The Coldest Blood

The body, a dead weight, fell; but not to earth. The plastic click of the neck breaking marked the extent of the rope, and with it the grinding of the shattered vertebra as the body turned, the legs running on air. The moment of death stretched out, calibrated by the rattle in the throat. Urine trickled from the bare feet, yellow in the torchlight.

I fainted, standing, for a heart beat. When I looked again the arms, bound and ugly in death, were lifeless.

It was justice, they said, licking parted lips.

Justice in Jude’s Ferry.

Chapter One

Seventeen years later

St Swithun’s Day Sunday, 15 July 2007 Whittlesea Mere

The Capri shook, and through the fly-splattered windscreen of the minicab Philip Dryden contemplated the Fen horizon. Humph, the driver, slept peacefully, his lips brought together in a small bow, his sixteen stone compressing the seat beneath him. Around them the drained wasteland that had once been Whittlesea Mere, an inland lake the size of a small English county, stretched beyond sight. Overhead a cloud the size of a battleship sailed across an unblemished sky.

The cab was parked in the cool shadow of a hawthorn, the only tree visible to the naked eye. They’d presented themselves at 9.00am precisely that morning at the checkpoint to Whittlesea Mere Military Firing Range, and been directed down a pot-holed drive to the assembly point: the wreck of a wartime tank, ferns hanging from the dark observation slit. They hadn’t seen another human being since they’d been waved through the gates, which had not stopped Dryden imagining they were being watched.

The reporter smoothed down his camouflage tunic and felt the familiar anxieties crowding round. This isn’t a war zone, he told himself, it’s a military exercise. You’re here to write about it, not take part. But the sight of a line of soldiers marching towards them, raising a cloud of desert-red peat dust, made his heartbeat pick up. A trickle of sweat set out from the edge of his thick, jet black hair, down towards his eye. He brushed it aside, aware that another one would quickly take its place.

Dryden checked his watch: 10.15am. The time had come. He fingered the webbing inside the blue tin combat hat he held and pulled it down over his black, close-cropped hair. The neat carved features of his medieval face remained impassive. He got out, the Capri’s rusted door hinges screaming, and circled the cab to Humph’s open side window.

‘You can go’ he said, the cabbie, waking, struggling to remember where he was and what he was doing.

‘Really…’ said Humph, wiping his nose with a small pillowcase. ‘Can’t I stick around until they start trying to kill people?’

Dryden tried to smile. ‘Just remember. Same place, 5.00pm. And for Christ’s sake don’t leave me here.’ Bodekka, the greyhound, asleep on a tartan rug in the back seat, yawned in the heat, trapping a bluebottle. Humph turned the ignition key, the engine coughed once and started, and he pulled away at speed, leaving an amber-red cloud as he raced towards the safety of the distant checkpoint. Dryden, alone, felt the hairs on his neck bristle.

The soldiers approached the tank and at a word from an officer made temporary camp. They sat, feet in the ditch, and broke out water bottles, while a billycan was set up on a portable gas ring. Little winding chimneys of white smoke rose from cigarettes in the still, hot air. Dryden felt their collective antagonism to the presence of the press, and watched, oddly fascinated, as one dismantled and oiled an automatic rifle. Another stood, walked a few yards downwind and urinated into a ditch.

Sensing the calculated insult Dryden looked away and heard laughter at his back, then footsteps approaching, so he turned to face a heavy man with three pips on his flak jacket. As the officer made his way through the gorse he picked up his legs and arms as he walked, a self-conscious compensation perhaps for the onset of middle age. Dryden guessed he was in his early forties, but recognized a military uniform had never made anyone look any younger. The major’s hair was boot-polish black and shone unnaturally, but his complexion was poor, blotched as if his face had been scrubbed with a nailbrush. Cross-checking his position on a hand-held GPS with a map in a plastic see-through wallet he looked up at Dryden, unable to hide a frisson of annoyance at the sight of the reporter.