Free The Coldest Blood by Jim Kelly Page A

creaking, Dryden vaulted the concrete stairs two, three and four at a time until he reached the ground floor where, doubled up, he waited for the lift to arrive. It thudded finally to rest, and the doors clattered open to reveal Buster’s cat.
    Looking up, Dryden saw a head jerk back from a balcony a few floors above, then running footsteps receded, muffled as they turned a corner and were gone, heading for another exit.
    From the top balcony Buster waved lamely: ‘Tea?’ he shouted.

11
    Dryden threw himself into the Capri’s passenger seat and slammed the door, tossing Declan McIlroy’s canvas on to the back seat beside the dog. The cab swayed, crying out on its geriatric springs. Humph, oblivious, had his earphones on and was repeating with painstaking care the directions to the railway station in Kohtla-Jarve. Dryden wiped the sweat from his forehead and, trying his pockets, uncovered a comforting cocktail sausage and munched it, regardless of the fluff. His diet, outside the egg sandwich for breakfast and the occasional full English, was satisfied by a kind of trouser-pocket smorgasbord, featuring pork pies, raw mushrooms and anything else acquired on his travels. In the other pocket he found a packet of wine gums and took two for pudding.
    He considered the brutal façade of High Park Flats. He’d rung Vee Hilgay on his mobile from Buster’s flat and she was still adamant that the unannounced doctor’s visit had nothing to do with the Hypothermia Action Trust. She’d checked with the local NHS Trust to be sure and there was no record whatsoever of such an initiative in the Ely area. Dryden asked her to contact local GPs as well.
    Were they dealing with a conman? Dryden recalled the news item in The Crow warning of bogus plumbers fleecing the elderly. Or had this conman been heading for Declan McIlroy’s flat all along? And had he just made a return visit? If it had been his intention to visit Declan, had he oiled the wheels of depression with the whisky, and then left him tocommit suicide – or had he enticed him into unconsciousness and then thrown open the windows himself?
    Or was Dryden indulging in newspaper fantasy? Perhaps it had been a low-life conman all along and the return visit was just a bit of unrelated daylight looting by one of High Park’s gifted thieves.
    Dryden placed a palm on his forehead and felt a fresh layer of icy sweat. Either way he needed to tell the police what he’d learned, while at the same time delaying, if possible, any public statements on the news for the Express ’s deadline on Tuesday. If he could raise enough questions over McIlroy’s sudden suicide he could at least run a story saying the police were – finally – investigating. He was inclined to sit on the information for twenty-four hours – but knew the possibility the bogus doctor would call again raised the stakes too high for journalistic games. He needed to get the information on the record fast.
    He hit the dashboard with the flat of his hand. ‘Ely cop shop,’ he said. ‘Pronto!’
    Humph finished his reiteration of directions to the railway station in what sounded like a suspiciously Fen dialect of Estonian and then fired up the Capri. A cloud of fumes belched from the exhaust pipe with a bang as the cab swept out of the car park, charging a series of sleeping policemen which lay in its path.
    Ely police station was a local monument, a humourless glass and concrete block with a radio mast on top slightly too short to afford regular communication with the outer planets. It was a common prejudice in the town that this impressive outpost of the constabulary was almost constantly empty, local emergency calls being routed automatically to a helpful officer seventeen miles away in Cambridge. The skyscraper aerial was not, however, acomplete waste of space as its impressive array of steel hawsers provided a roosting spot for several thousand starlings.
    Today the mast was decked in ice, which hung like