skin.
26
Humph was waiting for him in the Capri, a piece of surgical gauze held to his arm by a small plaster. The cabbie was listening to his language tape but still managed to exude a sense of painful self-sacrifice, one hand fluttering, but never quite touching, the wound.
Dryden got in and kicked out his long legs.
Humph disconnected the earphones and flipped down the glove compartment, retrieving two bottles of sambuca, cracking the tops of both and offering one to the reporter.
‘Lunch,’ he said, adding a packet of BBQ-flavoured crisps. ‘How’s Laura?’ he asked.
Dryden flipped down the vanity mirror and looked at his bottle-green eyes. How was Laura? It was a question he seemed, suddenly, least qualified to answer. He’d seen her briefly while Major Broderick had visited Jason Imber. She’d asked him then, again, about the bruising on his face, holding his head in her hands, and he’d told her about Thieves Bridge, the animal rights activists and the woman’s bones recovered from the Peyton grave, the ribs chipped by a blade. He talked about being afraid, and about not showing it.
‘You should tell me about these things,’ she said, her lips touching his ear. ‘We talk about what you do, but we don’t talk about you and how you feel.’
Dryden knew she was right, but he went on talking about what he did.
‘There’s this copper on the case, called Shaw, Peter Shaw. He’s kind of weird really. Young, driven, knows his stuff on the science, a real high flyer too, but then his dad was a DCI so everyone probably thinks he’s had it easy. But I don’t think so – Dad got chucked off the force a decade ago for fabricating evidence. I think it’s chewing him up, driving him on. It’s frightening you know, being around someone that focused.’
They’d laughed then and he’d taken the opportun ity to tell her what he really feared. ‘Don’t get too close to Jason Imber, Laura – we don’t know what happened to him. Help, there’s nothing wrong with that. But remember he can’t – he doesn’t know what he did, who he was. That could be a shock when he does find out.’
She shrugged, but Dryden could sense the irritation. ‘I just listen. I read the messages he sends,’ she said, touching her laptop. ‘He reads mine. I tell him about us, about your stories. It helps. He’s got nothing else to think about but missing memories, Philip.’
She closed her eyes, seeing that Dryden’s antagonism was undiminished. ‘Please, my neck.’
He’d massaged her shoulders then, knowing the long silence was a reproach.
Dryden rummaged in the glove compartment for a refill. Laura’s relationship with a man who might be a murderer disturbed him. What he couldn’t admit was that what really troubled him was that she had a relationship with someone else at all.
He rang DI Shaw on the mobile.
‘Tell me you’ve caught the other one,’ said Dryden before the detective could speak.
‘We still think he’s on his way to Coventry. He got the National Coach out of Cambridge yesterday for Nottingham, he’s on the CCTV. We’ve lost him at the other end, but he’s getting close. We know where he’s going, we just have to wait.’
Dryden inhaled some more alcohol. ‘Anything breaking I need to know about on the Skeleton Man?’
‘We’ve got a match on the gravel we found in the cellar…’
‘Orchard House, right?’ said Dryden. ‘Jason Imber’s home.’
‘Indeed. But it isn’t good enough for a courtroom – we’d be laughed out. It just helps if we get something else that puts him at the scene. And we’ll be interviewing Imber again once he’s recovered from the wounds to his hand. Forty-eight hours, perhaps a bit longer. He’s not going anywhere in the meantime.’
‘Charges?’
Shaw laughed and Dryden could hear him tapping a computer screen. ‘Imber’s keeping a secret. But the doctors say he’s genuine about the memory loss. We can’t push it, not now. Even if he did it we’re still short of a few crucial elements in our case, don’t you think – like a motive, the identity of the victim, the names of his accomplices, and any rationale at all which puts him in the river.’
‘Anything else on forensics?’
But Shaw did not intend to be pushed any further. Dryden’s deadline had gone, and with it some of his purchasing power. ‘I’m not aware I have a duty to update you in real time, Dryden – let’s have a chat after the weekend, OK?’
Dryden cut him off, angry that their deal had left him with one story he couldn’t print and another which made little sense. But the anger worked, as it often did, fusing two images in his memory – the gently turning bones of the Skeleton Man on his hook in the cellar and Humph, running a finger around the patch on his arm where the blood had been taken.
Dryden snapped his fingers, knowing just how much it annoyed the cabbie.
‘Surgical gauze,’ he said. ‘The Skeleton Man had a patch of surgical gauze on his arm.’
‘So – that’s narrowed it down, has it?’ asked Humph. ‘We’re looking for a blood donor. Is Tony Hancock the victim?’
‘Jabs,’ said Dryden. ‘When are you likely to need an injection as an adult?’
Humph tipped a packet of crisps back so that the last grains of monosodium glutamate could trickle down his throat.
‘Inoculation – a trip abroad?’
