Sley groaned and a thin river of saliva bubbled at the corner of his mouth.
Dryden cradled the bony angular skull, listening to the breath rattling in his throat.
‘Questions,’ he said. ‘How long do you think it will take them to put William Nabbs in the computer and find out he doesn’t exist?’
She took a cardboard box from the desk drawer and extracted some of the tiny pellets to reload the gun. She laughed once. ‘You don’t know how wrong you are.’
‘I know one thing I’m right about. Three people have been murdered to make sure the world thinks Paul Gedney died thirty years ago. But there was a worse crime than that, wasn’t there? A crime Chips Connor was party to – although he didn’t know it at the time. Three other lives – not ended but ruined, right from the start. Those three children who never got a chance, not a real chance thanks to the stigma: thieves. You made them thieves. Just to get them out of the camp, to make sure they couldn’t tell anyone who’d listen what they’d seen.’
He put a hand on John Sley’s shoulder. ‘That’s why he’s here. Marcie hasn’t forgiven you, she never will. Her mum – her adopted mum – thought she was a thief. I don’t suppose that troubles you, does it?’
She stood, retrieving another box from the safe. ‘You’ve got the wrong man,’ she said, and Dryden noted the implication, that there was a right man. ‘William Nabbs was born in Boston, Lincolnshire in 1960. A cute kid – I’ve seen the pictures. His degree’s hanging on the wall. His parents visit at Christmas – his dad’s an accountant, his mum a teacher. He’s more real than you.’
On the stairs they heard Nabbs returning but Marcie Sley got to the door first. Dryden stood and she came to his voice, and let him lead her hands down to her husband’s face.
‘I’ll check on the ambulance,’ said Nabbs, leaving again. ‘DI Parlour’s on his way too.’
Marcie held her husband’s face between her palms. ‘John. Here.’ She’d brought a bottle of mineral water and she let him sip as she slipped two pills between blue lips. Dryden put an arm around her and felt the gentle vibration as she shook with stress.
‘Johnnie,’ she said. ‘Johnnie, there’s a doctor coming.’ She turned her head to Dryden. ‘What happened?’
Ruth Connor drew back, and as she stood the lino creaked. Marcie stiffened, realizing there was someone else in the room, and then found her with her eyes. She sniffed the air and smiled. ‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘Don’t go now. Not yet.’
Dryden’s mobile chirruped, he went to kill the call but recognized the Ely number. ‘Keep his head up, Marcie,’ he said. He left then, knowing that would be what Marcie wanted. Just a minute alone.
Out on the landing there was a fire door. He pushed down the bar, desperate for air, and stepped out onto the top of the metal stairs. The call was from his voicemail box: ‘This is a message for Philip Dryden from Father John Martin. I have that information, Philip – I have a service at 7.30 but I’ll be free before that. Ring me at the presbytery. Ely 44875.’
Dryden stabbed the numbers into the keypad. He imagined the phone ringing in the chilly hallway of the house, beneath the faded Connemara landscape. There was another flash from the pylon and in it he saw a fire engine extending its ladder skywards.
‘Father?’ he said.
‘Dryden. Yes. Sorry, let me just close the door here.’
Dryden heard the clunk of the old receiver being put down, then a muffled voice. Suddenly he was back. ‘I found the records of the child who was fostered with Paul Gedney. An elder half-brother, you recall – different father. He left the foster home in ’73 – moved north. Malton, near York. I don’t have any records after that I’m afraid.’
‘The name?’ asked Dryden.
Dryden heard paper crackling. ‘Russell Fleet. Russell John Fleet.’
‘Dryden?’ asked Father Martin, after a few seconds’ silence.
‘Sorry. You’re sure?’
‘Yes. Why? The surname was his adopted family’s. And there’s something else. I remember the child – very different from his half-brother. Timid, really, and not as bright. The real problem was the father – who had access, and abused that trust. Alcohol I’m afraid. Anyway, he made an attempt to take the boy away before he came into care. He crashed the car, there were several internal injuries to the child – he was just three – and one wound which will have stayed with him all his life. The car turned over, shredding the roof, and the metal cut into his arm. In the file there’s a picture with the doctor’s report which we had for all applicants: the scar is very distinctive, Dryden – like a jagged S.’
46
Ruth Connor was gone, and so was the holdall. A paramedic knelt beside John Sley like a penitent, checking his pulse, while another unfurled a stretcher. In the flickering light of the neon tube Sley still looked deathly white, except for the skin beneath the eyes, which had the purple blush of dead meat. Dryden took Marcie’s arm above the elbow, and saw the fingers of her right hand were flecked with blood. ‘I hit her,’ she said, her voice vibrating with anger. ‘I hit her hard.’
Dryden heard DI Parlour’s voice below in the bar. He told Marcie to stay with her husband, then slipped out on to the fire escape again, and down to the rear yard. The sky was transformed: a full moon had risen at sea. It was colder again, the landscape ice-white, stiff with frost. He ran down to the old swimming pool and climbed to the first tier of the diving board. The camp lay below, lit by the occasional arc of electricity dancing between the severed high-voltage cables.
Dryden heard an inhuman cry of shearing, tortured metal. The fire engine, parked at the base of the giant pylon, played a floodlight over the superstructure. The tower twisted on its four legs, a single cross-member of steel falling as if in slow motion to the ground below. The lights in the holiday camp flickered once, died, and revived at half power.
He turned back to the sea and saw that the chalets along the crest of the dunes were still marked by their string of pale verandah lights. He thought of Laura within, alone with the glow of the flame from the propane heater, and at that moment Ruth Connor’s silhouette broke the horizon, against the grey-silver backdrop of the sea,
