by Jim Kelly
Sley stood, drinking savagely, the liquid slopping in the glass. ‘They grew up together, in care. Brothers really, but for the accident of blood.’
Dryden nodded. ‘So what’s the big secret?’ But his thoughts raced: if Joe had been at St Vincent’s was he too embroiled in the action against the orphanage?
‘There’s no secret. It’s just private, isn’t it? They were orphans. Joe’s parents were travellers, Romany. Gyppos – take your choice. Petulengo – a name he was proud of, eventually. But that was the nightmare for him – being in care, being inside, being locked up.’
‘And you?’
Sley ignored the question, refilling his glass. ‘Joe lived in a caravan, a mobile home really – plush. You’d be surprised. Snug as a peg.’ He laughed again, and Dryden sensed a longheld prejudice, finally liberated by death.
‘Until…?’
‘Last year. He was diagnosed with the cancer, throat. He said he’d always promised himself he’d die in a house. Die in his own home. Crazy. So he bought the Letter M and then spent most of his time on that seat by the water, just looking at it.’
‘He had the money then?’
‘Oh yeah. He was never short, Joe.’ He laughed without a sound. ‘And when Mary died he’d nothing left to spend the money on.’
‘A wife – I saw the picture,’ said Dryden.
‘Yeah. She was older, MS. Pretty nasty really. He never really got over it, although most of us thought she was pretty aloof, focused on the money. She’d married it, after all.’
Dryden let the slight pass. ‘And the allotment?’
‘Outside again. He spent hours here. It was Declan who’d started first. The council gave him that flat but he couldn’t stand it. Claustrophobia – much worse than Joe – even when he was out on the balcony. He’d slept rough for years – that’s where he really wanted to be. He just used to shrivel up indoors.’
Dryden nodded as if he understood. ‘Is that why he drank?’
Sley shrugged. ‘Life he’d had, you don’t need an excuse.’
‘And the cannabis. Anyone else smoke the stuff? Declan?’
Sley shook his head.
Dryden stood. ‘You said orphanage. He was a Catholic, Joe – yes? I noticed a cross, a crucifix on a chain at his neck.’
‘Sure. St Vincent’s, with Declan. It’s closed now.’
Dryden smiled, enjoying the inevitability of fate.
‘Declan was a victim of abuse in the case against St Vincent’s. Was Joe another?’
Sley shrugged. ‘Sure. I doubt any kid who went through that place escaped, do you?’
Dryden accepted a second mug of beer. The glow from the stove was more substantial, and he stretched out his legs in the heat. He saw them differently now, these two men whose damaged lives had ended so savagely; saw them at a dormitory window, two pale faces, held close, dreaming of an end to childhood.
17
Dryden set out across town, the stunning canopy of the night sky an antidote to sleep. Wisps of mist trailed from the cathedral’s great West Tower like medieval pennants in the moonlight. On Palace Green a single muntjac stood chewing at what looked like a refuse bag. As Dryden crossed the grass the deer looked up and then sprang into flight, its white underside flashing as it headed for the cathedral park. The cold of the night was at its deepest and each shop window glittered with rocket bursts of crystal ice.
As he trudged towards the distant landmark of The Tower Hospital Dryden considered the extent to which he had succumbed to a dubious conspiracy theory. If Declan’s death was suspicious, what about Joe’s? Had someone really murdered them both? They were both witnesses in the case against St Vincent’s – but was that really a motive for murder? A more mundane explanation looked plausible: that a lonely, damaged alcoholic had taken his own life when the bitter winter had offered him the opportunity; and that a benign accident had sped Joe Petulengo to a quick death, where a lingering one had seemed a certain fate.
But what of John Sley? Could the sale of drugs be linked to either death? Was the production of marijuana, so efficiently organized, really just to ease the passing of a friend?
