The Coldest Blood by Jim Kelly Read Free Book Online Page B

what they say to damn the guilty.’
    Again, effortlessly, he had distanced himself from the children who were in his care.
    ‘The priests in charge. What of their stories?’ said Dryden, encouraging him to implicate others.
    Martin laughed then, and Dryden sensed the corrosive cynicism which had been his punishment for those decades of responsibility.
    ‘Ask them,’ he said, spreading his arms wide. ‘They’re all here. Remember, I was thirty-one when I arrived. The youngest priest was twenty years older. The last died two years ago.’
    Dryden rubbed the lichen from the nearest grave and saw that each stone bore a simple cross and the diocesan crest.
    Father Martin looked at the sky. ‘That is my sentence, Mr Dryden. To be left alone amongst the accused.’
    Or your salvation, thought Dryden, filling his lungs with the frosted air.

8
    Dryden slept happily in Humph’s Capri, his dreams refusing to take flight thanks to the ballast provided by six pints of Isle of Ely Ale and a four-star curry which had given him hiccoughs. The session in The Fenman bar had been particularly lively, culminating in Garry’s ill-fated attempt to dance a Highland reel in anticipation of New Year.
    When Dryden finally awoke the moon was up and ice covered the Capri’s bonnet. He stretched, aware that a hangover hovered, and cleared a porthole in the condensation of the window. Outside, against the stars, the black outline of The Tower Hospital loomed like an exam.
    Humph was listening to one of his Estonian language tapes, repeating with care a long list of pastry delicacies available only in Tallinn, while flicking through his bilingual dictionary, unnaturally excited by the section devoted to pies. Each year he applied himself to some obscure language, in the almost certain knowledge there was little danger he would ever need to speak it in Ely. Then each Christmas he would flee the unspeakable horrors of the festive season by flying out to some forsaken European capital for a few days to try out his new vocabulary. He had just returned from Zagreb, having spent the previous year mastering Serbo-Croat menus.
    He flipped open the glove compartment to extract a miniature bottle of Croatian hooch he’d bought at the airport. It was purple and tasted of lighter fuel.
    Dryden peered out again at the lit foyer of The Tower.A former workhouse, the building had become a lunatic asylum throughout Victoria’s reign. It boasted a single turret, complete with an interior-lit clock and fake battlements, the whole encircled by grounds full of institutional trees.
    Laura Dryden, thanks to the continued support of the Mid-Anglian Mutual Insurance Company, was one of fifty paying ‘guests’ in the private hospital. It was a situation Dryden knew could not last for ever. One day the insurers would politely point out that their responsibilities were close to an end, and suggest a less expensive regimen of care involving what they called ‘home’ – a concept with which Dryden would have struggled if he had allowed himself to think about it at all.
    He pushed open the cab door before he had time to reconsider his decision to begin his ritual daily visit. The rust in the hinges screeched, as he knew it would, and he slammed the door closed without saying a word.
    Inside, beyond the overheated and over-lit reception, the carpeted corridors muffled his steps. There was an expensive silence, in which high-technology machinery hummed, spoilt by a solitary cry from a patient’s dream.
    Dryden knocked on Laura’s door, a little ceremony which marked out her right to privacy despite the certainty that she would not answer, would almost certainly never answer. He had not heard his wife’s voice for six years: since the night their car had been forced off a wintry Fen road by the oncoming headlights of a drunk driver, and down into the black water of Harrimere Drain. Dryden had escaped but Laura, trapped on the back seat, had been left in a diminishing