The Coldest Blood

20

The day had died and redundant Christmas lights winked in shop windows. High over the cathedral a flock of rooks were a thumbprint on the sky. It was a lost weekend, between Christmas and New Year, and the town centre was empty, a scarab street-cleaner criss-crossing the now deserted Market Square, which echoed to a pre-recorded rendition of ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’. In the butcher’s window a toy dog in tartan did somersaults.

Dryden stood in the lee of the giant Christmas tree. ‘The Connor case,’ he said out loud, his breath a cloud as tangible as candyfloss. He’d read something about it in the last week – perhaps two. But where? It had to be either one of the quality broadsheets, one of the tabloids, the two local evening newspapers – or The Crow. Unless he’d heard it on the radio. He made his way to the office and let himself in through the print yard door. The building was silent, Jean – the paper’s half-deaf receptionist – having closed the front counter at noon. Dryden put the 1 euro coin in the coffee machine and made his way to the large cupboard that the editor grandly referred to as the paper’s ‘library’. Here Jean pasted up cuttings in thematic folders – crime, weather, churches etc. She also bound copies of the nationals and tabloids for reference.

Where should he start?

Quite early in his journalistic career Dryden had developed a useful skill. On his first local newspaper in a small Midland town it had been his job to read the nationals to spot any story which might be followed up locally. After a while he found he could pick the town’s name out of a page of print without having to read it. The word just jumped out, a semantic Belisha beacon flashing ‘story’. For several years after moving to Fleet Street he was still haunted by the word, but he’d adapted the skill to pinpoint other key words, and always let his eye roll over a page before starting to read.

The nationals. He’d start with them. The story was unlikely to be local – they were rare enough and he’d written half the paper himself anyway. He ran through the broadsheets and the tabloids for the last two weeks. It took him twenty minutes and he found nothing. He felt tired and in need of a more convivial environment than a draughty newspaper office. Jean had not yet found time to bind copies of the local evening papers and The Crow for the last week so he took copies himself, stuffed them in a spare paperboy’s bag and set out for the riverside.

Out on the water meadows a few skaters circled the course marked out by the wooden posts Ed Bardolph and his fellow volunteers had set out on the two-inch-thick ice the previous day. Reaching the riverbank, Dryden turned north along the town-side towpath. After half a mile he came to a deserted Victorian dock called The Hythe, built to take the imported bricks which had fuelled the expansion of the city’s suburbs in the 1890s. By this miniature docklands the developers had built a pub – the Frog Hall – a riot of ill-judged Victorian taste dominated by ceramic exterior tiles which made it look like a giant public lavatory.

Dryden nudged open the door, smelt the aroma of stale beer and last night’s cigarette smoke and immediately felt better. The only customer, he took his beer into the tiny snug where a coal fire pulsed with warmth. He thought about his floating home out at Barham’s Dock, beached on ice, and he edged closer to the coals, producing a copy of The Crow from his trench coat pocket.

He read newspapers backwards. Starting with the small ads and personal column and ending with the front- page splash. The best advice he’d ever been given as a reporter was to read your own newspaper: very few did, missing plenty of stories in the small ads and failing to keep up with those written by the rest of the staff. The Crow posed less of a challenge, but the principle held.

He found a story he wasn’t looking for almost instantly and put a red ring round the tiny item…

LOST: Buffy, much-loved nervous Labrador, missing since December 24th. Must be found before New Year fireworks. Tel 66689.

‘Nice little tale,’ said Dryden, ringing the item with a pen. The barman, a morose Ulsterman, moved further down the bar.

Half an hour later he’d reached page 5. He picked out ‘Connor’ and reread the item at normal speed. It was a single paragraph in the flight of ‘News in Briefs’ laid out down the side of the page. He could see why he’d missed it: it had been taken off the Press Association wire service and was technically from outside The Crow’s circulation area anyway.

NEW WITNESSES IN MURDER CASE

The wife of holiday-camp killer Chips Connor, who has launched a campaign to win a re-trial 30 years after her husband was jailed for a brutal seaside murder, said today two witnesses had answered her appeal for new information on the case. Connor, born in the Fenland town of Whittlesea, was jailed at Cambridge Crown Court in 1975. Campaigners now plan to petition the High Court to hear an appeal against the life sentence in what has become a celebrated case.

Dryden checked the Cambridge Evening News and found that it had taken the item earlier that week on the Monday – at the same length – adding a thumbnail description of the victim – Paul Gedney. He folded the paper and looked in the fire. What had the case got to do with Declan McIlroy and Joe Petulengo and their childhoods spent in care?

Were Declan and Joe, the victims of St Vincent’s, the newly discovered witnesses in the Connor case? Thirty years ago they would have been children, thought Dryden, each with another decade before them at the orphanage. What might they have known that would have set Chips Connor free?

21

In the West Tower’s shadow a line of cabs sat, most with their engines dead. The cabbies had congregated in a licensed people-carrier halfway down the queue to save on fuel and conserve heat. A lone shopper, emerging from Argos, struggled across the High Street with a package slightly smaller than a postbox towards the black cab at the head of the rank. Dryden was surprised to see Humph’s Capri at the rear, with the cabbie firmly wedged into the driver’s seat, unsociable to the last. Humph was listening to the football: Ipswich Town versus Luton at Portman Road. He had his club strip on and in his lap a notepad on which he’d set out the team names in their proper formations. As Dryden pulled open the passenger-side door Humph fidgeted with the club scarf which he’d wrapped round one wrist.

‘Score?’ asked Dryden, flipping open the glove compartment. His mood lifted as he spotted a catering-sized packet of prawn-flavoured crisps in the footwell.

Humph flexed his miniature fists. ‘One all. Ten minutes to half time. Good job they invested in that undersoil heating. We could win this.’ The tones were clipped, warning against further conversation.

They sat in silence until half time, then they said nothing.