by Jim Kelly
‘Joe,’ said Dryden. ‘Declan’s mate, right? Another customer? A bit mature for your market, surely, he must be fifty if he’s a day.’
Sley stepped a foot closer. ‘He’s forty-one. But he won’t make forty-two. Cancer – larynx. You should hear him talk.’
Dryden shrugged. ‘I was looking forward to it. Marcie said she’d pass on my number. But no go, eh?’
‘We left messages,’ said Sley. ‘But the illness is bad right now.’
‘What’s that to me?’ asked Dryden, sensing that he’d been expertly hooked into the trap of empathy.
‘That’s why we grew the cannabis,’ he said, getting out a packet of Marlboro and lighting one up. The ash at the end, after the first deep draw, was the same colour as his hair.
‘Joe started it on the allotment, when he knew the pain was coming. But the supply never stretched through that first winter. That really scared him, and he was too ill to plant again in spring, and he’d bought this place. So I took over the shed: it’s not difficult stuff to grow if you get the gear, and there’s guides on the net. He needs the supply, he needs to know it’s there. This year was good – you know, the wet spring, the clear summer. There’s a surplus so… it got sold.’
He slammed the door of the 4x4 and the echo ran round the Fen, bouncing back off a brick-built pumping station half a mile to the east. A dog barked four times, rhythmically, and was quiet.
‘Why don’t you come with me?’ said Sley, walking off towards the house. ‘Meet the customer.’
Dryden had sat through too many gloomy inquests on the bleak deaths of lonely drug addicts to see anything in Sley’s crime but callous greed. But he hesitated now, knowing that to meet the dying Joe would complicate the simple balance of good against evil. Could he leave the cancer victim out of the equation? And other questions remained: had reliving his time at St Vincent’s orphanage really driven Declan McIlroy to self-destruction? Was he part of the criminal circle which had grown and peddled the dope? Had he, perhaps, encroached on a market where someone else had enjoyed a monopoly? And why hadn’t Declan eased his own pain, and his final hours, with a home-grown joint? Dryden had wanted to talk to Joe all along, and now he had the chance. He, better than anyone, would know if his friend had any enemies who might have shortened his brutal life.
The farmhouse was foursquare, a late-Georgian landmark with elaborate lead guttering and sash windows. A crack ran through the brickwork indicating that the house stood on the unstable drying peat.
Sley was peering into a half-lit hallway at the side of the house.
‘It’s odd,’ he said, when Dryden caught him up. ‘He normally comes out when he hears the car.’ He tapped a gold ring on the window and a cat – jet black – leapt to the sill.
‘Let’s try the back.’ There was a kitchen door, almost all glass, but all frosted. Inside they could see a light over a work surface and the glow of an oven. Sley flipped up the letterbox and shouted for Joe. Dryden was six feet away but caught the warm smell of roasted meat from within.
Sley stood, rattling the knob. He looked out across the Fen. ‘He can’t be far.’
‘Is there another door?’ asked Dryden, the cold beginning to slink between his shoulders.
He followed Sley round to what had been the main doorway of the old house. It had a series of three semicircular steps leading up to the door itself, which had a fanlight above.
Sley stiffened, and Dryden caught him up, walking past and looking around in the splash of electric orange which illuminated the porch. He saw the corpse almost immediately, knowing he was looking at death in the same instant that he recognized the curled form as human. The sleet and snow had accumulated, creating a shroud which covered most of the exposed flesh of the face and one hand, which had tried to cover the eyes but had slipped to reveal one socket, now itself full of marbled ice. Rigor mortis and the cold had drawn up the lips, revealing teeth disfigured by nicotine.
But it was the colour Dryden would remember, or the lack of it. The skin was white, as was the hair, but so were the lips, all coated in frost. The hand that had fallen from covering the eyes was scratched and caked with earth, but where the nails showed they too were white, without a blush of pink to signal life.
They hadn’t said a word. Sley tried the door and found that it too was locked. Dryden peered into the front room. A fire had burned in the grate but was ashes now.
Sley produced a mobile. ‘I’ll get the police. Ambulance.’
