The Coldest Blood

A door clattered open and a woman entered with a trolley, metallic and gleaming, hissing with steam. Connor crunched the paper ball again, placed his hand on the coffee table between them and withdrew it quickly, like a card player laying a bet. The ball of paper was left behind, unfurling gently.

‘Do you want a drink, Chips? A biscuit?’

He nodded rapidly. ‘Yes please. Orange juice, no added sugar. They sell wine gums too.’

Dryden fetched a tea for himself and spilt the sweets on the table by the paper ball.

Connor began to eat them, methodically, like a bird pecking at grain.

Dryden studied his face, which was oddly featureless, like Action Man’s. While his body had successfully fought the onset of age his face had taken the burden of the years. He’d been handsome once but the blandness had deepened to the point of being threatening: like a photofit. Over one eye, curving out of the hairline, was an old scar.

‘Do you remember them, Chips – Declan and Joe?’

An almost imperceptible nod.

‘They were in care – I guess you know that. St Vincent’s; it’s a Catholic orphanage.’

‘I don’t wanna leave, anyway,’ said Connor, ignoring him, stretching back in the chair, a yawn cracking his jaw. Dryden was struck again by the odd mix of the juvenile and the adult, an almost adolescent confusion.

‘Why don’t you want to leave?’ said Dryden, caressing the mug of tea.

Connor looked round, trying to find a rational answer. ‘I have a room here,’ he said eventually. ‘TV. No one can get in.’

It was an odd compliment to pay a prison, that its principal attraction was that no one could get in. He could understand now why Ruth Connor had not led or initiated the campaign to free her husband: it was, possibly, the last thing he seemed to want.

‘I used to go to the Dolphin,’ said Dryden, deciding to try and push the boundary back, back thirty years to the summer of 1974. ‘In the seventies. You probably gave me a swimming lesson in that very pool.’

Connor nodded, but didn’t smile, and finishing the sweets he began to sip the orange juice. Around them now some groups were breaking up, moving off through double doors and further into the prison. The woman at reception had told Dryden that if the prisoner wanted he might take him to his room, or to see an exhibition of art in the gym.

Dryden looked at Connor’s hands and noted they were powerful and still, a single wedding band the only jewellery.

‘I’m sorry. I know you answered all these questions before but Declan and Joe were my friends – I want to know who killed them.’

Chips stiffened in his seat, unable to stop the bland features of his face jerking suddenly into something like shock. ‘George, my solicitor, he said there’d been an accident, and a suicide.’

Dryden shook his head. ‘I don’t believe that. So I need to know more, Chips, more about that night of the robbery. You’ve probably told the story a thousand times, but can you tell me what happened? Can you tell it again?’

‘You’re a newspaper reporter, yup?’

‘So?’ Dryden considered how efficiently the Connors kept in touch.

‘So I shouldn’t talk. Ruth called. We speak every day, like I said. There’s no one else to speak to on the phone and I get a card. I have to use it up – I think it’s a rule.’ Again the casual, unconscious slight.

Connor laughed at something private and then leant forward. ‘I swim sometimes, in my head. I can show you.’

He stood and Dryden followed, despite the tea left steaming on the table. As Dryden rose he swept the rubbish and uneaten sweets into a bin but pocketed the ball of paper Connor had left to unfurl.

Beyond the doors a corridor ran round a courtyard, benches arranged in a square with a single dry fountain as a focus. A covered walkway led across lawns, the hallway antiseptic, the lighting brutal. When they got to what appeared to be a residential block they climbed the stairs to a corridor. They could smell ground coffee, and somewhere the trickling notes of Schubert. Connor led the way into his room but left the door open, kicking a wedge into place. In one corner a towel lay over an exercise bike, and several pairs of trainers were lined neatly along the skirting board. The walls were bare except for one which held a large poster of a swimming pool seen from above, the figure of a lone female swimmer in a white swimsuit gliding vertically between the lane markers.

Dryden took the only chair, Connor the bed, then he looked at the poster. ‘It was night time. I was passing the long pool – the one by the clock like you said. I was on the way back to our chalet, Ruth had gone to bed…’

He stopped suddenly, sipping the orange juice carton that he’d brought with him, remembering something.

‘And I was just doing the last round, checking the kids. Some of the parents were still in the bar so I had one or two left in the huts by the dunes. Two: Taylor and Atkinson. Girls – June and Rosie.’

Dryden nodded, remembering the ritual of the twitching curtain. ‘That’s a good memory.’