The Coldest Blood

He walked to the office bay window and looked out onto Market Street, past the etched motif of The Crow, where snow still fell for now in picturebook flakes. He abandoned work and walked out into town, buying tea from the mobile canteen in Market Square. Then he went to the police station and dutifully reported the theft of the canvas from his floating home, the uniformed PC on duty not bothering to reassure him that the culprits would be swiftly and professionally tracked down. He left with a reference number in case he had to make an insurance claim, although a second search by daylight had revealed that nothing else was missing from PK 129.

Back in town a few shoppers moved briskly between the Saturday market stalls, but already some traders were packing away, and a lorry had backed in to load up unsold vegetables. A wind was rising and the awnings and plastic sheeting strung up to protect the stalls snapped like whips. The town Christmas tree, surrounded by security fencing in the middle of the market, swayed. Dryden sought cover in the lee of a mobile fishmonger’s counter, and stood sipping the tea. He considered the lives of Joe Petulengo and Declan McIlroy, and he considered their deaths, weighing again the balance between conspiracy, suicide and accident. A large conger eel lay on one of the fishmonger’s white plastic trays, its eye flat and sightless. And he thought of the footsteps again, crisp on the towpath. He made a decision then, finished the tea, and headed back to the office.

Using The Crow’s online archive he’d checked for references to Petulengo. In May 1994 an article had been published to mark the tenth anniversary of the foundation of a company – JSK – a one-man business dedicated to designing and manufacturing high-performance kites for use on farms. Most models mimicked the shape, colour and flight patterns of birds of prey, the kestrel being the most popular. The flying scarecrows were endorsed, in the article, by a farmer who had used a prototype on his land for more than five seasons. A grainy picture showed Petulengo flying one from what looked like a rooftop, the spiky miniature pinnacles of the cathedral’s Lady Chapel just visible in the distant background. A spokesman from the National Farmers’ Union lauded the idea, and praised its environmental credentials. The paper described Petulengo as a ‘young entrepreneur’, and in a less-PC age as coming from a ‘well-known gypsy family’. Dryden recalled the lovingly arranged tails of the kite hung in the hallway of the farmhouse at Letter M Farm. He bent an Anglepoise lamp down over the cutting. The picture was good enough to see the face clearly – the statuesque head, the short white hair, the powerful, squat frame. He found JSK in the telephone book and noted down the address.

Twenty minutes later Dryden stood, dizzy now from lack of sleep, outside the factory wire, the view fractured into neat diamonds, gripping the metallic grid with bare fingers. He rested his forehead on the wire, wishing he’d tried to sleep.

The old jam factory had been the site of one of the town’s few large-scale industries, founded in the mid-nineteenth century. Fruit had been delivered via a spur of the railway, grubbed up in the 1960s. It was three storeys high, with large lattice windows for light and a set of iron folding doors across the ground-floor loading bays: a windswept spot, a solitary industrial landmark. From the flat roof a single thread of string rose into the air, a long low-slung loop like a washing line, disappearing into the slate grey sky. It swung precariously, as if the wind were fighting to keep it aloft.

Dryden lifted his hands free from the freezing wire, wincing at the slight tearing sensation which came from the skin at his fingertips. He breathed out, the cloud of steam almost fog-like. It was colder, much colder. He looked up at the pendant string. ‘Kites,’ he said, calling up the memory of one dipping over the sea.

Cars crammed a small car park, none of them aspiring to the adjective executive. To the east was a plot reclaimed from the peat on which stood a large mobile home, immaculately painted in white with green trimmings, with a brace of carriage lamps and a double garage; a tiny bit of kitsch suburbia, set adrift.

Up a set of stone steps and through a reinforced glass door a watchman slept in an overheated cubicle reeking of tea bags. A board on the wall indicated that the building was let to a range of small businesses, had been opened by the local MEP and sponsored by the regional development agency. Dryden slipped past the sleeping sentry, found JSK on the board and climbed to the top floor.