbed the stairs and crossed a landing creaking with lino, to a study bedroom. The bed was a single, neat as a prayer, and made up by someone who did it for a living. The desk faced the window looking towards the ruin of St Vincent’s. On the leather blotter stood a glass of milk and what looked like a cheese sandwich made, Dryden guessed, by the same professional hands which had produced the bed’s crisp hospital corners.

Father Martin turned the captain’s chair around, resting the milk and sandwich plate on his knee, the heavy grey sky behind him. Dryden took the one other seat, a straight-backed dining chair as uncomfortable as any pew. There were books, but not too many, a single Gaelic football banner over a black and white picture of some boys in shorts.

‘Daniel’s only trying to protect my privacy,’ said the priest.

Dryden nodded, thinking how thin it sounded, how self-pitying.

‘Paul Gedney. Why didn’t you tell me he was an orphan at St Vincent’s?’

Martin turned slightly to rest the plate on the desk. ‘The smart answer you know…’

‘Because I didn’t ask,’ said Dryden.

‘Quite. Paul Gedney came in 1957, I think. He’d be five or thereabouts. His mother had died, an only parent. There was a place at St Vincent’s, and the doctor was a member of the congregation here at Lane End. In those days such human details counted for much. He was with us for more than a decade.’

He took a single small bite of the sandwich and tucked a crumb back between thin lips.

‘You weren’t troubled by this double coincidence. That two of your boys should be the witnesses in the case of the murder of another?’

‘Well – it isn’t as much of a coincidence as you might think. Perhaps I can explain?’

Dryden nodded. ‘You didn’t seem keen to explain on the phone, Father.’

‘Ah, well. A different question. There are some things I must not discuss. But history is history.’

He put his fingertips together and closed his eyes, shutting Dryden out. ‘So. Paul found a foster home in 1967 at Whittlesea. A woman known to the diocese – Gedney was the family name – she’d taken several children and in fact took Paul’s older half-brother a few years before she took Paul, which is something St Vincent’s always encouraged, of course.’

Dryden nodded, wishing he’d taken a notebook.

‘Anyway, he did very well with the family – at school and so on, given his background and the inevitable emotional problems. In fact he did much better than the older brother. That didn’t last – he came back to us before moving on, although the brothers were in touch. But Paul was adopted, finally. He was an intelligent child, highly intelligent in many ways.’

‘I’m sorry – how do you know… this is all before your time here, isn’t it?’

‘Files. We have files. I had anticipated some interest. And I got to know him much later – after he’d begun his training, actually, to become a nurse.’ He stopped eating, and Dryden sensed he was enjoying the exposition.

‘And very laudable that was. I should have said that it was a peculiarity of his character that this coldness was allied to a sincere – I believe – a sincere wish to protect his adopted family, and indeed to help others generally. He was intensely close to his adopted mother, and the other children. One of his mother’s great interests was in helping make life easier for those pupils here not lucky enough to find a home. She was in constant touch with St Vincent’s – indeed, she was a governor for a short period – and she ran outings and suchlike – trips to the seaside, the zoo, the pantomime at Christmas, that kind of thing. Remarkable, really, considering their straitened circumstances and her worsening health.’

Father Martin sipped the milk, which left a white slick across the glass like medicine.

‘At school – in Whittlesea – Paul met Ruth Henry, as she was then. They were all friends, Chips too. Paul’s foster mother asked Ruth if it was possible her father would set aside a few chalets in the summer for children from St Vincent’s at the Dolphin. She agreed to ask – her father was by then a very sick man I have to say. Anyway, he had taken great solace from the Church and was happy to agree, and so for a few years at least we were able to send children on a holiday, a rare opportunity for them in those days, believe me. We paid a vastly reduced rate – as I think I mentioned to you on the phone only yesterday – a few pounds to cover costs. The year Declan and Joe went was the sixth year – unhappily the last, as I also mentioned.

‘Usually I sent one of the priests too – but that year Declan’s sister, Marcie, was included with her foster parents as I’ve explained. Not the kind of arrangement we could get away with today, of course, but I think everyone’s motives were for the best.’

Father Martin, stopped, peeling back the sliced bread to examine the cheese within. They both watched as snow fell against the window.

‘I tried to revive the holidays a few years ago but Mrs Connor declined – insurance, apparently – and they did other good works which suited them best. A young-offenders scheme, I believe; such is progress.’

Dryden stood, the noise of the chair scraping on the lino echoing in the empty house. ‘You said Paul Gedney had a half-brother, Father. What was his name?’

Father Martin ran a fingertip along an eyebrow: ‘Paul’s family name was…’ he flicked through the file. ‘Ah, here, yes: Earnshaw. But he and his half-brother shared a mother, and as I say he was ultimately adopted by another family. I can dig it up if it’s helpful. Can I ring? I’ve got your number.’ He glanced at the desk and at a notebook with an alphabetical staircase opposite the spine. Beside it lay a green file, with the diocesan crest in gold on the front, tied with a red lawyer’s ribbon.

‘I don’t suppose I can see Paul’s file?’

Father Martin shook his head. ‘I don’t think that would be appropriate. There’s a picture, though.’ He pulled the bow free and slid out a passport-sized snap; Paul Gedney aged ten.

‘Those eyes,’ said Dryden.

‘Yes. A thyroid complaint, I’m afraid, which may well explain some of the behavioural problems. He was seen by doctors here, but there was little they could do. Painful, I think. A tortured life, Dryden, but there were many. I will pray for his soul.’

Dryden nodded. ‘You do that, Father. I’ve got twenty-four hours to find out who beat him to death.’

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.

35

Marcie Sley looked out to sea, her green eyes reflecting the surface of the water. Her husband stood six feet behind her on the beach, a precisely calibrated distance which seemed designed to let her remember alone, but to offer the consolation of company. Dryden watched them from the verandah of the chalet for several minutes as the physiotherapist worked inside, massaging Laura’s back, oiling the skin and filling the small room with the sleepy aroma of almonds. The handheld COMPASS lay on the bed, the tickertape still blank.

It was a break, he knew that. And just in time. DI Reade would be there in the morning, but first he had a chance to talk to the one witness he was certain could tell him so much that he didn’t know. What exactly had the children seen that night through the single porthole? And why had they been sent home in disgrace, while he had been spared?

Out on the sand the wind was rising and John Sley wrapped himself tighter in his black donkey jacket. Dryden briefly spoke to the physio, organizing another trip to the pool, then slipped out on to the verandah, jumped down on to the sand below and walked towards the distant couple, trying to imagine what Marcie was seeing through unseeing eyes: her brother Dex perhaps, unpicking the string on one of Smith’s homemade kites, or the young Philip, staggering down the sides of the sun-splashed dunes with logs for the dam the children had built.

John Sley saw him first, and a word passed between the couple, the cigarette smoke dripping out of his mouth. In his other hand he held a key with a solid brass dolphin attached.

By the time Dryden was beside Marcie she was smiling. He felt again the urge to touch the skin, to be closer to the dense black hair.

Instead he stood, looking out to sea as well. ‘So you’re staying? First time back?’

Her hand rose, seeking her husband’s. ‘Yes. The phone call – you’ve got news?’

Dryden checked his watch, ignoring the question. ‘You came quickly. Thank you. We don’t have much time.’

‘I wanted to come.’

They listened to a gang of seagulls fighting over a fishtail in the shallows. ‘There was a boat – in the marshes, that summer. Can we see if it’s still there?’ she said. He nodded and took her arm, noting the deliberate use of the metaphor of sight.

They walked round the chalets and down towards the old camp. Dryden could almost feel the presence of the ten-year-old girl who’d held his hand within the covered boat, and he wondered if she too felt anything of the past.

John Sley had yet to speak, the cigarette still held in his shattered teeth.

There was a small bridge now over the ten-foot drain they had once jumped. They edged across it until they stood by the old sluice, rusted shut, while an ugly electric pump stood in its place in the dunes, humming.

‘We’re at a sluice,’ said Dryden, his voice in neutral.

‘We met here each night – the children,’ said Marcie, bringing her shoulders up towards her ears like a child treasuring a memory. ‘The boys were always late, and too excited. I could hear them coming through the dunes, it’s a very boyish thing – that mixture of fear and bravado.’

Dryden turned south as the north wind brought in a flurry of snowflakes.

‘Who was bravest?’ he said. ‘Smith? He would have been the oldest.’

‘Yes, always,’ she said, looking at him intensely now, the eyes shining. ‘Declan could live with the fear because Smith was there. And Philip was there because he was too scared to say no – he never looked scared but I knew he was. There was a kind of electricity, a shell of anxiety.’

She looked around her, smiling. Dryden felt the pain of recognizing himself, not just then, but now.

‘So we played the game,’ she said. ‘Sardines. Smith adapted it for the saltmarsh. One would hide, the others would spread out to find them. If you found the one who was hiding then you squeezed in and waited for the rest. It was ideal – the maximum injection of fear and excitement. There were only a dozen possible places, really – unless you took your chance in the reeds – so we always had time to finish. That night it was Philip who went first. It should have been Declan but there was a fight, and so we chose Philip instead. We gave him 100, then we killed the torches and spread out…’ she said, taking a step towards the edge of the drain.

Dryden took her arm before her husband could, and she gripped his hand as if to tell him something. ‘Which way?’ he forced himself to ask. A seagull screeched overhead.

‘The boat was to the south,’ she said.

For half a mile they wove between the channels of the liquid maze, where the last high tide had left little crystal palaces of ice, paper-thin canopies hanging in the freezing air, abandoned by the retreating seawater.

At first Dryden thought the old boat was gone. Thirty years of wet rot and the sluicing of the tidal water must have slowly rubbed it out, an artist’s mistake gently erased from a watery canvas. But as they stood on the bank he saw in the wet sand revealed by the tide the low-pitched roof of the Curlew, the seawater edging down her side to reveal the first graceful curve of the porthole, the glass as murky as a jellyfish.

Marcie’s husband had hung back, his great fists loose by his sides, reluctant to share the past.

‘There’s a boat just here,’ said Dryden. ‘A porthole’s showing.’

She nodded, living the memory within. ‘We’d been searching for ten minutes, perhaps a bit more. Then we all heard it, a cry. It seemed very close, and very real. Within a minute we were there – everyone except Philip because he was hiding – and there was a boat moored in the reeds, the porthole lit, so we crept forward to look inside.’

Dryden imagined himself listening too, still hidden beneath the green tarpaulin.

‘We didn’t normally go that far – down to the river. There were boats passing sometimes, and a path. So Smith had said no, right from the start, that it was out of bounds for the game. But I crept forward anyway, and the others followed. The water was gurgling out with the tide and the fair was on at the camp so there was plenty of noise to cover us.’

Dryden slipped a hand through her arm and she shifted her weight so that they leant together.

‘Paul Gedney was inside,’ she said. She touched each eyelid with her fingertips. ‘Smith and Declan saw him too. He had this mousy hair, cut short, and his shirt was off and he was well built, sort of marbled with muscle, grotesque really.’

‘What was he doing?’

She shrugged. ‘I think he’d passed out. He was lying in a bunk. There were loads of books, and food – biscuits, crisps, fruit. There was a generator running, and a single light, and clothes scattered about, and one of those plastic drinking barrels with a tap. And this box…’

Dryden led her down the bank towards the boat which, inch by inch, was emerging from the black water as the tide ebbed.

‘What kind of box?’

‘It was metal – aluminium perhaps: that white, blanched colour. It was ribbed and patterned on the outside, and it had a lid with two locks, about the size of one of those coolboxes you take on the beach. Perhaps that was it. His hand lay on it as if it was precious.’

She stood still, rebuilding the memory. ‘Where’s the boat?’she asked suddenly.

Dryden led her along the sand, crisp underfoot with ice. The Curlew had tipped to port over the years, lifting its starboard rail above the riverside bank. Dryden took her hand and put it on the frozen wood, edged with frost. On the stretch of exposed deck black crabs scuttled across the ice.

She gripped the rail. ‘He was just lying there, but the sleeve of his shirt was rolled up and the arm was covered in blood, dripping down. There was a clean open wound – two inches, perhaps three.’ She licked her lips and looked back, as if sensing her husband’s presence against the skyline. ‘The boys went back then, to find Philip – there were only a couple of places we hadn’t checked. But while they were away it happened again…’

She brought her other hand up beside the first. ‘He opened his eyes and he took the knife. The porthole was to his side, very close, but he was looking ahead or to the side where he’d strung up the light from the cabin roof. He cleaned his arm with a dressing – a medical dressing – and I could see the fresh wound still oozing the blood, and beside it another wound, still raw but not bleeding. The two wounds made a V-shape pattern on the muscle. Then he took the knife, put the point to the end of the fresh wound and drew it across his arm, again a few inches, opening up a third cut. Here…’ She touched her upper left arm just below the joint with the shoulder. ‘For a second the wound just gapped, and then it filled with blood, and he cried out again, that dreadful cry.’

Dryden heard the scream in his memory, with its hint of triumph. A zigzag wound, thought Dryden, and he saw another memory from that summer, of the subtle urgent rocking of white bodies in the sand.

‘I heard the boys coming back then,’ said Marcie. ‘Behind me, but I just couldn’t stop watching. Gedney’s eyes were closed, but the pain made him jerk his head to one side, and when he opened them he was looking at us. That’s why we remembered the face, and the eyes. It’s what Declan said when he saw that poster the newspaper printed: “I’ll never forget the eyes.”

‘We panicked then, and ran back through the marsh to the chalets. I was terrified, I think we all were – even Smith. We heard footsteps behind us, I think Declan always did.’

Dryden nodded and looked seawards, where a bank of black cloud stood on the horizon like a mountain range. ‘Do you think he knew who you were – that night, I mean? Do you think Paul Gedney could have known who you were?’

‘I know he did,’ she said, breathing in the air, heavy now with damp as the ice storm finally edged towards the coast. ‘Because of what happened the next day.’

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.’

37

Out at sea, the bank of advancing cloud was now an almost tangible barrier. It appeared to drop to the surface of the water itself, and Dryden watched as a falling curtain of snow turned a red container ship grey before obliterating it entirely.

Dryden and Marcie Sley sat in a perspex shelter by the Dolphin’s swimming pool, shielded from the wind. The blind woman was still, the wind buffeting the shelter at her back, while Dryden described the scene.

‘There are clouds at sea,’ he said. ‘Creeping in. But it’s snow still, no sign yet of the rain.’

