The farmhouse was foursquare, a late-Georgian landmark with elaborate lead guttering and sash windows. A crack ran through the brickwork indicating that the house stood on the unstable drying peat.
Sley was peering into a half-lit hallway at the side of the house.
‘It’s odd,’ he said, when Dryden caught him up. ‘He normally comes out when he hears the car.’ He tapped a gold ring on the window and a cat – jet black – leapt to the sill.
‘Let’s try the back.’ There was a kitchen door, almost all glass, but all frosted. Inside they could see a light over a work surface and the glow of an oven. Sley flipped up the letterbox and shouted for Joe. Dryden was six feet away but caught the warm smell of roasted meat from within.
Sley stood, rattling the knob. He looked out across the Fen. ‘He can’t be far.’
‘Is there another door?’ asked Dryden, the cold beginning to slink between his shoulders.
He followed Sley round to what had been the main doorway of the old house. It had a series of three semicircular steps leading up to the door itself, which had a fanlight above.
Sley stiffened, and Dryden caught him up, walking past and looking around in the splash of electric orange which illuminated the porch. He saw the corpse almost immediately, knowing he was looking at death in the same instant that he recognized the curled form as human. The sleet and snow had accumulated, creating a shroud which covered most of the exposed flesh of the face and one hand, which had tried to cover the eyes but had slipped to reveal one socket, now itself full of marbled ice. Rigor mortis and the cold had drawn up the lips, revealing teeth disfigured by nicotine.
But it was the colour Dryden would remember, or the lack of it. The skin was white, as was the hair, but so were the lips, all coated in frost. The hand that had fallen from covering the eyes was scratched and caked with earth, but where the nails showed they too were white, without a blush of pink to signal life.
They hadn’t said a word. Sley tried the door and found that it too was locked. Dryden peered into the front room. A fire had burned in the grate but was ashes now.
Sley produced a mobile. ‘I’ll get the police. Ambulance.’
‘It’s an odd way to die,’ said Dryden, his eye for the first time picking out across the frosted gravel the scuffed furrow which led to the body from the direction of the distant magnolia tree. He recalled a picture on Declan McIlroy’s wall, the two friends on a bench, the distant horizon of the Fen a shimmering line of summer heat.
He saw an image then, the dying man pulling himself along the frozen ground towards the warmth and light of his home. How could the door be locked? An accident? But that was the problem with tragic deaths, thought Dryden; they were inherently unbelievable. There was something about the curled, catlike form on the step which spoke of resignation, rather than desperation.
Dryden pressed his nose against the window again. There was a flat-screen TV in front of which a single armchair had been pulled up. In front of that was a small table from a nest, upon which was a knife, fork, and heatproof mat.
‘Dinner alone,’ said Dryden to himself.
He made a mental inventory of the room’s personal effects. The walls were bare but for a framed map of Ireland, a mirror – the only object of any age – and one richly framed canvas. He recognized one of Declan’s landscapes, the black peat tinged with an angry purple.
On a sideboard a wooden gypsy caravan stood, and before the fire a cat’s basket with a wool fleece inside. On the mantle there was a gold-framed picture of a woman: fifty perhaps, the smile as smart and sharp as the executive hair, a dark business jacket boasting a cameo brooch. The smile had lost any warmth it might have once had, like the ashes in the grate below.
Something about the picture, its precise alignment, its central position, signalled remembrance. Joe had lived alone. But did he die alone?
15
An eggshell-blue squad car swung in off the drove road, its headlamps sweeping the landscape like a lighthouse beam. Dryden, having fetched Humph from the road, watched from the fusty interior of the Capri, now parked beside the 4x4. He’d been shivering, not because of the ice which had begun to encroach on all the cab’s windows, but because death left him cold, disheartened and afraid of the future. He’d applied an antidote to depression: three miniature malts, but the inner glow only flickered, then died. Sley had rung for the police but it seemed they were in little hurry. Dryden dozed fitfully in the Capri while Humph grumbled intermittently about lost suppers.
Sley had sat more comfortably in the heated four-wheel drive: punching numbers into a mobile and, presumably, breaking bad news. Dryden expected others would arrive the next morning, a caravan of condolence.
The police car parked beside the 4x4. The uniformed PC was young, perhaps twenty-five, enveloped in an overcoat which touched the ground. They met him on the gravel. ‘John,’ he said to Sley, shaking hands. They’d met before and Dryden felt suddenly excluded.
He slipped off a glove and shook Dryden’s hand, replacing it immediately. ‘Richard Ware. I’m the community officer for the Fen out to Shippea Hill. The station rang. They’d have sent from Ely but they’ve closed the drove at the city end ’cos of black ice. So I’d better secure the scene – can you show me, John?’ He buttoned up the overcoat to his throat, shuddering with the cold. ‘It’s a record – the temperature. Minus 18 – and that’s without a wind. We should be inside…’
‘He’s round at the front of the house, on the step, the door’s locked,’ said Sley.
Ware nodded. ‘OK.’ His eyes slipped over the house, checking windows. ‘You’ve both been round the front?’
They nodded.
‘Right. Enough footprints then already. Let’s try to get to him through the house from the back. Chances are he’s locked himself out by accident, but I need to check from the inside, secure the scene. Let’s play it by the book.’
They went to the kitchen door and the policeman expertly forced the Yale, sliding a plastic card down the door jamb. Dryden felt the heat hit his skin. Inside the smell of meat was overpowering. Ware flipped down the oven door and retrieved a chicken, the breastbone protruding through the overcooked flesh, while the vegetables stood peeled and immersed in water, but unheated.
‘Last supper,’ said Ware, moving through to the living room, his eyes dancing over what seemed familiar territory. In the hall, on the high wall which skirted the stairwell, hung a kite in the shape of a kestrel, its tail feathers tacked up in swirls. Dryden lingered in the kitchen, where a cork notice-board was dotted with memoranda, secured with drawing pins: a hospital appointment card, bus timetables, a few postcards and several newspaper cuttings – he noted one from The Crow by the paper’s gardening correspondent about the cold snap, and something from the Lynn News on Fen house prices. In the middle of the board was an open patch, oddly at variance with the rest of the crowded surface. Two drawing pins, with red heads, had been pressed neatly together in the middle.
Ware came back down the hall. ‘There was this,’ said Dryden, giving him a copy of The Crow and three editions of the Lynn News– the local evening paper. ‘I took a walk. These were in the post box down by the road.’ Dryden had noted the name stencilled on the US-style mail box: Joe Petulengo.
Ware nodded. ‘That means he hadn’t been down to the road since, what – Tuesday afternoon – late afternoon.’ He looked around again, staring briefly into the dead ashes of the fire and along the mantelpiece.