‘It’s an odd way to die,’ said Dryden, his eye for the first time picking out across the frosted gravel the scuffed furrow which led to the body from the direction of the distant magnolia tree. He recalled a picture on Declan McIlroy’s wall, the two friends on a bench, the distant horizon of the Fen a shimmering line of summer heat.
He saw an image then, the dying man pulling himself along the frozen ground towards the warmth and light of his home. How could the door be locked? An accident? But that was the problem with tragic deaths, thought Dryden; they were inherently unbelievable. There was something about the curled, catlike form on the step which spoke of resignation, rather than desperation.
Dryden pressed his nose against the window again. There was a flat-screen TV in front of which a single armchair had been pulled up. In front of that was a small table from a nest, upon which was a knife, fork, and heatproof mat.
‘Dinner alone,’ said Dryden to himself.
He made a mental inventory of the room’s personal effects. The walls were bare but for a framed map of Ireland, a mirror – the only object of any age – and one richly framed canvas. He recognized one of Declan’s landscapes, the black peat tinged with an angry purple.
On a sideboard a wooden gypsy caravan stood, and before the fire a cat’s basket with a wool fleece inside. On the mantle there was a gold-framed picture of a woman: fifty perhaps, the smile as smart and sharp as the executive hair, a dark business jacket boasting a cameo brooch. The smile had lost any warmth it might have once had, like the ashes in the grate below.
Something about the picture, its precise alignment, its central position, signalled remembrance. Joe had lived alone. But did he die alone?
15
An eggshell-blue squad car swung in off the drove road, its headlamps sweeping the landscape like a lighthouse beam. Dryden, having fetched Humph from the road, watched from the fusty interior of the Capri, now parked beside the 4x4. He’d been shivering, not because of the ice which had begun to encroach on all the cab’s windows, but because death left him cold, disheartened and afraid of the future. He’d applied an antidote to depression: three miniature malts, but the inner glow only flickered, then died. Sley had rung for the police but it seemed they were in little hurry. Dryden dozed fitfully in the Capri while Humph grumbled intermittently about lost suppers.
Sley had sat more comfortably in the heated four-wheel drive: punching numbers into a mobile and, presumably, breaking bad news. Dryden expected others would arrive the next morning, a caravan of condolence.
The police car parked beside the 4x4. The uniformed PC was young, perhaps twenty-five, enveloped in an overcoat which touched the ground. They met him on the gravel. ‘John,’ he said to Sley, shaking hands. They’d met before and Dryden felt suddenly excluded.
He slipped off a glove and shook Dryden’s hand, replacing it immediately. ‘Richard Ware. I’m the community officer for the Fen out to Shippea Hill. The station rang. They’d have sent from Ely but they’ve closed the drove at the city end ’cos of black ice. So I’d better secure the scene – can you show me, John?’ He buttoned up the overcoat to his throat, shuddering with the cold. ‘It’s a record – the temperature. Minus 18 – and that’s without a wind. We should be inside…’
‘He’s round at the front of the house, on the step, the door’s locked,’ said Sley.
Ware nodded. ‘OK.’ His eyes slipped over the house, checking windows. ‘You’ve both been round the front?’
They nodded.
‘Right. En
ough footprints then already. Let’s try to get to him through the house from the back. Chances are he’s locked himself out by accident, but I need to check from the inside, secure the scene. Let’s play it by the book.’
They went to the kitchen door and the policeman expertly forced the Yale, sliding a plastic card down the door jamb. Dryden felt the heat hit his skin. Inside the smell of meat was overpowering. Ware flipped down the oven door and retrieved a chicken, the breastbone protruding through the overcooked flesh, while the vegetables stood peeled and immersed in water, but unheated.
‘Last supper,’ said Ware, moving through to the living room, his eyes dancing over what seemed familiar territory. In the hall, on the high wall which skirted the stairwell, hung a kite in the shape of a kestrel, its tail feathers tacked up in swirls. Dryden lingered in the kitchen, where a cork notice-board was dotted with memoranda, secured with drawing pins: a hospital appointment card, bus timetables, a few postcards and several newspaper cuttings – he noted one from The Crow by the paper’s gardening correspondent about the cold snap, and something from the Lynn News on Fen house prices. In the middle of the board was an open patch, oddly at variance with the rest of the crowded surface. Two drawing pins, with red heads, had been pressed neatly together in the middle.
