They shook hands, the assistant manager’s flesh flabby and moist. Russell was a stone overweight but still powerful: middle aged, medium height, with the kind of limpid blue eyes usually reserved for people in recent receipt of a telegram from the queen. His skin was blotchy and overheated, discoloured by liver spots. His head was shaven in the modern style: a mistake as the stubble was prematurely grey and the cranium revealed was shallow, lacking the high dome which can make the skull noble. One eye was inflamed, an infection edging the eyelids in red.
Dryden knew a picture of health when he saw one.
‘How about a White Lady?’ asked Fleet.
Dryden nodded, wondering if he was missing a private joke. ‘Sure.’ He turned back to Ruth Connor as Fleet fussed with the cocktail shaker, brushing aside an offer of help from a young barman who had appeared from a back office.
‘You’ve been talking to William Nabbs,’ said Dryden.
‘Yes. He mentioned your – interests. Can I take it your visit is partly professional?… I’m sorry – perhaps I should have recognized the name. George Holme, Chips’ solicitor, sends us the cuttings. It’s been a great help, the support of the press. Thank you – I don’t get the chance to say that very often to a reporter in person. There was a story today, I think – in the
Dryden shook his head, impervious to the flattery. He’d written one story about Chips Connor and he doubted she’d even noticed his name. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I saw it too. So the appeal is off? The lawyers seem to think there’s no hope now.’
‘What do you think, Mr Dryden?’ said Fleet, setting the drinks on the bar. ‘Ruth’s lost hope too – it’s been cruel these last few weeks. She thought Chips was coming home.’
Dryden could sense the electricity in the air, a conversation hidden within another. He picked up the cocktail. ‘To estate agents – the only profession the British public distrusts more than journalism.’
Ruth Connor coloured slightly and took a gulp, glancing at a framed picture on the polished wooden panel beside the bar. Dryden stood, taking a closer look, letting the alcoholic thud of the cocktail take effect. It was Chips, a teenager, posing on the edge of the pool in trunks, the sunshine catching his natural summer tan.
Dryden turned. ‘Could have been a film star, eh?’
She nodded, turning her chin to catch the light on what Dryden imagined was her best side.
Dryden threw some money on the bar and bought a round, excluding Fleet, who had been cradling an orange juice anyway. Ruth Connor’s assistant manager moved off down the bar with a sheaf of paperwork once he’d conjured up two more of the lethal concoctions.
‘I visited him today,’ said Dryden, still watching for a reaction.
She didn’t miss a beat. ‘I know. We talk most evenings when I can’t get over. If this is a working holiday, Mr Dryden, there seems to be very little holiday involved.’
Dryden shrugged as if it were a decision made by others. ‘It’s handy – having the prison up the road,’ he said. ‘So – do you think he’s resigned to seeing out the sentence? What’s that – another five years? He seems like a model prisoner, but no remission?’
She siphoned up some more cocktail and Dryden thought there was suddenly something desperate about her, a tension which made her hand vibrate as she shuffled an errant hair from her cheek: ‘It’s been obvious to anyone who’s talked to Chips for the last thirty years that he’s an innocent man. But the judge stipulated that he should serve the sentence. And, frankly, he is not interested in going in front of a parole board. All we want is for the verdict to be quashed – which would be as much justice as he could hope for. After that, who knows what will happen? There’s money, he can choose.’
Dryden sipped his White Lady. ‘I’m sorry – can I ask a personal question?’
‘You can try.’ The tone was as hard as the old ballroom floor.
‘The newspaper reports that I’ve read said Chips had learning difficulties. Today – well, it’s clear that he has some problems. Were those problems as marked when you were married?’
She smiled the clinical smile again and retrieved a handbag from the bar. A Filofax, businesslike, held a snapshot wallet. Out of it she took a colour picture, a couple dancing, both faces together for the camera.
‘Our wedding day,’ she said. ‘August 31st, 1971. We were eighteen.’
Dryden recognized the face but everything else was different. She danced with arms thrown free at her side, her hair turning and rising, both feet just clear of the ballroom floor.
‘It’s here,’ he said, tapping his shoe on the wooden polished boards.
She nodded, reaching out to reclaim the image.
Fleet appeared with the third round of cocktails and she took an inch off the top. ‘I don’t think anyone approved – but Chips was good looking, great fun. He loved the camp, wanted to make a go of it too. We’d been at school together, so there was nothing of the whirlwind about it, quite the opposite. I was very lucky, actually, and very happy.
‘But there was an accident.’ She touched her forehead at the precise spot Dryden had noted the scar on her husband’s forehead. ‘He was diving – in the main pool. We had a high board then…’
Dryden nodded, remembering the falling bodies, the thrill of danger.
‘A child, just toddling, pushed one of the pedalos on the poolside into the water. It drifted under the board – Chips didn’t see it until he was falling. There was a lot of blood…’ Dryden thought how pale she always was. ‘The skull was split, there was some damage to the brain where it had been crushed up against the serrated bones behind the forehead – it’s a common feature of car-crash injuries. He came back quickly enough, that was Christmas ’73, and in many ways he seemed unhurt. The good humour was there, but there was something childlike after that… and there were childlike fears. He seemed to find people very frightening, especially close up, and he was genuinely terrified by emotions. There was a loss of something. He’d always been so good with people… but now, he was very cold. It was like he couldn’t imagine how anyone else felt.’
