The Coldest Blood

‘I wanted to come.’

They listened to a gang of seagulls fighting over a fishtail in the shallows. ‘There was a boat – in the marshes, that summer. Can we see if it’s still there?’ she said. He nodded and took her arm, noting the deliberate use of the metaphor of sight.

They walked round the chalets and down towards the old camp. Dryden could almost feel the presence of the ten-year-old girl who’d held his hand within the covered boat, and he wondered if she too felt anything of the past.

John Sley had yet to speak, the cigarette still held in his shattered teeth.

There was a small bridge now over the ten-foot drain they had once jumped. They edged across it until they stood by the old sluice, rusted shut, while an ugly electric pump stood in its place in the dunes, humming.

‘We’re at a sluice,’ said Dryden, his voice in neutral.

‘We met here each night – the children,’ said Marcie, bringing her shoulders up towards her ears like a child treasuring a memory. ‘The boys were always late, and too excited. I could hear them coming through the dunes, it’s a very boyish thing – that mixture of fear and bravado.’

Dryden turned south as the north wind brought in a flurry of snowflakes.

‘Who was bravest?’ he said. ‘Smith? He would have been the oldest.’

‘Yes, always,’ she said, looking at him intensely now, the eyes shining. ‘Declan could live with the fear because Smith was there. And Philip was there because he was too scared to say no – he never looked scared but I knew he was. There was a kind of electricity, a shell of anxiety.’

She looked around her, smiling. Dryden felt the pain of recognizing himself, not just then, but now.

‘So we played the game,’ she said. ‘Sardines. Smith adapted it for the saltmarsh. One would hide, the others would spread out to find them. If you found the one who was hiding then you squeezed in and waited for the rest. It was ideal – the maximum injection of fear and excitement. There were only a dozen possible places, really – unless you took your chance in the reeds – so we always had time to finish. That night it was Philip who went first. It should have been Declan but there was a fight, and so we chose Philip instead. We gave him 100, then we killed the torches and spread out…’ she said, taking a step towards the edge of the drain.

Dryden took her arm before her husband could, and she gripped his hand as if to tell him something. ‘Which way?’ he forced himself to ask. A seagull screeched overhead.

‘The boat was to the south,’ she said.

For half a mile they wove between the channels of the liquid maze, where the last high tide had left little crystal palaces of ice, paper-thin canopies hanging in the freezing air, abandoned by the retreating seawater.

At first Dryden thought the old boat was gone. Thirty years of wet rot and the sluicing of the tidal water must have slowly rubbed it out, an artist’s mistake gently erased from a watery canvas. But as they stood on the bank he saw in the wet sand revealed by the tide the low-pitched roof of the Curlew, the seawater edging down her side to reveal the first graceful curve of the porthole, the glass as murky as a jellyfish.

Marcie’s husband had hung back, his great fists loose by his sides, reluctant to share the past.

‘There’s a boat just here,’ said Dryden. ‘A porthole’s showing.’

She nodded, living the memory within. ‘We’d been searching for ten minutes, perhaps a bit more. Then we all heard it, a cry. It seemed very close, and very real. Within a minute we were there – everyone except Philip because he was hiding – and there was a boat moored in the reeds, the porthole lit, so we crept forward to look inside.’

Dryden imagined himself listening too, still hidden beneath the green tarpaulin.

‘We didn’t normally go that far – down to the river. There were boats passing sometimes, and a path. So Smith had said no, right from the start, that it was out of bounds for the game. But I crept forward anyway, and the others followed. The water was gurgling out with the tide and the fair was on at the camp so there was plenty of noise to cover us.’

Dryden slipped a hand through her arm and she shifted her weight so that they leant together.

‘Paul Gedney was inside,’ she said. She touched each eyelid with her fingertips. ‘Smith and Declan saw him too. He had this mousy hair, cut short, and his shirt was off and he was well built, sort of marbled with muscle, grotesque really.’

‘What was he doing?’

She shrugged. ‘I think he’d passed out. He was lying in a bunk. There were loads of books, and food – biscuits, crisps, fruit. There was a generator running, and a single light, and clothes scattered about, and one of those plastic drinking barrels with a tap. And this box…’

Dryden led her down the bank towards the boat which, inch by inch, was emerging from the black water as the tide ebbed.

‘What kind of box?’

‘It was metal – aluminium perhaps: that white, blanched colour. It was ribbed and patterned on the outside, and it had a lid with two locks, about the size of one of those coolboxes you take on the beach. Perhaps that was it. His hand lay on it as if it was precious.’

She stood still, rebuilding the memory. ‘Where’s the boat?’she asked suddenly.

Dryden led her along the sand, crisp underfoot with ice. The Curlew had tipped to port over the years, lifting its starboard rail above the riverside bank. Dryden took her hand and put it on the frozen wood, edged with frost. On the stretch of exposed deck black crabs scuttled across the ice.

She gripped the rail. ‘He was just lying there, but the sleeve of his shirt was rolled up and the arm was covered in blood, dripping down. There was a clean open wound – two inches, perhaps three.’ She licked her lips and looked back, as if sensing her husband’s presence against the skyline. ‘The boys went back then, to find Philip – there were only a couple of places we hadn’t checked. But while they were away it happened again…’