The gravel on The Tower’s drive was frozen solid, each stone to its neighbour. The great clock was still lit in its mock-Florentine tower, but had frozen at 11.45, a disc of ice smudging the normally crisp outlines of the Roman numerals of the face. The automatic doors of the foyer swished open and he lingered in the caress of the hot air within, letting his shoulders slump, easing the exquisite pain in his joints. The nurse behind the desk was a regular and looked up only to check the electric clock: 1.02am.
‘For Laura Dryden,’ he said. The nurse nodded. Dryden’s late-night visits were not uncommon. Laura’s sleep pattern was erratic enough for it to make little difference to her when he called, as long as he did.
Her room was tropical. As he closed the door the COMPASS clattered into life and he analysed his reaction: was he pleased that his wife was conscious? He walked to the bed and felt the familiar thrill of seeing her face, her brown eyes wide and, briefly, locked on his. He leant in low, and lifted her in an embrace.
He took the tickertape from the COMPASS.
A LETTER.
He searched the screen of the PC and found a new file marked HOLIDAY.
He opened the document, and lay beside her on the pillows to read. Laura’s consultant had suggested that she could leave the hospital for a brief break. They’d had to put the request in writing, and this was his formal reply. For more than six months now she had been free of the complications which had once confined her to her room: bouts of pneumonia and a series of blood infections had demanded constant observation. But now her health was stable, the lingering physical symptoms of her illness the only bar to a wider freedom – and even here there had been improvements.
But for Dryden the progress she had made merely doubled her schizophrenia: her world had always been divided between conscious and unconscious – but now the conscious world was divided between those hours when her recovery provided hope of a return to the life they had once had, and those in which it mocked their dreams, promising only the prospect of a slow and imperfect rehabilitation, a struggle back to the rudimentary movements of early childhood.
Tonight her hopes were alive and Dryden shared them, genuinely thrilled that there might be a life for both of them outside this hospital room.
The memo listed the conditions for her release from The Tower for a period of seventy-two hours.
• You will need to either transport a hoist or take the break at a destination which has one on site. We recommend a bridge hoist with a lifting weight of no less than 100lb.
• You will need a supply of waste bags and PEG-feed apparatus. We can provide these.
• We recommend that your destination should be no more than 45 minutes drive from a general hospital. Ideally it should not be more than 90 minutes from The Tower.
• You will need to either transport a wheelchair or have immediate access to one at your destination. We recommend you take one of those used at The Tower which can be adjusted to relieve pain and increase seating tolerance.
• Clearly it is possible to transport the COMPASS, although cumbersome. A small handheld version is now on the market and costs around £2,000. Unfortunately, we do not have this item, but we can order it for you.
• We need both a landline telephone number and a mobile number deposited with us at reception. We will give you the emergency lines for the hospital. We can guarantee an immediate response and retrieval of the patient to The Tower within four hours as long as all other stipulations have been followed.
• You need to contact the Mid-Anglian Mutual to amend insurance cover while not on the premises. We understand that their response is likely to make cover contingent on following these stipulations.
• For the time our patient is outside the hospital our fees will remain unaltered.
‘Unbelievable,’ said Dryden, tapping a finger on th
e last prescription. ‘Don’t forget the fees, eh? We wouldn’t want to get away with two days at a cut price.’
He lifted his wife up against the pillows and began the tiny rituals which had made his nightly visit to The Tower an almost religious ceremony. Uncorking a bottle of Italian red wine from the side cupboard, he poured two glasses, setting one down on Laura’s tray. If she asked, he would pour a little of the liquid into the drinking tube she was beginning to master. Then he sat, tapping a single white Greek cigarette from the packet out into his hand. He no longer smoked as a habit but Laura enjoyed the acrid smell of the harsh tobacco, and the memories it brought her of a honeymoon spent in the Cyclades.
Taking the perspex tube attached to the COMPASS, Dryden looped it tenderly over his wife’s lips. He watched as her cheeks moved with the effort of sucking and blowing the commands which would move the on-screen cursor.
LATE?
They had developed a shorthand language to restrict the agonizing stutter of the computer printout.
‘Yeah. Sorry. I should have texted. Sorry.’
He drank a glass of the wine and took a refill.
