The Coldest Blood (37 page)

Authors: Jim Kelly

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Crime

The judge closed a file before him and looked first right, then left. All three judges, almost imperceptibly, nodded agreement. ‘In these circumstances we find the appellant’s conviction was unsafe. We are aware, as must be his widow, that Mr Connor cannot now enjoy this statement of his innocence. But the record will be altered to reflect it, and the conviction set aside. Justice should be done, and it is.’

They rose, the bluebottle fell silent, and the journalist yawned.

Outside, Dryden stood on the steps, the neo-Gothic towers of the Royal Courts of Justice behind him, watching the traffic inch past, climbing the hill from Fleet Street. Marcie Sley leant against him, the glossy black hair swallowing the light. Dryden held the handles of Laura’s chair, using his weight to balance it on the step.

Marcie opened her bag and produced a postcard: a picture of Whittlesea Market Place in limp Kodacolour. ‘John read it to me,’ she said. ‘It’s from Grace Elliot, my foster mother. She was in the phone book, so I wrote.’

Dryden flipped it over. The handwriting was a tracery of loops and curls.

My Dearest Marcie,

Your letter was the most wonderful surprise. Of course I’ve never forgotten you, and you’re right, you did cause me a lot of pain, but not the pain you think. I shouldn’t have let you go, and it’s something I’ve always regretted. I’m alone now, so do come.

Love

Grace.

‘Will you go?’ asked Dryden.

Marcie nodded, putting the card carefully away. ‘If you’ll come too. I want her to know the truth.’

Suddenly she was there: Ruth Connor stood below them, skin dry despite the sweltering city heat. She held out her hand for Dryden’s and let go almost as soon as they touched. ‘Perjury’s a crime,’ she said.

Marcie stiffened beside him, but Dryden could see Ruth Connor’s eyes, and the smile on the thin red lips.

The Capri crunched against the kerb and Humph hooted the horn twice.

‘Alone?’ asked Dryden, looking beyond her.

Ruth Connor glanced down at the deep shadow crowding in around her feet. Then she said what she’d wanted to say the night Paul Gedney died for the second time: ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, and walked away, the tap of the high heels scattering pigeons into the sky.

THE SKELETON MAN

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.

The soldiers approached the tank and at a word from an officer made temporary camp. They sat, feet in the ditch, and broke out water bottles, while a billycan was set up on a portable gas ring. Little winding chimneys of white smoke rose from cigarettes in the still, hot air. Dryden felt their
collective antagonism to the presence of the press, and watched, oddly fascinated, as one dismantled and oiled an automatic rifle. Another stood, walked a few yards downwind and urinated into a ditch.

Sensing the calculated insult Dryden looked away and heard laughter at his back, then footsteps approaching, so he turned to face a heavy man with three pips on his flak jacket. As the officer made his way through the gorse he picked up his legs and arms as he walked, a self-conscious compensation perhaps for the onset of middle age. Dryden guessed he was in his early forties, but recognized a military uniform had never made anyone look any younger. The major’s hair was boot-polish black and shone unnaturally, but his complexion was poor, blotched as if his face had been scrubbed with a nailbrush. Cross-checking his position on a hand-held GPS with a map in a plastic see-through wallet he looked up at Dryden, unable to hide a frisson of annoyance at the sight of the reporter.

‘Dryden?’ he asked. ‘Philip Dryden – from
The Crow
?’ They shook hands, the grip surprisingly weak, but the voice was higher than he’d expected and held some warmth despite the clipped tones. ‘Broderick. Major John Broderick.’ He seemed embarrassed by the informality of the first name and turned to scan the horizon. ‘You’ve signed the blood sheet?’ he asked.

Dryden nodded. At the gate he’d been presented with the official form for signature which effectively removed his right to claim insurance if some idiot with a long-range peashooter turned him into a human jigsaw.

The major smiled, taking five years off his age: ‘Just routine. Only with live firing we insist. Regulations. You lot in the press would be the first to get on our case if we broke the rules.’

Laughter rolled along the line of men by the ditch, and Dryden wondered what was funny. Excluded, he looked towards the north where the guns must be, hidden beyond the horizon.

‘So they’ll fire over our heads right?’ he asked realizing immediately that there was little alternative. ‘Sorry. Stupid question.’

The major nodded.

‘When does the shelling start?’ Dryden asked.

‘Maroon – that’s the signal flare – goes up 10.50am. They’ll hit it on the pip. Ten minutes later they open fire with an eight-minute bombardment, then we go in to the first line of attack and stop. Then 11.20 another maroon, followed by a further five-minute bombardment at 11.30. Then we move forward to the targets.’ Broderick rubbed his hands together. ‘Pictures?’

Dryden swung round a digital camera. ‘I’m a one-man band.’

‘Great.’ The major smiled. That was all the military was ever interested in thought Dryden – pictures to send home, pictures for the scrapbook, pictures for the mess wall, pictures in the local paper, pictures for the MoD. Sod the words.

Broderick looked up at the sky: ‘St Swithun’s Day,’ he said: ‘Looks like we could have a good month.’ The single cloud was a distant smudge to the east, and the noon sun was already compressing their shadows around their boots.

Dryden slapped a mosquito against the back of his hand. ‘You Territorial Army too?’ he asked, keen to talk about something other than the weather.

‘Sure, sure. These are my men,’ he said, managing not to make it sound proprietorial.

‘So what do you do in Civvy Street?’

The major looked him in the face. ‘Business,’ he said, ducking the question.

A maroon thudded from the direction of the checkpoint, the signal that they had ten minutes before the bombardment began. The dull percussion in the sky was marked by a purple blotch and matched by a solid jolt through the earth.

The men stood and gathered round, following Broderick up on to the top of the old tank. The billycan was passed around, the tea inside reeked of tannin, had been sweetened with carnation milk, and was the colour of liquid cattle manure. Dryden took a gulp, casually, knowing he was being watched.

Broderick sat on the turret, spreading out a map for the men. ‘Right. Listen up. Today’s exercise is live firing. This range was requisitioned in 1907. That’s a century. So far the number of soldiers who have left Whittlesea Mere in a body bag is four. There is absolutely no law of nature which says one of you can’t make it five, so listen.’

Dryden imagined the crumpled body bag, his own hand peeping from the folds of black plastic, blood under the fingernails. ‘War games,’ he thought, realizing what an obscene juxtaposition of words it was.

The major’s briefing was brutally short. The Royal Artillery would bomb the two targets – twice – then the company would move in, conduct house-to-house searches, flush out insurgents, secure the target, and replace the red target flags with blue. All shells would be live, all personal ammunition blank. Blue tin hats denoted Blue Force – those attacking. Red Force, the enemy, was in position. Its soldiers, wooden cut-out targets with concentric rings running out from the heart, wore red hats; a helpful designation Dryden could not help feeling undermined the integrity of the
exercise. His own yellow armband proclaimed him a non-combatant.

‘And this is our target,’ said Broderick, stabbing a finger at the heart of the wasteland of fen shown on the map. ‘The lost village of Jude’s Ferry.’

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