Dryden shrugged. ‘I was looking forward to it. Marcie said she’d pass on my number. But no go, eh?’
‘We left messages,’ said Sley. ‘But the illness is bad right now.’
‘What’s that to me?’ asked Dryden, sensing that he’d been expertly hooked into the trap of empathy.
‘That’s why we grew the cannabis,’ he said, getting out a packet of Marlboro and lighting one up. The ash at the end, after the first deep draw, was the same colour as his hair.
‘Joe started it on the allotment, when he knew the pain was coming. But the supply never stretched through that first winter. That really scared him, and he was too ill to plant again in spring, and he’d bought this place. So I took over the shed: it’s not difficult stuff to grow if you get the gear, and there’s guides on the net. He needs the supply, he needs to know it’s there. This year was good – you know, the wet spring, the clear summer. There’s a surplus so… it got sold.’
He slammed the door of the 4x4 and the echo ran round the Fen, bouncing back off a brick-built pumping station half a mile to the east. A dog barked four times, rhythmically, and was quiet.
‘Why don’t you come with me?’ said Sley, walking off towards the house. ‘Meet the customer.’
Dryden had sat through too many gloomy inquests on the bleak deaths of lonely drug addicts to see anything in Sley’s crime but callous greed. But he hesitated now, knowing that to meet the dying Joe would complicate the simple balance of good against evil. Could he leave the cancer victim out of the equation? And other questions remained: had reliving his time at St Vincent’s orphanage really driven Declan McIlroy to self-destruction? Was he part of the criminal circle which had grown and peddled the dope? Had he, perhaps, encroached on a market where someone else had enjoyed a monopoly? And why hadn’t Declan eased his own pain, and his final hours, with a home-grown joint? Dryden had wanted to talk to Joe all along, and now he had the chance. He, better than anyone, would know if his friend had any enemies who might have shortened his brutal life.
The farmhouse was foursquare, a late-Georgian landmark with elaborate lead guttering and sash windows. A crack ran through the brickwork indicating that the house stood on the unstable drying peat.
Sley was peering into a half-lit hallway at the side of the house.
‘It’s odd,’ he said, when Dryden caught him up. ‘He normally comes out when he hears the car.’ He tapped a gold ring on the window and a cat – jet black – leapt to the sill.
‘Let’s try the back.’ There was a kitchen door, almost all glass, but all frosted. Inside they could see a light over a work surface and the glow of an oven. Sley flipped up the letterbox and shouted for Joe. Dryden was six feet away but caught the warm smell of roasted meat from within.
Sley stood, rattling the knob. He looked out across the Fen. ‘He can’t be far.’
‘Is there another door?’ asked Dryden, the cold beginning to slink between his shoulders.
He followed Sley round to what had been the main doorway of the old house. It had a series of three semicircular steps leading up to the door itself, which had a fanlight above.
Sley stiffened, and Dryden caught him up, walking past and looking around in the splash of electric orange which illuminated the porch. He saw the corpse almost immediately, knowing he was looking at death in the same instant that he recognized the curled form as human. The sleet and snow had accumulated, creating a shroud which covered most of the exposed flesh of the face and one hand, which had tried to cover the eyes but had slipped to reveal one socket, now itself full of marbled ice. Rigor mortis and the cold had drawn up the lips, revealing teeth disfigured by nicotine.
But it was the colour Dryden would remember, or the lack of it. The skin was white, as was the hair, but so were the lips, all coated in frost. The hand that had fallen from covering the eyes was scratched and caked with earth, but where the nails showed they too were white, without a blush of pink to signal life.
They hadn’t said a word. Sley tried the door and found that it too was locked. Dryden peered into the front room. A fire had burned in the grate but was ashes now.
Sley produced a mobile. ‘I’ll get the police. Ambulance.’
‘It’s an odd way to die,’ said Dryden, his eye for the first time picking out across the frosted gravel the scuffed furrow which led to the body from the direction of the distant magnolia tree. He recalled a picture on Declan McIlroy’s wall, the two friends on a bench, the distant horizon of the Fen a shimmering line of summer heat.
He saw an image then, the dying man pulling himself along the frozen ground towards the warmth and light of his home. How could the door be locked? An accident? But that was the problem with tragic deaths, thought Dryden; they were inherently unbelievable. There was something about the curled, catlike form on the step which spoke of resignation, rather than desperation.
Dryden pressed his nose against the window again. There was a flat-screen TV in front of which a single armchair had been pulled up. In front of that was a small table from a nest, upon which was a knife, fork, and heatproof mat.
‘Dinner alone,’ said Dryden to himself.
He made a mental inventory of the room’s personal effects. The walls were bare but for a framed map of Ireland, a mirror – the only object of any age – and one richly framed canvas. He recognized one of Declan’s landscapes, the black peat tinged with an angry purple.
On a sideboard a wooden gypsy caravan stood, and before the fire a cat’s basket with a wool fleece inside. On the mantle there was a gold-framed picture of a woman: fifty perhaps, the smile as smart and sharp as the executive hair, a dark business jacket boasting a cameo brooch. The smile had lost any warmth it might have once had, like the ashes in the grate below.
Something about the picture, its precise alignment, its central position, signalled remembrance. Joe had lived alone. But did he die alone?
15
An eggshell-blue squad car swung in off the drove road, its headlamps sweeping the landscape like a lighthouse beam. Dryden, having fetched Humph from the road, watched from the fusty interior of the Capri, now parked beside the 4x4. He’d been shivering, not because of the ice which had begun to encroach on all the cab’s windows,
