The Fire Baby

by The Fire Baby

  The northern perimeter fence of Gifford’s ran beside the beach. The sea was the only thing moving in the landscape, sucking at a bank of baked mud. The coast appeared a featureless foreshore on the estuary of the Ouse, except for the plastic cartilage skull of a conger eel which stuck up like a pagan symbol from the beach and was collecting early morning flies.

  Dryden, pressing his face against the diamond-weave electric fence, picked up an electric charge which made his watch run backwards for a week. Humph, sitting in the cab, was beginning a Greek conversation with Eleni. The great Romantic, thought Dryden, trapped in a 1974 Ford Capri with soiled swinging dice and surrounded by the corrosive aroma of old socks.

  ‘Claustrophobia,’ said Dryden out loud to nobody, kicking the wire fencing. That’s local journalism for you, he thought, unbearable excitement in exotic locations. He felt tired and drained. The black eye throbbed and made him feel bilious. The pillbox murder had shocked him far more than he had admitted, even to himself. People smugglers and porn pushers made his flesh crawl. He had no interest in meeting them and a positive fear of them trying to meet him. The newspaper cutting left on the Capri’s windscreen was a clear enough warning to leave the story of Black Bank Fen to history. He felt threatened, confused, but most of all defeated by his inability to see clearly how events were linked. But he had little doubt that they were.

  Then the dogs arrived. At least that prompted a sharp emotion: fear. Three vans pulled up and half a dozen uniformed coppers spilt out. Inspector Andy Newman arrived in an unmarked police car. Unfortunately he was marked, having had ‘copper’ inscribed on his forehead at birth.

  One of the uniformed PCs rolled up the backs of the three vans: Dryden counted fourteen dogs, and every one an Alsatian with a regulation string of saliva hanging from custard yellow canines. ‘Dogs,’ he said, to Newman. ‘I don’t like dogs.’

  ‘Who cares?’ said Newman, looking at a map upside down.

  Two of the dogs, immediately aware that Dryden was an international-class coward, nosed his crotch with indecent interest. Briefly, as if from another world, Dryden could hear Humph laughing.

  The keyholder was in the second van. He was tall, with the kind of fissured face reserved for those addicted to illegal substances in commercial quantities. The gates swung open on the sunlit maze of the container park and the dogs ran, abandoning Dryden’s privates.

  Viewed from above, the scene must have been bizarre; a laboratory maze with the role of the mice taken by fourteen skittering dogs. They were using their noses, but if they’d used their eyes they would have seen the gravid cloud of flies hanging, despite the onshore breeze, over a lime-green container marked ZKA-RAPIDE.

  It took the dogs twenty minutes to find it. While they were waiting Dryden told Newman about the Nissen hut at the old airfield at Witchford. ‘Looks like that’s where they let them sleep – kind of depot, I guess.’

  Newman, ill-tempered, was watching the dogs scrabble round the lime-green container. ‘We’ll check it out. But my guess is they’ve changed their routine. Roe’s death must have put the fear of God into them. They’ll be finding a new route.’

  Two PCs with bolt-cutters got to work on the tailgate restraints on the container. But Dryden knew what they’d find. An empty container full of filth. The one abandoned in the lay-by had been the worst, the sixteen illegal immigrants inside had not been let out for nearly four days. The toilet had started in one corner and then trickled across the whole floor. Sickness had, not surprisingly, been a problem. Food had consisted of cans of Coke and clingfilm-wrapped pasties from a Seven-11 at Felixstowe.

  And then there was the dead dog. Curled around a spare tyre. The only fatality and the only occupant of the container with a real name.

  The bolts sheared and the container door swung open to emit an overpowering wall of stench.

  Pork, thought Dryden, the smell of cloying grease immediately unbearable. Dead pigs, about thirty of them, scattered the floor. The heat in the container drifted out. The meat was slow cooked, no crackling, but plenty of juices. A slick of animal fat began to trickle over the tailgate. Between the pigs were the telltale signs that people had shared their final journey – but had got off just in time. Ice-cream wrappers, some burger bar cartons and the usual shipment of human faeces.

  ‘Unbelievable,’ said Newman, spotting a heron on a rotting wooden post just off the beach. Then he checked the ever-present clipboard. ‘Nark told us there were two.’