Marcie’s husband had gone back to their chalet, but Dryden still sensed his antagonism. Humph had retreated to the sand dunes with the Capri, the dog and a bag of chips.

Dryden was acutely aware that Marcie Sley had yet to ask again about the witness he had uncovered, the missing boy. Trying to postpone the moment further, he found his own question.

‘Tell me about John,’ he said. ‘Have you ever seen him?’

She laughed. ‘No. No, I haven’t. But I could tell his face in a thousand,’ she said, stretching out her fingers inside her gloves. ‘I trust him with my life, Dryden – quite literally. But he doesn’t trust you. Forgive him, he’s not a sociable man at all, but he loved the Gardeners’ – and he could spend time with Declan and Joe. They were happy there, and so was I.’

She ungloved her right hand and reached out, taking his own. ‘And he doesn’t trust you because he doesn’t know who you are. But I do. Philip.’

Dryden laughed, strangely elated by the moment of recognition. She held out both her hands, palm up, and he meshed his fingers with hers. ‘I wondered why you hadn’t asked. A guess?’

A blast of snow peppered the perspex. Her face, suddenly animated, looked younger, and Dryden saw again the girl who had played in the dunes.

‘Perhaps, at first. There was something when we met – at the Gardeners’. I don’t know what it was, but first names are odd like that. I always think you can end up liking people you should hate just because their name reminds you of someone you liked. I’ve always liked the name – perhaps that’s down to you.’ She smiled. ‘When you called it made me think – but it seemed such an extraordinary coincidence, that you should be… our Philip. But it isn’t, is it? You’re a reporter, they died in Ely. Then today, down by the old boat, you called Joe plain Smith – but I thought that might be something you’d found in the files, or a cutting. But Dex – I knew then, I don’t think anyone has called him Dex for twenty years.’

In the distance, through the side window of the shelter, Dryden saw John Sley standing under the canopy by the camp’s reception, a flare of light briefly illuminating his face as he lit a cigarette.

‘I’m sorry. When we were children…’ He stopped, recognizing what an extraordinary statement that was. ‘When we were children – I didn’t think there was anything wrong – with your sight, I mean.’

She nodded, and released his hand. ‘When I left the home in Peterborough – that was in ’82, Christmas – I just walked out, I was old enough, past my eighteenth, anyway. There were schemes, a hostel, all sorts of safety nets I guess. But I knew better. I had a friend who’d gone into a squat in a terraced house down by the river. It was unbelievably exciting, being free from… from everything, and it outweighed what I should have seen, that the house was dangerous, that the drink and drugs would crush me like they crush everyone.

‘But I let it happen. It is really disorientating, that kind of experience. I can’t really remember anything concrete, real, about the next three years at all. I drew benefit and I know that one day someone from the council tracked me down and said that there was still a place in the hostel. I laughed in his face, and then when we’d chucked him out I locked myself in the bathroom and cried. I just didn’t have the guts to do the right thing.

‘One day in summer we crashed out down in the park, all of us, and when we got back the landlords had moved in and boarded the place up. There was tape over the windows and new locks. I had this box, a writing box, which Grace – my foster mum – had given me before I’d left and it was on the lorry. I lifted it out but this bailiff just pushed me over and took it back. After that I ended up sleeping rough, around the city centre mainly, there’s a place under the inner by-pass where they let you sleep in cardboard boxes. I had this dog and we begged on the pedestrian subway.’

Dryden found his hip flask and sipped the malt. ‘Were you in touch with Dex?’

She shook her head and dropped her chin. ‘I wasn’t in touch with anything. The last time I’d seen Declan was in ’81. He was still at St Vincent’s then – and so was Joe. Declan was fourteen. We had a day together, in Peterborough. They dropped him off by mini-van. He cried most of the time – they’d punished them, you see – for the theft. They’d taken them off the register for adoption and fostering – Declan said they were losing kids and the place was running down and he thought they’d done it just to keep the numbers up. And they abused them. Because they could. They’d locked him in a toilet cubicle; he said they often did it, that he’d be there for days. It’s incredible, isn’t it? That’s where the claustrophobia came from, of course. I could tell how scared he was when they came to pick him up.’

‘And that was because of the letter that was sent home with them, from the camp?’

‘Yes. As far as I know they did nothing to check it out, they just took it for the truth. That was wrong too, Dryden. Another injustice.’

She accepted the flask. ‘I was never an alcoholic. I hated it really – even what it did.’ She drank and handed it back. ‘Then one day I went down to the exchange to pick up the benefit and they gave me this form to fill in – they did it most times. And I looked at it and I couldn’t see bits – they were just like black patches in my vision, moving, slipping. I was frightened then, so when they gave me an appointment at the clinic I went. But it was too late.’

A gust hit the shelter like a blow, whipping over and dashing snow into the empty swimming pool. Through the perspex Dryden could see a jagged white seascape.

‘Toxocariasis,’ she said. ‘You catch it from dog shit. There are worms, and if the eggs get in your eyes you get this disease. I had it in both – and the retinas were damaged. They tried to stop it but by the winter I couldn’t see at all.’

Dryden nodded. ‘And John?’

‘Being blind saved me. I couldn’t survive down there any more, not on the street. I got the place in the hostel and a disability allowance with the benefit. They found Declan for me, he was on benefit, and he came to Peterborough. He said he had these friends and that there was somewhere I could stay. I said no to the flat, I needed to be alone, but it was spring then – 1987 – so they put up a bed in the Gardeners’ Arms. Joe’s business was going well: like I told you, he’d given John a job at the factory. He was part of the crowd. We got married that winter. He saved my life.’

Dryden nodded. ‘You didn’t say what John had done to get put away.’

‘He’d been in and out most of his life, mainly burglary, but he had good hands too…’ She smiled. ‘Safes. It’s a dying art. He’d got five years for the last one. And that was the last one. But he still has good hands.’ She shivered, clasping her coat at her neck.

Dryden’s shoulders began to shake in the suddenly damp cold.

They stood. ‘I must get back to him,’ she said. ‘Can I ask you something? The solicitor said you’d found the missing witness. I think you let him presume something, didn’t you? That young Philip had seen what we’d seen that night?’

Dryden pressed her hand. ‘It’s a presumption he made, yes. And it might be true. I can’t think of any other way of finding out who killed them.’

She tried to find his eyes with hers. ‘I’m sorry, it was unfair of me, it’s brave of you. They ruined our lives, didn’t they, just as they could have ruined yours. Have you asked Ruth yet? Asked her who told Chips Connor to look under the huts?’

Dryden shook his head. ‘No. But it’s not the only question she has to answer, it’s just first in the queue.’

38

The lorry driver was trapped inside the cab of the HGV parked on the tarmac outside the Dolphin’s glass-fronted reception block. Steam from the engine rose in clouds which obscured the lorry’s windscreen. Russell Fleet, embedded in an oversized fluorescent green windjammer, was working on the passenger side lock with a hair dryer. Through the side window Dryden could see the driver reading the Sun spread out on the steering wheel.

‘Freezing locks. The windows are jammed too,’ said Russell. ‘The snow’s damp. The forecast says we’ll get the ice storm tomorrow.’ The flaccid skin of his face was flushed and, despite the cold, a sheen of sweat glinted on his forehead. Dryden was struck again by the almost tangible odour of illness which hung over the Dolphin’s assistant manager. It looked like he’d been out in the weather for hours, his hair matted with ice and the outer fabric of his windjammer flecked with water.

The lorry’s rear lights glowed in the gloom, the sign on the side of the container read: Propane Direct – Heat in a Hurry!

‘Hasn’t the camp got its own generator?’ he shouted to Fleet over the wind.

‘Sure. But it’s for emergency lighting and the freezers. The Grid’s just been on with a warning. They can’t guarantee power if they can’t get the ice off the pylons. We’d be pushed to run electric storage heaters in the chalets on the generator. These are a back-up.’

Dryden looked up and let his eye trace the looping lines of wire overhead. The electric hum of the power, audible even above the storm, was clearer now, a jagged whine, like fingernails across a blackboard.

Suddenly with a thud the locks on the HGV sprung, liberating the driver. He dropped the tailgate to reveal a stack of gas-fired portable heaters, each one a foot-long cylinder on a stand connected to a high-pressure container. In the subzero air Dryden sniffed the intoxicating scent of lighter fuel.

Fleet ran back into the office and reappeared with a gang of daytime staff and they started to offload the heaters onto a trailer slung behind a miniature tractor used in the summer months to run the camp’s ‘train’ between reception and the beach. It was nursery-school yellow with Disney characters on each side and a red bell on the bonnet, but now the paintwork was ribbed with streaks of ice.

Fleet raised his voice against the wind. ‘We’ll take one to every chalet that’s occupied,’ he told his reluctant workforce. ‘You’ve got master keys. If there’s someone in, explain – I’ve sent ’em an e-mail on the TV with instructions. Remember – tell ’em not to panic. It’s just in case. And tell them to keep an eye on the flame – if it gets blown out they need to relight it, otherwise the gas can build up.’

A battered Citroën estate swung through the camp gates and pulled up alongside the HGV. A woman at the wheel, brushing mousy hair back from her eyes, peered out through the windscreen. In the back two children fought between car seats.

Fleet’s shoulders sagged. ‘Bloody hell. Now what?’

The woman dropped the passenger-side window. ‘Russ.’ The voice was tired and edgy. ‘School’s closed; no prep, either. The heating’s failed. Can you?’ She looked behind her at the brawling children.

‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘How long? Not tonight, Jean, please.’

‘I’ll pick them up about eight – OK? There’s a crisis at work…’ She tried a grin but Fleet’s eyes hardened. ‘If you’d learn to drive it would make life a lot easier,’ she said.

Fleet pulled open the rear door. ‘What’s the point of paying the bloody fees?’ The children untangled themselves from seatbelts. ‘OK, kids. Come on. You can go on the machines.’ A ritual cheer greeted the news and the young teenagers, a boy and girl so close in age and looks they might be twins, ran towards the Dolphin’s foyer doors. They didn’t say goodbye as the woman swung the Citroën violently in a semicircle and bounced over the speed hump at the security gate. In the falling snow the tail-lights were lost within twenty yards.

‘She works then, your wife?’ said Dryden, as they both headed for the warmth of reception.

‘She’s my partner, actually,’ said Russell pointedly, then he bit his lip. ‘Yup. School fees – they’re crippling. They stay late for prep and stuff, otherwise it’s not fair on them, you know – latchkey kids and everything. But we didn’t want them to board, no family life that way. Jean’s got a business too… accountants, they work all hours.’

The light in the sky was gone, the chalet lanterns picked out in rows running down towards the sea. Briefly, beyond Lighthouse Cottage, the buoy flashed red twice, and then white. They could hear the sea now, distinct from the wind, a howl of sand and pebbles.

Dryden took one of the heaters off the trailer. ‘I’ll take one of these now, if it’s OK,’ he said.

The reception doors whisked open automatically and they met Ruth Connor, clutching her elbows in the sudden wedge of cold air which came in with them. ‘Russ, the kids? Is that sensible tonight?’

Fleet unzipped the windjammer and ignored his boss. ‘Mr Dryden,’ she said, still looking at Fleet. ‘George Holme phoned about Chips’ appeal – can we talk? Ten minutes in the bar? It looks like I owe you a drink.’

Fleet rubbed his face with both hands and watched her go. ‘It’s gonna be a long night,’ he said. ‘I’ll join you.’

The Floral Bar was warm and low-lit, a haven from the rawness of the night outside, its dark wood panelling reflecting the art deco lamps. Behind the bar was one of the staff, a teenager in an ill-fitting white shirt and a strangulating black tie. Fleet’s children were playing on a bank of machines in an alcove off the old ballroom floor.

Dryden watched as Fleet ordered two bottles of luminescent pop and grabbed a brace of crisp packets. Returning, he went behind the bar and poured Dryden a whisky and a large vodka for himself, which he downed, and then refilled the glass. They listened in silence to the electronic shuffle of the gaming machines and the gentle chug of coins dropping.

Fleet seemed uncomfortable with the absence of conversation. He shrugged, as if he’d made a silent decision. ‘So – like Ruth says, the lawyers have rung. Holme. Good news?’

‘I think so. I’d better fill her in first, though. Courtesy.’

Fleet licked his lips. ‘Sure.’

‘How’s business?’ asked Dryden, playing for time.

‘Well – considering it’s the worst winter on record – bloody great. We’ve got fifteen chalets taken. It only needs five to cover our costs. That’s the real point, you see – usually this kind of operation you have to lay off all the summer staff, mothball the place. That way you never get any better, you just have to retrain new staff every spring. It’s like Groundhog Day. Nightmare. This way we can keep people ticking over – and they can get away, holidays and that, which means you can keep the people who work, the ones that really care. The quality of the service improves, you get better customers, you can charge them higher fees. Off you go.’

Dryden considered Fleet and thought how dreary it was to find someone motivated by making money to the point that they’d live with an accountant.

‘Must be worth a few bob, then – the Dolphin.’

‘Yeah. Some of the big leisure groups have shown an interest – you know, Center Parcs, Warner’s… but it’s not for sale.’

Ruth Connor came in and joined them, armed with another smile from the brochure. She’d clearly heard the end of the conversation. ‘So. Russell’s been filling you in on the business. Our business.’ She handed Fleet a pile of correspondence. ‘Post just in off the van, Russ – could you?

‘Let’s talk,’ she said turning to Dryden, waiting only for the barman to pour her a glass of wine before shepherding him into one of the booths surrounding the ballroom. Fleet took the pile of letters and went to the far end of the bar to sort them, taking with him a large bunch of keys.

A gust of wind made the window beside them flex. ‘So, good news,’ she said. ‘You’ve found our elusive witness. That’s unbelievable. Chips deserves this, you know, after everything that’s happened.’

‘Yes,’ he said, noting how she sipped the wine, sensing a genuine electricity, a spark of excitement, perhaps – or fear.

‘Tell me. How did they come forward?’

‘I’ve spent some time on this case, Mrs Connor – there are some surprising twists and turns. Let’s just call it fate. I think you can look forward to the possibility – at the very least – that your husband will be coming home soon.’

He smiled, knowing she was smart enough to read between the lines.

She was looking at him when her eyes filled suddenly with tears.

