The Coldest Blood

Sis looked at him then and he tried to smile. But he felt the fear return and his mind raced on: mapping out the game. Where? Where would he hide? He felt for the torch in his pocket, the relief at the cold touch of metal profound, then he jumped down and ran, knowing the minute hand on Dex’s watch would be racing on. Sixty seconds, never more.

The old boathouse was lost in darkness and reeds, behind it a wooden rowing boat rotted, covered by a tarpaulin. Smith, he knew, had hidden in the boathouse more than once, and Dex had used the boat itself. Philip lifted the worn green material and slipped in, turned the torch on, and imagined what the others would be doing, crowding his imagination so that the fear wouldn’t have the space to get in. He saw them, by moonlight, spreading out now, each one alone, each one searching.

He killed the light and the darkness pushed up against his eyes. Desperate to see out, to see anything, he worked his fingers along the wood where the moss was dry until he’d got a hand under the tarpaulin, and raised it an inch.

The moonlight, shredded by a passing cloud, lit up the reed tops. Beyond the dyke, along the river where they never played, there was a circular light like a bird’s eye. It was perfectly round and pale and seemed to hang in the dusk, the eye of a predator watching its prey.

18

Saturday, 31 December

Humph had dropped him by the boat in the early hours and he’d climbed aboard, made coffee, and brought it up on deck to try to fend off sleep. That’s when he saw them, the measured footprints which had come out of town during the night, and then appeared to return. Footprints: heel and toe, paced out along the riverbank in the peppered snow. He checked the boat, the painter, the tarpaulin. Nothing. In winter few walked the footpath, and his post was left up at the farm. He’d gulped the coffee, trying not to think, telling himself that paranoia was an illness.

Then he’d gone below, making another pot of coffee, and seen what wasn’t there. Against the forward bulwark he’d tacked up Declan McIlroy’s canvas. The two men waist deep in blood. It was gone. Until then the cold of the night had not made him shiver. He checked the boat out, the deck and forward through the cabins. Nothing else was gone. So he poured himself a malt and returned to the deck.

He could see only one image: the intruder’s face glimpsed through the frosted striped window of the serving hatch in Declan McIlroy’s flat. The fear returned and he switched on PK 129’s floodlight, illuminating the river and the banks. A pair of black swans, startled, took to the air.

He went below but hadn’t slept, the silent landscape beyond the porthole peopled by shadows which seemed to hover on the edge of vision. By dawn the lack of sleep buzzed in his blood like adrenaline and when, a few hours later, he heard Humph hoot the Capri’s horn he felt a flood of relief not to be alone.

Over the weekend the cabbie transferred his services to better-paying customers, mostly bar and club workers who needed ferrying at ungodly hours. Dryden didn’t resent the desertion but it didn’t make Saturdays any easier to live through. But Humph always made it for breakfast, complete with fried egg sandwiches. Dryden ferried out the coffees, trying hard to let the comfort of routine obscure the rawness and fear of the sleepless night.