The Coldest Blood

Jim Kelly

Now available in hardback Michael Joseph ?16.99

For seventeen years, the Cambridgeshire hamlet of Jude’s Ferry has lain abandoned, requisitioned by the Ministry of Defence for military training in 1990. The isolated, 1000-year-old community was famous for one thing – never having recorded a single crime.

But when local reporter Philip Dryden joins the Territorial Army on exercise in the empty village, its spotless history is literally blown apart. For the TA’s shells reveal a hidden cellar beneath the old pub. And inside the cellar hangs a skeleton, a noose around its neck.

Two days later, a man is pulled from the reeds in the river near Ely – he has no idea who he is or how he got there. But he knows the words ‘Jude’s Ferry’ are important, and he knows he is afraid…

As the police launch an investigation into the skeleton in the cellar, Dryden is convinced the key to the mystery rests in the last days of the village when passions, prejudices, guilt and hatred all came to a head. Everything leads him back to Jude’s Ferry. But who is waiting for him there?

Read on for a taster…

Prologue

St Swithun’s Day Sunday, 15 July 1990

It was a child’s high stool, commandeered for the execution.

I stood with my back to the wall, part of the crowd, not the mob, but even then I knew that such a line could not be drawn: a line to separate the guilty from the innocent.

Twelve of us then, and the accused on the stool, the rope tight to the neck.

Again the question. ‘Why?’ Each time marked by a blow to the naked ribs, blood welling up beneath the skin.

I could have answered, ended it then. But instead I pressed my back against the cool wall, wondering why there were no more denials, wondering why life had been given up.

The victim’s knees shook, and the legs of the stool grated on the cellar’s brick floor. Outside in the night there was a dog’s bark, heard through the trapdoor above, and twelve chimes from the church on the hill.

Then the ringleader did it, because he had the right that was in his blood. Stepping forward he swung a foot, kicking the stool away.

The body, a dead weight, fell; but not to earth. The plastic click of the neck breaking marked the extent of the rope, and with it the grinding of the shattered vertebra as the body turned, the legs running on air. The moment of death stretched out, calibrated by the rattle in the throat. Urine trickled from the bare feet, yellow in the torchlight.

I fainted, standing, for a heart beat. When I looked again the arms, bound and ugly in death, were lifeless.

It was justice, they said, licking parted lips.

Justice in Jude’s Ferry.

Chapter One

Seventeen years later

St Swithun’s Day Sunday, 15 July 2007 Whittlesea Mere

The Capri shook, and through the fly-splattered windscreen of the minicab Philip Dryden contemplated the Fen horizon. Humph, the driver, slept peacefully, his lips brought together in a small bow, his sixteen stone compressing the seat beneath him. Around them the drained wasteland that had once been Whittlesea Mere, an inland lake the size of a small English county, stretched beyond sight. Overhead a cloud the size of a battleship sailed across an unblemished sky.

The cab was parked in the cool shadow of a hawthorn, the only tree visible to the naked eye. They’d presented themselves at 9.00am precisely that morning at the checkpoint to Whittlesea Mere Military Firing Range, and been directed down a pot-holed drive to the assembly point: the wreck of a wartime tank, ferns hanging from the dark observation slit. They hadn’t seen another human being since they’d been waved through the gates, which had not stopped Dryden imagining they were being watched.

The reporter smoothed down his camouflage tunic and felt the familiar anxieties crowding round. This isn’t a war zone, he told himself, it’s a military exercise. You’re here to write about it, not take part. But the sight of a line of soldiers marching towards them, raising a cloud of desert-red peat dust, made his heartbeat pick up. A trickle of sweat set out from the edge of his thick, jet black hair, down towards his eye. He brushed it aside, aware that another one would quickly take its place.

Dryden checked his watch: 10.15am. The time had come. He fingered the webbing inside the blue tin combat hat he held and pulled it down over his black, close-cropped hair. The neat carved features of his medieval face remained impassive. He got out, the Capri’s rusted door hinges screaming, and circled the cab to Humph’s open side window.

‘You can go’ he said, the cabbie, waking, struggling to remember where he was and what he was doing.

‘Really…’ said Humph, wiping his nose with a small pillowcase. ‘Can’t I stick around until they start trying to kill people?’

Dryden tried to smile. ‘Just remember. Same place, 5.00pm. And for Christ’s sake don’t leave me here.’ Bodekka, the greyhound, asleep on a tartan rug in the back seat, yawned in the heat, trapping a bluebottle. Humph turned the ignition key, the engine coughed once and started, and he pulled away at speed, leaving an amber-red cloud as he raced towards the safety of the distant checkpoint. Dryden, alone, felt the hairs on his neck bristle.