‘I know you think I’m a fraud, Mr Dryden.’ She held up a hand before Dryden could deny it. ‘William tells me you’ve taken an interest in my private life. It is none of your business, of course, but I think you’ll find there are no surprises here for Chips. What happens when he gets out is up to him. The important thing is that he’ll be free to do what he wants. You may not believe it, but that is very important to me – and to William, actually.’

Dryden took his telling-off like a man. ‘I realize that your main concern is getting Chips out – but I’m quite interested in the question that comes next: if he didn’t beat Paul Gedney to death, who did? The morning after the children saw him in the old boat they were sent home – they were accused of a series of petty thefts in the camp. I presume you’d made the connection, that you recall the incident? In the circumstances it was all the more remarkable that they came forward at all. Can you remember anything about that – who accused them, for example?’

She creased her brow as if trying to reconstruct the scene. ‘It was quite a minor incident, Mr Dryden. We had to deal with that kind of thing a lot then.’

‘It was the morning after they’d seen Gedney – you must remember…’

She rose. ‘Must I? Must I really?’

Dryden sensed anger again and held up his hands by way of capitulation. ‘Sorry. I know it is a long time ago.’

She took her seat again. ‘Yes. And don’t forget, we didn’t know any of that then. It was just another case of petty theft, as I say – and not the first.’ She downed the wine and picked up his empty tumbler. ‘Can I get you another malt?’

While Fleet poured the drinks they talked in low whispers. When she ferried them to Dryden’s table she’d recovered her composure completely, her chin held elegantly high. ‘I do recall it, of course, and I know why. We’d asked the security guards to keep an eye out after dark – there was always some petty theft, as I said, but things had got worse. The problem was keeping the police out – it’s not a great advert for a fun-filled holiday. And the staff get jumpy too. That night there’d been a disturbance in one of the chalets and the guard had gone down to check things out. A domestic, of course; people always take the opportunity to throw our ornaments on holiday rather than their own.’

Dryden let the whisky burn his throat.

‘Anyway, he was down there and he saw the children running back through the camp – this was late, after 10.30. He didn’t see where the boys went but the girl’s chalet was by the main pool, and he said he saw her putting something under the hut. Next morning he asked Chips to have a look… Once they’d found the stuff, they checked the brother’s hut, too.’

‘Why Chips?’

‘First up. It was one way he avoided people. He’d do the pool, checking the chemicals, netting any leaves or rubbish. I was usually up for seven – but Chips had been up an hour by then, more. He’d just creep out of bed with the dawn.

‘Anyway, they found plenty of stuff. Sad, really – we couldn’t take kids like them ever again after that – kids from the orphanage. But we take young offenders, outward bound in the autumn – so we do our bit – but they come with their social workers so we don’t have to worry.’

Dryden nodded. ‘Why was it unfortunate that Chips was involved?’

‘We didn’t call the police – nothing like that; it’s hardly ever worth it, and, as I said, we don’t relish the publicity. But Chips had to face these kids, and he had to make a statement which we sent to the authorities – the council for the girl and a Catholic orphanage for the boys. It was very stressful for him, too much really. We’d been considering getting him away all that summer, but that was the trigger. I guess these days we’d say he had a breakdown. We found him in the dunes later that day. So he went away – a private clinic near Lynn.’

‘Which is where he was arrested for the murder of Paul Gedney.’

‘Indeed.’

‘This guard – the one who spotted the kids – do you have a name?’

‘Um…’ She looked towards the office. ‘I’m sure we’ll have it on record. Dad was meticulous about the staff. I could check… tomorrow perhaps?’

Dryden smiled, leaning forward, thinking that tomorrow DI Reade would be running the investigation. ‘No chance tonight? I’d really like to get something wrapped up for my paper. If someone framed Chips then there’s a good chance they framed the kids as well. This security guard has never been interviewed, none of this was part of the original inquiry.’

She smiled, not moving. Dryden realized she had the strength and the will to defy him. He listened to the clock over the bar chime the hour.

‘There is still a chance, Mrs Connor, that the police will be forced to reopen Chips’ file. George Holme is pressing the Chief Constable’s Office to at least review the case. If they do they will want to talk to this man. Whoever framed the kids almost certainly killed Paul Gedney. Wouldn’t it be a bright idea to try and find him now?’

She couldn’t fault the logic. ‘Bring your drink,’ she said, standing. They went behind the bar and down a short corridor with panelled walls to the foot of a narrow staircase which led up a single flight to a landing.

Ruth Connor struggled with a double lock to the only door. ‘This is daft. I can see that man as clearly as I can see you. It’s just his name… I think it was Jack – but that’s not much good on its own, is it?’

The office was spacious and modern – the 1930s art deco ceiling design obscured by a thick coat of white paint. Two PCs and a laser printer hummed on a desk suite. A TV monitor in the corner showed the bar, and Russell Fleet still bent over the post. One wall was covered with a staff rota; framed sunshine publicity shots covered the rest: minor celebrities pictured hugging total strangers.

‘Is this the original office?’ asked Dryden.

‘Yes. Indeed. But there’s not much left from the old days, I’m afraid – it didn’t have the charm of the bar,’ she said, laughing. Dryden, distrusting the sudden upbeat mood, failed to return the smile.

‘The safe?’ he asked, knowing it was the right question.

She laughed again, but this time Dryden sensed she was playing for time. ‘When was the last time you saw someone pay for a holiday with cash?’

Dryden nodded, recognizing that he hadn’t got an answer.

‘Here. Staff wage records.’ She swung a drawer out from a filing cabinet and put a ledger on the table, beginning to flick back through the large pages covered in copperplate. ‘I don’t think he was ever on the database. I’ll know the name when I see it.’

Dryden stood waiting, wondering if it really took this long. He studied the pictures on the wall and his eye was drawn to one: Ruth Connor had mentioned an outward bound course for young offenders and here they were, a group of six, arms thrown around necks, posing on the windswept sands, and in the background one of the course leaders – Ed Bardolph, Declan McIlroy’s social worker.

‘Here…’ she said, stabbing a finger on the page. ‘Potts. Francis Peter. That was him – Frank Potts. Told you it was Jack! Dad took him on, but he was good, absolutely straight as a die.’

‘Remember anything about him?’ asked Dryden, wondering about Bardolph, trying to concentrate on Frank Potts, feeling again the unnatural caress of coincidence.

Outside they heard the wind drop, the gritty patter of the falling hail suddenly silent.

She smiled, putting the book back. ‘I do, actually. He liked being a security guard so much he decided to make a career out of it. He became a policeman. You might still be able to find him.’

‘Any idea where I could start?’ asked Dryden.

She let the file drawer close with a crash. ‘I think we got a card at Christmas for a few years. New Zealand, Australia? Yes – Melbourne, or Sydney. Somewhere like that.’

The internal telephone bleeped from the desk and Ruth Connor hit a button. A loud static-scarred voice filled the room. ‘Mrs Connor? You asked me to let you know. Mr Nabbs phoned in, he’ll be with you in ten minutes.’

‘Kate, thanks. Can you send him straight up to the office – and we’ll have a pot of coffee.’

Ruth Connor didn’t bother with a smile this time. ‘If you’ll excuse us, Mr Dryden. An evening’s work, I’m afraid.’

‘Right. I’ll get on the track of Frank Potts, then. Just about anywhere in the southern hemisphere, right?’

But she wasn’t listening any more, or even pretending she was. Dryden saw himself out and went back to the bar, where he sat on a stool for ten minutes, thinking about where you would hide a safe. He saw William Nabbs arrive and head for the office, walking quickly, carrying a single holdall, unmarked, and obviously heavy.

39

From the verandah of the chalet it looked as if the sea had deserted the coast for good. Moonlit sand stretched to the horizon, where a glimmering white chalk line hinted at breaking surf a mile offshore. The air was still, the wind blown out for now. According to teletext on the chalet TV the ice storm was still twelve hours offshore, wheeling in with a deep anticyclone.

He’d sat with Laura for an hour until he knew she was asleep; waited another, sipping malt.

The bedside radio beeped the hours and the incantation of the shipping forecast began. In nine hours DI Reade would be at the camp with his team, and the following morning he would have to take Laura back to The Tower. Dryden would make his statement, then step into the background. The detective would play it by the book, tie up any loose ends left by the original inquiry, test out Declan and Joe’s story. But Dryden knew now that the heart of the mystery was still impenetrable, and would certainly defeat the half-hearted inquiry DI Reade was determined to conduct. Dryden had failed, failed the friends who had refused to fail him.

He flicked on the bedside monitor and stepped outside: flashing the torch three times into the darkness. Carefully descending the ice-covered steps he set out along the beach towards the high bank of marram grass where he knew Humph lurked in the Capri. It was time to send the cabbie home.

Dryden stood on the high-water mark amongst fractured sheets of ice left by the receding sea. The beach was a landscape revealed, a foreign country normally hidden beneath the North Sea. The power and swiftness of the falling tide had left the wide sands incised deeply with miniature valleys, channels, coves and hills, a country of black shadow and gentle curves as seductive as a desert. The red buoy, which at high water rode out the waves in the middle of the bay, lay on its side in a trickling brook. There was a single island, a sandy outcrop in the shape of a teardrop topped with grass. Here, in the summer, the lifeguards flew their flags. Tonight a red flag lay frozen to the staff.

A dog barked and, turning west, Dryden saw Boudicca, briefly cresting a moonlit sandhill before falling again into a lightless hollow. Humph hove into view, as substantial as the beached buoy in the channel below.

Dryden joined him, his footsteps up the incline marked by deep shadow-filled footprints.

‘A ball?’ said Humph, when he joined him, pointing inland.

They were above the stream that was all that was left of Morton’s Leam at low tide. Trundling down the brook was a round glass fisherman’s float – colourless in the moonlight, held within a rope harness. It bobbed as it weaved along the sinuous line of the S-bends, catching occasionally on the sand, before bolting on towards the sea.

‘Any progress?’ asked Humph, taking the tennis ball from Boudicca’s jaws and sending it skittering off downhill again.

‘A bit, but not enough. There may be a motive – or two. Scratch a place like this there’s all sorts of hidden stories just beneath the surface. I can think of several reasons why someone would want to keep Chips Connor inside, but when it comes to finding who killed Paul Gedney the cupboard is virtually bare. There is only one person in the camp who was here that summer – and that’s Ruth Connor. She’s lying about something, and her husband was a burden to her, but for the life of me I can’t think she had a decent motive for murder.’

‘There’s you,’ said Humph. ‘You were here that summer.’

‘Right. So I did it? Thanks.’ He shivered, sensing the temperature falling beneath a clear sky. Looking inland he saw something else following the float down to the sea. ‘That’s odd,’ he said. It was two things, something round like another float, but behind it something smaller, pointing up out of the water. The two bobbed together, a few feet apart, clearly tied beneath the surface.

‘Come on,’ said Dryden, dropping quickly down the face of the bank to the stream’s edge.

Whatever it was, it was in midstream, moving swiftly with the icy water. Just below the point where the stream cut through the dunes the channel widened into a pool, and here the objects circled, waiting for the stream to nudge them out into the final stretch to the sea.

Dryden edged out in the water, feeling the icy coldness at his toes. It looked like the float was wreathed in weed, but the other smaller object was suddenly clearer and Dryden’s heart missed a beat upon recognition: it was a glove, grey-green in the moonlight, the fingers vertical.

‘Humph!’ he shouted, wading out, the water stingingly cold. He tracked it now as it swung past, and the glove, leading, caught an incline of hidden sand which slowed it, bringing the float towards the bank in a graceful arc.

He was six feet away now and he saw the weed-encrusted fisherman’s buoy for what it was: a human head. Between skull and hand an expanse of black material spread, just submerged. The head, the weeds revealed as matted hair, was face down. Humph was at his side, the rasp of breath painful.

‘Shit,’ said the cabbie. He trudged in, grabbed the arm beneath the glove, and hauled the body round and half out on the sand. The water ran out of the clothes and an eel zigzagged back towards the safety of the black pool. The body was clad in a thermal tracksuit, Dryden saw now, dark blue with fashionable piping.

The corpse was splayed like a starfish: the head wasn’t turned down as Dryden had thought but ricked violently to the left, the face obscured by the hair and weeds. The left arm was flung back like the right but at the elbow bent back again, the hand turned up as the rigor contorted the limbs. Between the thermal glove and the tracksuit sleeve a chunky sportsman’s wristwatch showed.

Dryden pulled the body up by the shoulder, fully into the moonlight and lifted the hair clear of the face. The pallor was purple-white, like a beached jellyfish. There was some ugly black bruising at the neck, below the ear, and across one cheekbone, but it was clear enough who it was, or who it had been. The last time Dryden had seen that face it had been peering dreamily into a make-believe swimming pool, where a woman in a white swimsuit swam languid lengths. Chips Connor had come home.

The Dolphin Holiday Camp

Saturday, 31 August 1974

Philip ran to the dunes and climbed them to a place he knew where a bowl of sand like a seat looked out over the sea. Here he’d often sat after breakfast waiting for the other children to come, whooping, out from the chalets and down onto the beach. He sat this last time, letting the minutes of summer tick away as the waves swept in across the empty morning beach. Soon he’d be home on the Fen, with a new horizon, home for winter, and this world would not be his again. He knew that now, but dug his hands down into the sand, as if clinging to the surface of the earth, and felt the coolness beneath.

The cry, when it came, reminded him of the night before: the pain, with pleasure in the release. It was close, in the dry grass, and the voices were so low that they seemed to be inside his head. He edged forward, careful not to breast the crest of the dunes where he could be seen against the sky, until he saw below a miniature valley in the sand, blown out by the winds, an amphitheatre unseen from the beach. In the centre were the ashes of a fire. There was a rug of green, a bedspread, and two bodies intertwined as one, seen through the dry grass.

He heard her first, the words in a rhythm as if kneading dough. ‘I told you, they’re gone. Relax now.’

She sat up on his waist, her hair in a red scarf, wisps of blonde hanging free, her face turned away. Philip didn’t understand the way they moved, the man’s hand played on the sun-splashed skin. But only one hand. The other lay beside him curled, the fat bicep turned outwards so that Philip could see the jagged angry thunderbolt of the scar.

Then he ran.

40

Tuesday, 10 January

Within the hour the sea had spilled back into the pool, edging up towards the sand dunes. Dryden and Humph dragged Chips Connor’s body to the high-water mark, pulling it through the broken ice and flotsam onto the sandy path beyond. A police squad car, answering Dryden’s mobile call, edged down through the seagrass, its tyres crunching in the frost. The moonlight shone into Connor’s open and unblinking eyes. The black body bag, stiff with ice, cracked as they zipped it up. In his memory Dryden saw another corpse, curled on a doorstep, shrouded in ice.