  The next container along was lime green as well. It still had a cab attached. Same markings: ZKA-RAPIDE. The cab was blue, dusty, with a black oil-slick under one tyre, which Dryden noticed was slightly flat.

  The same two PCs got to work on the tailgate. But this time Dryden didn’t watch, his complacency already shattered by the casual slaughter of the dead pigs. One of Inspector Newman’s DCs had broken open the cab door, and he climbed up after him. On the first three jobs this had made the best copy, giving Dryden a chance to examine the detritus of the real villain – the driver who knew he had a human cargo. Maps, fags, sweets, and always the soiled copy of the Sun. He looked at the date: 10 June, seven days old. He sat on the wide driver’s seat and picked through the evidence. Tape in the deck: Indian pop songs, glove compartment, packet of condoms (unopened), map of Birmingham, some black sticky binding tape, and an alarm clock.

  He knew something was wrong when he looked in the wing mirror. Newman was smoking. He’d given up a year earlier after an autopsy on a down-and-out who died in a ditch of lung cancer, but he was gulping in the nicotine now. And the change in the atmosphere was tangible, the squad of cynical coppers tautly alert. The dogs went berserk as Dryden jumped down and ran to the back.

  Pork, he thought. But this time it wasn’t pigs; this time it was people. Three of them were crawling on the ground throwing up what little they had in their stomachs on to the sun-bleached tarmac, where it sizzled obscenely. Those in the van were alive, but another few hours in the heat of the afternoon sun would have done for them. All of them were black and soaked in sweat and urine. They blinked in the sun and cracked bent limbs. There was an almost complete lack of any human sound, except that of lungs sucking in air. The heat and smell formed an almost physical barrier. Gradually Newman’s team helped them out, down from the tailgate, while Dryden took a walk up-wind, gulping in lungfuls of sea air.

  When he got back there was only one person left in the back of the container. He knew immediately it was a corpse. The lower limbs were rigid and ugly, the torso’s upper body slightly raised from the floor of the van on one side. One arm was flung behind the neck, which craned up for air, while the other stretched towards the place where light would have been. He didn’t want to see the face but he did. Later, he couldn’t describe it even to himself, but he knew what it wasn’t: it wasn’t ‘Died Quietly in His Sleep’. It was Emmy Kabazo.

  27

  Did Jimmy Kabazo kill Johnnie Roe? It was a thought Dryden could not dislodge as he sat in the Capri, the doors open, and drank in the big sky over the sea like some visual antidote to the image of Emmy Kabazo’s tortured body. They’d parked by the beach at Old Hunstanton so that Dryden could phone over the story – single paragraphs for the tabloids, but more substantial stories for the white broadsheets: Guardian, Telegraph, Times and Independent. He got the basics over to the BBC’s Look East and made a note to bill them for the tip-off fee. The spate of work helped him deal with the helplessness he felt. Jimmy had to be a suspect. When Dryden had talked to him at the old airfield he claimed to be waiting for Emmy’s arrival. But what if his son was long overdue? Had Jimmy tried to track him down through the Ritz? Had he tortured Johnnie to find out where his son had gone? Had Johnnie died not knowing how to give him the answer he needed, the answer which would have saved his life?

  Dryden filled his lungs with ozone but failed to eradicate the lingering aroma of cooked pig. Humph, silent, looked out to sea. He liked the beach, principally because there was so much to look at
before you needed to get out of the car. ‘Gonna swim?’ he said, scrambling in the glove compartment for a miniature bottle of gin. He’d bought a large bottle of tonic and a lemon at a roadside service station. He produced two plastic cups and sliced the lemon with a Swiss Army knife marginally smaller than a fork-lift truck.

  ‘Sorry, no ice,’ he said, trying pathetically to cheer Dryden up.

  ‘What’s Emmy short for?’ asked Dryden.

  Humph gave him the drink, and sipped his own. ‘Emerson? Emmanuel?’

  Dryden gulped the drink, failing to blot out the double image of Emmy’s corpse and Johnnie Roe’s skin grafts. Then he rooted in the Capri’s boot for his swimming shorts and a towel. He wanted the North Sea to dilute whatever was left on his skin of the odour of rotting flesh. And worse, much worse. He walked off into the dunes to change, then ran towards the sea, a sprint which turned into a long-distance run. The water was a Mediterranean blue but the temperature of meltwater off a snow-covered roof. That was the problem with the Norfolk coast, the ice-cream vans were manned by Norwegians. Dryden’s testicles jockeyed violently for re-entry to his body.