‘Odd. Another death from the cold. Out on the Fen. This guy was just frozen on his doorstep. Under ice. It was like something from a wildlife film, some animal rigid in the Arctic snow. Disturbing, really; much worse than a bloody corpse.’
SUICIDE?
Dryden shook his head: ‘I guess – or an accident. But there’s a few things wrong. It’s like this other one in the flats, the guy who just threw the windows open and died in his armchair. It turns out he’d had a visitor just before he died – a doctor, but there’s no record of an official visit from any of the emergency services, Age Concern, nothing. Then, when I go back to the flat there’s someone there. Someone who shouldn’t be there. I tried to catch him but he did a runner. So what’s that about?
‘And the one out on the Fen… he was locked out of his own house. I know that can happen – I did it once at the flat, remember? But this guy gets an evening paper every day, right? Plus weeklies. And yet there are no newspapers in his recycling bin, even though the bin’s full.’
There was a silence and Dryden dribbled some of the wine into the drinking funnel and replaced the COMPASS tube with a feed. He watched as the surface of the wine vibrated, draining slowly away.
‘OK. He keeps the newspapers somewhere else. That could be true. And the bogus doctor could have just been a con artist – although nothing’s missing from either the victim’s flat or the next door neighbour’s, not that either was stuffed with treasures. And the bloke in the flat when I went back could have just been looting the place now the owner’s dead.’
He unhooked the feeding tube.
‘But the thing that I can’t let go is the coincidence. They knew each other, these two – the victims. Lifelong friends. Two accidents, two sudden deaths, a shared childhood. That’s fiction – and fiction doesn’t happen.’
Dryden shook his head again, and walked to the window to raise the blinds.
The COMPASS jumped: CAN WE GO?
He sat, taking her hand, massaging the finger joints where the nurses had shown him.
‘Sure. If you want to.’ He’d hesitated and he knew why. What if depression came with the journey and the realization that this would be a brief interlude in the rest of her life? What if temptation came with the freedom?
‘Where?’ he asked, trying to push back the thought, the idea that there might be an end to it.
ANYWHERE THATS NT HERE.
He thought of that childhood summer, the white surf fizzing around his tanned legs, the sea stretching as far as a Fen horizon.
‘Give it a month, three. Let the spring begin. Then we can go – to the coast. Let’s go to the coast.’
The Dolphin Holiday Camp
Friday, 30 August 1974
They called him Dex but it didn’t suit him. He was shy, frail, with a lopsided poor-boy’s haircut. Timid too, frightened even, but he punctuated his fear with eruptions of random violence. Philip pitied him, but never turned his back on him. He ran to him now across the grass that separated the rows of chalets and they stood for a second, listening to the sounds of the distant jukebox, the metallic jangle of the camp’s fairground, their eyes piecing together the night in shades of black and white. A seagull, almost luminously pale, balanced on one of the lampposts which lit the path to the sea, its body turned into the breeze like the prow of a ship.
Smith appeared in the still-open doorway. Smith was bigger, a full year older, long limbs disjointed by a child’s rush to grow. He held the torch lightly, juggling it, smiling at the prospect of the game and scratching at his white, crewcut hair.
They stood together, saying nothing, and Philip was thrilled again by the intimacy this implied. Were they brothers? Philip could think of no way to ask. Why did they share the chalet – while Dex’s sister slept alone in a chalet by the pool? It worried him, this inconsistency in a world he thought he understood.
They ran down towards the saltmarsh. The tides had been high all week, the second of the game. Seawater, flowing up the river estuary, backed up through the network of channels to create a liquid maze. Here they had mapped out the rules – between the pumping station and the sluice, the old boathouse and the bird hide. Ahead they saw the iron sluice gate where they always met, and Dex’s sister there, waiting to begin, standing in a pool of light from her downturned torch.
Philip got there first and jumped up to sit beside her on the cool iron safety rail. He brushed her thigh with his leg, the guilt at this sudden intimacy almost buried beneath another emotion: a confused but intense attraction to the cool skin and the stretched mahogany tan.
