by Jim Kelly
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 sh
elter.
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.