There was a silence and Dryden dribbled some of the wine into the drinking funnel and replaced the COMPASS tube with a feed. He watched as the surface of the wine vibrated, draining slowly away.
‘OK. He keeps the newspapers somewhere else. That could be true. And the bogus doctor could have just been a con artist – although nothing’s missing from either the victim’s flat or the next door neighbour’s, not that either was stuffed with treasures. And the bloke in the flat when I went back could have just been looting the place now the owner’s dead.’
He unhooked the feeding tube.
‘But the thing that I can’t let go is the coincidence. They knew each other, these two – the victims. Lifelong friends. Two accidents, two sudden deaths, a shared childhood. That’s fiction – and fiction doesn’t happen.’
Dryden shook his head again, and walked to the window to raise the blinds.
The COMPASS jumped: CAN WE GO?
He sat, taking her hand, massaging the finger joints where the nurses had shown him.
‘Sure. If you want to.’ He’d hesitated and he knew why. What if depression came with the journey and the realization that this would be a brief interlude in the rest of her life? What if temptation came with the freedom?
‘Where?’ he asked, trying to push back the thought, the idea that there might be an end to it.
ANYWHERE THATS NT HERE.
He thought of that childhood summer, the white surf fizzing around his tanned legs, the sea stretching as far as a Fen horizon.
‘Give it a month, three. Let the spring begin. Then we can go – to the coast. Let’s go to the coast.’
The Dolphin Holiday Camp
Friday, 30 August 1974
They called him Dex but it didn’t suit him. He was shy, frail, with a lopsided poor-boy’s haircut. Timid too, frightened even, but he punctuated his fear with eruptions of random violence. Philip pitied him, but never turned his back on him. He ran to him now across the grass that separated the rows of chalets and they stood for a second, listening to the sounds of the distant jukebox, the metallic jangle of the camp’s fairground, their eyes piecing together the night in shades of black and white. A seagull, almost luminously pale, balanced on one of the lampposts which lit the path to the sea, its body turned into the breeze like the prow of a ship.
Smith appeared in the still-open doorway. Smith was bigger, a full year older, long limbs disjointed by a child’s rush to grow. He held the torch lightly, juggling it, smiling at the prospect of the game and scratching at his white, crewcut hair.
They stood together, saying nothing, and Philip was thrilled again by the intimacy this implied. Were they brothers? Philip could think of no way to ask. Why did they share the chalet – while Dex’s sister slept alone in a chalet by the pool? It worried him, this inconsistency in a world he thought he understood.
They ran down towards the saltmarsh. The tides had been high all week, the second of the game. Seawater, flowing up the river estuary, backed up through the network of channels to create a liquid maze. Here they had mapped out the rules – between the pumping station and the sluice, the old boathouse and the bird hide. Ahead they saw the iron sluice gate where they always met, and Dex’s sister there, waiting to begin, standing in a pool of light from her downturned torch.
Philip got there first and jumped up to sit beside her on the cool iron safety rail. He brushed her thigh with his leg, the guilt at this sudden intimacy almost buried beneath another emotion: a confused but intense attraction to the cool skin and the stretched mahogany tan.
The sister. Dex called her ‘Sis’ when he spoke, which was rare, but he stuck with her; a satellite, always connected by invisible bonds of gravity. Philip envied him that, and the soft brush of the skin.
So jealousy too: which only made him want to touch her again.
Smith, suddenly unsure, turned his square head towards the marsh. He took the torch from his pocket and shone it briefly into his own face.
‘Philip. It’s Philip’s turn.’
Sis looked at him then and he tried to smile. But he felt the fear return and his mind raced on: mapping out the game. Where? Where would he hide? He felt for the torch in his pocket, the relief at the cold touch of metal profound, then he jumped down and ran, knowing the minute hand on Dex’s watch would be racing on. Sixty seconds, never more.
The old boathouse was lost in darkness and reeds, behind it a wooden rowing boat rotted, covered by a tarpaulin. Smith, he knew, had hidden in the boathouse more than once, and Dex had used the boat itself. Philip lifted the worn green material and slipped in, turned the torch on, and imagined what the others would be doing, crowding his imagination so that the fear wouldn’t have the space to get in. He saw them, by moonlight, spreading out now, each one alone, each one searching.
He killed the light and the darkness pushed up against his eyes. Desperate to see out, to see anything, he worked his fingers along the wood where the moss was dry until he’d got a hand under the tarpaulin, and raised it an inch.
The moonlight, shredded by a passing cloud, lit up the reed tops. Beyond the dyke, along the river where they never played, there was a circular light like a bird’s eye. It was perfectly round and pale and seemed to hang in the dusk, the eye of a predator watching its prey.