Ware came back down the hall. ‘There was this,’ said Dryden, giving him a copy of The Crow and three editions of the Lynn News– the local evening paper. ‘I took a walk. These were in the post box down by the road.’ Dryden had noted the name stencilled on the US-style mail box: Joe Petulengo.
Ware nodded. ‘That means he hadn’t been down to the road since, what – Tuesday afternoon – late afternoon.’ He looked around again, staring briefly into the dead ashes of the fire and along the mantelpiece.
‘Something wrong?’ asked Dryden.
Ware shrugged. ‘Nope. Something missing… perhaps.’ He knocked his knuckles together: ‘So – where is he?’
Sley went out into the hall and pointed to the door. Ware examined the locks – a Yale, and a Chubb below it. The Chubb was open, but the Yale firmly engaged. He turned the locking handle and swung the door in.
The victim lay still, rimed with frost.
‘God,’ said Ware, kneeling and inching an ungloved finger towards the marble-white jugular. Dryden saw that at the neck was a gold chain, a hanging crucifix. Ware slipped a hand under the outer waterproof coat and within, to a jumper below. The sound of ice breaking made Dryden wince.
The constable stood, regloved his hand and looked out across the moonlit field towards the distant magnolia.
‘All his clothes are frozen, they’re heavy with ice. He’s been drenched.’
Ware stepped out but stopped them following.
‘Go back through and come round.’
By the time they’d circled the house Ware had taped off the scene. ‘That was his place – down by the water,’ he said. ‘Every time I went by on the road he seemed to be out there. I tried to tell him it was too cold… you too, John,’ he said, catching Sley’s eye.
Ware produced a heavy-duty police-issue torch and lit a circle around his boots. Across the gravel was the clear trail of the victim’s body, the central furrow of the torso, the intermittent scuffs where the elbows had levered his weight forward.
They left the path and walked on the grass towards the mirrored surface of the pond, shattered now by the hole at its edge. Sharp shards were thrust up from the impact, refracting the moonlight into a jagged spectrum of cold rainbows.
The hole had frozen over but the star was clear to see.
Ware stood, his arms crossed over his chest, his hands in his armpits. ‘Looks like he fell in. He used to sit here.’ He touched the iron seat. ‘You can see the slip marks along the edge.’
It was true, Dryden acknowledged it with a nod. ‘Suicide?’
‘He’d talked about it,’ said Sley. ‘I asked Richard to keep an eye on the place – but you know, if he’d decided, what could we do? He might have tried, changed his mind, crawled back to the house.’
A single flashing blue light caught everyone’s attention at the same moment. It was a mile distant, slipping easily across the night like a ship’s light at sea.
‘I’ll meet them,’ said Ware, setting off quickly back towards the house. ‘Keep off the gravel and don’t touch anything.’
Sley didn’t move and Dryden knew why. They watched in silence as a satellite crossed the sky, horizon to horizon in an elegant curve.
‘How much of the dope have you got left?’ asked Dryden.
‘Not much. Joe’s supply until the first harvest of spring, I guess.’
‘Why did you need the money?’
Sley didn’t answer.
‘Destroy it. Strikes me you’ve got a bumper surplus now your friend’s dead. Just burn it. The police are giving us updates. Any stuff appears on the street I’ll go straight to the station – OK?’
Sley turned to the house where the ambulance had parked by the front porch.
‘And I want a lift back into town – we need to talk some more,’ said Dryden, troubled now by a double coincidence he didn’t trust: two deaths by ice, two regulars from the Gardeners’ Arms.
He told Humph to go home and went round to the kitchen door. Ware was in the living room, overcoat off, perched on a double radiator. A phone stood on the window ledge and the PC pressed PLAY for messages.
‘Message timed 11.15am Thursday, 29th of December.’
