After making a cup of coffee, he wrapped himself in his winter trench coat and sat in the open wheelhouse. The river was white, the swans dark by comparison, lined up exactly in mid-channel to survive the night-time visit of the fox. Across the silent landscape the only sound was the creak of ice, compressing the hull of the moored boat. In the distant miniature city of Ely nothing stirred except for the trundling amber light of a gritter, glimpsed intermittently on the edge of town. A single house, still decked in Christmas lights, blinked back.
For the thousandth time since he’d bought his floating home he ran a gloved hand over the brass plaque above the wheel.
DUNKIRK 1940
It was a romantic touch which had sealed her purchase. He caressed the cold metal once more, feeling history, seeing again in his imagination the boat weaving in the shallows between the flailing, desperate soldiers.
A seagull, the first of the morning, screeched over the cathedral’s Octagon Tower.
Cradling the hot mug Dryden traced with his eyes the outline of the town, west from the cathedral to the Victorian mass of The Tower Hospital. There his wife lay between cool linen sheets, locked still in the coma which had brought both their lives to an abrupt halt: stalling them in this twilight world between the past and the future.
Dryden stood, trying to shake off the depression which always lurked in the hour before dawn, and stepped out over the frozen water to the riverbank. His coarse jet-black hair was already iced white by the frost, a frame around the stone-like geometry of his face. The features were medieval, a Norman brow dominating perfectly symmetrical cool green eyes – a face from one of Chaucer’s tales. He could have passed for thirty-five, but by nightfall he’d look a decade older.
The moon cast a long shadow from his 6' 2" frame and he paced the riverbank with it, trying not to think of the past. A sound brought relief, the crunch of tyres as a car left the high road and began to zigzag across the Fen towards Barham’s Dock, the long-abandoned inlet where PK 129 was moored. He checked his watch: 7.25am. His other life had begun.
The light was greyer now, the stars fading, as a lifeless colour crept into the December landscape. The white blanket of frost held more light than the pre-dawn sky.
He began to prepare the ritual round of coffees, looking forward to the egg sandwich which would be his in return. When he got back on deck Humph had parked the cab half a mile from the dock and was outside, circling it, his only daily exercise. The cabbie was not hard to see, even at that distance. He carried his startling weight lightly on ballerina’s feet, a skipping gyroscope teetering around his beloved Ford Capri, the only two-door taxi on the road.
The third circuit complete, Humph retrieved the greyhound, Boudicca, from the rear seat, taking from the boot the tennis machine Dryden had bought them both for Christmas. The cabbie set it on its tripod feet, putting a fluorescent green ball in the slot, leant back on the Capri’s peeling paintwork and pulled the handle, shooting the ball fifty yards along the riverbank. Boudicca, unleashed, moved like a swallow over the black peat, a graceful thudding icon of speed.
The ball returned, Humph loaded it again, and fired.
Dryden zipped up the green tarpaulin covering the wheelhouse and joined them. They drank coffee wordlessly having extracted their egg sandwiches from the foil provided by Humph’s favourite greasy spoon café. Humph encompassed his in two bites, the oozing yellow yolk the only colour in the dawn light.
‘How cold is it?’ said Dryden.
‘Search me,’ said Humph, enjoying the dog’s careering run along the floodbank.
Dryden considered his friend’s planetary girth. ‘We don’t have the manpower,’ he said.
Boudicca returned and indecently nuzzled Dryden’s testicles.
‘Another death,’ said the cabbie, nodding towards the Capri. ‘On the radio.’
‘The cold?’
The cabbie nodded. ‘Some poor bastard on the Jubilee. Dead in his flat.’
The Jubilee was Ely’s sink estate, a warren of brick terraced streets enlivened by the occasional outbreak of ill-judged stone-cladding. Humph had a house there, his home since an acrimonious divorce, which he contrived hardly ever to visit, sleeping instead in the cab in a series of convenient lay-bys.
‘What time?’ said Dryden, pulling open the Capri’s passenger door and bracing himself for the familiar screech of rust from its hinges.
Humph let Boudicca into the back seat and then lowered himself into the driver’s seat by holding on to the door and the roof. The Capri listed alarmingly, the suspension twanging underneath.
‘Neighbour found him late last night when he saw the windows open,’ said Humph.
Dryden tried to imagine it. The flat, up in the sky, with frozen air blowing through it.
He checked his watch again. The Crow’s deadline was still hours away, but it was press day and the journalist in him needed a decent tale.
‘Let’s take a look,’ he said, and their moods lifted, buoyed up by the mutual relief that they had somewhere to go.
3
At the foot of the stairwell of High Park Flats a puddle of urine had frozen solid. There was another puddle in the lift, frozen too, but the colour of no known bodily fluid.
Dryden pressed the button marked 12 but the lift didn’t move. The doors did a shimmy, closed once, and then retreated. Out on the tarmac he could see Humph in the Capri, smirking.
Dryden trudged up the first flight of stairs, the walls a maze of graffiti except for a Day-Glo yellow poster offering help for the aged during the cold snap. Twenty-four flights of stairs later Dryden arrived on Frobisher, the level where Declan McIlroy had lived until the early hours of that day. There was a wind up here, and it took another five degrees off the temperature. Dryden’s breath billowed, and the air made his throat ache. The cold snap had lasted a week now, a dry blast of Arctic air bringing clear skies and showers of oversized snowflakes.
Dryden wrapped his greatcoat around himself and felt the ice in his hair.
On the drive into town he’d rung the station at Ely for the bare details: a neighbour had come onto the landing to rescue his wailing cat, stranded outside by a frozen flap. He’d noticed that the landing window of McIlroy’s flat was open, unusual itself at 2 in the morning, but alarming given the freezer-like conditions. The neighbour found the door unlocked and entered to find McIlroy dead in an armchair in the living room, the TV on, a cup of coffee frozen in the mug beside him. All the room’s windows were open. Death by hypothermia had been the doctor’s call. There’d be an inquest, but McIlroy had a long history of mental illness, and had attempted suicide twice before: both times using a knife.
Dryden peered over the edge of the lift-shaft wall down at the car park as a seagull flew below him. High Park Flats had been built in the 1960s and was the centrepiece of the Jubilee Estate. Fifteen storeys high it tussled, controversially, with the cathedral’s West Tower to dominate the horizon. Each floor had an external walkway linking the front doors of each flat. McIlroy’s was No. 126, a corner flat, the last on the gangway.
Dryden walked to the door and tried the handle: locked. He was surprised to find the police and emergency services had already left the scene. There was no sign anyone had died here, let alone lived. He knocked once, twice, and waited, looking south towards the city centre and beyond. The rush hour had begun and headlights in a long necklace stretched out east across the Fen towards Newmarket.
Dryden looked through the window but could see little in the gloom – the dull glint of unpolished taps, orange Formica kitchen units and a rusted gas-fired boiler.