The wind, blustery now, threw spray over the pathologist, whose examination was cursory. Chips Connor’s pale hand, reclaimed from the frozen glove, seemed to call the tide inland. Lighthouse Cottage was requisitioned as a temporary morgue, and Dryden told to wait there for the arrival of the duty inspector from Lynn, while Humph was allowed to retreat with Boudicca to the privacy of the Capri. Dryden left them there, hugging each other.

Lighthouse Cottage bustled with discreet activity and the edgy electronic static of police radios. William Nabbs gave Dryden coffee and threw driftwood on an open fire set quickly beneath a brushed aluminium hood in the kitchen: the clock above read 1.30am. Chips Connor’s body had been taken inside first, through to the front room. Outside, a group of uniformed PCs, conducting a fingertip search of the beach, dunes and riverbank in relay teams, made periodic appearances for hot drinks and shelter.

Nabbs drank coffee too. His hair was matted and wet, the blond dyed streaks in stripes through the natural brown. By the door stood a sea rod and tackle, while on the deal table lay a brace of cod glistening in the flickering light, more life in their iridescent scales than in their dead eyes. Dryden, vaguely aware that Nabbs had put something strong in the coffee, watched in fascination as blood dripped from the open mouths to the quarry-tiled floor beneath.

‘You OK?’ said Nabbs, fussing with the wood.

Dryden nodded. ‘Fine. I like midnight walks, I deserve what I get.’

A DI arrived, a raincoat stiff with ice plastered to his legs. He was young – mid-thirties – and would have been keen if he hadn’t just worked forty hours straight. He had weak eyes, close together, in a face which looked worried at rest. He introduced himself as Detective Inspector John Parlour of King’s Lynn CID, and tried to suck some nicotine from a packet of low-tar menthol cigarettes.

‘Where is she?’ asked Nabbs, giving the detective coffee too, complete with whisky.

The DI leant his back against the door. ‘She’s with a WPC now, up in the flat. They won’t be long – then they’ll bring her here.’

They all glanced at the living-room door.

Nabbs nodded. ‘I just don’t understand… How can it be Chips?’

He looked at Dryden for an answer while the DI consulted a notebook. ‘There’s some confusion at Wash Camp,’ said Parlour. ‘The governor is talking to his people now but Connor was counted in at lunch and out again at 1.30pm, went to his room and then to the gym for an hour, that’s his daily routine. Then there was a run, outside. Then the weather turned bad, the light went, they brought them in early. The next time there was a count was back in the showers at 3.00pm – he wasn’t there. They were running in tracksuits and that’s what he’s got on now. Plus a wedding ring and the watch.’

‘It’s twenty-five miles away,’ said Nabbs. ‘More.’

The DI shrugged. ‘He could have hitched – he could have run and walked. He had the time. Map?’

Nabbs spread an Ordnance Survey sheet out on the kitchen table, edging the fish to one end, cleaning the trail of blood away with a piece of kitchen towel. Briefly Dryden imagined he could smell the haemoglobin, a rusty metallic edge which made him wince.

With a finger Nabbs traced the course of the main river back inland. One tributary led towards the prison, stopping short by five miles.

‘He could have fallen in there,’ said Nabbs. ‘Suicide?’

DI Parlour shook his head, the cigarette clamped between his lips. ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said, launching the stub into the flames of the fire. ‘Pathologist says the neck was broken, the head twisted round and back over the left shoulder. He’s only making an educated guess but there appears to be little fluid in the lungs – so it’s probable he was dead before he hit the water. Hypothesis has to be he was attacked from behind, his chin wrenched round, then dumped.’

Parlour put down the coffee cup and, interlacing his fingers, cracked the bones.

Dryden nodded. ‘A few problems with all that. You’ll find the channels up inland are frozen – they have been for a week. He’s got to have fallen into salt water, below the tidal reach of the main channel – about a mile inland, or in the marshes over here.’ He pointed to the intricate tracery of channels to the west of the camp. ‘When you get the water off his clothes or out of his lungs I bet you very little of it’s fresh. And there were strands of weed on the body – that points to the marshes too.’

‘Right,’ said Parlour, making a note.

‘So he got here sometime this afternoon – probably late,’ said Dryden, just – he thought – as Paul Gedney had done more than thirty years before.

The door opened and a WPC brought in Ruth Connor. Naturally pale, she’d blanched further, some hastily applied lipstick a gash across the face. Dryden, who relied almost entirely on first impressions when judging character, thought she looked genuinely shocked, her eyes fighting to keep focused on the real world around her. Dryden felt she made a conscious effort not to look at William Nabbs, but took a chair by the fire and a whisky she hadn’t asked for.

‘One moment please, Mrs Connor,’ said DI Parlour, opening the living-room door just wide enough to slip beyond. The WPC stood guard, a puddle of meltwater forming at her feet.

‘It’s Chips?’ she said, turning to look at Dryden as Nabbs stood behind her, both hands on her neck.

‘You’ll have to make sure – but yes, I’m sorry, it’s Chips.’

She put a hand across her mouth, and when it dropped her lips had left a kiss on the palm. ‘Why?’ She twisted her head to look at Nabbs.

‘We know someone didn’t want him to come back,’ said Dryden, dropping his voice. ‘But he did come back – why do you think he did that?’

She looked into the fire and Dryden could see her fingernails digging into Nabbs’ palm.

‘You called him in prison, you said. Perhaps…’

Nabbs stiffened. ‘Is this the time?’

‘You tell me,’ said Dryden, standing and walking to the window. ‘I don’t know how much time you’ve got.’ He came closer while the WPC answered a radio call. ‘I think it’s probably time to stop lying…’

The living-room door opened and Ruth Connor jerked visibly in her seat. ‘Mrs Connor? Would you…’ The WPC came over and took her arm, but she held on to Nabbs and allowed him to encircle her waist as they went through the door.

DI Parlour let them go first. ‘If you’d wait a little longer, Mr Dryden – we need a statement.’

The door closed and the silence in the cottage was complete. The clock on the kitchen wall ticked on: 2.15am. Dryden closed his eyes and felt a rush of nausea. Why had Chips left the security of his prison cell to come back to the Dolphin? Dryden dwelt again on the message the prisoner had left scrawled on the unfurling paper ball: I DIDN’T KNOW. Chips had helped, perhaps unwittingly, to set the children up for a crime they didn’t commit – the punishment for which had haunted them throughout their lives. Dryden remembered then what Chips had said: ‘I never knew their names.’ But he had known their names, he’d signed the statement at the time confirming he’d found the stolen goods beneath their chalets. What he’d meant, of course, thought Dryden, was that he never knew the names of the witnesses who had come forward thirty years later. Once Dryden had told him, his remarkable memory had pieced the past together: he’d helped to frame them, helped to frame himself.

The outer door opened and a uniformed PC appeared with John Sley.

Dryden helped himself from the malt whisky bottle Nabbs had left on the kitchen table.

‘This is ridiculous…’ said Sley. ‘It can’t be a crime to walk on a fucking beach.’

‘Sir. Please. Just take a seat for a moment. This is a crime scene. A man has been murdered. I’m afraid we just need to ascertain that we don’t require a statement from you – OK? Just routine, if you could wait a moment.’

From the living room they heard a sob and a low murmur of sympathy, and the PC slipped back out, leaving them alone.

‘Murder?’ said Sley, subsiding into a chair by the fire, his donkey jacket flecked with ice. ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Who?’

‘Chips Connor. Early-morning stroll for you, is it, or late-night?’ said Dryden.

Sley looked to the door. ‘We’d been talking, but Marcie’s asleep now. I couldn’t – too much to think about.’

‘Now there’s a bit more to think about. Tell Marcie – tell her tonight. Chips got out of prison and came home, then someone killed him and chucked him out with the tide.’

They heard movement beyond the door and Dryden decided it was time to see John Sley in action. ‘And tell her something else. Tell her the safe’s still there, the one Paul Gedney robbed. I’m sure it’s still there because Ruth Connor wants me to think it isn’t. You could talk about that. About how interesting it might be to know what’s in it.’

John Sley held his hands in his lap, the fingers unlaced and still.

The PC returned and began taking down a brief statement from Sley so that he could return to his chalet. Dryden closed his eyes again. Sleep swept over him as if he’d been drugged. When he opened his eyes he was still alone and the clock read 3.15am. Then he remembered DI Reade, who would no doubt arrive unannounced at 9.00am. He fished out his mobile and called the number Reade had given him. Typically, the detective’s mobile was off.

‘Hi. This is Philip Dryden. There’s something you need to know. Your colleagues from Lynn are all over the Dolphin. Chips Connor’s body has been found on the beach. Someone broke his neck. This might change your plans. Sorry about that. Ring me when you can.’

Dryden wondered what the murder of Chips Connor would do for Reade’s career prospects. The chief constable was unlikely to view the appearance of a fresh corpse as a suitable opportunity to wrap up a troublesome case.

Dryden let his head loll back, his eyelids fighting gravity. Under the deal table the fish had bled again, creating a second pool on the quarry tiles as blood bled on blood. Something malevolent stirred in Dryden’s subconscious and he struggled to rationalize his fear. When sleep did come he dreamt of the black blood again, this time dripping from the beaten, jagged lips of Paul Gedney.

41

At dawn the snow was falling again from an inkblot sky. A brisk wind blew and helped offset the effects of a fitful sleep in William Nabbs’ kitchen chair – interrupted only by a laborious and studious interview with DI John Parlour. Dryden had kept his statement brief and factual, leaving more tortuous matters for the arrival of DI Reade, who had not returned his call. Finally, released to return to his chalet, he found Laura asleep, the COMPASS blank, the comforting light of the monitor blinking red in the dark.

As he walked between the chalets the air was as cold as a butcher’s fridge. A North Norfolk Electricity van was already parked in the staff car park beside two squad cars and a police van. Ruth Connor sat in reception, behind the downlit counter, drinking from an espresso cup. Her pale fingers encircled the thin china, and Dryden expected to see it shatter under the suppressed anxiety which radiated from her like a colour. A WPC sat in one of the foyer’s comfy chairs by the internet café, arms folded, with a stare as blank as a bank teller’s. Dryden let his shoulders sag in the sudden damp heat which seeped into the room from the misty heated pool.

Ruth Connor looked up, looked through him, and turned to the WPC. ‘You don’t have to wait, really…’ She caught Dryden’s eye. ‘There’s work to do here, I’ll be fine now.’

As if to prove it they heard a shout from the indoor pool followed by a splash.

The policewoman checked her watch. ‘No problem – I’ll stick around till your partner gets here. About seven thirty you said?’ Dryden noted that apparently some truths may have been told during the night, if not all.

He pulled a high stool up to the reception counter. ‘You all right?’ he said, wanting to hear her talk, wanting to see her struggle to maintain that remarkable façade. She looked like she hadn’t slept, the hair failing for once to divert attention from the spider’s web of wrinkles by her eyes.

She nodded. ‘William’s out with the engineers, at the pylon. We’re going to take a break away; a few days, when the police are done.’

They both tried identical insincere smiles. The phone rang and she grabbed it, her relief palpable as she became immersed in taking down a booking. Dryden was more convinced than ever that she was hiding something, but other than her discreet relationship with William Nabbs he’d got no closer to finding out what it was.

Tyres crunched over snow outside as the Dolphin’s staff minibus edged up to the foyer. Russell Fleet dashed over the tarmac and in through the automatic doors. He swapped a glance with his boss, a nod with Dryden, and headed for the bar.

She finished the call and before Dryden could resume the questions she stood. ‘Excuse me. Russ phoned earlier – I need to get him up to speed – he’ll be running the place for a few days.’

Dryden sat down opposite the WPC, who continued to examine a spot in the mid-distance. Outside, the minibus idled, waiting for its return passengers to Whittlesea and the surrounding villages. Dryden considered his options: for a day at least the Dolphin would be crowded with police, a team working inside the taped-off scene of crime area by the beach, while a separate search was being carried out by frog teams and foot parties across the saltmarsh. DI Parlour, he knew, planned further interviews, and they’d swapped mobile numbers. And then there was DI Reade. But Dryden calculated that a fresh corpse outranked a thirty-year-old miscarriage of justice. The review of Chips Connor’s conviction would have to await the completion of the inquiry into his murder. Dryden’s role, as witness, victim, amateur detective and, for all he knew, suspect, would be central. He didn’t relish being around when DI Parlour discovered just how many details Dryden had left untold, or having to watch the tussle for power in the investigation.

And there was still one place he wanted to go: one central character in the tawdry tale of Paul Gedney who remained a cipher: Elizabeth Lutton, the pharmacist who had made his crime possible and then slipped away from the scandal of Whittlesea Hospital. She was a crucial link to the real story of Chips Connor. Her successor at the hospital had been circumspect. What Dryden desperately needed was a more immediate witness, someone who could tell him how she had felt, who else might have been entangled in their deception, how she’d lived out the rest of her short life. He logged on to one of the screens in the camp’s internet café and punched in her husband’s name. From the website of his private clinic at Lynn he took up a weblink to Whittlesea District Hospital’s outpatients clinic.

‘Bingo,’ he said, waking up the WPC. George Lutton’s NHS clinic ran every Tuesday and Thursday morning.

He took a decision then, and deserted the warm embrace of the Dolphin’s foyer. The minibus was fugged up, the onboard heater gently cooking the only occupant – the driver. Dryden tapped on the window. ‘Sorry, I know this is a bit cheeky – I need to get into Whittlesea – any chance?’

The driver was a middle-aged woman, big-boned with a moon face and a nylon uniform bearing the Dolphin’s blue motif. ‘Sure. At your own risk, mind – we saw three accidents on the way up, and I don’t normally drive this old tub. And these don’t help…’ The windscreen wipers had locked, and the glass was a web of cut-glass ice, like a Victorian fruit bowl.

She passed Dryden a can of de-icer and he sprayed the wipers free, before taking the front passenger seat.

‘Philip Dryden,’ he said, as she pulled out onto the coast road and then almost immediately turned south on the long road to Whittlesea. ‘So, if you don’t normally drive, what do you do?’

‘I’m Muriel,’ she said. ‘I run the cleaners, chambermaids.’ She let a silence lengthen that threatened to last the whole journey. ‘Muriel Coverack – it’s Cornish.’