The sister. Dex called her ‘Sis’ when he spoke, which was rare, but he stuck with her; a satellite, always connected by invisible bonds of gravity. Philip envied him that, and the soft brush of the skin.
So jealousy too: which only made him want to touch her again.
Smith, suddenly unsure, turned his square head towards the marsh. He took the torch from his pocket and shone it briefly into his own face.
‘Philip. It’s Philip’s turn.’
Sis looked at him then and he tried to smile. But he felt the fear return and his mind raced on: mapping out the game. Where? Where would he hide? He felt for the torch in his pocket, the relief at the cold touch of metal profound, then he jumped down and ran, knowing the minute hand on Dex’s watch would be racing on. Sixty seconds, never more.
The old boathouse was lost in darkness and reeds, behind it a wooden rowing boat rotted, covered by a tarpaulin. Smith, he knew, had hidden in the boathouse more than once, and Dex had used the boat itself. Philip lifted the worn green material and slipped in, turned the torch on, and imagined what the others would be doing, crowding his imagination so that the fear wouldn’t have the space to get in. He saw them, by moonlight, spreading out now, each one alone, each one searching.
He killed the light and the darkness pushed up against his eyes. Desperate to see out, to see anything, he worked his fingers along the wood where the moss was dry until he’d got a hand under the tarpaulin, and raised it an inch.
The moonlight, shredded by a passing cloud, lit up the reed tops. Beyond the dyke, along the river where they never played, there was a circular light like a bird’s eye. It was perfectly round and pale and seemed to hang in the dusk, the eye of a predator watching its prey.
18
Saturday, 31 December
Humph had dropped him by the boat in the early hours and he’d climbed aboard, made coffee, and brought it up on deck to try to fend off sleep. That’s when he saw them, the measured footprints which had come out of town during the night, and then appeared to return. Footprints: heel and toe, paced out along the riverbank in the peppered snow. He checked the boat, the painter, the tarpaulin. Nothing. In winter few walked the footpath, and his post was left up at the farm. He’d gulped the coffee, trying not to think, telling himself that paranoia
was an illness.
Then he’d gone below, making another pot of coffee, and seen what wasn’t there. Against the forward bulwark he’d tacked up Declan McIlroy’s canvas. The two men waist deep in blood. It was gone. Until then the cold of the night had not made him shiver. He checked the boat out, the deck and forward through the cabins. Nothing else was gone. So he poured himself a malt and returned to the deck.
He could see only one image: the intruder’s face glimpsed through the frosted striped window of the serving hatch in Declan McIlroy’s flat. The fear returned and he switched on PK 129’s floodlight, illuminating the river and the banks. A pair of black swans, startled, took to the air.
He went below but hadn’t slept, the silent landscape beyond the porthole peopled by shadows which seemed to hover on the edge of vision. By dawn the lack of sleep buzzed in his blood like adrenaline and when, a few hours later, he heard Humph hoot the Capri’s horn he felt a flood of relief not to be alone.
Over the weekend the cabbie transferred his services to better-paying customers, mostly bar and club workers who needed ferrying at ungodly hours. Dryden didn’t resent the desertion but it didn’t make Saturdays any easier to live through. But Humph always made it for breakfast, complete with fried egg sandwiches. Dryden ferried out the coffees, trying hard to let the comfort of routine obscure the rawness and fear of the sleepless night.
‘Someone’s been on the boat,’ he said, unable to remove the edge of anxiety from his voice. ‘Last night, before you dropped me off. Look.’ They walked along the riverbank, the footsteps still clear despite a smattering of newly fallen snow. ‘They took the canvas, the one from Declan McIlroy’s flat.’
‘I told you,’ said the cabbie, pausing briefly before attacking his sandwich. Humph had a low view of life on water and had advised Dryden to get a flat in town. ‘Water gypsies,’ he said. ‘Change the locks.’ Humph believed that the river’s small population of New Age narrow-boat dwellers was responsible for almost all recorded crime.