Dryden refilled their glasses at the bar and checked that Humph was still happy, the cab gently vibrating to an Estonian nursery rhyme.
‘Grace left the kids with Jack and took me to the office. Smith and Declan were already there and on the table was another bag – Declan’s bag from St Vincent’s, I remember the purple crest. And there was more stuff: a fountain pen, a hip flask, a musical box with a silver lock, just a magpie’s haul really. The kind of stuff kids love.’
‘No police?’ asked Dryden.
She shook her head. ‘No. Not even then. They said they didn’t want the publicity. Declan said thank you. He was crying, and Smith held him. The security guard was different this time. I guess he was the one in charge. He said they couldn’t just forget it. They had to do something, just to make sure we never came back, in case the police did get involved. So he wrote a letter, setting out what had happened, and he put a statement with it from the Blue Coat as well. Then they copied them on a machine, three copies, and gave Grace two.’
‘What did she do?’
‘She drove us all home – that morning. We went back to the chalets and packed. Grace had got most of it all sorted anyway the night before. We just got our stuff into the car and piled in. I can’t remember much…’
She looked towards the wineglass. ‘She drove to St Vincent’s first and dropped the boys off. We all saw it. She gave the letter to the priest. Declan looked so fragile, Smith was better. He was strong enough for both of them, otherwise I really don’t believe my brother would have got through it.
‘Then she took us home. Nothing happened for a week. I didn’t ask, but I knew. She’d been talking about taking Declan as well, so we could be together. But I knew that wouldn’t happen now. And then the next weekend – on the Saturday night – we heard this row downstairs. It was her and Jack shouting, and it was a real shock because they never argued. Then the next day she just told me to pack, that I was going back to the council home. I’d been with her three months, which was the trial period, but they’d decorated my room, and we’d talked about holidays for the next summer. I’d have stayed, I know that. But it changed everything. She said she’d never see me again, and she hasn’t. She might be dead now and I wouldn’t know, she wasn’t that strong.’
She covered her mouth and lifted the wineglass, so Dryden looked away. ‘You told them you didn’t steal those things?’ he asked.
‘We did. But only once, that first morning. After that it wasn’t the most important thing. The most important thing was avoiding the police, getting away from there. And we didn’t want to say where we were – out in the marshes. That would just have been admitting we were not in the chalets, that we could have been out thieving. We couldn’t talk together so we didn’t know what we’d said. It happened so quickly I don’t think any of us had the wit to see the link – between what we’d seen the night before and what had happened the next morning. But it’s clear now, isn’t it? That they’d done it to get us away, before we could go back to the boat. If we’d told someone, they wouldn’t have believed us – and there’s no way Gedney would still have been there – not that day, not that morning.
‘So we just went along with it, their version of what we’d done. Except for one thing. They asked who the other boy was. But we never told them that.’
Dryden felt that sense of loss again, for the children who had refused to betray him. ‘And the Blue Coat?’
‘Well – yes. An irony. It was Chips Connor. Mum had paid for swimming lessons, so we knew him. We were terrified, of course, so I can’t remember much, but like I said, they gave him a kind of statement to sign – you know, just setting out that he’d gone to look under the huts and that he’d found the bags and what had been inside. And we all watched, and his hand just shook, like a leaf, shook so much he could hardly hold the pen.’
37
Out at sea, the bank of advancing cloud was now an almost tangible barrier. It appeared to drop to the surface of the water itself, and Dryden watched as a falling curtain of snow turned a red container ship grey before obliterating it entirely.
Dryden and Marcie Sley sat in a perspex shelter by the Dolphin’s swimming pool, shielded from the wind. The blind woman was still, the wind buffeting the shelter at her back, while Dryden described the scene.
‘There are clouds at sea,’ he said. ‘Creeping in. But it’s snow still, no sign yet of the rain.’
Marcie’s husband had gone back to their chalet, but Dryden still sensed his antagonism. Humph had retreated to the sand dunes with the Capri, the dog and a bag of chips.
Dryden was acutely aware that Marcie Sley had yet to ask again about the witness he had uncovered, the missing boy. Trying to postpone the moment further, he found his own question.
‘Tell me about John,’ he said. ‘Have you ever seen him?’
She laughed. ‘No. No, I haven’t. But I could tell his face in a thousand,’ she said, stretching out her fingers inside her gloves. ‘I trust him with my life, Dryden – quite literally. But he doesn’t trust you. Forgive him, he’s not a sociable man at all, but he loved the Gardeners’ – and he could spend time with Declan and Joe. They were happy there, and so was I.’
She ungloved her right hand and reached out, taking his own. ‘And he doesn’t trust you because he doesn’t know who you are. But I do.
Dryden laughed, strangely elated by the moment of recognition. She held out both her hands, palm up, and he meshed his fingers with hers. ‘I wondered why you hadn’t asked. A guess?’
A blast of snow peppered the perspex. Her face, suddenly animated, looked younger, and Dryden saw again the girl who had played in the dunes.
‘Perhaps, at first. There was something when we met – at the Gardeners’. I don’t know what it was, but first names are odd like that. I always think you can end up liking people you should hate just because their name reminds you of someone you liked. I’ve always liked the name – perhaps that’s down to you.’ She smiled. ‘When you called it made me think – but it seemed such an extraordinary coincidence, that you should be… our Philip. But it isn’t, is it? You’re a reporter, they died in Ely. Then today, down by the old boat, you called Joe plain Smith – but I thought that might be something you’d found in the files, or a cutting. But Dex – I knew then, I don’t think anyone has called him Dex for twenty years.’
In the distance, through the side window of the shelter, Dryden saw John Sley standing under the canopy by
