The Coldest Blood

‘Someone’s been on the boat,’ he said, unable to remove the edge of anxiety from his voice. ‘Last night, before you dropped me off. Look.’ They walked along the riverbank, the footsteps still clear despite a smattering of newly fallen snow. ‘They took the canvas, the one from Declan McIlroy’s flat.’

‘I told you,’ said the cabbie, pausing briefly before attacking his sandwich. Humph had a low view of life on water and had advised Dryden to get a flat in town. ‘Water gypsies,’ he said. ‘Change the locks.’ Humph believed that the river’s small population of New Age narrow-boat dwellers was responsible for almost all recorded crime.

Dryden shook his head. ‘Nah. Why take the painting and nothing else?’

Humph thought about it. ‘Stay at mine – there’s room.’ This was an understatement. Since divorce had separated Humph from a wife and two daughters his semi echoed like a giant oil drum.

‘I’m fine,’ said Dryden, collecting up the mugs and plates. ‘They won’t come back.’ He looked to the horizon and found the box-like outline of High Park Flats, hoping he was right.

But twenty minutes later, as he watched the cab disappear, a final backfire marking its arrival on the main road, the sense of insecurity made him sick. He liked his own company, and loneliness was not an emotion he normally recognized, but suddenly he needed the distractions of work.

He used his mobile to make a round of calls – fire, ambulance, police, coastguard and the press office number for the county council’s social services department which was coordinating help for the old and infirm during the cold snap. The police had nothing fresh on the death of Joe Petulengo. His age was given as forty-one, a widower, with no children. Cause of death was confirmed as hypothermia, and an initial examination of the clothes in which he was found confirmed they had been soaked in water. There were also traces of pond weed and clay on his clothes, and several fibres of cannabis. Police were treating the incident as a tragic accident. An inquest would be held that Tuesday.

The news from the cold-weather helpline had been equally bleak. Today’s top temperature at sea level was likely to be minus 8 degrees centigrade, falling to minus 14 at dusk. The night would break records, with ground temperatures touching minus 20 in some exposed areas. The short-term forecast was still dry, almost parched, with little threat of any significant snowfall. But the medium-range forecast was ominous. A layer of warm air from the south was insinuating itself northwards. It would lie between the snowclouds above and the supercooled earth below. Storms were gathering and if snow did fall it would melt as it fell, passing through the warm layer, and then reach the ground as iced water, freezing on impact with buildings, cars, roads – almost anything that got in its way. Freezing showers were forecast, with the prospect of a full-blown ice storm at any time in the following ten days. He took a note, but knew it wasn’t enough. So he drank more coffee, put on another layer of clothing and rummaged in the forward store for his ice skates, then he hung his shoes by their laces around his neck and skated into town, the exhilaration of the open sky and luminous river lifting his spirits.

The Crow’s offices were deserted, like the rest of town. He began to put together a package of information on the weather – a painstaking process of ringing charities, utilities and the emergency services which would save him time come Monday morning when the pressure would be on to find some decent news stories for the Express. He found one good line almost immediately: the water board predicted that freezing ground temperatures could threaten the mains supply. Plans were being made for a fleet of water tankers to provide outlying districts, and a list of locations had already been posted online.

The risk of an ice storm, rare in the UK, was worth a standalone story. He needed some background material to paint the picture for The Crow’s readers, so he went online and Googled up some facts and figures from a lethal storm which had hit Ottawa and Quebec in 1998. The headline numbers were suitably alarming – 100,000 people had fled to special shelters, nearly 2 million had lost all power at home, hundreds had either died in accidents or been poisoned by fumes at home using faulty heaters after electricity supplies had failed. Transport had been almost entirely halted, the freezing rain making car door locks almost impossible to open. Millions of trees had died, cracked open by the freezing rain which had seeped into the wood only to expand into wedges of ice. The sea had frozen in several spots on the eastern seaboard, and pack-ice had crowded the Great Lakes.

‘It’s a disaster movie,’ said Dryden to himself, his mood lightening further.