‘Joe? It’s Marcie. We hope you’re feeling better. They said at work you’d taken a few days. Look, it’s really important you ring me, Joe; there’s some news. Some bad news. I can’t just leave a message. Ring please.’
There were two messages and he hit PLAY again.
‘Message timed 6.45pm, Friday, 30th of December.’
‘Joe. Marcie. John’s coming out tonight to see you, OK? But if you get this and are feeling well enough, ring me – the mobile’s on.’
‘Did he ring?’
Sley shook his head.
‘So. That fits. There’s every chance he was dead by the time the messages were left,’ said Ware.
Dryden went back to the kitchen and began picking his way through the paper in the recycling bin: bills, junk mail, some typed business letters from the bank.
The kitchen units were modern, the oven hi-tech. But like the rest of the house the room felt unused, a showcase. A single plate and mug stood on the draining board, a black recycling bin full of paper by the back door.
Ware came through. ‘I should lock up.’
Dryden stood, kicking the bin with his shoe. ‘Odd. When does the council pick up recycled paper round here?’
Ware joined him by the bin. ‘Today.’
‘A week’s worth of rubbish but no newspapers,’ said Dryden.
Ware nodded: ‘And there is something missing,’ he said, turning back to the living room. ‘I’m sure there was another picture on the mantle. He’d picked himself out once when I asked – a faded snapshot from the seaside. This bunch of kids, smiling…’
16
A sky like an army blanket hid the stars. In High Park Flats a single bathroom light shone coldly out, joined only by a solitary string of Christmas lights trailing from a window ledge. Sley parked the 4x4 by the entrance to the allotments and killed the engine, checking his watch.
‘Two minutes past closing time precisely,’ he said. ‘I need a drink.’
Beyond the fluorescent lights of the car park the darkness lingered amongst the bean posts and frost-bitten furrows and Dryden stumbled several times as they picked their way towards the dull gleam of the stove pipe. Once, looking back, he saw a pair of car headlights swing into the shadow of the flats, then die.
Sley, playing a torch at his feet, found a log pile and collected an armful of kindling and wood, balancing it expertly with a splayed hand while inserting a key in the door of the Gardeners’ Arms.
Inside, the smell of drying fruit was intoxicating, the sweetn
ess of apples mingling with the fusty aroma of yeast from the home brew. Sley stooped by the stove and quickly lit a fire, leaving the glazed door open to light the room. Something rustled in the corner, like an autumn leaf.
Dryden sat on some sacking piled on an old garden stool, aware that the hessian was crisp with frost. He imagined the ghosts of Joe Petulengo and Declan McIlroy just beyond the light, cradling mugs of the tangy double-strength alcohol. The Gardeners’ Arms was a refuge, Dryden could see that now, a hidden corner of the world reserved for outcasts, and those who had chosen to join them.
The fire began to draw and Sley added the logs. He lit a cigarette and rubbed at his scalp with the heel of his hand.
‘How well did they know each other – Joe and Declan?’ asked Dryden, taking an earthenware cup from Sley. The beer was icy, the thud of the alcohol palpable.
Sley held his own full glass but didn’t drink. ‘It’s history. I don’t understand what you’re trying to prove…’
It was an odd word to choose. Dryden set the mug down and retrieved a Greek cigarette from a packet in his overcoat and lit it with a piece of kindling from the fire. He watched Sley’s hatchet face, half lit in the firelight, and wondered if he’d regret not going straight to the police with what he knew.
‘I’m not trying to prove anything,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to write a feature about those in danger from the cold – if they were friends, that helps. This is information I need. But just a reminder – if I don’t get it, I’ll get something else off the police in return for tipping them off as to the identity of the elusive drugs peddler. How does that sound?’
Dryden realized he didn’t fear Sley any more. It was an eloquent admission that he sensed a common decency beneath the brutal exterior.
Sley drew in two lungfuls of nicotine. ‘So. How well did they know each other?’ repeated Dryden.
‘The allotments were a meeting place. For all of us.’
‘But before. How long had they been friends?’ Dryden could sense the boundary he was pushing at, sure now that just beyond it lay the link he sought. He watched Sley through the drifting smoke from the cigarette, and sensed he was calculating a reply.