Dryden felt the blood draining from his face. ‘You’re a genius,’ he said, turning to the cabbie.
‘Piss off,’ said Humph, sensing an unpardonable excursion into sarcasm.
‘No. It was blackmail all right. But Lutton’s husband said something to me earlier back at his clinic – “Why do you people always assume crime is about money?” Well, he’s right. This time it wasn’t. He didn’t want money. He wanted something else, and what if Gedney wanted both the Luttons to help?’
Dryden let the glove compartment fall open and twisted the cap off another malt.
By the time they reached the camp gates he was sure; but he needed to be safer than that. ‘Drop me over there, beyond the lights by reception – I’ll meet you in the dunes at the usual place – give me twenty minutes.’
The ice storm was already causing havoc: a telegraph pole lay across the path to reception, a ball of tangled ice at its head. A bare apple tree stood encased in ice and as Dryden passed a crack rang out like a gunshot as one of the branches sheared away from the main trunk and smashed to the ground like a chandelier. Looking up, Dryden could see the power lines clearly despite the falling night, a luminescent white wire hung with icicles. One half of the canopy over the entrance doors had buckled under the weight of ice above and only a few of the carriage lamps on the chalets still shone.
The rain fell like pellets, tapping at his skull and bouncing high from the hard surfaces of the tarmac and path.
The foyer was empty, the buzz of Muzak replaced by a live local radio broadcast.
‘… and residents in Whittlesea report a complete loss of power to the Eastfields Estate. A series of accidents has closed the main bridge into the town and police now advise all motorists who are able to leave their cars and find refuge for tonight.’
The lights flickered once and then regained power as Muriel Coverack appeared from the back office.
‘How you getting home?’ asked Dryden.
‘I’m not. I took a busload back a few hours ago but I’ve got a chalet here for the night. And a free meal. Big deal, eh?’
Dryden nodded and headed for the internet cafe, where he extracted a large espresso from the vending machine.
Muriel followed him in. ‘The police left a message. They said if I saw you to make sure they knew. You’ve got to go to the dining hall. They’re all down there – there’s a mobile kitchen and everything.’
The sound of rain clattering against the roof filled the foyer with noise like static.
‘Thanks,’ said Dryden, not looking up from the computer.
‘Shall I tell them, then?’
‘Don’t bother,’ said Dryden. ‘I’m on my way.’
The Google search box came up and he punched in the name of Lutton’s private clinic. The website was adorned with a picture of the building, a Queen Anne house in lush grounds with the kind of gravel drive over which only polished cars crunch. There was a Q & A section on Graves Disease, and a cross-link to an NHS site which listed the various symptoms. It was a thyroid condition which could lead to fluctuating sex drive, weight loss, intolerance to heat and sweating. Most symptoms could be kept under control with steroids, but the treatment brought with it side-effects – diabetes, high blood pressure, psychosis, cardiovascular problems and cataracts. Dryden tried another site for Graves Disease and found a more extensive list of symptoms, including proptosis. He clicked on it and found himself looking at a series of before and after mug shots.
‘Bingo,’ said Dryden. ‘Pop eye.’
He read on quickly. Bulging eyes were one of the commonest symptoms of the disease. In most cases patients were treated with steroids or had part of the thyroid gland removed. But if the bulging of the eye continued an orbital decompression – surgery – could be undertaken, an operation which results in the eye sitting back in its socket. The pictures were graphic: in the ‘before’ version one young woman stared out, the whites completely encircling the iris in both eyes, the lids seemingly unblinking, the edges inflamed and red. In the ‘after’ version the bulging of the eyes, and the swelling of the face around the eye sockets, was gone. She looked like a different person. If you’d been her brother or sister you’d have walked past her in the street.
Dryden heard voices from the office behind the reception counter, so he hit a printout button and grabbing the sheet ran out into the dusk, down through the camp. The floodlight by the amusement park was still working and showed that the helter-skelter had buckled, the top third sinking down and skewing round. A line of changing booths had collapsed and several telegraph wires lay rigid on the frosted grass. A uniformed PC stood guard down by the water’s edge, the scene-of-crime tapes flapping like prayer flags in the wind.
As Dryden looked to the distant lines of white surf just visible at sea the rain stopped. Within seconds the air was completely still and champagne-chilled, the only sound the high-pitched hum of the pylons overhead and the occasional crack of tortured wood. The storm had passed inland, revealing a planetarium of stars. At sea red and green navigation lights came and went.
He thought about the face of Paul Gedney. He thought about thirty years of natural ageing, layered onto a face transformed by an operation to cure the symptoms of Graves Disease. He saw faces, calling them up from the twisting story which had unfurled since the day he had climbed the steps of High Park Flats to the home of Declan McIlroy: and in each he searched for the pale fleeting image of the thief.
Humph joined him at the water’s edge, Boudicca racing past them to dance on the sand.
‘Nothing moving on the road,’ said the cabbie, and they turned to look inland. The usual ribbon of red and white lights shuffling along the coast was still, a few cars stationary. ‘It’s like an ice rink up there. Copper stopped the cab, wanted to know where you were. I said the chalet.’
A light shone from Laura’s room and another PC stood duty on the verandah steps.
‘You said blackmail,’ said Dryden, digging his hands deep into his coat pockets. ‘Blackmail, sure. He needed a new face. I said it was a perfect plan – but it was better than that. They wanted to get rid of Chips, they wanted to make sure the police thought Paul Gedney was dead, and they wanted each other.
‘If he went to the police and agreed to a deal Elizabeth Lutton faced jail, but more to the point her husband’s career would have been wounded too, perhaps fatally. According to the website the clinic was founded in ’73 – he’d
