On Dryden’s lap the office cat, Splash, slept on its back, its pink paw pads extended. He stroked her, envying the independence as much as the fur coat.
His phone rang, making them both jump.
‘Got five?’ He knew the voice, feminine and forceful, and could almost smell the acrid scent of the builder’s tea in the big no-nonsense mug.
‘Vee?’
‘Pop over,’ she said. ‘I’ve got something you’d like.’
He slipped out the back of The Crow’s offices into the old print yard and around into Market Street, then down a treacherously iced alleyway to High Street. Vee’s office was over one of the town centre’s myriad charity shops, this one by the Sacrist’s Gate, the Norman gateway into the cathedral grounds. A Gothic shadow had left this darkened archway in permafrost since the cold snap had brought even the noontime temperatures below freezing. Beneath the cobbles here Dryden recalled that builders in the sixties had found the skulls of the cathedral’s monastic community, stacked in a charnel house. He shivered, wrapping his great black trench coat more closely to his thin frame.
In the charity shop a pensioner was trying on hats. A two-bar electric fire provided the shop assistant, who was asleep, with some warmth. Before her on the counter lay an offertory plate sprinkled with silver and copper coins. Up a spiral stone staircase Dryden found Vee’s office. Even here, amongst the damp cardboard boxes and the unstripped floorboards, Vee was patently top-drawer, a real-life living remnant of old money and radical liberal politics. She was a pocket battleship amongst pensioners: compact, with sinewy hands and an outdoor tan. One of her eyes had been blinded in youth, and the pupil was now a single white moon, which watered slightly. She rented the office, headquarters of the Hypothermia Action Trust, which she had founded, and a single bedroom above. That, and a £1m bank balance, was all anyone needed to know about Vee Hilgay.
‘Another one this morning,’ she said as Dryden came in, folding himself into a wobbly captain’s chair.
‘I know. I’ve been out – to High Park.’
She nodded. ‘That’s the eighth in a week,’ she said, setting down a pint mug of tea decorated with a picture of Tony Benn. She poured Dryden a cup from the brown pot on her desk. Then she went to a narrow lancet window set in the stone wall, opened it and retrieved a thermometer.
‘Minus 3 degrees centigrade. The average for the month is minus 2 – that’s the lowest since ’47. Last night it fell to minus 10 out at Mildenhall. This could be a disaster; someone else will die today, and tomorrow…’
Dryden made a small indecipherable mark in his notebook to help him remember the quote. ‘What do you want me to say?’
‘Look at this one,’ she said, dropping a file on the table. Dryden opened it, bracing himself for emotional blackmail. There was a picture of an elderly woman, white hair recently set in a geriatric helmet, the skull just showing through.
‘Millie Thompson. Eighty-six. Found dead in bed at Manea three days ago,’ said Vee. ‘On the mat three cheques from the social security and her pension. She was too cold to go out and she had a fault in the gas boiler – she’d rung the board but told them not to bother to rush out. She went to bed instead – that was ten days ago. Ten days without hot food, or heat. The cottage was damp. When they found her she was frozen between the blankets.’
Dryden took the head and shoulders picture. ‘I can do something – wrap it up with this morning’s.’
Vee smiled, knowing that Dryden’s career as a journalist had been severely hampered by a conscience. She checked her notes. ‘Declan McIlroy. Psychiatric patient – so, confused, or desperate?’
Dryden slurped his tea. ‘I guess…’ He held Vee’s good eye for just a moment too long.
She caressed the Tony Benn mug. ‘You don’t think the cold did it?’
‘Didn’t say that, Vee. Just think the police are a bit quick to tie up the paperwork on deaths like this… I mean, if I was a murderer I’d grab my chance. You’d never get spotted. It’s like the Blitz. You can’t tell me a few scores didn’t get settled on the bomb sites…’
‘And Millie too?’ she said, tapping the file.
‘I didn’t say that. It’s McIlroy I’m talking about – just McIlroy.’
Vee let the silence stretch. Dryden looked out the window, the West Tower of the cathedral dominated the view, frozen water glistening like slug trails down the Norman stonework. Another giant snowflake fell.
‘Neighbour says he’s broke most of the time. He does part-time electrical work – but it’s smalltime stuff. He’s on sickness benefit. But the meter’s jammed with coins – more than twenty quid’s worth. Most people wait till the coin drops and the lights go out…’
‘But he’s confused…’
‘I guess. And he drinks. So perhaps he stuffed his benefit in the meter to make sure it didn’t get spent at the offy. And…’
‘Would you like it to be murder?’ asked Vee astutely.
Dryden bridled. ‘No. Not really.’ He stood. ‘I’ll run something – with the usual advice and emergency numbers. It’s all I can do…’ Dryden was less than enthused by the cold-snap story, partly because the whole of eastern England was hit so there was little unusual in the situation in the Fens, and partly because The Crow’s readership shared a deep-rooted, immoral disregard for anyone who wasn’t a star in Neighbours.
Back at The Crow the A team had arrived. The editor, Septimus Henry Kew, was installed behind his glass partition checking the proofs. The news editor, Charlie Bracken, was at his desk, sweating into a blue shirt he’d had on all week. There was an aroma of stale alcohol in the air, which emanated from Charlie’s skin and the half-open deep drawer in his desk where he kept an emergency bottle of Bell’s.
Dryden brought his screen to life with a single touch of the keyboard and began, instantly, to type:
An Ely man was today found frozen to death in his armchair – the latest victim of the cold snap which has claimed the lives of eight vulnerable, frail or elderly victims in a single week.
Dryden tapped on as Garry Pymoor, The Crow’s junior reporter, arrived enveloped in his habitual full-length black leather coat. Garry’s balance was poor, having suffered from meningitis as a child, so as he threw himself into his chair he nearly missed.
‘Got a goody,’ he said to Dryden, trying to knock a cigarette out of a packet with one hand while clipping his phone headset over his head with the other.
Dryden braced himself. Garry’s news judgement was as sound as his semicircular canals.
‘They’ve issued a warning to parents that there’s a dope supplier targeting kids. The schoolgate market. Cheap cannabis for young teenagers – twelve- to fifteen-year-olds mainly. They reckon someone is growing locally and flogging it cut-price. Probably a farmer. What d’ ya reckon?’
Dryden nodded. ‘OK. Get a quote from the NFU. Tell Charlie – it’s got to be worth the front.’
Dryden put his story on hold and hit calls: the last round of checks with the emergency services before the final deadline of The Crow. There was an RTA on the bypass and a small house fire at a village near the edge of town. And one item worth a par at least – a warning from the police for householders to watch out for bogus plumbers touting for work on burst pipes. A pair of conmen had already made off with one customer’s life savings.
‘What’s the splash?’ Dryden asked the room.
Charlie jerked in his seat, realizing it was supposed to be his job to have an answer to this question.