Dryden sipped a malt whisky, wondering where Chips Connor was now. He abandoned the memory. Until he could talk to Marcie Sley – or possibly Ed Bardolph – he could make little progress in trying to understand how the case was linked to Joe Petulengo and Declan McIlroy. He checked his watch: it was still too early to catch Bardolph before the skating began down by the river. And he’d have to leave Declan McIlroy’s sister another day at least before trying a fresh pitch for information.
‘The Tower?’ he asked Humph, pulling the seatbelt across his chest.
Humph pointed forward along the parked-up rank. ‘You’ll have to wait.’
There was nothing quite as rigid as the etiquette of the taxi driver. They sat listening to the second half as the cabs edged forward until Humph was able to pull away from the head of the queue. By the time The Tower came into sight the day was over, unlike the one-all draw which was limping into its final minute.
The foyer’s Christmas lights winked expensively in the gloom. The Tower’s heating system, always efficient, was as plush as the carpets. Laura’s room was a few degrees cooler, and Dryden went to the window to watch the last of the light draining from the sky. The sight lifted his spirits and he raised his wife from the bed, hugging her close until he could hear her heartbeat. He felt an echo of what home had been like, finally banishing the anxiety which had been with him since he’d found the footsteps in the snow alongside
He poured wine and lit a cigarette, going back to the window to drop the blinds.
‘It’s night now,’ he said, the need for sleep almost overwhelming. ‘You’ve no idea how cold it is out there. The monkey puzzle tree – the big one on the lawn – that’s just crystal, like one of those cheap trinkets we used to buy on the coast. And I can see Humph in the Capri – he’s asleep. He’s been listening to the football – I think the excitement wears him out. He’s got the dog on his lap – or it could be the other way round…’
He drew deeply on the cigarette, the nicotine bringing tears to his eyes.
Laura’s auburn hair lay in a fan on the pillowcase. He lay down beside her and ran his fingers through it, smelling the rich natural scent of the oil, as pungent as a child’s.
‘Why do you think some kids never get adopted? They spend their whole lives in foster homes, or care. I guess it’s like animals – people always want the perfect one, the youngest one, the one they can mould themselves. They don’t want a history, they don’t want issues.’ That word again.
The COMPASS jumped into life, the roll of paper clattering as it fed out of the computer printer.
HOLIDAY PLEASE.
She never said please. Dryden sensed that she felt the word was too much; a symbol of dependency and need.
‘Of course. I’m sorry. It’s just so cold, and we can’t go far. A cottage, perhaps – the coast, like we said? How about one with an Aga?’
There was silence then, and he knew this was a reproach, for making her plead, and for failing to disguise his reluctance – a reluctance which sprang not from any rational fear, but from anxiety about what might happen if he took his wife away from The Tower. The leaving in itself would be good for them both, even if it suggested the possibility of not returning.
22
Humph dropped him on the riverbank, where the ice was now thick and pitted with the tracks of pebbles and stones pitched across its surface. A pair of ungainly swans strolled in midstream like cowboys. Dryden walked south past the Maltings and the Cutter Inn to a terrace of Victorian houses which looked out over the watermeadows. At the end of the row was a boathouse, the temporary HQ of the Fen Skating Association. The ground floor had originally housed the boats, while upstairs there was a balcony outside a function room behind a single picture window. Here Dryden had watched the Cambridge crew in training the previous year during a press event before the annual Varsity boat race, a memory clouded by six large glasses of Pimm’s No. 1 sucked through a straw.
The wooden doors which ran the entire length of the boat-house frontage were shut, leaving a small wicket gate as the only entry point. Inside, trestle tables had been set up between the low-hanging boats, piled high with skater registration forms. The space was crowded with men in Christmas sweaters and other assorted festive knitwear. Fluorescent yellow stewards’ jackets hung in lines, above a rank of metal lanterns. There was a small kitchen at the rear and soup was being decanted into thermos flasks. Dryden found Ed Bardolph unwrapping loudhailers from a packing case.
Dryden shook his hand. ‘Ed.’
Bardolph’s face was flushed with the cold and adrenaline, and the room buzzed with childlike excitement.
‘The river’s nearly solid,’ said Dryden.
Bardolph nodded, checking a small oven crammed with heating pies. ‘Should be safe by 8.00pm we reckon. We might try and rerun the long-distance race to Cambridge. They did it in ’63.’
‘Time?’
‘Late. Maybe midnight. We could wait a day but the forecast is not 100 per cent – there’s warm air up there, if it touches ground level we could lose the lot and freezing rain would ruin the ice.’
‘I’m sorry…’ said Dryden, stepping closer. ‘I’ve got some bad news that you may not have heard yet. Can we talk… in private?’
They climbed the stairs. Bardolph had clearly been dividing his time between his real job and his passion, and had set up an impromptu office on the bar in the function room complete with fax, laptop, mobile charger, and file case.
‘I can work pretty much anywhere,’ he said, as if trying to convince himself. ‘And we only get the weather once in a blue moon.’
They went out on to the balcony. The view across the frozen Fen was breathtaking, a living Dutch masterpiece of gliding figures.