On the dashboard was a bunch of keys attached to a key ring in the form of a small plastic photo frame: two children, teenage girls, leered into the camera, clutching each other.

Dryden tapped it. ‘Yours?’

‘Nope,’ she said. ‘Sister’s. But they come for the hols.’

Dryden nodded, sensing the presence of a lonely life.

She checked the rear-view again. ‘You’re the one with the wife – in the wheelchair. We don’t clean those chalets without a call first – perhaps tomorrow? We’ll be really quick.’

‘Sure. Thanks.’

Another silence in which Dryden imagined sympathy welling up. ‘So, what happened?’ she asked, embarrassed too. ‘There was something on the local radio – we all heard it on the way. Russ said it was Chips – that he’d been found on the beach. That right?’

‘Sure. I found him, actually – someone broke his neck.’ He nodded inappropriately, realizing that the image of Chips’ contorted hand, reaching out from the water, had haunted him since he’d woken that morning. He still felt cold from the night, and began to shiver violently.

Muriel turned up the heating. ‘There’s a rug on the seat behind – use it. You seen a doctor? It might be shock.’

Dryden put the blanket round his shoulders and told her as much as he could, spinning out the story so that he could try and win something back in return. They drove south across the Fens, the thirty miles to Whittlesea like a trek across the Great Plains.

‘Odd place, the Dolphin,’ he said eventually, as they edged over a crossroads where the traffic lights were out. ‘Decent job though?’

She nodded. ‘Might all be over soon.’

Dryden turned in his seat. ‘Why’s that?’

‘They’re gonna sell it, aren’t they? Russ says no when we ask. But last year they had the agents in, and last week they was back. They had guests over Christmas, too – showed them round. They’ll do it this time.’

Dryden nodded, remembering something odd. ‘Russell always catch the bus in, does he? No car?’

She shrugged. ‘Jean drives – I’ve never seen Russ behind the wheel. We pick him up at Sea’s End every morning – six thirty. Hasn’t missed a day in twenty years.’

‘Settled, then?’

‘Yeah – yeah. They’ve been together nearly as long now. The kids are smart – hardly kids, really. Twins – teenagers. Nice family. Everyone has a row now and then though, don’t they?’ she added.

Dryden nodded, thinking of Laura again, thinking how wonderful it would be to have a row. When he’d got back to the chalet he’d caught some sleep in a chair and made breakfast as dawn broke. They’d eaten something together: coffee and a milky cereal. He’d gone to shave and when he got back she’d written something on the COMPASS.

YOU PROMISED. IT’S TIME.

He’d made so many promises, but he knew all too well which one she wanted him to keep. He’d lit the propane heater, set it on low, just in case the heating failed while he was out. He’d smelt it then, the smell of heated gas, burning innocently. He could have blown the flame out with a kiss, letting the deadly gas fill the chalet.

He looked out of the minibus window through the circular porthole he’d cleared and saw the black peat, a blur to the horizon. ‘So you go back that far, do you – twenty years? Is that when Russ arrived?’

‘Oh no, I can beat that,’ she said, creeping past a police car parked near where a lorry had slewed off the road and into the dyke. The container stuck up at a crazy angle, the cab embedded in the bank.

‘I started work at the Dolphin in ’69. Chambermaid. I worked for Ruth’s father – John Henry. I’m the boss now – twenty staff. I’m running the bus because the driver didn’t make it.’

Dryden swung round in his seat. Other than Ruth Connor she was the first person he’d found who could recall the camp before the murder of Paul Gedney.

‘What was he like – the old man, John Henry?’

‘Nothing like her,’ she said, and realizing she’d said too much, she made a show of concentrating on an L-driver ahead on the icy road.

‘She’s a cool customer,’ said Dryden, as lightly as he could. ‘It was ’75, wasn’t it – when Chips was jailed? I’ve been in to see him – nice guy. What did people think?’

She checked the rear-view again. ‘Russ said you were a reporter.’

Dryden looked out of the window. ‘That’s right. But I’m off duty. You know there were two witnesses who could have got Chips freed – kids at the camp in ’74. They were friends of mine. I was here too that summer. I was just a kid.’

‘Thanks. Now I feel ancient.’

‘Sorry,’ said Dryden, smiling into the rear-view. His eyes were tired, and his shock of black hair flattened on one side where he’d slept heavily back at the chalet.

‘It’s just that I’d like to find out what happened to them. I think someone killed them to stop them coming forward.’

‘Russ said.’

‘And I think they tried to kill me.’

She looked at him then, the car stationary in a queue tailing back from a flashing police light by the main bridge into Whittlesea. ‘Russ said the police didn’t think there was anything suspicious – that they’d died naturally. One of them was an alky?’

Dryden thought Russ had done a lot of talking. ‘So what did people think – at the time, about Chips?’

She turned off the ignition and they sat in sudden silence in the unmoving queue. ‘Chips and Ruth went back a long way, yup? To school. Sweethearts, married at eighteen. And they were happy, you could see that. Then she took over at the camp when John Henry fell ill. Chips was brilliant with kids, a natural. A few years went by, there were no kids. People talk, like they do.’

She bit her lip, sensing the irony. ‘She’s always been odd with kids. Brittle. Then Chips had the accident. I was in the camp that day, we all came running because they had an alarm by the pool and someone set it off. There was this slick in the water, you know – like from his head.’ She turned to Dryden and he could sense the frisson of horror even after thirty years.

‘When he got back from the hospital, he was a mess. He was just scared of everything, really jumpy, but he couldn’t tell you what was wrong – just like a child.’ She blushed suddenly. ‘I don’t have any, so what do I know – but that’s what they say, isn’t it?’

Dryden nodded.

‘He used to do the poolside duty and the locking up and stuff but anything else, like with people, was too much. He’d end up in the dunes somewhere, and they’d have to send the security guards out to find him.’

‘But they stayed together… him and Ruth?’ said Dryden.

‘Sure. But he was ill, and they decided to get some treatment, see if they could do anything. So they took him away. Course, looking back, they said it was the stress – that he’d killed that bloke, beat him to death, and he’d dumped the body out at sea.’

Dryden nodded. ‘I’ve read all about the trial. About Paul Gedney turning up and asking them for help.’

Muriel licked her lips. ‘Read about Lizzie Sykes?’

She had a smile on her face now and Dryden sensed the kind of communal thrill that comes from shared malicious gossip. ‘Nope.’

She fired up the ignition and they crawled forward again. ‘After Gedney went missing the police put out his picture, right? He didn’t have a face you could forget. Those eyes. Anyway, this Lizzie Sykes recognized him straight off. She was a bit simple, actually, but I don’t think she had the wit to lie. Big girl, but slow. Anyway, she was from Whittlesea too – not like the rest of us, we’re all from Lynn – and she’d seen him in the park. This was a bit back, the late sixties, when they were all at school.’

Dryden looked across in the silence and saw that Muriel was smiling, her tongue pushing out her cheek.

‘He was sat on a park bench with Ruth Henry – as she was – kissing. Well, the way she told it, more than kissing. Lizzie liked that story. She told it enough.’

Dryden saw the scene differently then, Paul Gedney arriving at the Dolphin by motorbike on a summer’s night.

‘Did she, Lizzie, tell the police?’

‘She told the court. Didn’t do her any good though. The other thing about Lizzie was she had light fingers. Petty theft, but then she wasn’t the only one. If you knew what they paid chambermaids at a place like the Dolphin, it makes the minimum wage look like a lottery win.’

Dryden had read all the news copy from the trial and there’d been no mention of her testimony, but he knew from experience that newspaper reports were at best a summary, and incidental witnesses were often left out entirely. ‘So?’

‘They brought it all up in court. Apparently Ruth had caught her once the previous season and docked her wages. Lizzie went round telling everyone she’d get her own back – settle the score. They dragged it all into the court – so the judge said the jury should forget what she said. Ruth denied it flat anyway. But it didn’t help Chips, did it? I think a few of us felt he’d clumped Gedney to get even.’

Dryden made a show of checking his mobile for messages, but he took the time to try and think things through. When the phone trilled it made him jump. It was a text message from DI Reade.

RING. NOW.

Dryden checked the incoming call details. The call was timed at 8.48am, Reade was still in Ely, and the rest of his inquiry team was presumably kicking their heels with him. All of which would make a nasty mess of the staff rota.

Dryden decided not to reply and turned to Muriel. ‘So, do you think Ruth was two-timing Chips after they were married?’

‘I don’t think anyone could have blamed her, although we all did. Chips was popular, yeah? He was drop-dead gorgeous for a start and then after the accident kind of pathetic too, a big kid. Whereas we all thought she was a callous cow. And a rich one, of course – that didn’t help.’

‘And then along came William Nabbs,’ said Dryden.

‘Yeah – but he wasn’t the first. That’s the school…’ she said, nodding to the side of the road where a set of iron railings ran beside a playground. ‘Whittlesea Catholic High School. That’s where they all met.’

Dryden was surprised the school was open. Children played, wrapped in scarves and hats. One enterprising teenager was sledging down a frozen grass slope onto the tarmac. As a bell rang he imagined the three of them, a group apart, their heads together, planning.

42

The entrance to Whittlesea District Hospital was an echoing cavern of Victorian marble marred by ill-disguised wiring and a large poster exhorting patients to save your local hospital. The Grecian bust still stood, eyes blank, and dust-covered. On one wall the faded colour picture of Elizabeth Lutton hung, the smile still wavering. Dryden dwelt on the white blonde hair, thinking of the bodies entwined in the morning sunlight of the dunes thirty summers earlier. Today the bitter cold had seeped into the hall and somewhere Dryden could hear the trickling of a burst pipe. The WRVS had a stall selling tea and biscuits and he asked for directions to the weekly clinic. Out through Aamp;E, where a single elderly patient sat holding a bloody home-made bandage to his ear, he followed a broken path of sand across the tarmac to a Portakabin. By the ramp up to its doors stood a board.

WHITTLESEA CLINIC.

Clinics morning: 9.15am to 12.15pm. Clinics afternoon: 1.15pm to 3.15pm.

TODAY: Cataract Clinic: Mr Lutton. Medical photography: appointment only. Blood Donors Clinic – all day (Caxton Road Site).

Inside the Portakabin three rows of plastic seats stood empty. In the two far corners paraffin heaters had been lit, scenting the air. The sound of the door closing brought a nurse out from behind a partition.

‘Mr Lutton?’ asked Dryden. She took Dryden into a consulting room which was also empty.

‘Mr Lutton’s just at the pharmacy – he’ll be five minutes. Take a seat.’

Dryden examined the wall, covered with medical information posters. He winced at the sight of a set of photos illustrating the onset of cataracts. In the final one a blanched retina swam in an eyeball marbled with tiny blood vessels.

Dryden considered what he’d learnt about the human triangle which had been Ruth Henry, Chips Connor and Paul Gedney. Childhood friends in a small Fen town. Ruth leaves school and goes to work in her father’s business, and as his final illness deepens, she takes over the day-to-day management of the Dolphin. Chips Connor, handsome, cheerful, and in love, follows her out to the coast. Perhaps they were happy, but somewhere in the background is an unfinished affair with Paul Gedney. Then comes Chips’ accident, and his retreat into childhood and manic insecurity. For the young Ruth Henry – a beauty queen and an heiress – it must have been an almost insupportable blow – to be chained for life to a man she would have struggled not to despise.

Dryden covered his eyes and let the cool palms heal the soreness beneath.

A phone rang on Lutton’s desk and Dryden jumped. He considered the coming interview without relish. What did he know about Mr George Lutton, consultant ophthalmic surgeon? Paul Gedney’s drug-pilfering scam relied on falsified records. Elizabeth Lutton had been the pharmacist at the time Gedney had committed his crimes. The police had gone after Gedney, but she’d been allowed to take early retirement. If Gedney had been found, would his testimony have implicated others? Was it a good enough reason to see him dead? When, and how, had Elizabeth Lutton died?

Impatient, Dryden stood again, and scanned the wall posters. One showed an eye, bulging out in diagram, incisions marked at the side.

Graves Disease, read the caption: It can be treated.

You’d never forget the eyes: it’s what everyone had said. Dryden began to read the small print but the Portakabin shook suddenly as someone climbed the outside steps.

George Lutton was the wrong side of 15 stone, a bow tie accentuating the stretched white shirt over his stomach. His face was hairless and his cheeks had livid red spots, as if the exercise of crossing the hospital yard had been a significant challenge.

He crashed into his chair and adjusted his glasses.

‘Oh yes,’ he said, reading a note, and immediately began to pack away pen and documents into an attaché case. ‘I’m sorry. I know you rang but I really can’t help you now. Elizabeth and I separated in ’78. As you know, she died in ’89; she’d been ill for several years. By that time she had a new family, and so did I. So you see…’

‘It was about Paul Gedney.’

Lutton stood, taking an overcoat down from a wooden hat stand. ‘Indeed. But I don’t want to talk about Paul Gedney, Mr Dryden.’

‘I’m sorry, it’s just I’ve never understood why your wife got involved.’

Lutton froze. ‘It’s almost impossible to slander the dead, Mr Dryden, but be careful. Involved in what?’

Luckily Dryden knew the law of slander better than Lutton. There were no witnesses, so he pressed on. ‘Paul Gedney stole drugs over a period of nine months during the winter of 1973–4. I understand that’s impossible to do without attracting attention – unless the records are falsified. Your wife was responsible for the records. She retired six weeks after the police inquiry became public. Did she really need the money?’

He walked away from Dryden towards the outer doors. ‘Why do you people always assume crime is about money?’

Lutton had a Jag, black and polished like a hearse. He struggled with the door.

‘It’ll be frozen,’ said Dryden. ‘De-icer?’

Lutton, angry now, walked to the rear and the boot flipped up automatically.

Dryden was thinking fast: there was something about Lutton’s indignation that was intensely personal, a loss of face perhaps, and dignity. He thought again about the unsatisfied smile of Elizabeth Lutton. ‘They had an affair, didn’t they?’ he asked.

Lutton straightened, holding a can of de-icer. Then he leant in close and Dryden caught the whiff of cigars. ‘Look. Can I suggest you fuck off. I consider your attempts to gain access to the surgery are improper. I am being harassed. If you do it again I shall make a formal complaint. I wish to get on. I have another clinic at Friday Bridge.’

