The Coldest Blood

by Jim Kelly

  ‘Connor! How…?’ Bardolph looked out over the frozen Fen, knocking his gloved fists together in frustration. ‘Look. Wait there.’

  He went inside and Dryden could see him rifling through the box folders, before returning with a single Manila file. ‘You need to understand,’ he said, ‘the two cases are linked.’ He retrieved some reading glasses and scanned the first page of the file.

  ‘The friendship between Joe and Declan was very important, but they were vastly different characters. Declan had been inside, he’d become very timid, a kind of recluse in many ways. Joe was a very confident man – at least that’s what Declan always said. He’d made a success of his business, he had power – something Declan never had. Anyway, several months ago one of the evening newspapers ran an appeal for new witnesses in the Connor case – Connor’s wife had decided to mark the thirtieth anniversary of his sentence with another attempt to get him freed. She’d always said he was innocent, and she wasn’t the only one. So Joe saw the story and got in contact. The Connor family solicitors…’ here Bardolph flicked through the pages. ‘Holme & Sons – of Lynn. They interviewed Joe and asked him to try and get Declan to come forward as well. If it had been the other way round, if Declan had seen the appeal, he would have kept quiet – I’m sure of that.’

  ‘But he was a witness too, and he agreed to step up?’

  ‘Joe was very important to Declan – a mentor, I guess. If Joe was happy to do it – so was Declan. George Holme interviewed them both, separately, and took statements. They were in care at the time they were staying at the holiday camp. It became clear during Holme’s questioning about what happened at the camp that they had been badly treated at St Vincent’s – I can’t tell you exactly why because it involves the sister – but it all came out.’

  ‘There was abuse in the holiday camp?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. Anyway, the important thing is that Holme knew about the action being co-ordinated by Hugh Appleyard against St Vincent’s – solicitors are a pretty close bunch. So Joe and Declan found themselves under pressure to come forward. I don’t think Joe thought twice about it. After a lot of soul searching, Declan also agreed to give evidence against the diocese, to tell a court what he’d suffered at St Vincent’s.’

  ‘So it’s not a coincidence that they are involved in both cases?’

  ‘No. Not at all. It’s all down to Joe coming forward. Then one thing led to another.’

  ‘So what happens now?’

  Bardolph looked out over the ice. ‘St Vincent’s? They would have been compelling in court, I think – especially together. I never actually met Joe, but it was clear they were close. Brothers, almost. They’d shared that childhood, that sense of being victims, a very intense emotion. I don’t think any court could have ignored their evidence, or put it aside as hysterical, or contrived. But they were not the only victims. There’ll be delays, but it’ll come out in the end. The abuse – you know – was pretty widespread, institutionalized, really. That was the problem.’

  Dryden nodded. ‘And the Connor case… how exactly were they involved in that?’

  ‘The basic facts aren’t disputed: Joe saw the appeal in the newspaper for evidence in the Connor case, as I said. The article included the last known picture of Paul Gedney – that’s Connor’s alleged victim. In essence their statements would have been simple, as I understood it: that they had seen Gedney.’

  ‘So?’

  Bardolph laughed, buttoning the jacket at his throat. ‘They saw him a month after the prosecution said Chips had beaten him to death at the holiday camp at Sea’s End. He was holed up in some old boat in the marsh along the coast. The police never found the body, you see. If they’d been able to make that ID in court – between the face on the poster and the face they’d seen, well then Chips would have been freed immediately. There would have been a review at the very least.’

  ‘Sea’s End,’ said Dryden. ‘The Dolphin?’

  ‘Yes. It’s still in business, actually – gone upmarket.’

  Dryden saw the camp gates, that first sight of the crowded beach of 1974, and a single lit porthole shining in the marsh. ‘But this was in ’75?’ he asked.

  Bardolph went on nodding, flipping the page and finding a colour photograph. He looked at it briefly, seemed to make a decision, and then held it out: ‘No. No – it was 1974. The summer. The trial was the following year. That’s them at the time… August.’

