The Coldest Blood

He read on quickly. Bulging eyes were one of the commonest symptoms of the disease. In most cases patients were treated with steroids or had part of the thyroid gland removed. But if the bulging of the eye continued an orbital decompression – surgery – could be undertaken, an operation which results in the eye sitting back in its socket. The pictures were graphic: in the ‘before’ version one young woman stared out, the whites completely encircling the iris in both eyes, the lids seemingly unblinking, the edges inflamed and red. In the ‘after’ version the bulging of the eyes, and the swelling of the face around the eye sockets, was gone. She looked like a different person. If you’d been her brother or sister you’d have walked past her in the street.

Dryden heard voices from the office behind the reception counter, so he hit a printout button and grabbing the sheet ran out into the dusk, down through the camp. The floodlight by the amusement park was still working and showed that the helter-skelter had buckled, the top third sinking down and skewing round. A line of changing booths had collapsed and several telegraph wires lay rigid on the frosted grass. A uniformed PC stood guard down by the water’s edge, the scene-of-crime tapes flapping like prayer flags in the wind.

As Dryden looked to the distant lines of white surf just visible at sea the rain stopped. Within seconds the air was completely still and champagne-chilled, the only sound the high-pitched hum of the pylons overhead and the occasional crack of tortured wood. The storm had passed inland, revealing a planetarium of stars. At sea red and green navigation lights came and went.

He thought about the face of Paul Gedney. He thought about thirty years of natural ageing, layered onto a face transformed by an operation to cure the symptoms of Graves Disease. He saw faces, calling them up from the twisting story which had unfurled since the day he had climbed the steps of High Park Flats to the home of Declan McIlroy: and in each he searched for the pale fleeting image of the thief.

Humph joined him at the water’s edge, Boudicca racing past them to dance on the sand.

‘Nothing moving on the road,’ said the cabbie, and they turned to look inland. The usual ribbon of red and white lights shuffling along the coast was still, a few cars stationary. ‘It’s like an ice rink up there. Copper stopped the cab, wanted to know where you were. I said the chalet.’

A light shone from Laura’s room and another PC stood duty on the verandah steps.

‘You said blackmail,’ said Dryden, digging his hands deep into his coat pockets. ‘Blackmail, sure. He needed a new face. I said it was a perfect plan – but it was better than that. They wanted to get rid of Chips, they wanted to make sure the police thought Paul Gedney was dead, and they wanted each other.

‘If he went to the police and agreed to a deal Elizabeth Lutton faced jail, but more to the point her husband’s career would have been wounded too, perhaps fatally. According to the website the clinic was founded in ’73 – he’d hardly got it off the ground. He was on the up. A scandal like that would have meant starting again, at the very least. So he did it for her: he operated on Paul Gedney. They gave him a new face, Humph.’

‘So he’s alive?’

‘Sure,’ said Dryden. ‘And he lives in Lighthouse Cottage.’

44

The sky was an immaculate blue-black, the cold air super clear so that offshore Dryden could see the coastal lights sinking slowly away to the north with the curvature of the earth. He turned to look inland, along the marching line of pylons, when he saw the first high-voltage flash, an arcing vein of light, high up in the rigging of the nearest tower – the one which Nabbs had inspected the day before. In the half-second it was lit he saw that it was encased in ice.

A moment later he heard the thwap of the cable breaking, and saw it snaking in the air as it jolted and flashed against its neighbours. The pylon beneath shuddered with the release of tension, and Dryden heard ice shards falling in the darkness to the frozen ground below.

The pylon itself stood in a pool of security light splashed within a wire perimeter. Dryden could see a group of engineers working inside to clear ice from the steel housing which protected the ground-level control gear. The ice fell amongst them, and Dryden heard shouts of pain as they dived for cover. William Nabbs was with them, the collar of his yellow thermal jacket zipped up to his chin, his face craned skywards into the superstructure of the tower above, which groaned now as the breaking wires upset the subtle vectors of tension which held the steel frame aloft.