‘She must have been worried when he disappeared,’ Dryden persisted. ‘Worried he’d get caught, and try to shift the blame. Did he get in touch?’

But Lutton had said enough; he reached up to close the boot but Dryden stopped him. It was packed with kit: sealed cellophane packages of medical equipment, a small carousel for dispensing drugs and an aluminium box, like a picnic cooler, with locks.

‘What’s that?’ said Dryden, touching the cold metallic surface.

Lutton sighed, and crashed the boot down. ‘Friday Bridge has a small Aamp;E department for injuries – they’re short of blood, I run stuff out on clinic days. It’s a blood box. Now goodbye, Mr Dryden.’

43

Humph picked him up outside the hospital gates and drove in silence to the Eel’s Foot, parking up on the edge of the long dyke which ran to the horizon: a single white line of ice which seemed to separate the landscape into two equal halves of black, featureless peat. Its surface smoked in the setting sunlight, gently smudging the image of a swan which flew towards them along the arrow-straight track, one webbed foot occasionally touching the ice in its wake.

Dryden fetched beer and juice from the bar. The sun had gone, a vast lid of steel-grey cloud having slid over their heads from the north. A violent gust of wind rocked the Capri on its rusted springs.

The cabbie carefully retrieved a miniature bottle of tequila and added it to the orange juice. ‘It’s medicinal,’ he explained, belching.

‘In what sense?’ asked Dryden.

‘In the sense that it tastes like medicine,’ said Humph, adding a second.

Suddenly the ice storm struck, rain thrashing the windscreen and cutting visibility from ten miles to twenty feet in five seconds. As they watched, the water froze on the cab’s windows in opaque patterns. Dusk seemed close now, and Humph flicked on the vanity light over the passenger seat.

Humph checked his watch and fiddled with the radio knob. They listened patiently to the national news before it switched to local weather. Dryden’s mobile had been off since DI Reade’s unwelcome text. He flicked it back on and found a voice message from DI Parlour.

‘Mr Dryden. I’ve just had a brief chat with DI Jock Reade from Ely. I understand you know each other. I’d like to try that statement again, if it’s all right with you. Now, please. I’m at the camp, we’ve set up an incident room in the old dining hall. I’ll expect you. Frankly, if I don’t see you by dusk one of my officers will come and get you.’

Humph leant forward and turned up the radio volume ‘… and for East Anglia the Met Office has issued a severe weather warning. Freezing rain showers have reached the north coast of Norfolk and will deepen towards nightfall. Ground temperatures are likely to remain at minus 5 or lower, leading to widespread formation of ice on trees, overhead wires, rails, roads and other artificial surfaces. By mid-evening the storm front will have passed from coastal areas, with skies clearing, leading to severe freezing temperatures of minus 10 and below. Police in North Norfolk advise all motorists to stay off the roads unless their journey is vital. Conditions are already described as treacherous.’

‘Super,’ said Dryden. Humph killed the radio and resisted the language tape: an eloquent, and rare, offer of uninterrupted communication.

‘The camp’s still crawling,’ said the cabbie. ‘They want to know what I’ve been doing parked up on the beach.’

‘What did you tell ’em?’

‘The truth. That I was keeping an eye on Laura because someone had tried to kill you. I think the copper wants another word.’

‘You don’t say,’ said Dryden. ‘I may have overlooked mentioning it in my statement. So I’ll look forward to that.’

Dryden closed his eyes, trying to blot out the storm. ‘OK,’ he said to Humph. ‘Stick with me. I see some light at last…’ He slurped more beer and then balanced the pint on top of the glove compartment, spilling peanuts into the shallow plastic depression.

Humph folded his arms like a Buddha.

‘Paul Gedney is – how can I put this nicely – romantically attached to Elizabeth Lutton, Whittlesea District Hospital’s senior pharmacist. She’s in a marriage she will later escape, she’s thirty-five, or thereabouts. He’s fifteen years younger – and as far as we know a manipulative and damaged young man. This may not be his fault, but for the sake of the argument, who cares? So what does he see in her? It’s only a guess, but I reckon our Paul sees a way of lifting drugs out of the pharmacy without being caught. So Elizabeth is a means to an end; in fact, everyone he knows is probably a means to an end, a fact only marginally more palatable when you remember the object of his little money-raising scheme was to pay for medical treatment for his adopted mother. Then it all goes wrong. The police find some of Gedney’s customers reeling around the low spots of Whittlesea and the Fen towns and they’re prepared to name their supplier. He gets to hear on the grapevine they’re going to bust him, so he does a runner.’

‘And ends up at the Dolphin,’ said Humph, attempting to winch a four-inch-wide crisp into his mouth without breaking it.

‘Indeed. He tries to tap his friends for some money is my guess – which they refuse, and instead offer him refuge for the night. It’s just possible Ruth Connor – who is another one of his former conquests – decides that he deserves more help than that, and she slips him the combination to the office safe. Anyway, the plan goes wrong and Chips catches him and wallops him with the stapler. What happens next? My guess is he rides east on the coast road and then doubles back to Lighthouse Cottage, where he dumps the bike – it’s still there. Then I reckon, once the police have been and gone, he tracks down Ruth Connor. And that’s when they see their real chance.’

Dryden slapped the dashboard and corralled some nuts. Outside, the lights of the Eel’s Foot came on, a string of Christmas bulbs swinging violently in the wind.

Humph shrugged, but for once played the game. ‘Which was?’

‘It’s perfect. Two people – two problems. Paul Gedney is on the run and needs to disappear. Ruth Connor is stuck with a husband who – even by his own admission – wasn’t happy living in the same world as she was. Emotionally, he’s a ten-year-old, with a fragile personality which can break when exposed to the slightest stress. Next stop the funny farm. So Ruth and Paul Gedney figure it out: Chips has got the robbery on the record, the police have got the stapler as exhibit number one if they ever track down the thief. The lovers decide to fit up Chips Connor for Paul Gedney’s murder. That way, Chips goes to jail and Paul Gedney gets a new life.’

‘How do they fake the murder scene?’ said Humph, hooked now, despite himself.

‘Blood. Lots of it. Gedney is a trained nurse – or at least part trained. He’s done a hundred blood transfusions. She sets him up in the boat – the Curlew– over in the marsh, on the riverbank, well out of the way. The police aren’t looking anyway, they think he’s beggared off by motorbike like Chips said. Five pints of blood – that’s all it takes. He had nearly six weeks – plenty of time for his own body to have replaced the blood. He stores it in a blood box – a metal container which preserves it at the right temperature. The technicalities are beyond me, but it’s not rocket science, all he needs is a generator.’

Humph looked out the driver’s side window, unconvinced. ‘Why’d he cut himself up with the knife?’

Dryden covered his eyes. ‘I don’t know.’

Humph, rallying, filled in the gaps. ‘So once they’ve got the blood they choose a spot – the old huts are perfect. Then they spill it all in one go and give it a few days to dry so the police aren’t tempted to give it the full forensic treatment?’

Dryden shook his head. ‘I’ve read the trial reports. The examination on site was done by the local man – there’s no way they would have spotted the different ages of the blood samples taken at the scene. They’d take three, six, whatever, but only to make sure it was all from one body. That’s it. Standard practice.’

‘Then they set up the other stuff – clothes, hairs… how about the fingerprints?’ asked Humph.

‘Every item with a print was movable – the clever bit was the iron bed end, but if you look in the old huts you can see they’re easy to take apart. They knew where Chips had been working. It was easy enough, and they had so much time. Chips was out of the way by then – at the clinic – so they could choose their moment. And they had time to plant evidence on his fishing boat too – so it looked like he’d dumped the body at sea.’

Dryden took the glasses back and Humph fired up the Capri, but they didn’t move. ‘Then what?’ said the cabbie.

‘Good question. He got away – right away. Gedney has to think fast. He’s got a face no one can forget. The police have got a picture, and within a week every copper in the east of England has got a copy. OK – he’s got some cash, perhaps a lot of cash.’ He paused, sensing he was close to something. ‘He may have touched Lutton again. She’s still got a job, although by now everyone’s crawling all over the pharmacy records, so she’s heading for the best exit she can negotiate that protects her pension. So he leans on her.’

Humph burped, rocking the Capri. ‘Is that where he got the kit, the blood box, the transfusion gear?’

‘Brilliant. Exactly. Elizabeth Lutton. It has to be. A quick call, a plea for help not very subtly wrapped up in a threat. The blood box, transfusion gear, even a fresh supply of blood for a full transfusion.’

‘Blackmail,’ said Humph. He squirted water on the windscreen automatically and the ice cleared, but re-formed quickly between swipes of the wipers. ‘Blimey. We’ll be lucky to get back in this.’

Dryden felt the blood draining from his face. ‘You’re a genius,’ he said, turning to the cabbie.

‘Piss off,’ said Humph, sensing an unpardonable excursion into sarcasm.

‘No. It was blackmail all right. But Lutton’s husband said something to me earlier back at his clinic – “Why do you people always assume crime is about money?” Well, he’s right. This time it wasn’t. He didn’t want money. He wanted something else, and what if Gedney wanted both the Luttons to help?’

Dryden let the glove compartment fall open and twisted the cap off another malt.

By the time they reached the camp gates he was sure; but he needed to be safer than that. ‘Drop me over there, beyond the lights by reception – I’ll meet you in the dunes at the usual place – give me twenty minutes.’

The ice storm was already causing havoc: a telegraph pole lay across the path to reception, a ball of tangled ice at its head. A bare apple tree stood encased in ice and as Dryden passed a crack rang out like a gunshot as one of the branches sheared away from the main trunk and smashed to the ground like a chandelier. Looking up, Dryden could see the power lines clearly despite the falling night, a luminescent white wire hung with icicles. One half of the canopy over the entrance doors had buckled under the weight of ice above and only a few of the carriage lamps on the chalets still shone.

The rain fell like pellets, tapping at his skull and bouncing high from the hard surfaces of the tarmac and path.

The foyer was empty, the buzz of Muzak replaced by a live local radio broadcast.

‘… and residents in Whittlesea report a complete loss of power to the Eastfields Estate. A series of accidents has closed the main bridge into the town and police now advise all motorists who are able to leave their cars and find refuge for tonight.’

The lights flickered once and then regained power as Muriel Coverack appeared from the back office.

‘How you getting home?’ asked Dryden.

‘I’m not. I took a busload back a few hours ago but I’ve got a chalet here for the night. And a free meal. Big deal, eh?’

Dryden nodded and headed for the internet café, where he extracted a large espresso from the vending machine.

Muriel followed him in. ‘The police left a message. They said if I saw you to make sure they knew. You’ve got to go to the dining hall. They’re all down there – there’s a mobile kitchen and everything.’

The sound of rain clattering against the roof filled the foyer with noise like static.

‘Thanks,’ said Dryden, not looking up from the computer.

‘Shall I tell them, then?’

‘Don’t bother,’ said Dryden. ‘I’m on my way.’

The Google search box came up and he punched in the name of Lutton’s private clinic. The website was adorned with a picture of the building, a Queen Anne house in lush grounds with the kind of gravel drive over which only polished cars crunch. There was a Q amp; A section on Graves Disease, and a cross-link to an NHS site which listed the various symptoms. It was a thyroid condition which could lead to fluctuating sex drive, weight loss, intolerance to heat and sweating. Most symptoms could be kept under control with steroids, but the treatment brought with it side-effects – diabetes, high blood pressure, psychosis, cardiovascular problems and cataracts. Dryden tried another site for Graves Disease and found a more extensive list of symptoms, including proptosis. He clicked on it and found himself looking at a series of before and after mug shots.

‘Bingo,’ said Dryden. ‘Pop eye.’

He read on quickly. Bulging eyes were one of the commonest symptoms of the disease. In most cases patients were treated with steroids or had part of the thyroid gland removed. But if the bulging of the eye continued an orbital decompression – surgery – could be undertaken, an operation which results in the eye sitting back in its socket. The pictures were graphic: in the ‘before’ version one young woman stared out, the whites completely encircling the iris in both eyes, the lids seemingly unblinking, the edges inflamed and red. In the ‘after’ version the bulging of the eyes, and the swelling of the face around the eye sockets, was gone. She looked like a different person. If you’d been her brother or sister you’d have walked past her in the street.

Dryden heard voices from the office behind the reception counter, so he hit a printout button and grabbing the sheet ran out into the dusk, down through the camp. The floodlight by the amusement park was still working and showed that the helter-skelter had buckled, the top third sinking down and skewing round. A line of changing booths had collapsed and several telegraph wires lay rigid on the frosted grass. A uniformed PC stood guard down by the water’s edge, the scene-of-crime tapes flapping like prayer flags in the wind.

As Dryden looked to the distant lines of white surf just visible at sea the rain stopped. Within seconds the air was completely still and champagne-chilled, the only sound the high-pitched hum of the pylons overhead and the occasional crack of tortured wood. The storm had passed inland, revealing a planetarium of stars. At sea red and green navigation lights came and went.

He thought about the face of Paul Gedney. He thought about thirty years of natural ageing, layered onto a face transformed by an operation to cure the symptoms of Graves Disease. He saw faces, calling them up from the twisting story which had unfurled since the day he had climbed the steps of High Park Flats to the home of Declan McIlroy: and in each he searched for the pale fleeting image of the thief.

Humph joined him at the water’s edge, Boudicca racing past them to dance on the sand.

‘Nothing moving on the road,’ said the cabbie, and they turned to look inland. The usual ribbon of red and white lights shuffling along the coast was still, a few cars stationary. ‘It’s like an ice rink up there. Copper stopped the cab, wanted to know where you were. I said the chalet.’

A light shone from Laura’s room and another PC stood duty on the verandah steps.

‘You said blackmail,’ said Dryden, digging his hands deep into his coat pockets. ‘Blackmail, sure. He needed a new face. I said it was a perfect plan – but it was better than that. They wanted to get rid of Chips, they wanted to make sure the police thought Paul Gedney was dead, and they wanted each other.

‘If he went to the police and agreed to a deal Elizabeth Lutton faced jail, but more to the point her husband’s career would have been wounded too, perhaps fatally. According to the website the clinic was founded in ’73 – he’d hardly got it off the ground. He was on the up. A scandal like that would have meant starting again, at the very least. So he did it for her: he operated on Paul Gedney. They gave him a new face, Humph.’

‘So he’s alive?’

‘Sure,’ said Dryden. ‘And he lives in Lighthouse Cottage.’

