‘Settled, then?’
‘Yeah – yeah. They’ve been together nearly as long now. The kids are smart – hardly kids, really. Twins – teenagers. Nice family. Everyone has a row now and then though, don’t they?’ she added.
Dryden nodded, thinking of Laura again, thinking how wonderful it would be to have a row. When he’d got back to the chalet he’d caught some sleep in a chair and made breakfast as dawn broke. They’d eaten something together: coffee and a milky cereal. He’d gone to shave and when he got back she’d written something on the COMPASS.
YOU PROMISED. IT’S TIME.
He’d made so many promises, but he knew all too well which one she wanted him to keep. He’d lit the propane heater, set it on low, just in case the heating failed while he was out. He’d smelt it then, the smell of heated gas, burning innocently. He could have blown the flame out with a kiss, letting the deadly gas fill the chalet.
He looked out of the minibus window through the circular porthole he’d cleared and saw the black peat, a blur to the horizon. ‘So you go back that far, do you – twenty years? Is that when Russ arrived?’
‘Oh no, I can beat that,’ she said, creeping past a police car parked near where a lorry had slewed off the road and into the dyke. The container stuck up at a crazy angle, the cab embedded in the bank.
‘I started work at the Dolphin in ’69. Chambermaid. I worked for Ruth’s father – John Henry. I’m the boss now – twenty staff. I’m running the bus because the driver didn’t make it.’
Dryden swung round in his seat. Other than Ruth Connor she was the first person he’d found who could recall the camp before the murder of Paul Gedney.
‘What was he like – the old man, John Henry?’
‘Nothing like her,’ she said, and realizing she’d said too much, she made a show of concentrating on an L-driver ahead on the icy road.
‘She’s a cool customer,’ said Dryden, as lightly as he could. ‘It was ’75, wasn’t it – when Chips was jailed? I’ve been in to see him – nice guy. What did people think?’
She checked the rear-view again. ‘Russ said you were a reporter.’
Dryden looked out of the window. ‘That’s right. But I’m off duty. You know there were two witnesses who could have got Chips freed – kids at the camp in ’74. They were friends of mine. I was here too that summer. I was just a kid.’
‘Thanks. Now I feel ancient.’
‘Sorry,’ said Dryden, smiling into the rear-view. His eyes were tired, and his shock of black hair flattened on one side where he’d slept heavily back at the chalet.
‘It’s just that I’d like to find out what happened to them. I think someone killed them to stop them coming forward.’
‘Russ said.’
‘And I think they tried to kill me.’
She looked at him then, the car stationary in a queue tailing back from a flashing police light by the main bridge into Whittlesea. ‘Russ said the police didn’t think there was anything suspicious – that they’d died naturally. One of them was an alky?’
Dryden thought Russ had done a lot of talking. ‘So what did people think – at the time, about Chips?’
She turned off the ignition and they sat in sudden silence in the unmoving queue. ‘Chips and Ruth went back a long way, yup? To school. Sweethearts, married at eighteen. And they were happy, you could see that. Then she took over at the camp when John Henry fell ill. Chips was brilliant with kids, a natural. A few years went by, there were no kids. People talk, like they do.’
She bit her lip, sensing the irony. ‘She’s always been odd with kids. Brittle. Then Chips had the accident. I was in the camp that day, we all came running because they had an alarm by the pool and someone set it off. There was this slick in the water, you know – like from his head.’ She turned to Dryden and he could sense the frisson of horror even after thirty years.
‘When he got back from the hospital, he was a mess. He was just scared of everything, really jumpy, but he couldn’t tell you what was wrong – just like a child.’ She blushed suddenly. ‘I don’t have any, so what do I know – but that’s what they say, isn’t it?’
Dryden nodded.
‘He used to do the poolside duty and the locking up and stuff but anything else, like with people, was too much. He’d end up in the dunes somewhere, and they’d have to send the security guards out to find him.’
‘But they stayed together… him and Ruth?’ said Dryden.
‘Sure. But he was ill, and they decided to get some treatment, see if they could do anything. So they took him away. Course, looking back, they said it was the stress – that he’d killed that bloke, beat him to death, and he’d dumped the body out at sea.’
Dryden nodded. ‘I’ve read all about the trial. About Paul Gedney turning up and asking them for help.’
Muriel licked her lips. ‘Read about Lizzie Sykes?’
She had a smile on her face now and Dryden sensed the kind of communal thrill that comes from shared malicious gossip. ‘Nope.’
She fired up the ignition and they crawled forward again. ‘After Gedney went missing the police put out his picture, right? He didn’t have a face you could forget. Those eyes. Anyway, this Lizzie Sykes recognized him straight off. She was a bit simple, actually, but I don’t think she had the wit to lie. Big girl, but slow. Anyway, she was from Whittlesea too – not like the rest of us, we’re all from Lynn – and she’d seen him in the park. This was a bit back, the late sixties, when they were all at school.’
