The Coldest Blood

Father Martin ran a fingertip along an eyebrow: ‘Paul’s family name was…’ he flicked through the file. ‘Ah, here, yes: Earnshaw. But he and his half-brother shared a mother, and as I say he was ultimately adopted by another family. I can dig it up if it’s helpful. Can I ring? I’ve got your number.’ He glanced at the desk and at a notebook with an alphabetical staircase opposite the spine. Beside it lay a green file, with the diocesan crest in gold on the front, tied with a red lawyer’s ribbon.

‘I don’t suppose I can see Paul’s file?’

Father Martin shook his head. ‘I don’t think that would be appropriate. There’s a picture, though.’ He pulled the bow free and slid out a passport-sized snap; Paul Gedney aged ten.

‘Those eyes,’ said Dryden.

‘Yes. A thyroid complaint, I’m afraid, which may well explain some of the behavioural problems. He was seen by doctors here, but there was little they could do. Painful, I think. A tortured life, Dryden, but there were many. I will pray for his soul.’

Dryden nodded. ‘You do that, Father. I’ve got twenty-four hours to find out who beat him to death.’

34

Back at the Dolphin Dryden craved sea air to clear his head. Lighthouse Cottage clung to the horizon on a narrow spit of wind-tossed dune grass. Dryden picked his way along the beach between the clumps of marram, retracing Ruth Connor’s brief journey of the night before. It was time, he’d decided, to find out more about the private life of William Nabbs. The path was well-worn, a sandy twisting alley between the overarching sea-thorn. On the beach the tide was piling shards of ice towards the high-water mark, a jumble of miniature icebergs stained with yellow seafoam.

The cottage itself had been partly buried over the decades by the creeping dunes which protected it from the sea, the garden encircled by a dry-stone wall, a barrier which had kept alive a solitary sheltered palm. Dryden clattered the gate and rapped the door. Satisfied Nabbs was out, he peered in through the double-glazed windows. The kitchen was high-tech and stylish, the appliances black, sleek and edged with chrome. To the seaward side there was a sitting room with a large window looking out over the sand and the surf. Before it was a Mastermind-style black leather chair with kick-out foot support. On one wall an eight-foot-square canvas of a wave breaking mirrored the reality beyond the glass. There was a flat-screen TV, a CD and DVD deck. Fitted bookshelves covered the walls, the volumes neat and precise. Dryden couldn’t be sure, but he’d guess they’d be in alphabetical order.

It looked like a bachelor pad, but there was something distinctly feminine about the sofa, covered with a silk throw, and on the coffee table two mugs sat, a copy of a celebrity magazine on the glass top.

On the seaward side a wooden garage stood low in the sand, the roof weighted down with rocks and pebbles from the beach. Through a small glass pane in the door Dryden glimpsed the dull white gleam of a surfboard, its skeg like a shark’s tooth. Further back a machine, covered with a tarpaulin. Black, with dull rust-dotted chrome, and the glazed emblem of a starburst on the petrol tank: a British motorbike, without number plates. He didn’t bother to try the door, which boasted two padlocks and a triple bolt.

‘Did he come back here?’ Dryden asked himself. He imagined the wounded Paul Gedney taking refuge on the night of the robbery, watching the distant blue light of the police patrol car on the coast road to the south, answering Ruth Connor’s call. Had the motorbike lain for three decades untouched? Surely not. Unless someone had wanted to keep it hidden in those first few weeks when the police had been trying to track Gedney down. After that it was perhaps too dangerous to sell, or even risk dumping without the plates.

From the top of the wide garden wall Dryden looked inland across a landscape of brittle frosted seagrass. Half a mile to the south stood one of the huge electricity pylons. High security fencing ran round its four splayed girder feet, while by a gate a blue electricity company van was parked, an amber light pulsing silently on the roof.

By the time Dryden got to the wire the engineer was climbing the encased ladder within to the pylon’s lower gallery. William Nabbs was outside the wire looking up, swaddled in a heavy-duty yellow thermal jacket, charting the climb through binoculars.

‘Hi,’ said Dryden, exhilarated by a sudden squall of hailstones. ‘What’s up?’

‘Snow and ice,’ said Nabbs, not lowering the glasses.

‘I was always terrified of these,’ said Dryden, looking up through the concentric squares of the superstructure to the high ceramic insulators which held the wires nearly 150 feet above. ‘We’d fly kites – down on the beach. They always looked closer to the wires than you’d think. I guess that’s what the fencing’s for, eh?’