44

The sky was an immaculate blue-black, the cold air super clear so that offshore Dryden could see the coastal lights sinking slowly away to the north with the curvature of the earth. He turned to look inland, along the marching line of pylons, when he saw the first high-voltage flash, an arcing vein of light, high up in the rigging of the nearest tower – the one which Nabbs had inspected the day before. In the half-second it was lit he saw that it was encased in ice.

A moment later he heard the thwap of the cable breaking, and saw it snaking in the air as it jolted and flashed against its neighbours. The pylon beneath shuddered with the release of tension, and Dryden heard ice shards falling in the darkness to the frozen ground below.

The pylon itself stood in a pool of security light splashed within a wire perimeter. Dryden could see a group of engineers working inside to clear ice from the steel housing which protected the ground-level control gear. The ice fell amongst them, and Dryden heard shouts of pain as they dived for cover. William Nabbs was with them, the collar of his yellow thermal jacket zipped up to his chin, his face craned skywards into the superstructure of the tower above, which groaned now as the breaking wires upset the subtle vectors of tension which held the steel frame aloft.

Dryden told Humph to go back to the car, and set off along the coast path towards Lighthouse Cottage. The smell of ozone on the air was thrilling, the air so cold his lips tingled. Dryden turned his fear into energy, running along the frozen sandy path towards the dark silhouette of the house. What did he hope to find? Pictures, perhaps; documents; a careless clue to the former life of William Nabbs. How had he done it? How had he remade a life in the months and years after staging his own murder? Who did he have to fool? Some of the staff at the Dolphin had glimpsed him that night, but only briefly. Lizzie, the maid who’d spotted him with Ruth Connor, was no doubt swiftly sacked. And there was Ruth Connor herself – but then he didn’t have to fool her.

A light burned within the cottage and the gate to the walled garden stood open. The palm tree, an exploding ball of crystal spears, had snapped and lay shattered. Dryden looked in the kitchen window. Where the fish had lain on the deal table a bloodstain remained. He pushed open the door and called: ‘Anyone?’ The echo within told him he was alone, so he walked through the kitchen to the front room and up the narrow wooden stairs to the bedrooms above. One was empty except for a sunbed, the source of William Nabbs’ surfer’s tan. There was a double bedroom at the front, with two windows – one overlooking the sea, the other the dunes. A set of framed pictures cluttered the landward sill: in one, Ruth Connor and Nabbs sat in a tropical sun, perhaps a decade earlier, perhaps more. Her hand reached under his T-shirt, his fingers through her hair. In another they walked on the beach below, their bodies so close she was almost falling into him, while the huts of the old camp dotted the dune grass beyond.

The electric lights fluttered, blanked out for a second, and returned.

On the bed was the holdall he’d seen Nabbs bring to the Dolphin the night before, empty now. In the bathroom a cabinet of cosmetics. On the tiled edge of the bath itself a plastic case for a set of contact lenses. Dryden prised one out and held it up to the light: a deep marine-blue pigment made it glow like a piece of mosaic.

‘The fake surfer,’ said Dryden. ‘Fake hair, fake eyes.’ But something gnawed at his memory, and he tried, and failed, to recall in colour the poster of Paul Gedney.

Back in the bedroom he picked up the picture of the sunshine couple, searching Nabbs’ face for the likeness he knew must be there. He heard the footstep at the same moment that he heard his voice. ‘What exactly…?’

Dryden was proud of himself. He didn’t panic, he just placed the framed photograph carefully back on the sill and picked up the next: a shot of Ruth Connor in a one-piece swimsuit, laughing with delight that someone had caught her on film.

Nabbs, a mobile Velcroed to the outside of his jacket, held a builder’s lamp. The streaked hair was matted to his head, and he looked tired, haunted even.

‘The pylon’s coming down,’ said Dryden. ‘I came to say.’

Nabbs placed the lamp carefully on the bedside table and something crossed his face which wasn’t fear. ‘I was unlikely to be in bed…’

Through the landward windows Dryden could see the flashing light of an emergency vehicle at the camp gates.

Nabbs re-zipped his jacket. ‘Look. The engineers can’t shut the power down, the gear’s frozen. I need to be out there – I came back for tools and saw the door was open. The police – Parlour – he’s looking for you. They’re in the old dining hall. He said he’d stay the night. We should go…’

‘I heard you were planning a trip,’ said Dryden, nodding at the holdall. ‘But this looks more like a runner. What brought it on? The new witness perhaps – and this time you don’t know who to kill.’

He laughed at him then, right in the eyes, and Dryden’s heart contracted at the change in tone, the confidence in the voice when he finally spoke. ‘I’m not going anywhere, Dryden.’

Dryden, unsettled by doubt, blundered on. ‘Birth certificate, driver’s licence, National Insurance number. It’s only a guess – but you’ve got none of them. How’d you manage the holiday abroad?’

Nabbs’ eyes darted to the holdall. ‘So there’s a passport – of course, that’s where you went after Chips was arrested? Out of the country? A year perhaps, two… time enough for the operation, time enough for the hair, an extra stone of muscle.’

‘Sorry. What the fuck are you talking about? This doesn’t make any sense,’ he said, but he was dancing on his feet, desperate to leave.

‘It does if you’re not William Nabbs.’

A flash, like lightning, lit up the window and the night beyond, although the sound which followed wasn’t thunder but the fizz of shorting electricity.

‘You’re Paul Gedney,’ said Dryden, and he saw Nabbs flinch. ‘The motorbike you dumped in ’74 is still in the garage downstairs.’

Nabbs wiped the back of his hand across his lips. ‘The bike’s not mine. All the stuff’s Ruth’s. I just keep the surfboards in there, for the class.’

Dryden flipped open the top of the holdall. ‘Another sunshine holiday then?’

‘This is crazy.’ Nabbs’ voice was brittle, and Dryden guessed his pulse was racing.

Dryden came round the bed to the window and looked out. ‘It was something someone said about Gedney, someone who knew him – knew you – before that night. A kind of arrogance, an ability to rise above the accepted moral code, to take action, get results, to be omnipotent. That’s why you did it, because it seemed to solve everything, didn’t it? You needed to disappear, you wanted to be with Ruth, you got both. Chips got what he wanted too, didn’t he? Or that’s what you told yourselves. So nobody got hurt, right? Except the kids. That’s where you got it so wrong. You branded them as thieves, ruined their lives, and you could have ruined mine.’

Dryden craned his neck against the window to look east towards Laura’s chalet. He could just see the light.

‘You thought they’d seen the blood box. If they’d told an adult, found an adult who’d listen, the plan was wrecked. There was no going back. So you had to discredit them, get them away.’

Nabbs looked to the door but Dryden guessed he wouldn’t go until he knew as much as Dryden.

‘And when they’d gone you met in the dunes.’ He looked at him then. ‘Was it worth it? Was she worth it?’

Nabbs, finally, was still. ‘I don’t like being accused of murder.’

‘Well done. I hadn’t, actually – but yes. You killed Declan McIlroy and Joe Petulengo because they’d seen you that night. If they’d given evidence in court, Chips Connor would have been freed. And if Chips Connor had come home it was all over, wasn’t it? Because, despite the surgery and the makeover and the intervening thirty years, he’d have recognized you with a glance: his childhood friend. And you tried to kill me.’

Dryden ploughed on, his confidence returning. ‘When you failed, you decided to quit. Run. Find a new life. Again. You couldn’t be sure, could you, that I hadn’t told someone else. The police perhaps. So you couldn’t try again.’

They heard the gate clatter below. ‘And when Chips came back he did recognize you – which is why you killed him as well. He’d guessed, not all of it, but enough. Whoever sent him out to search under the chalets had planted the stuff for him to find because they wanted the kids out of the camp. It was Ruth, wasn’t it? She paid the security guard to stick with the story – that he’d seen Marcie hiding the stuff under the huts. What was the price? A one-way ticket to the other side of the world? So Chips came back to confront her. But he met you, didn’t he?’

They heard the door bang below, but the footsteps which climbed the stairs were oddly delicate. The lights flickered again and they stood in darkness for a second as someone stopped in the doorway, breathing.

The light flooded back. Ruth Connor stood, her hands held out. They were blood red.

‘Please come. I think I’ve killed him,’ she said.

45

A wedge of electric light fell across the darkness of the office floor. The man lay on his chest, the body twisted at the waist, the limbs randomly arranged in the awkward semaphore of the dead. Across his back a line of crimson wounds punctuated the material of the donkey jacket, each edged with a black ring of burnt threads. On the air was the acrid twist of cordite and an undercurrent of urine. In the corner one of the filing cabinets had been pulled clear of the wall and a safe stood open to reveal a pile of black and gold metal safety-deposit boxes. One was open, revealing the purple-orange blush of £50 notes. On the desk a canvas lay half unfurled, two men, naked, stood in a pool of blood.

William Nabbs put down the holdall and flicked a switch. A single neon tube buzzed like a dying insect. Ruth Connor walked to the body and ran a hand into her hair, leaving a streak of livid red on the dry skin of her forehead. ‘It was so quiet. I was down in the bar and heard the noise.’

She looked into the corner of the room by a filing cabinet. On the cracked lino lay a gun, the metal a dull silver, the handle clean.

‘It’s just for pellets, just to scare. Russ kept it behind the bar,’ she said, and laughed out of place. Dryden noted the odd tense. He stood over the body, dreading the sightless eyes, but before he could touch him a shoulder jerked, the head lifted, and he rolled over: eyes open, but clouded. It was John Sley. His face held the pallor of butcher’s fat, a living waxwork. Dryden noticed that his hand lay over his heart, the fingers feebly trying to massage the chest beneath.

He leant in close. ‘John.’ The eyes rolled back into the head and the lids closed. ‘He needs help – quick. An air gun can’t do this. A heart attack’s my guess. We need a doctor – or a nurse,’ he added, turning pointedly to William Nabbs.

‘I’ll get a doctor,’ said Nabbs, flicking open his mobile.

‘Get his wife too – Chalet 18. He may have a condition, there could be pills.’

Nabbs thought for a moment, then fled, leaving the holdall at Ruth Connor’s feet.

Sley opened an eye and Dryden glimpsed the iris, struggling to escape the upper lid. Dryden pressed his arm, and felt the cold sweat on his forehead.

‘Who did you think it was?’ asked Dryden.

Ruth Connor walked to the safe and removed one of the untouched deposit boxes, turned a key in the lock, and revealed that it too was packed with crisp cash.

‘For the trip?’ asked Dryden.

She tipped the bundles into the first bag, then knelt down and picked up the gun. ‘I don’t think that is a very clever thing to do,’ said Dryden. ‘But then you aren’t hanging around to answer any questions, either of you.’

Sley groaned and a thin river of saliva bubbled at the corner of his mouth.

Dryden cradled the bony angular skull, listening to the breath rattling in his throat.

‘Questions,’ he said. ‘How long do you think it will take them to put William Nabbs in the computer and find out he doesn’t exist?’

She took a cardboard box from the desk drawer and extracted some of the tiny pellets to reload the gun. She laughed once. ‘You don’t know how wrong you are.’

‘I know one thing I’m right about. Three people have been murdered to make sure the world thinks Paul Gedney died thirty years ago. But there was a worse crime than that, wasn’t there? A crime Chips Connor was party to – although he didn’t know it at the time. Three other lives – not ended but ruined, right from the start. Those three children who never got a chance, not a real chance thanks to the stigma: thieves. You made them thieves. Just to get them out of the camp, to make sure they couldn’t tell anyone who’d listen what they’d seen.’

He put a hand on John Sley’s shoulder. ‘That’s why he’s here. Marcie hasn’t forgiven you, she never will. Her mum – her adopted mum – thought she was a thief. I don’t suppose that troubles you, does it?’

She stood, retrieving another box from the safe. ‘You’ve got the wrong man,’ she said, and Dryden noted the implication, that there was a right man. ‘William Nabbs was born in Boston, Lincolnshire in 1960. A cute kid – I’ve seen the pictures. His degree’s hanging on the wall. His parents visit at Christmas – his dad’s an accountant, his mum a teacher. He’s more real than you.’

On the stairs they heard Nabbs returning but Marcie Sley got to the door first. Dryden stood and she came to his voice, and let him lead her hands down to her husband’s face.

‘I’ll check on the ambulance,’ said Nabbs, leaving again. ‘DI Parlour’s on his way too.’

Marcie held her husband’s face between her palms. ‘John. Here.’ She’d brought a bottle of mineral water and she let him sip as she slipped two pills between blue lips. Dryden put an arm around her and felt the gentle vibration as she shook with stress.

‘Johnnie,’ she said. ‘Johnnie, there’s a doctor coming.’ She turned her head to Dryden. ‘What happened?’

Ruth Connor drew back, and as she stood the lino creaked. Marcie stiffened, realizing there was someone else in the room, and then found her with her eyes. She sniffed the air and smiled. ‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘Don’t go now. Not yet.’

Dryden’s mobile chirruped, he went to kill the call but recognized the Ely number. ‘Keep his head up, Marcie,’ he said. He left then, knowing that would be what Marcie wanted. Just a minute alone.

Out on the landing there was a fire door. He pushed down the bar, desperate for air, and stepped out onto the top of the metal stairs. The call was from his voicemail box: ‘This is a message for Philip Dryden from Father John Martin. I have that information, Philip – I have a service at 7.30 but I’ll be free before that. Ring me at the presbytery. Ely 44875.’

Dryden stabbed the numbers into the keypad. He imagined the phone ringing in the chilly hallway of the house, beneath the faded Connemara landscape. There was another flash from the pylon and in it he saw a fire engine extending its ladder skywards.

‘Father?’ he said.

‘Dryden. Yes. Sorry, let me just close the door here.’

Dryden heard the clunk of the old receiver being put down, then a muffled voice. Suddenly he was back. ‘I found the records of the child who was fostered with Paul Gedney. An elder half-brother, you recall – different father. He left the foster home in ’73 – moved north. Malton, near York. I don’t have any records after that I’m afraid.’

‘The name?’ asked Dryden.

Dryden heard paper crackling. ‘Russell Fleet. Russell John Fleet.’

‘Dryden?’ asked Father Martin, after a few seconds’ silence.

‘Sorry. You’re sure?’