  Dryden took the snapshot and felt the world around him recede, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope, as he brought the snapshot close to his face. Three boys and a girl, a sandy path between dunes and a distant view of the sea. The familiarity of his own childhood face staring out of the past was surreal, and the jolt of recognition made his heart contract. He walked to the balcony rail and looked out across the white Fen, hiding his eyes.

  ‘Declan is the one on the far left,’ said Bardolph.

  Dryden nodded. Dex, the frightened loner armed only with the unpredictability of violence.

  ‘The others?’ asked Dryden, trying to keep the emotion from serrating his voice.

  ‘The other boy, the one with his arm round Declan’s shoulder, is Joe Petulengo. The girl on the end is Declan’s sister.’

  Dryden nodded, confused. He flipped the picture over and read the pencilled caption on the back.

  McIlroy – Smith – Unknown – McIlroy.

  ‘But it says Smith,’ said Dryden. ‘Not Petulengo.’

  Bardolph was still rummaging through the paperwork. ‘Sure. Joe was from a traveller family; Smith was their adopted name. It’s common amongst the Romany: helps in business and avoids some nasty racism. He was plain Joe Smith until his marriage, I think. Times change, and by then he was on his feet, JSK was up and running. I guess he decided he was proud of his past, even if it was too late to change the company brand.’ Dryden saw it now, the stencilled logo on the factory unit door: JSK. Joe Smith Kites.

  ‘And the girl is Marcie Sley?’

  Bardolph grunted. ‘Yup.’

  The skin, Dryden thought, dusted with sand. ‘And the third boy – the one with the black hair?’ he asked.

  Bardolph shrugged. ‘No idea. All we know is that his first name was Philip – which, as you will appreciate, is not an uncommon first name. He played with the others, but they never got his full name. The camp’s records haven’t survived – at least not the bookings. They had to leave early… they didn’t swap addresses or names.’

  No, thought Dryden. There’d been no time for that. The picture had been taken on the second day by the woman Marcie had called ‘Grace’, when it seemed as if they had a lifetime in which to play together.

  ‘And Marcie’s not involved because…’

  ‘Because she’s blind. Identification is the key. She could have provided some corroboration of timing and so on. She was sighted at the time. But that’s not much good now, is it? What she can’t do is stand up in a court of law and identify the picture of Paul Gedney as that of the man she did see. She’s never seen that picture – she’s no use at all as a witness.’ Bardolph shivered. ‘Look. We need coffee – hang on a minute.’ He disappeared inside to fuss over one of the thermos flasks.

  Dryden knew then: knew when they’d seen what they’d seen. That last night of the game.

  Bardolph reappeared with coffees and another file, which he held awkwardly, leafing through the typed pages. ‘Once Declan decided to go up with Joe to see George Holme I talked through his evidence with him to see if it stacked up. Back in ’75, during the trial, the prosecution alleged that the victim died on the night of 5 August 1974 – at the Dolphin. But Declan and Joe’s evidence would make it clear that Gedney was alive a month later – on the 30th. Friday, August 30th.’

  Dryden rested a fingertip on the image of his own young face. ‘Did he see what they saw? Could this… Philip… be a witness?’

  ‘Possibly. Joe and Declan seemed unsure. I guess they might run the picture again – see if they
can find him. Holme could even take the statements they’ve got to appeal – but I doubt that would get very far.’

  Pellets of hail began to fall and Dryden wrapped the trench coat more closely to his bones. Had someone killed Declan McIlroy and Joe Petulengo to keep Chips Connor in jail? Did anyone know that he, Philip Dryden, was the missing child from the snapshot? And if they did, did they fear that he too had seen what they had seen the last night they’d played the game?

  The Dolphin Holiday Camp

  Friday, 30 August 1974

  In the saltmarsh, under a covered boat, Philip lay still.

  The dilemma was always the same one – an excruciating tension between the fear that he would never be found, and the fear that he would. Switching on his torch, he played the beam on his wristwatch: a Timex Christmas present with half-hearted luminosity. 8.42pm.

  Twenty-five minutes had passed since he’d left the others by the sluice gate. He’d heard some footsteps almost immediately, timidly padding round the old boathouse. Dex. Almost certainly Dex. Then nothing, except the distant barrel-organ leitmotif of the fairground.

