beyond the steamed windows of a laundry.
A pair of female nurses stood arm-in-arm on the doorstep engaged on separate mobile phone calls. Dryden, extracting one of his Greek cigarettes, stood close to the orderly and lit up.
It took five seconds for the orderly to speak. ‘Visiting?’ He was in his twenties, unshaven, his eyes haunted by lack of sleep and overindulgence in something liquid.
Dryden shook his head. ‘Looking for the union rep – Unison. Any idea?’
‘Not on site. This place is closing – not enough patients to justify the staff, not enough staff to justify the funding. Lynn’s got the nearest full-time rep.’
‘I was after a bit of history, actually – someone who used to work here as a nurse. Anyone still around?’
‘Yeah. Loads – that’s the problem. Nurse, you said?’
‘Yeah – male, a trainee. With access to the dispensary. This would be ’74, perhaps a bit earlier.’
He whistled, as if Dryden had asked to speak to Queen Victoria. ‘That’s going back a bit.’ He ground the stub of the cigarette out on the tarmac. ‘Come on.’
The change in temperature was astonishing: the heated fug of the hospital interior settling instantly on Dryden’s frosted skin. The smell turned his stomach, the memory of custard weaving round that of urine and floor scourer. They picked their way through a hallway strewn with dirty linen and out into one of the hospital’s main corridors. Sixty yards ahead of them an overweight nurse pushed a patient into the distance on a trolley: otherwise the long vista was empty, the dully polished floor reflecting noise from the wards at each side. A TV buzzed a sports commentary, while somewhere a tap gushed into a bath, the plumbing banging as it dealt with the rush of hot water.
At the far end they descended damp brick steps under a sign marked DISPENSARY. At the bottom was a windowless room with some plastic seats and a matching pot plant. A counter behind meshed glass took up one side of the room, the service hatch was open and deserted except for a single tea cup and saucer. It was even hotter here and Dryden could feel through the soles of his feet the hum of a boiler somewhere in the basement.
Dryden’s guide smacked the counter with the palm of his hand: ‘Shop! Marina, shop!’
His guide retreated, leaving Dryden to wait alone. He paced the room, reading posters on the walls, many of which looked like they’d been printed up for the launch of the NHS in the forties – a diagram of a dissected eye, a list of do’s and don’ts for diabetics and a gruesome set of pictures showing the progress of malignant melanomas. He checked his watch: Laura was in the pool at the camp doing hydrotherapy, but he felt the gentle tug of guilt.
‘Yes?’ The woman was black, a kind of red-mahogany colour, and Dryden guessed the genes were Cameroonian. There was something imperious about the long, graceful neck and the precise angle at which she held her elegant head, the hair cut short and grey. Dryden estimated she was sixty.
‘I’m sorry to bother you – you must be busy. I was looking for someone who might remember a nurse who worked here in the seventies. My name’s Dryden – Philip Dryden. I am a journalist, with a local paper in Ely.’ He let that sink in and, when she didn’t throw him out, carried on. ‘It’s about a nurse called Paul Gedney. The police were after him – something to do with stealing drugs? He was here then – in the summer of ’74.’
She picked up the tea and came round the counter, sitting elegantly on one of the plastic chairs, expertly balancing the cup in its saucer. ‘It’s a long time ago.’
‘But you remember him?’
She shook her head as if trying to dislodge a persistent image. ‘What’s this about?’ she asked, fiddling with a long amber earring.
Dryden told her about Chips Connor’s case, and the hunt for witnesses to free the convicted man. He said he didn’t have much time, and he checked his watch to prove it. But it seemed she’d decided to talk anyway, because she cut in before Dryden had finished his pitch.
‘Paul – I remember Paul, yes. I’d just qualified, so I was a few years older, but we got on well. There was something very odd about him, you see.’
She paused, waiting for Dryden to invite the disclosure. ‘Which was?’
‘Unlike the rest of the population, he was not a racist.’
Dryden didn’t need this, and he suppressed an urge to pick up the point. He wondered if she’d mixed up racial discrimination with the innate Fen antipathy to newcomers of all colours. In the mid-1970s they probably hanged people with ginger hair in Whittlesea.
‘Right. But what was he like?’
‘An outsider, like me. He would have been eighteen or nineteen years old, I think, when he first came here. Very self-contained, you know, almost arrogant really. He always made it plain that he’d chosen to be a nurse, that it wasn’t second best to being a doctor, which was a bit disingenuous because while he was certainly smart he’d missed out on a formal education. He was that type: a kind of undisciplined intelligence. I think he resented that lost opportunity.’
‘Did he resent anything else?’
She sipped the tea. ‘People who got in his way. There was something slightly malevolent about him, you see. I got the feeling he’d do anything, you know, if he’d judged the outcome as correct. He was one of those people with their own moral compass – he decided what was right and wrong.’
‘And he stole drugs? He’d decided that was right, had he?’
‘Yes,’ she said, tilting her chin. ‘Yes he had. He was very close to his family – his mother, actually. She was ill, and had been for many years – diabetes, I think, but I could be wrong. Anyway, she needed support and help at home. He tried to manipulate the bureaucracy, the red tape, to get her extra cash and visits. But it didn’t work. I think he stole to finance a carer, the medical treatment. She had private care at a clinic, I think, which didn’t come cheap.’
‘Regular Robin Hood, then. What kind of drugs?’
