The Coldest Blood

Saturday, 31 December

Humph had dropped him by the boat in the early hours and he’d climbed aboard, made coffee, and brought it up on deck to try to fend off sleep. That’s when he saw them, the measured footprints which had come out of town during the night, and then appeared to return. Footprints: heel and toe, paced out along the riverbank in the peppered snow. He checked the boat, the painter, the tarpaulin. Nothing. In winter few walked the footpath, and his post was left up at the farm. He’d gulped the coffee, trying not to think, telling himself that paranoia was an illness.

Then he’d gone below, making another pot of coffee, and seen what wasn’t there. Against the forward bulwark he’d tacked up Declan McIlroy’s canvas. The two men waist deep in blood. It was gone. Until then the cold of the night had not made him shiver. He checked the boat out, the deck and forward through the cabins. Nothing else was gone. So he poured himself a malt and returned to the deck.

He could see only one image: the intruder’s face glimpsed through the frosted striped window of the serving hatch in Declan McIlroy’s flat. The fear returned and he switched on PK 129’s floodlight, illuminating the river and the banks. A pair of black swans, startled, took to the air.

He went below but hadn’t slept, the silent landscape beyond the porthole peopled by shadows which seemed to hover on the edge of vision. By dawn the lack of sleep buzzed in his blood like adrenaline and when, a few hours later, he heard Humph hoot the Capri’s horn he felt a flood of relief not to be alone.

Over the weekend the cabbie transferred his services to better-paying customers, mostly bar and club workers who needed ferrying at ungodly hours. Dryden didn’t resent the desertion but it didn’t make Saturdays any easier to live through. But Humph always made it for breakfast, complete with fried egg sandwiches. Dryden ferried out the coffees, trying hard to let the comfort of routine obscure the rawness and fear of the sleepless night.

‘Someone’s been on the boat,’ he said, unable to remove the edge of anxiety from his voice. ‘Last night, before you dropped me off. Look.’ They walked along the riverbank, the footsteps still clear despite a smattering of newly fallen snow. ‘They took the canvas, the one from Declan McIlroy’s flat.’

‘I told you,’ said the cabbie, pausing briefly before attacking his sandwich. Humph had a low view of life on water and had advised Dryden to get a flat in town. ‘Water gypsies,’ he said. ‘Change the locks.’ Humph believed that the river’s small population of New Age narrow-boat dwellers was responsible for almost all recorded crime.

Dryden shook his head. ‘Nah. Why take the painting and nothing else?’

Humph thought about it. ‘Stay at mine – there’s room.’ This was an understatement. Since divorce had separated Humph from a wife and two daughters his semi echoed like a giant oil drum.

‘I’m fine,’ said Dryden, collecting up the mugs and plates. ‘They won’t come back.’ He looked to the horizon and found the box-like outline of High Park Flats, hoping he was right.

But twenty minutes later, as he watched the cab disappear, a final backfire marking its arrival on the main road, the sense of insecurity made him sick. He liked his own company, and loneliness was not an emotion he normally recognized, but suddenly he needed the distractions of work.

He used his mobile to make a round of calls – fire, ambulance, police, coastguard and the press office number for the county council’s social services department which was coordinating help for the old and infirm during the cold snap. The police had nothing fresh on the death of Joe Petulengo. His age was given as forty-one, a widower, with no children. Cause of death was confirmed as hypothermia, and an initial examination of the clothes in which he was found confirmed they had been soaked in water. There were also traces of pond weed and clay on his clothes, and several fibres of cannabis. Police were treating the incident as a tragic accident. An inquest would be held that Tuesday.

The news from the cold-weather helpline had been equally bleak. Today’s top temperature at sea level was likely to be minus 8 degrees centigrade, falling to minus 14 at dusk. The night would break records, with ground temperatures touching minus 20 in some exposed areas. The short-term forecast was still dry, almost parched, with little threat of any significant snowfall. But the medium-range forecast was ominous. A layer of warm air from the south was insinuating itself northwards. It would lie between the snowclouds above and the supercooled earth below. Storms were gathering and if snow did fall it would melt as it fell, passing through the warm layer, and then reach the ground as iced water, freezing on impact with buildings, cars, roads – almost anything that got in its way. Freezing showers were forecast, with the prospect of a full-blown ice storm at any time in the following ten days. He took a note, but knew it wasn’t enough. So he drank more coffee, put on another layer of clothing and rummaged in the forward store for his ice skates, then he hung his shoes by their laces around his neck and skated into town, the exhilaration of the open sky and luminous river lifting his spirits.

The Crow’s offices were deserted, like the rest of town. He began to put together a package of information on the weather – a painstaking process of ringing charities, utilities and the emergency services which would save him time come Monday morning when the pressure would be on to find some decent news stories for the Express. He found one good line almost immediately: the water board predicted that freezing ground temperatures could threaten the mains supply. Plans were being made for a fleet of water tankers to provide outlying districts, and a list of locations had already been posted online.

The risk of an ice storm, rare in the UK, was worth a standalone story. He needed some background material to paint the picture for The Crow’s readers, so he went online and Googled up some facts and figures from a lethal storm which had hit Ottawa and Quebec in 1998. The headline numbers were suitably alarming – 100,000 people had fled to special shelters, nearly 2 million had lost all power at home, hundreds had either died in accidents or been poisoned by fumes at home using faulty heaters after electricity supplies had failed. Transport had been almost entirely halted, the freezing rain making car door locks almost impossible to open. Millions of trees had died, cracked open by the freezing rain which had seeped into the wood only to expand into wedges of ice. The sea had frozen in several spots on the eastern seaboard, and pack-ice had crowded the Great Lakes.

‘It’s a disaster movie,’ said Dryden to himself, his mood lightening further.

He walked to the office bay window and looked out onto Market Street, past the etched motif of The Crow, where snow still fell for now in picturebook flakes. He abandoned work and walked out into town, buying tea from the mobile canteen in Market Square. Then he went to the police station and dutifully reported the theft of the canvas from his floating home, the uniformed PC on duty not bothering to reassure him that the culprits would be swiftly and professionally tracked down. He left with a reference number in case he had to make an insurance claim, although a second search by daylight had revealed that nothing else was missing from PK 129.

Back in town a few shoppers moved briskly between the Saturday market stalls, but already some traders were packing away, and a lorry had backed in to load up unsold vegetables. A wind was rising and the awnings and plastic sheeting strung up to protect the stalls snapped like whips. The town Christmas tree, surrounded by security fencing in the middle of the market, swayed. Dryden sought cover in the lee of a mobile fishmonger’s counter, and