‘Yes. Why? The surname was his adopted family’s. And there’s something else. I remember the child – very different from his half-brother. Timid, really, and not as bright. The real problem was the father – who had access, and abused that trust. Alcohol I’m afraid. Anyway, he made an attempt to take the boy away before he came into care. He crashed the car, there were several internal injuries to the child – he was just three – and one wound which will have stayed with him all his life. The car turned over, shredding the roof, and the metal cut into his arm. In the file there’s a picture with the doctor’s report which we had for all applicants: the scar is very distinctive, Dryden – like a jagged S.’

46

Ruth Connor was gone, and so was the holdall. A paramedic knelt beside John Sley like a penitent, checking his pulse, while another unfurled a stretcher. In the flickering light of the neon tube Sley still looked deathly white, except for the skin beneath the eyes, which had the purple blush of dead meat. Dryden took Marcie’s arm above the elbow, and saw the fingers of her right hand were flecked with blood. ‘I hit her,’ she said, her voice vibrating with anger. ‘I hit her hard.’

Dryden heard DI Parlour’s voice below in the bar. He told Marcie to stay with her husband, then slipped out on to the fire escape again, and down to the rear yard. The sky was transformed: a full moon had risen at sea. It was colder again, the landscape ice-white, stiff with frost. He ran down to the old swimming pool and climbed to the first tier of the diving board. The camp lay below, lit by the occasional arc of electricity dancing between the severed high-voltage cables.

Dryden heard an inhuman cry of shearing, tortured metal. The fire engine, parked at the base of the giant pylon, played a floodlight over the superstructure. The tower twisted on its four legs, a single cross-member of steel falling as if in slow motion to the ground below. The lights in the holiday camp flickered once, died, and revived at half power.

He turned back to the sea and saw that the chalets along the crest of the dunes were still marked by their string of pale verandah lights. He thought of Laura within, alone with the glow of the flame from the propane heater, and at that moment Ruth Connor’s silhouette broke the horizon, against the grey-silver backdrop of the sea, before dropping out of sight, down towards the old sluice.

He ran, the moon lighting the bone-white sandy path.

The tide was ebbing within the maze of channels in the marsh. Canopies of ice hung over the inlets and pools the seawater had fled. Dryden made his way along one of the fingers of stiff sand until he emerged opposite a wide expanse of open water where the main river emptied into a wide, sluggish pool. He crouched down by the water’s edge and saw across the mirror-like surface the wreck of the Curlew. The moon caught the gentle curve of the hull, and beside it the sleek black inflated outline of an inshore dinghy, a powerful outboard motor at the rear, silent for now.

Across the water he heard Ruth Connor’s voice, as clear and close as if she had whispered in his ear.

‘It’s all there.’ He saw her now, standing on the rotting deck, Russell Fleet beside her, between them the holdall. ‘I thought you’d come to get it all,’ she said.

Fleet knelt, looking inside the bags. ‘Is he dead?’

She shook her head in silence. He held out his hand and she put something in it: the gun perhaps. ‘Dryden knows,’ she said. ‘He knows about the blood.’

Fleet checked the horizon, zipping up a sailing jacket. ‘He was always close: and he was there, with the others. Even if he didn’t see, he’s always known it was the truth. But there’s no choice now.’

‘You said it was perfect, that nobody would get hurt.’ Her voice was louder, a challenge. ‘But you killed them.’

‘Ruth.’ He took a step towards her and she stepped back quickly, the sound of rotting wood creaking under her foot. ‘You didn’t complain when you got what you wanted – when they took Chips away. You didn’t say no that morning in the sand dunes. I was the one who got the butchered face. What did you have to do? Remind me, Ruth. And when the witnesses came forward I did what needed to be done – you didn’t have to know.’

She folded her arms, and even by moonlight Dryden could see the chin jut out. ‘But when it was all over – when they were dead – you told me then, didn’t you, Russ – told me the details, just to share the guilt. Pouring water over the first one after you’d broken his legs, opening the windows and leaving the other to die after you’d laced his drinks with pills. But you didn’t have to do any of it. You could have left, melted away.’

He stepped down into the dinghy. ‘Yes. I could have gone, Ruth, when the witnesses came forward. Left you two alone. The lovebirds. But then I’d have had to leave the kids as well – my kids, Ruth, my family.

‘Because that’s where your guilt lies Ruth, or part of it. Telling me that you’d not had children because of Chips. That Chips couldn’t. But we found out the truth, didn’t we? You couldn’t give me a family so I found someone who could.

‘And then there was the business,’ he said, kicking the holdall. ‘Why the fuck should I let two wrecked lives stand in my way? I deserved my share. Just because I don’t have the pieces of paper doesn’t mean I don’t deserve my cut. We’d always been agreed on that, Ruth. I paid in blood. I can’t take the family with me, but I can take the money.’

She had a hand to her face and Dryden guessed she was crying, letting his words wound her.

His head was still down, counting in the holdall. ‘How did you make Chips agree to the sale?’

‘I told him it was what I wanted,’ she said, defeated now.

Fleet nodded, standing.

‘Did he have to die too?’ she asked. ‘He came to see me, he wanted to see me. I could have talked. It wasn’t about being sent away, it wasn’t about what happened to him, it was the kids. He told me when I phoned the prison. He wanted to know why we’d done that to them, Russ.’

‘It wasn’t a crime, Ruth.’

Dryden let his fingers bunch in fists, knowing that it was.

‘A bunch of kids. Jesus,’ Fleet said, lighting a cigarette, cupping it so that the flame illuminated the cradle of his fingers. ‘He wanted to see you all right. I found him at the back of the flat, under the fire escape, waiting for you to come home. It would have been a long wait, wouldn’t it? Telling darling William all about it, were you?’

‘He knows now,’ she said.

‘Oh, now– I see. But not till now – a mistake, I think. You didn’t trust him, did you, Ruth? Didn’t trust him with our secrets. It must have been a surprise for him, finding out I wasn’t a partner after all. He’ll remember that. It’s corrosive, distrust; it’ll get you both in the end.’

He unlooped a rope and pushed the dinghy clear. ‘And we were right. It’s been thirty years, but despite what every one of those years has done to my face Chips knew me – knew within seconds. So I said we should talk. We walked here while I explained that we thought it was what he wanted – to go away, to get away from the world. That nobody got hurt that way. We walked here and I took a chance – he was a strong man, Ruth, always was. But I crooked my arm around under his chin and I broke his neck. It echoed, the snap, across the water.’

She stood back then, climbing up onto the bank. ‘Go,’ she said.

Fleet threw a rope into the dinghy. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said. ‘I’m gonna become someone else – I’ve done it before. Perhaps I’ll come back one day, for old times’ sake.’ He picked up the starter line for the engine. ‘You’ll know the face.’

47

Russell Fleet pulled the starter cord on the outboard engine in a fluid, practised arc, and a harsh mechanical whine filled the night. He left without looking back, guiding the dinghy out into the main channel, skirting the clumps of reeds which crowded the banks, while the sky flickered still with the arcing electric sparks from the overhead wires.

Somewhere, lost now, Dryden could hear Ruth Connor running, the rigid frozen reeds snapping, her breath rasping. He ran too, trying to keep in touch with her sound, and they emerged together, above the old sluice, on the high dune above the chalets.

‘He’s gone,’ she said, knowing Dryden was there. She pulled a hood in close to her face and looked inland where the twin red and green lights of the dinghy crept along the channels of the marsh towards the river. Blood, black in the moonlight, trickled from the corner of her mouth where Marcie Sley had hit her.

‘Not yet,’ said Dryden. ‘Where will he go? The same place he went that summer? How long was he away?’

She shivered. ‘You can’t prove anything. Not about me.’ She took a step away, then another, trying to be alone.

‘Where?’ asked Dryden again, following.

‘Two years. Abroad – travelling. He sent cards. Norway, Sweden – heat was bad for his eyes, after the operation. I said I’d wait and I did.’

Dryden nodded, recalling the expert skater glimpsed through the porthole of PK 129. ‘That’s why he needed the passport,’ he said. ‘Distinguishing features: a zigzag scar.’

They heard the outboard engine surge as the dinghy reached clearer water.

‘I didn’t think he’d do that,’ she said. ‘With the knife. It always scared me; he’d do anything to have a life like other people – he just didn’t realize other people aren’t like that.’

‘I heard it,’ said Dryden, stepping closer. ‘That night, the cry of pain.’

‘I know. I know you’re Philip. Russ said he’d seen a picture on your boat. He’d gone out to check you over, knowing you wouldn’t drop the case, wondering why, and he said you had that picture – the one with the blood. He said there was a snapshot as well. A child in the sun, by the pool. And Petulengo had a snapshot at home too, the four of you. A match.’

Dryden nodded, thinking that Fleet had taken the newspaper cuttings too, unnerved by the thumbnail picture of his teenage self.

‘But I didn’t see,’ said Dryden. ‘I didn’t see him – I was there, but I wasn’t a witness. I didn’t see his face.’

She turned towards him then but never said what she wanted to say.

There was a fresh flash of arcing electricity between the pylons and when the glare had leached out of the sky they saw the dinghy swing out into the main channel of Morton’s Leam.

‘I offered him money to go,’ she said. ‘I always said the business was half his – half my share anyway. But we couldn’t make it legal – the risk was too great, you need an ID, bank account. Jean’s done wonders for him with money over the years, but even she couldn’t fix that.’

‘Did she know?’

Connor laughed, running a finger over the bruise Marcie Sley had left. ‘She’s an accountant. Ask no questions, and you hear no lies. Perhaps he told her a story, perhaps he didn’t bother. I doubt she’s got the imagination to guess. When he’s gone she’ll tell the kids the truth, just to pay him back for not loving her.’

Dryden shivered. ‘So when William arrived you told him Russ was a partner to cover your tracks?’

She nodded. ‘It was easier to leave it like that. I paid his salary into a trust Jean had set up. She kept the taxman happy, did the paperwork.’

The whine of the outboard motor shifted key as the inflatable hit an incoming wave and briefly lifted from the water.

‘When the witnesses turned up I said I’d buy Russ out of what I’d promised him. But he said that wasn’t enough, that we didn’t know what the business was really worth until we sold it. So that’s what we’ve done.’

They heard the engine choke and pick up revs as the dinghy breasted the first wave in the channel.

Dryden put a hand through his hair, collecting ice crystals. ‘And he didn’t drive, did he – again, the paperwork. But he must have driven out to the farm – to kill Joe. That was a risk – he could hardly use his own licence from back in ’74.’

‘Risks were what he was good at, Dryden.’

‘So when he came back, after the operation – I don’t understand. What happened?’

‘He’d changed. He always said I’d fallen out of love with his face. But it wasn’t that. It was the children. The children we didn’t have.’

‘And then William Nabbs arrived.’

‘He didn’t know, Dryden. He never knew – till now.’

Dryden climbed up, to the very crest of the dune, and she followed. ‘They’ll find him this time,’ he said.

She shivered again. ‘Maybe. But he’s been getting ready, since the witnesses came forward. Killing them was the last bet – but he knew it might not be enough. There’s a boat, a yacht, somewhere out there, along the coast. By daybreak he’ll be gone. He’ll become someone else, Dryden; he’s good at it.’

They walked towards the curving, twisted structure of the old footbridge over the channel. The ice which hung from the superstructure had twisted the geometry of the wood, and they clung to the rail as they made their way to the centre. Upstream they could see the green and red lights and the white splash of surf at the prow of the dinghy.

A sound of snapping metal drew Dryden’s eyes away and he watched as four of the power cables parted simultaneously, the sudden release of tension making the giant pylon shudder and twist at the waist. They heard screaming then, as ice showered down, and the sky filled with the zigzag shorting of the power supply.

Russell Fleet’s boat emerged around the last bend in the channel and headed for the bridge. The pylon knelt at its north-eastern corner, metal shearing, and tossed its apex down into the black water. Instantly a sheet of blue lightning covered the surface, a shimmering electric dance, and the visceral thud of the power rocked the bridge. Dryden covered his face with his hands but still the arcing flashed between his fingers and through his eyelids.

When he turned back the world was black except for a single image: in midstream there was a fire licking at the outboard motor on Fleet’s boat. He stood, flapping at the flames, which leapt to his arms and head. Then the fuel tank exploded, a dull percussion which popped Dryden’s ears. The flames were in Fleet’s hair then, so he threw himself into the shimmering water.

Ruth Connor was on her knees when his body passed out to sea beneath them. They looked down through the wooden planking and, by the light now only of the moon, they saw the blackened twisted body, one arm thrown up across the eyes, revealing the ugly black zigzag of the self-inflicted scar.

48

The air, thick with the stench of seared electrics, held a hint of something else which made Dryden retch. He stood with Ruth Connor for a minute, watching the body turn languidly in the tide under the bridge until it was lost from sight. The camp lay half-lit now, the emergency generator rattling in the cold air. By reception the flashing lights of a police car punctuated the darkness. In the silver light Dryden could see fish on the outgoing tide, their dead scales still iridescent.

There was silence but Dryden wondered if he’d been deafened by the explosion. He pressed his fingers to his ears and the pressure popped. Along the bridge he heard footsteps and William Nabbs climbed up from the river-bank. He held Ruth Connor close like a child, looking out to sea.

Dryden rang DI Parlour’s mobile. ‘Hi. Yup. On the bridge down by the river. Get a boat out, quickly, there’s a body going out on the tide. We need the body. There’s no time now, I’ll be there in ten, but get a bloody boat out.’

Then he ran to the chalet. Laura sat by the window, the COMPASS on her lap where he’d left it.

There was a message again, a brutal repetition: YOU PROMISED

He leant forward to the keyboard and typed: I LIED

Then he picked up the propane heater, killed the flame, and took it outside with his torch. Three flashes into the night were answered immediately from the dunes, the Capri’s headlights suddenly blazing, swinging round like a lost lighthouse.

He had time so he walked down to the beach where there was an oil drum used to burn flotsam. He fished out a rope caked in tar and lit it with his lighter, then tossed it in with the propane heater. Looking back at the chalet, he saw the flames reflected in the sightless glass. After a minute the canister popped, a miniature mushroom cloud rising up into the night sky, sparks sizzling on the frosted sand.

The lights of Humph’s cab crept down to the foreshore. Dryden went back inside, picked Laura up, and carried her out under the moon. They pushed Boudicca down into the footwell in the passenger seat and slid Laura on to the worn plastic seating. Dryden slipped in beside her and held her.

‘The Tower?’ said Humph.

‘No. The old dining hall. The police are there. It’s over. Then we’re going home – to the boat. All of us.’

Postscript