YOU PROMISED. IT’S TIME.
He’d made so many promises, but he knew all too well which one she wanted him to keep. He’d lit the propane heater, set it on low, just in case the heating failed while he was out. He’d smelt it then, the smell of heated gas, burning innocently. He could have blown the flame out with a kiss, letting the deadly gas fill the chalet.
He looked out of the minibus window through the circular porthole he’d cleared and saw the black peat, a blur to the horizon. ‘So you go back that far, do you – twenty years? Is that when Russ arrived?’
‘Oh no, I can beat that,’ she said, creeping past a police car parked near where a lorry had slewed off the road and into the dyke. The container stuck up at a crazy angle, the cab embedded in the bank.
‘I started work at the Dolphin in ’69. Chambermaid. I worked for Ruth’s father – John Henry. I’m the boss now – twenty staff. I’m running the bus because the driver didn’t make it.’
Dryden swung round in his seat. Other than Ruth Connor she was the first person he’d found who could recall the camp before the murder of Paul Gedney.
‘What was he like – the old man, John Henry?’
‘Nothing like her,’ she said, and realizing she’d said too much, she made a show of concentrating on an L-driver ahead on the icy road.
‘She’s a cool customer,’ said Dryden, as lightly as he could. ‘It was ’75, wasn’t it – when Chips was jailed? I’ve been in to see him – nice guy. What did people think?’
She checked the rear-view again. ‘Russ said you were a reporter.’
Dryden looked out of the window. ‘That’s right. But I’m off duty. You know there were two witnesses who could have got Chips freed – kids at the camp in ’74. They were friends of mine. I was here too that summer. I was just a kid.’
‘Thanks. Now I feel ancient.’
‘Sorry,’ said Dryden, smiling into the rear-view. His eyes were tired, and his shock of black hair flattened on one side where he’d slept heavily back at the chalet.
‘It’s just that I’d like to find out what happened to them. I think someone killed them to stop them coming forward.’
‘Russ said.’
‘And I think they tried to kill me.’
She looked at him then, the car stationary in a queue tailing back from a flashing police light by the main bridge into Whittlesea. ‘Russ said the police didn’t think there was anything suspicious – that they’d died naturally. One of them was an alky?’
Dryden thought Russ had done a lot of talking. ‘So what did people think – at the time, about Chips?’
She turned off the ignition and they sat in sudden silence in the unmoving queue. ‘Chips and Ruth went back a long way, yup? To school. Sweethearts, married at eighteen. And they were happy, you could see that. Then she took over at the camp when John Henry fell ill. Chips was brilliant with kids, a natural. A few years went by, there were no kids. People talk, like they do.’
She bit her lip, sensing the irony. ‘She’s always been odd with kids. Brittle. Then Chips had the accident. I was in the camp that day, we all came running because they had an alarm by the pool and someone set it off. There was this slick in the water, you know – like from his head.’ She turned to Dryden and he could sense the frisson of horror even after thirty years.
‘When he got back from the hospital, he was a mess. He was just scared of everything, really jumpy, but he couldn’t tell you what was wrong – just like a child.’ She blushed suddenly. ‘I don’t have any, so what do I know – but that’s what they say, isn’t it?’
Dryden nodded.
‘He used to do the poolside duty and the locking up and stuff but anything else, like with people, was too much. He’d end up in the dunes somewhere, and they’d have to send the security guards out to find him.’
‘But they stayed together… him and Ruth?’ said Dryden.
‘Sure. But he was ill, and they decided to get some treatment, see if they could do anything. So they took him away. Course, looking back, they said it was the stress – that he’d killed that bloke, beat him to death, and he’d dumped the body out at sea.’
Dryden nodded. ‘I’ve read all about the trial. About Paul Gedney turning up and asking them for help.’
Muriel licked her lips. ‘Read about Lizzie Sykes?’
She had a smile on her face now and Dryden sensed the kind of communal thrill that comes from shared malicious gossip. ‘Nope.’
She fired up the ignition and they crawled forward again. ‘After Gedney went missing the police put out his picture, right? He didn’t have a face you could forget. Those eyes. Anyway, this Lizzie Sykes recognized him straight off. She was a bit simple, actually, but I don’t think she had the wit to lie. Big girl, but slow. Anyway, she was from Whittlesea too – not like the rest of us, we’re all from Lynn – and she’d seen him in the park. This was a bit back, the late sixties, when they were all at school.’
Dryden looked across in the silence and saw that Muriel was smiling, her tongue pushing out her cheek.
‘He was sat on a park bench with Ruth Henry – as she was – kissing. Well, the way she told it, more than kissing. Lizzie liked that story. She told it enough.’
Dryden saw the scene differently then, Paul Gedney arriving at the Dolphin by motorbike on a summer’s night.
‘Did she, Lizzie, tell the police?’
‘She told the court. Didn’t do her any good though. The other thing about Lizzie was she had light fingers. Petty theft, but then she wasn’t the only one. If you knew what they paid chambermaids at a place like the Dolphin, it makes the minimum wage look like a lottery win.’
Dryden had read all the news copy from the trial and there’d been no mention of her testimony, but he knew from experience that newspaper reports were at best a summary, and incidental witnesses were often left out entirely. ‘So?’
‘They brought it all up in court. Apparently Ruth had caught her once the previous season and docked her wages. Lizzie went round telling everyone she’d get her own back – settle the score. They dragged it all into the court – so the judge said the jury should forget what she said. Ruth denied it flat anyway. But it didn’t help Chips, did it? I think a few of us felt he’d clumped Gedney to get even.’
Dryden made a show of checking his mobile for messages, but he took the time to try and think things through. When the phone trilled it made him jump. It was a text message from DI Reade.
RING. NOW.
Dryden checked the incoming call details. The call was timed at 8.48am, Reade was still in Ely, and the rest of his inquiry team was presumably kicking their heels with him. All of which would make a nasty mess of the staff rota.
Dryden decided not to reply and turned to Muriel. ‘So, do you think Ruth was two-timing Chips after they were married?’
‘I don’t think anyone could have blamed her, although we all did. Chips was popular, yeah? He was drop-dead gorgeous for a start and then after the accident kind of pathetic too, a big kid. Whereas we all thought she was a callous cow. And a rich one, of course – that didn’t help.’
‘And then along came William Nabbs,’ said Dryden.
‘Yeah – but he wasn’t the first. That’s the school…’ she said, nodding to the side of the road where a set of iron railings ran beside a playground. ‘Whittlesea Catholic High School. That’s where they all met.’
Dryden was surprised the school was open. Children played, wrapped in scarves and hats. One enterprising teenager was sledging down a frozen grass slope onto the tarmac. As a bell rang he imagined the three of them, a group apart, their heads together, planning.