The Fire Baby

by The Fire Baby

  ‘Yeah,’ said Peake. ‘It’s a sight. Fire training facility has gone up, then a petrol tank. It’s right by the wire on the south side – near the road to Beck Row, half a mile north of the junction with the main Ely road. I’m officer in charge at the scene for the civil – give us a wave. The yellow hat. Ciao.’

  Dryden checked the back seat for The Crow’s office cameras and a decent pair of binoculars. Humph already had the cab on the road going east, while overhead the sky was turning from blue to purple like a giant bruise as the sun set. They saw the single gout of fire ten miles short of the end of the main runway, a vertical eruption of fuel-blue flame closely followed by the crump of exploding metal.

  The approach roads to the base were closed by military policemen with mobile road-blocks but Humph swung the Capri off down an unlit drove road around the perimeter wire. They big-dippered along the rock-hard farm track until they bounced out into a large field of unmown grass gone to seed. It was a camp site run by an enterprising local farmer exclusively for plane spotters. Their caravans and trailers stood well back from the twelve-foot security wire while in front of each stood a small fisherman’s tent from which the spotters could train their telephoto lenses on the arrivals and departures at Mildenhall. It was, Dryden had often thought, the village of the sad.

  The entire population of this dysfunctional holiday camp was up against the perimeter wire including half a dozen kids in stripy pyjamas.

  The fire was 200 yards beyond the wire. An alcopop orange flame curled up in a single sickly cone of ear-splitting combustion. Dryden pressed his face against the diamond-webbed fence with all the rest. The guy next to him made Humph look like a bathing belle. He could only dream of pressing his face against the fence. On his huge chest a pair of binoculars rested unused, as he shielded his eyes by pulling down a cap peak slightly smaller than a garage door.

  ‘Fucker,’ he said, burping. A small boy at his knee, with suspicious quantities of puppy fat still adhering to his tiny limbs, looked up with adoring eyes. There was a lot to look up to.

  ‘What happened?’ said Dryden, hoping the guy wouldn’t swing round and flatten him.

  ‘The fire house went up.’

  Dryden realized immediately that the big man didn’t know he was not one of the brothers, one of that intimate band that knew the difference between an FK-109 and an FK-109XA, or even the secret society within that, which actually cared.

  But being a reporter is all about owning up. ‘Actually. I’m a reporter. Just driven out – what’s a fire house?’

  Dryden took an evasive step back as the big man swung round. He looked at Dryden as one would greet an alien life form, spitting effortlessly over Dryden’s head and then cracking his knuckles. It sounded like he was dislocating the legs on a turkey.

  ‘Fire house is where they practise fire fighting, OK? It’s just a brick shell – but with concrete floors. Only difference is they have metal hatches over the windows, doors, chimney – all the outlets. That way they can control the fire. This one’s got a fake fuselage attached, and a wing with an engine. They flood ‘em with high-octane fuel and then – Bang!’

  Dryden jumped. The big man liked that. So he did it again. ‘Bang!’

  They returned to the diamond mesh fence. ‘So what went wrong?’

  ‘Guess they didn’t have this one under control.’

  Dryden saw Darren Peake’s yellow hat bobbing on the edge of the fire zone. He rang him on the mobile and waved, stupidly, from beyond the wire. Darren strolled over, removing the hat and the breathing gear, and Dryden took some pictures through the fence as he approached with the fire in the background.

  ‘There’s a body,’ he said, sucking water from a bottle attached to his protective suit.

  ‘In there?’

  Darren nodded. ‘Guy’s a crisp. Not a lot left, even the teeth are carbonized.’ Dryden felt a crème de menthe ease itself into his lower gut. ‘How?’

  He replaced the yellow hat. ‘Between you and I? There was a practice scheduled for tomorrow morning; they usually let us know, just in case, so we can stand by. So everything would have been ready. There’s a reservoir of aircraft fuel inside which was full. Looks like someone took their chance, dumped chummy and lit the fuel. Bingo – crispy bacon. There are ventilation grilles on all four outside walls which provide the fire with air – they were all open. Some sparks got out and lit the runway grass. That heated up the waste oil tank, which ignited.’

  ‘Bang!’ said the man-mountain, who had been listening intently.

  They all looked back as a hissing sound overrode the screaming of the flames. Several jets of foam were being played on the flames which fluttered before dying in a cauldron of steam. The fire house was instantly buried under a snow drift.

  ‘Send us some prints, eh? Show’s over,’ said Darren, walking off.

  But it wasn’t. The oil tank, capped with white foam, blew itself up. Darren, and everyone behind the wire, hit the grass, the big man going down with surprising grace. As cinders fell like black smoke Dryden left everyone else trying to pick him up.

  He woke Humph up. ‘There’s a body in there. Human bacon. This place will be crawling with police when they get the call. Let’s go.’

  Humph, horrified, fired the Capri into life.

  34

  ‘I’d like you to come with me, OK?’

  Humph studied the Capri’s rear-view mirror.

  ‘I’ve never asked before. I won’t again. Once.’

