by Jim Kelly
‘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 sign
al, 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.