skies would stay clear. The Capri’s heating rattled, churning out warm air which reeked of barbecued motor oil.
Tipping the miniature bottle back, Dryden finished the malt, feeling the heat burning down into his chest. Humph produced an identical bottle and passed it over, while he turned the ignition and choked the engine into life.
‘Where?’ he said.
Did Dryden care if Declan McIlroy had been murdered? He could go back to the office, polish off a pile of wedding reports and gut some council minutes before hitting the pub with Garry and the subs for the ritual Friday tea-time piss-up – a celebration only marginally less riotous than the press-day binge. McIlroy’s case was going nowhere. He checked his mobile but there was still nothing and he wondered if Marcie Sley had really passed on his number to the elusive Joe. Why had Declan’s only close friend suddenly stopped visiting the flat? Did he know Declan was dead?
‘Misadventure’ was a verdict which covered several sins, but was unlikely to prompt the police to invest any more time in checking out the bogus doctor. But then he thought again about McIlroy’s final hours, sitting alone as the killing Arctic wind tore through the flat. He thought of the cold enamel washbasins in the dormitory at St Vincent’s, and a life disfigured by casual abuse.
Had he committed suicide after all? It was possible, Dryden admitted to himself, familiar with the subtle horrors of an aimless life.
He jerked the seatbelt across his chest. ‘High Park Flats. The allotments.’
As they drove north the snow began to fall again, a shower of half-hearted confetti, blurring the windscreen and adding an element of outright chance to Humph’s normally erratic driving style.
The allotments looked deserted, although a clutch of vehicles stood frosted by the entrance, like sugar-dusted chocolates. Through the picket fence Dryden discovered that the Dobermann was off duty – which lifted his mood dangerously higher – as he wandered between the stiff winter vegetable tops. Then, from out of the silence, he heard voices. The Gardeners’ Arms was clearly open for business. Instinctively Dryden kept himself out of view behind a large water butt. The door of the shed with the stove pipe opened, the sound of voices swelled, and a figure was admitted to what sounded like a party. A wake perhaps, for Declan McIlroy?
Dryden had not, as far as he could tell, been seen. He slipped away towards the perimeter Leylandii hedge, moving in a series of zigzags, using the dotted sheds and makeshift cabins as cover. At the back of the allotments was a dumping area for garden refuse fed by a narrow track which ran behind the hedge. Despite the icy air the aroma of rotting vegetables and manure was astringent.
The sound of voices swelled and, looking towards the stove-pipe shed, Dryden saw John Sley slipping out. Dryden slid sideways and found a new viewpoint, between two tree trunks. He watched Sley, vulture’s head forward, shoulders hunched under his donkey jacket. Marcie’s husband was bareheaded, the cruelly shorn grey hair barely covering the bones of his skull, cigarette smoke trailing from a butt held between his lips.
Sley approached a large hut at the back of the allotments, checked the lock and turned to retrace his steps to the Gardeners’ Arms. Thinking twice, he stopped himself, slipped a key in the lock and moved inside the hut, leaving the door open. A light came on, and in the dim twilight an amber wedge illuminated the frosted ground outside the door.
But no light showed at what Dryden had taken to be a line of PVC sheets set in the roof. Why build a shed with no windows or skylights? Dryden took a further step back into the shadows.
Then the orange light on the grass turned red. The shift in colour was striking, the red tinged with yellow like a burning ball of sodium. Then the light turned blue, not the pale dying blue of the sky but a cold neon blue, this time tinged with the blacker shades of iodine. There was a brief return to red, and then the orange light returned. Sley reappeared, closing the door behind him and double checking the lock. He stood for a second, patting something in his overcoat chest pocket, and then returned towards the Gardeners’ Arms.
Dryden made his way to the hut Sley had visited, and circled it. Up close he realized he had underestimated its size. It had to be a good twenty-five feet long and ten wide. Not a single pinpoint view was open to the inside. The lock was a Yale, new and shiny. At the far end was a water butt, with a pipe cut out to enter the wooden panelling through a sealed port. Dryden swung himself up onto the top of the butt and tried to peer in through the roof. Nothing. Plywood boards were secured under each pane of the transparent ribbed PVC.
The sound of laughter drifted across the allotments, the light of the stove flared within the Gardeners’ Arms, and Dryden thought now that he knew, at least in part, the secret they shared within.
14
It was 4.00pm and the day had died. Dryden, within the warm, darkened sanctuary of Humph’s cab, struggled to see through the frosted windscreen. A security lamp on one of the allotment sheds caught the glitter of frost forming on the Leylandii hedges. A car backfired on the Jubilee Estate and a car alarm pulsed. Humph moodily considered the distant convivial glow from the Gardeners’ Arms. Dryden had made him move the Capri back into the shadows near High Park Flats. Here the air was colder still, the ice forming Spirograph patterns on the inside of the windscreen which the cabbie periodically attacked with a chamois leather.
‘You could fetch me back a pint,’ said Humph, shifting in his seat and emitting a thin odour of chicken tikka massala.
Dryden, equally tempted to gatecrash, wound down the window to refresh the air. ‘I’d love to, but – and I’m only guessing here – they don’t do carry-outs. Besides – I’m watching that,’ he said, nodding towards a 4x4 parked up with the rest by the white picket fence near the entrance to the allotments. In the grey world of the dusk they could just see enough of the interior to make out the dog-mesh behind the rear passenger seats. Within, a grey shape flexed and stretched before sinking from view.
The first to leave the wake was a thin man with a whippet, staggering slightly over the uneven ground. He found his car, at the third attempt, and drove off without his lights on, local radio blaring suddenly from the onboard stereo.
John Sley was next out, expertly juggling car keys from left hand to right, and enjoying a sinuous swagger. The donkey jacket lapels were turned up against the night as he unlocked the 4x4. He flicked a switch on the dashboard which lit the ground below the car in fluorescent blue.
‘Now there’s clever,’ said Dryden, his heartbeat rising.