  He lay, curled in a ball now, hoping above all that it wouldn’t be Smith. Then he’d have to lie still with Smith, waiting for the others. That was the game: each one had to squeeze in until the last one was left alone, searching.

  Let it not be Smith, who smelt of the cloying tang of the chemicals they made him rub in his hair. Let it not be Smith, who would clamp a hand over Philip’s mouth if the others got near.

  Or the sister? Philip’s heart leapt. The last time, she’d held his hand to stop him crying out. She smelt of the sand, and of the natural oil in her coal-black hair.

  The tide, resting at the full, began to ebb. He could hear the black water slap the rotting planks of the old boathouse, and somewhere the sea began to trickle back through an open sluice. He thought again of the single lit porthole in the marsh, and wondered what lay within.

  And then, as sharp as a seagull’s violent screech, a single cry of pain. Philip’s hair bristled and his heart creaked in his chest. Then a sob, but not the one he would have expected after the pain – there was relief, satisfaction, even joy. What pain gave joy?

  Had something happened in the game? Dex, almost certainly Dex, falling and snapping one of his narrow bony ankles. Or Smith, vaulting a channel, breaking an arm. Would they leave him now, forgetting him, running home?

  He lay, praying for it to end, praying for it not to end, and a second before it did he knew it would. A rattle, loose change in a pocket, gave him away. The tarpaulin, ripped back, showed Smith against a sky of stars.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, shining his torch in Philip’s face. ‘We’ve found something. Something by the river.’

  They ran along a bank head high with the bristling moon-splashed reeds. Then the pale eye of the porthole was ahead of them; closer now, and impossibly bright. Against the yellow circle of light he could see Dex and his sister at the glass, peering in. Smith roughly put an elbow round his neck and a hand over his mouth, dragging him down to his knees: ‘Quiet. Did you hear it? He’s in the boat, we’ve seen him.’

  He was afraid then, realizing again how lonely he was with these children, how much he didn’t know about what they shared.

  They started to crawl forward to join the other children and Philip was close enough to smell Dex’s fear when they heard the second cry of pain, like the first, laced with that after-shock of satisfaction.

  There was a single beat of silence before Dex screamed, his small head jerking wildly, while the sister pulled him down, away from the light.

  Philip knew then that he wouldn’t get to see, that like so much else of his childhood, and his life, the night would be defined by what others had experienced, and by what he had missed.

  But they’d been seen, and they were running now, all of them, back along the dyke. He found Dex’s hand in his and they ran together, back to the sluice, the jagged gasping of their collective breath louder than the waves beyond the dunes. But here Philip, haunted by what he’d missed, turned and saw the distant silhouette of a man on the boat against the sky, one arm cradled by the other.

  The sister pulled him back, down the path to the leap, then over and on between the chalets. When they reached the lamp by Philip’s they stood for a second, listening, and he saw that the sister had gone.

  From the fairground came the ritual screams from the falling big dipper.

  Philip waited to catch Dex’s eyes. ‘What?’ he said, knowing he would answer. But Smith dragged the younger boy away. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow.’

  23

  Flares had been lit on the floodbank, throwing a guttering light across the crowd that had gathered for the races. Dryden, still struggling with the innocent collision of the past and present, left Ed Bardolph with the rest of the volunteers at the boathouse making final preparations for the long-distance skate to Cambridge. He’d found Humph still parked up on the riverbank, the cab resounding to the ritual intonation of the football results being repeated on the local news. He’d rifled half a dozen miniatures from Humph’s glove compartment, grabbed Boudicca’s lead, his skates, and set out for the ice fair.

  Railway sleepers had been piled into a makeshift grandstand for the traditional start of the championships: the Flying Mile, four circuits of the oval course Bardolph’s men had earlier marked out. Other spectators were already crowding along the high floodbank, between the flares. Sparklers, sold at the gate, cascaded silver where children stood. Skaters zigzagged between the fairground stalls and the tea bars, one with a hand-held flaming torch which left a wake across Dryden’s eye.

