The Coldest Blood

• You need to contact the Mid-Anglian Mutual to amend insurance cover while not on the premises. We understand that their response is likely to make cover contingent on following these stipulations.

• For the time our patient is outside the hospital our fees will remain unaltered.

‘Unbelievable,’ said Dryden, tapping a finger on the last prescription. ‘Don’t forget the fees, eh? We wouldn’t want to get away with two days at a cut price.’

He lifted his wife up against the pillows and began the tiny rituals which had made his nightly visit to The Tower an almost religious ceremony. Uncorking a bottle of Italian red wine from the side cupboard, he poured two glasses, setting one down on Laura’s tray. If she asked, he would pour a little of the liquid into the drinking tube she was beginning to master. Then he sat, tapping a single white Greek cigarette from the packet out into his hand. He no longer smoked as a habit but Laura enjoyed the acrid smell of the harsh tobacco, and the memories it brought her of a honeymoon spent in the Cyclades.

Taking the perspex tube attached to the COMPASS, Dryden looped it tenderly over his wife’s lips. He watched as her cheeks moved with the effort of sucking and blowing the commands which would move the on-screen cursor.

LATE?

They had developed a shorthand language to restrict the agonizing stutter of the computer printout.

‘Yeah. Sorry. I should have texted. Sorry.’

He drank a glass of the wine and took a refill.

‘Odd. Another death from the cold. Out on the Fen. This guy was just frozen on his doorstep. Under ice. It was like something from a wildlife film, some animal rigid in the Arctic snow. Disturbing, really; much worse than a bloody corpse.’

SUICIDE?

Dryden shook his head: ‘I guess – or an accident. But there’s a few things wrong. It’s like this other one in the flats, the guy who just threw the windows open and died in his armchair. It turns out he’d had a visitor just before he died – a doctor, but there’s no record of an official visit from any of the emergency services, Age Concern, nothing. Then, when I go back to the flat there’s someone there. Someone who shouldn’t be there. I tried to catch him but he did a runner. So what’s that about?

‘And the one out on the Fen… he was locked out of his own house. I know that can happen – I did it once at the flat, remember? But this guy gets an evening paper every day, right? Plus weeklies. And yet there are no newspapers in his recycling bin, even though the bin’s full.’

There was a silence and Dryden dribbled some of the wine into the drinking funnel and replaced the COMPASS tube with a feed. He watched as the surface of the wine vibrated, draining slowly away.

‘OK. He keeps the newspapers somewhere else. That could be true. And the bogus doctor could have just been a con artist – although nothing’s missing from either the victim’s flat or the next door neighbour’s, not that either was stuffed with treasures. And the bloke in the flat when I went back could have just been looting the place now the owner’s dead.’

He unhooked the feeding tube.

‘But the thing that I can’t let go is the coincidence. They knew each other, these two – the victims. Lifelong friends. Two accidents, two sudden deaths, a shared childhood. That’s fiction – and fiction doesn’t happen.’

Dryden shook his head again, and walked to the window to raise the blinds.

The COMPASS jumped: CAN WE GO?

He sat, taking her hand, massaging the finger joints where the nurses had shown him.

‘Sure. If you want to.’ He’d hesitated and he knew why. What if depression came with the journey and the realization that this would be a brief interlude in the rest of her life? What if temptation came with the freedom?

‘Where?’ he asked, trying to push back the thought, the idea that there might be an end to it.

ANYWHERE THATS NT HERE.

He thought of that childhood summer, the white surf fizzing around his tanned legs, the sea stretching as far as a Fen horizon.

‘Give it a month, three. Let the spring begin. Then we can go – to the coast. Let’s go to the coast.’

The Dolphin Holiday Camp

Friday, 30 August 1974