  The shock helped. He managed to dislodge from memory the sight of that single, juvenile arm stretching up to the light. But the slick of putrid pork fat still lapped at the edge of consciousness. Thankfully the fizzing white spume of the waves gave off a cleansing rush of ozone.

  He sat in the dunes and thought about being there with Laura four summers ago. They’d talked about the two cottages they’d seen, on Adventurer’s Fen: Flightpath Cottages. Derelict and sodden with damp they would cost less to knock down than restore. It had been a discouraging day and Laura had seemed distant, preoccupied by some inner anxiety she seemed reluctant to share. The cottages weren’t right, they’d agreed that. And there had been something mean and pinched about the man who’d shown them round. But they shared a view which redefined the concept of panoramic. The wide snaking river running north, the reed beds to the east and west, and the deep cut of the Thirty Foot Drain providing the final defence against the outside world. And Laura’s reticence seemed coupled with another emotion, just below the surface, like the snaking green weed of the river. Excitement? Perhaps. Dryden sensed a coiled spring of elation somewhere within her, something brimming towards the surface but constantly hidden from him. He was growing impatient with their search and suspicious that Laura was avoiding the commitment the house, the home, would symbolize. She’d hugged her secret to herself, for that is what Dryden knew it to be that day, like a lonely child. It was a bad memory, but one of the last ones with any vividness before the crash in Harrimere Drain which had changed their lives for ever.

  The memory didn’t improve his mood. He felt depression sweeping over him like a cold front over a trawler at sea. He took evasive action, retrieving a white folded piece of paper sticking out of his trouser pocket. It was the printout from Laura’s COMPASS machine that he had failed to read the night before. Now he laid it in the sand and put two pebbles at either end to hold it firm.

  He saw the name but didn’t recognize it, even though he felt his skin goosebump, despite the eighty-degree heat. Until now Laura’s messages could have been simply the product of her unique view on the world. A view of hospital visitors whispering and discussing family secrets around the deathbed of Maggie Beck. But this? This was a warning.

  WATCH WHITE

  He knew that if he concentrated on something else the memory would come back. He watched a trawler running in on the gravy-brown tide, while on the beach a child stuck lollipop sticks into the tops of sandcastles.

  Then he had it: Freeman White, Lyndon Koskinski’s fellow prisoner in Al Rasheid jail. Koskinski had said he was stationed at Mildenhall, undergoing medical treatment.

  They were back at The Tower within an hour. Dryden sensed now that Laura had been at the centre of what had happened to Maggie Beck in the last days of her life. The life she had recorded on tape.

  He climbed the stairs to Laura’s room. The COMPASS machine was silent but a length of tickertape hung motionless in the room’s fetid air. She was getting more expert at using the machine, Dryden could see that now. The gibberish was probably all involuntary movements. But when the message came it was separate and clear.

  SHDUTUF F GKO GLDJUCN TAPESECORDER

  FDHGFI FHGO SHSYGFKF DHDYWISJ SJSOSOJ

  He felt the hair on his neck prickle. She was one letter out. He should have noticed before, the tape deck Estelle and Lyndon had left on the window ledge was gone.

  The nurse on duty at the desk in the foyer seemed mildly affronted that Dryden could suggest one of the staff was a thief.

  ‘I can’t imagine anyone has taken it,’ she said, a practised smile revealing sharp teeth.

  ‘So where is it?’

  ‘Perhaps Mrs Beck’s family took it?’

  ‘They said they left it, it’s mine. But I’ll double check,’ said Dryden. ‘In the meantime, perhaps you could ask around. If it turns up, no questions will be asked – OK? Otherwise, I guess it’s the police.’

  He showed his teeth back.

  Then he told Humph to take him home. They drove in silence to Barham’s Dock where PK 129 lay motionless under a large moon.

  ‘Drink?’ asked Dryden, getting out, and not looking back.

  He knew something was wrong before he reached the boat. It lay low in the water and he could see now that the bow was much lower than the stern. Some of the pots in which he grew herbs on the deck had spilled on to the bank.

  He heard Humph behind him. ‘Shit.’

