The Coldest Blood

The third circuit complete, Humph retrieved the greyhound, Boudicca, from the rear seat, taking from the boot the tennis machine Dryden had bought them both for Christmas. The cabbie set it on its tripod feet, putting a fluorescent green ball in the slot, leant back on the Capri’s peeling paintwork and pulled the handle, shooting the ball fifty yards along the riverbank. Boudicca, unleashed, moved like a swallow over the black peat, a graceful thudding icon of speed.

The ball returned, Humph loaded it again, and fired.

Dryden zipped up the green tarpaulin covering the wheelhouse and joined them. They drank coffee wordlessly having extracted their egg sandwiches from the foil provided by Humph’s favourite greasy spoon café. Humph encompassed his in two bites, the oozing yellow yolk the only colour in the dawn light.

‘How cold is it?’ said Dryden.

‘Search me,’ said Humph, enjoying the dog’s careering run along the floodbank.

Dryden considered his friend’s planetary girth. ‘We don’t have the manpower,’ he said.

Boudicca returned and indecently nuzzled Dryden’s testicles.

‘Another death,’ said the cabbie, nodding towards the Capri. ‘On the radio.’

‘The cold?’

The cabbie nodded. ‘Some poor bastard on the Jubilee. Dead in his flat.’

The Jubilee was Ely’s sink estate, a warren of brick terraced streets enlivened by the occasional outbreak of ill-judged stone-cladding. Humph had a house there, his home since an acrimonious divorce, which he contrived hardly ever to visit, sleeping instead in the cab in a series of convenient lay-bys.

‘What time?’ said Dryden, pulling open the Capri’s passenger door and bracing himself for the familiar screech of rust from its hinges.

Humph let Boudicca into the back seat and then lowered himself into the driver’s seat by holding on to the door and the roof. The Capri listed alarmingly, the suspension twanging underneath.

‘Neighbour found him late last night when he saw the windows open,’ said Humph.

Dryden tried to imagine it. The flat, up in the sky, with frozen air blowing through it.

He checked his watch again. The Crow’s deadline was still hours away, but it was press day and the journalist in him needed a decent tale.

‘Let’s take a look,’ he said, and their moods lifted, buoyed up by the mutual relief that they had somewhere to go.

3

At the foot of the stairwell of High Park Flats a puddle of urine had frozen solid. There was another puddle in the lift, frozen too, but the colour of no known bodily fluid.

Dryden pressed the button marked 12 but the lift didn’t move. The doors did a shimmy, closed once, and then retreated. Out on the tarmac he could see Humph in the Capri, smirking.

Dryden trudged up the first flight of stairs, the walls a maze of graffiti except for a Day-Glo yellow poster offering help for the aged during the cold snap. Twenty-four flights of stairs later Dryden arrived on Frobisher, the level where Declan McIlroy had lived until the early hours of that day. There was a wind up here, and it took another five degrees off the temperature. Dryden’s breath billowed, and the air made his throat ache. The cold snap had lasted a week now, a dry blast of Arctic air bringing clear skies and showers of oversized snowflakes.

Dryden wrapped his greatcoat around himself and felt the ice in his hair.

On the drive into town he’d rung the station at Ely for the bare details: a neighbour had come onto the landing to rescue his wailing cat, stranded outside by a frozen flap. He’d noticed that the landing window of McIlroy’s flat was open, unusual itself at 2 in the morning, but alarming given the freezer-like conditions. The neighbour found the door unlocked and entered to find McIlroy dead in an armchair in the living room, the TV on, a cup of coffee frozen in the mug beside him. All the room’s windows were open. Death by hypothermia had been the doctor’s call. There’d be an inquest, but McIlroy had a long history of mental illness, and had attempted suicide twice before: both times using a knife.

Dryden peered over the edge of the lift-shaft wall down at the car park as a seagull flew below him. High Park Flats had been built in the 1960s and was the centrepiece of the Jubilee Estate. Fifteen storeys high it tussled, controversially, with the cathedral’s West Tower to dominate the horizon. Each floor had an external walkway linking the front doors of each flat. McIlroy’s was No. 126, a corner flat, the last on the gangway.

Dryden walked to the door and tried the handle: locked. He was surprised to find the police and emergency services had already left the scene. There was no sign anyone had died here, let alone lived. He knocked once, twice, and waited, looking south towards the city centre and beyond. The rush hour had begun and headlights in a long necklace stretched out east across the Fen towards Newmarket.

Dryden looked through the window but could see little in the gloom – the dull glint of unpolished taps, orange Formica kitchen units and a rusted gas-fired boiler.