  ‘Last time,’ said Humph, fingering the retied ends of his beloved fluffy dice.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Dryden. ‘He slashed the seats. It wasn’t Pearl Harbor. This is important. I need your help.’

  Dryden got out of the car, slammed the door and took the steps two at a time into the reception area of the hospital. Humph followed carefully, picking his way up each individual step, and when he got to the top he surveyed the plush carpet-muffled interior of The Tower. ‘Is there a lift?’

  They rode up to the third floor in a silence punctuated by the bronchial whistles of Humph’s pulmonary system coping with the shock of physical effort.

  Humph had never actually seen Laura. His partnership with Dryden had begun in the desolate weeks after her accident when the reporter needed ferrying from the hospital to his mother’s house on Burnt Fen. Wordless journeys of unshared grief which had somehow forged between them a bond of mutual alienation. Humph was dissolving in a toxic combination of anger and grief after his wife had walked out with the kids. Dryden was coming out of shock after the accident and wishing he wasn’t. They were made for each other.

  Humph felt guilty seeing the figure in the bed for the first time, as if he was peeping into a private nightmare. Dryden’s rare excursions into memory had given an impression of his wife characterized by an exuberance of warmth: Latin temperament, Italian colouring, and ample curves. Humph had seen a picture reluctantly withdrawn from the zipped pocket of the wallet: a broad face blessed with perfect skin, brown eyes with a slight cast, and a jumble of auburn hair. The cabbie was not surprised to find the real Laura dramatically different. Her skin was ice-white and lifeless. The eyes open, brown, but blank; the arms laid straight at the sides, and the lips pale and parted by a centimetre. The teeth behind were perfect, linen white, and dry.

  ‘She’s beautiful,’ said Humph, lying.

  Dryden nodded, pleased at the lie, and oddly moved. ‘Tear it off,’ he said, pointing at the tickertape from the COMPASS machine.

  ‘Why?’ said Humph, tearing off the sheet and sitting down on two bedside chairs.

  ‘Tell me what it says. It’s beginning to freak me out. She told me to watch Freeman White. I’m pretty sure he’s responsible for the threats, the attempt to sink my boat. How the hell does she know?’

  Humph shrugged and studied the tape. There were a few lines of jumbled letters.

  SGARTFN FH F F DGFDHFYRND LOPQJFCYOID

  SGSH SI I H SHSJOSD SDHFUTKG SHFDGFYTO

  G
HLL

  ‘Nothing,’ said Humph.

  ‘There’s gotta be,’ said Dryden, snatching the paper back.

  There was a long silence in which Dryden tried to force meaning from the jumble of letters.

  Then the tickertape machine bashed out a single letter: T.

  They both jumped, Humph’s return to earth producing a perceptible after-tremor.

  The COMPASS machine ticked and printed a second letter: H. They jumped again and Humph began to edge back from the COMPASS machine. Dryden held his ground, holding the paper. ‘Tell me, Laura,’ he said, looking into her vacant brown eyes.

  THE. Then she stopped. A minute passed in which they could hear a B-52 overhead droning in towards Mildenhall while the string of letters slowly lengthened.

  THE WHISSLES

  Dryden tore off the sheet and studied the letters again. ‘Wait in the car,’ he told Humph.

  Dryden sat beside Laura’s bed. ‘I need help,’ he said. ‘Not this.’

  He waited by the COMPASS machine for an hour in complete silence.

  She knew the moment when she’d made the decision: the unilateral decision that she loved him. She’d always loved the idea of him, ever since she’d understood what America was. But that day at the track, she’d gone to get hot dogs and Cokes while he strolled round the cars before the first race. Running his fingers sensuously along the beaten metal, the way he’d run his fingers over her.

  When she got back with the food the first race had begun. What she remembered was that he seemed to be the only thing that wasn’t moving. The backdrop was chaotic. The stock cars raising dust even that early in the summer, the metal screeching as two clashed on a bend, then heaved over together as if in a brawl. The crowd, mostly US military from the air bases, had run to the rail to view the wreckage, to cheer the two drivers emerging from the dust

  And he’d just stood there, on the grass with his leg up on the running board of the Land Rover, flicking the Zippo. His self-contained stillness made her want to be near him always. It was the antidote to her own life, which had never seemed to have a centre, let alone one which would always hold. Even as she approached with the food and the drinks he didn’t turn.

  She touched his arm. ‘Lyndon?’ And that was when he knew he’d fallen in love with her, the point when he knew he wanted to come back to the world he’d lost in Al Rasheid. He’d been lonely ever since, avoiding strangers because they could ask questions, and friends because they couldn’t, because they felt that saying nothing was the kindest cure for what he knew they must call many things – his illness, his injuries, his imprisonment, his lifelessness.

  In truth he’d always been lonely. His lifelessness was older than his imprisonment. His childhood had been oddly passionless, an orphan doted on, but never loved, not with the unconditional love of a parent. An orphan placated by money and education. A friendless boy who loved only an heroic image of his father, the Vietnam hero. A figure of intoxicating excitement always just beyond his reach. So he’d been lonely all his life: which is why he’d survived Al Rasheid.