  About three foot of black, stinking river water lay inside the main cabin. A crude siphon pump had been set up to draw the river water up, over the bulwarks, and into the cabin well. He plucked one end of the pipe from the river and climbed aboard. He submerged the pipe in the water in the wheelhouse and then flipped one end of the pipe back overboard, reversing the flow and beginning the long task of draining the boat dry. Peeking through the forward portholes he saw debris floating: a picture of Laura’s parents in Turin, some plastic plates, and a half-full bottle of malt whisky, bobbing cork up.

  They edged on board, aware that PK 129 had a dangerous list to port. Humph found the newspaper cutting – identical to the one left on the Capri’s windscreen. It was pinned to the chart board in the galley. Pinned with a carving knife.

  The childless house had mocked Maggie Beck from the first day: the day they’d driven through the military monotony of the Forestry Commission estates. The windows mocked her with their identical views of pine trees and sandy paths. And the ivory dress mocked her too, even now, from its crêpe-paper package above the wardrobe. She longed for the view across Black Bank Fen, wondering at the same time how she could miss, so much, something she had hated so much. The memory of an amphitheatre sky haunted her claustrophobic life. She longed for a horizon, a distant view of miniature people, a cloud casting a shadow half a county away.

  She’d married Don two years ago. The best wedding picture was in the front room over the gas fire. He could have been her dad, she knew that’s what everyone was saying behind their hands. Sometimes she wished he was. Then she could have shared the memory, the memory of the falling star that had taken Matty away.

  Why had she married him? Children, security, kindness, decency. Four powerful reasons she knew now did not add up to love.

  She went to the front room and touched Matty’s picture: the one she’d taken when he was a week old. She loved this image, the one she saw every day, but she loved her secret more. So she ran, up the stairs, to the laundry room where the chest was. It was burnt too, like her cheek, and she ran her finger down the scar with an almost sensual caress. She lifted it open and slipped her hand down beside the old clothes until she found the waxed wallet that held the air-letters. They’d started to arrive last year on Lyndon’s first birthday. She’d had to ask, by registered letter. She’d lost Matty, they knew that, she only asked to see how the boy she’d saved was growing. And he
was growing. Her favourite showed him naked, just two, standing in a lake with a smile like a searchlight and a plastic Captain Hook cutlass.

  She flipped it over but she knew the inscription, knew all the inscriptions: ‘Tokebee, Michigan. Summer 78. London plays pirates.’

  That’s all she had until now: pictures of a memory. Until now. She checked her watch: 9.38.

  Where was Don? He should be here, they’d agreed that, together. She ran to the nursery and checked the temperature: 74°F, just like the book had said. She rested her hand on the blanket in the cot and felt the familiar surge of grief of loss, the almost overwhelming conviction that she could feel his body warmth even now, two years later.

  She cried at the funeral. Cried openly for the little boy she didn’t know, and secretly for the little boy she’d sent to live another life 5,000 miles away. Her lover’s tears were real. They burst out of him like a spring and he’d knelt in the red dust and wept like a child who can find no logic in the world’s cruelty. It was the only time she’d felt like touching him since the night she’d seen the pictures. The pictures of her. She could have reached out, told him even then, and ended those tears. But she kept her secret, and bathed instead in his grief.

  The doorbell rang. She slipped on the stairs and clattered down into the hat stand. She fumbled with the latch and threw it open, knowing it was Don: two long rings and one short. It was his warning signal. To summon her from the depths of the old farmhouse. He was trying to smile, trying to hide what he felt: ‘There’s something wrong. The boy’s gone, Maggie. The boy’s gone. We have to talk to them again.’

  She hated his farmer’s face then, with the cheeks nipped red by the frost.

  Wednesday, 18 June

  28

  Dawn: the sun broke on the eastern horizon and swung a searchlight beam over the landscape. From the observation platform on which Dryden stood he looked down on the canopy of trees which seemed to cover the earth. To the east a large freshwater lake broke the sea of feathered, sunlit green; motionless except for an excited flock of flamingoes, an impossibly pink blotch on the eggshell blue water. He was the only one in the tree hide forty feet above Wicken Fen. An elephant could have ambled out of the tall rushes and drunk at the water beneath him. Exotic bird calls cut the silence which had come over the waterscape with the start of the day. Dryden felt his spirit swell at the sheer scale of the landscape below him, and the skyscape above. In spring and autumn, when dawn was later, it was a sight which brought the crowds to see the feeding: but not today. He could see the reflective flash of binoculars from some of the other hides, but he was alone in his: a sentry against a purple sky.