  The night sky, clear and crowded, was crushing. Dryden drank one of the bottles from his overcoat pocket, the aroma of the malt sharpened by the frost. Ice was forming in his hair and he took a black woollen hat from his pocket and drew it down over his brow. After buying a ticket, he took a seat on the sleepers at the top. There was a breeze here and he could feel the moisture turning to ice in his eyelashes. The malt made his blood rush, so he had another.

  Looking out over the winter scene he tried, once again, to conjure up the heat of that lost summer. He’d met the others on the first day, let loose by his uncle and aunt to wander the camp and find new friends. Taking a book, he’d gone down to the beach and watched the three strange children, the siblings – Dex and the sister – and the brooding presence of the older Smith, with his bleached white hair. And he envied them the familiarity of the triangular world they shared. They’d dammed a stream which crossed the sands, creating a wide deep pool on which Dex sailed a paper boat. Smith had dragged logs from the dunes to reinforce the sand, while Marcie had stood, almost motionless, in the centre of the pool, waiting for the water to rise, as insubstantial as her rippling reflection.

  He’d been sitting on a log that Smith wanted. So he’d stuffed the paperback he’d been reading inside the belt of his shorts and helped him haul it down to the sand. Wordlessly he’d followed him up to the dunes to find more. When they’d finished Dex had sailed the boat to him across the newly formed lake, a thrilling act of friendship. After tea in the clattering canteen, in the hour of dusk before bedtime, they’d toured the camp. The boys’ chalet was opposite Philip’s while the sister had one to herself down by the pool, next to the one where the woman she called Grace slept beside a double cot for the baby boys. There was a man, too, Grace’s husband, but he seemed disengaged and never spoke to any of the children, immersed – whenever Philip saw him – in a newspaper, putting red circles round names in the close, dense print of the sports pages. And they’d seen him once, glimpsed through the club door, under the strip-light of a snooker table. Grace was always outside, her florid, intelligent face blighted by anxiety. Philip had never understood, never understood how this disparate family fitted together.

  At breakfast on the second day Philip had watched them all, eating at one of the Formica-topped tables in the canteen. He’d told Uncle Roger that he h
ad found some friends to play with, pointed them out, and could still recall the way the man’s cheerful smile had faded. ‘OK, Philip,’ he’d said. ‘That’s fine.’ Fine, nothing more.

  They met again in the dunes above the beach, and the intoxicating excitement of belonging had overwhelmed him. Once, he’d seen his uncle by the coastguard’s hut, watching them play. He’d waved, then stepped back beyond the horizon.

  Dryden closed his eyes and tried to squeeze meaning out of the idyllic memories he had: the Gothic sandcastles, the tide sweeping in the paper boats, Smith and his kite. And the game after dark – Smith’s brilliant idea. Of course it had been easy for them, the boys in their chalet, and the sister too. But for Philip the game held an edge, for he alone was taking a real risk of discovery and punishment.

  A bell rang, breaking the trance. A man skated across the ice below, ringing a bell and clearing the ice for the race. Four men slowly traversed the course pushing a home-made wooden snow plough which brushed clear the loose snow and ice, flattening out the stipples left by the frozen rain. At the start a dozen skaters straddled the line, then a klaxon set them free, the crowd cheering as they wheeled past, completing a circuit before they were able to break from their prescribed lanes. Boudicca stood, barking at the unnatural sight of men sweeping past, arms like metronomes. The biting cold had reduced the crowd, but perhaps 400 had come, the steam of their collective breath drifting across the track. The floodlights were harsh, the scene entirely coloured in white, silver and the chilliest of blues.

  He watched three races, then, tiring of the people around him, he climbed down and through the tunnel under the railway line back to the riverside. A makeshift set of halogen floodlights lit the frozen surface where a line had been scoured across from bank to bank. Clearly the 17-mile dash to Cambridge was on – for the first time in more than forty years. A blackboard by the footbridge announced the start would be at 10.30pm – and that all competitors had to register at the boathouse. Dryden found Humph parked on the far side of the river, his lower body obscured by a giant bag of chips. Dryden decanted the dog into the rear seat and took a handful of chips, using the mobile to ring Mitch Mackintosh, The Crow’s staff photographer. The paper could use some pictures of the start – and Mitch could alert the Cambridge Evening News to get some snaps of the skaters finishing along The Backs by King’s College.