  Estelle had ended that loneliness because their shared history made her unique. She’d known him all his life, but he was a stranger. Ever since he could remember they’d sent her presents from Texas, dolls when she was a child, then clothes, CDs, pictures of the desert, and the city where they lived: the pool, the Christmas tree, the people-carrier. And she’d sent pictures back, from the awkward Fen child in farm clothes clutching her American doll, to the blonde teenager with the all-American smile.

  ‘Pretty kid,’ said his grandfather, sourly. They’d resented the contact, his grandparents, he knew that now. He knew that it was Maggie who had kept them together, persisted, and used their guilt to keep the link alive.

  And Estelle had envied him his family as well, with all the cruelty of a child. The lack of parents, the doting grandparents, the freedom. Her father had died when she was four, long before her memory had been born. And her mother had loved her as her second child, precisely that and nothing more. A great love, but always, she sensed, short of its absolute potential. Estelle knew that even before memory began.

  And so they’d shared a childhood, an adolescence, despite the 5,000 miles that had always separated them. When he’d been stationed overseas he’d flown out via the Pacific – but they’d told Maggie he was posted in Iraq and that if he came back through the UK he’d visit. He’d dreaded the thought, the reality of the contact after all these years, but his grandparents had insisted it was only right. Only what Maggie deserved. She’d saved his life. But after Al Rasheid he couldn’t face them, despite the calls from home telling him Maggie was ill.

  But his depression had deepened, alone in his room at the base. He had to drive, drive anywhere without a map. Perhaps he knew it would happen. He’d seen the sign and felt the past pulling him towards the centre of his life: that moment when the plane had disintegrated in a fireball of burning aviation fuel. He’d never wanted to see it the spot where his parents had died. But just after the sign came the stone, the memorial stone. He’d always carried the picture in his wallet. But now he got out and ran his fingers over the raised names on the stone, back and forth like a prayer said in Braille.

  He’d left the car and walked to the house. There was no answer so he walked round to the yard. She had a towel out on the grass by the greenhouses. A bikini, in sky blue he remembered, contrasting with the corn-yellow hair. A CD player belting out country and western. She hadn’t heard him so he stood and considered her, trying to recall what it was like to hold such a body. He couldn’t remember the name of the last woman he’d made love to. It seemed like an episode from a book he’d read, on a forgotten train journey. Or even the last time he’d held anybody, or been held. In the cell, at Al Rasheid, he’d held Freeman, to hold someone, and to keep him alive. But now he wanted to hold this woman.

  So he’d said hello. She’d jumped up and removed her sunglasses. And that was the start of it, and now there was an end to it.

  Thursday, 19 June

  35

  ‘The pillbox,’ said Dryden to himself, looking up at the shimmering bulk of the cathedral where a mirage already played above the lead roof. On Palace Green a gaggle of Japanese tourists had surrounded an ice cream van, but otherwise the town centre was deserted. The wet pools beneath the hanging baskets in the High Street had long since been burnt dry.

  Dryden checked the court list again. He was first up on the rota for the magistrates: Peter Selby, of Caddus Street, Rushden. The stud from the pillbox porn show. Dryden zig-zagged through the streets from shade to shade until he reached the imposing façade of the courthouse. Inside, an assortment of Ely low-life shuffled about in ill-fitting suits, and they were the solicitors.

  In the main courtroom the press bench was empty except for Alf Walker, a veteran wireman who had the county magistrate circuit stitched up, making a decent living filing anything juicy to the nationals. But he was no Rottweiler. He cut The Crow in for a nominal fee, which saved Henry Septimus Kew a fortune every year in staffing the court, while in return The Crow tipped him off if they heard something lively was on the court list.

  Normally Dryden would have left this one to Alf, but he was beginning to take a strong personal interest in the pillbox on Black Bank Fen and everything that had happened there.

  Alf was the opposite of the Fleet Street stereotype. Teetotal, with 180-wpm perfect Pitman shorthand, he dressed in country tweeds and sported a hat with a bird’s feather sticking out of the band. His hobby was birdwatching and his notebook pages alternated between beautifully inscribed shorthand verbatim notes and mildly gifted line drawings of British birds. He was half-way through a fine kestrel when Dryden slumped on to the bench next to him.

  At that moment the court clerk entered and promptly called the court to order with an ‘All rise!’ The magistrates trooped in.

  ‘How’s Andy?’ Dryden whispered. Walker was a member of the same birdwatching society as Inspector A
ndy Newman. Dryden had noticed that he and Alf were occasionally blessed with the same inside information as a result.

  ‘Chasing his arse. He’s got two corpses and no idea. But I doubt he’s losing any sleep over it.’ Alf nodded at the dock: ‘Hey up.’

  There stood Peter Selby, the stud from Newman’s pornographic snaps. Dryden reckoned he was six feet two, blond lifeless hair cut short and trendy with a French peak. He’d been given bail at his last appearance and was in a casual T-shirt which showed off the flawless muscles Alice Sutton had, at first, found so sexy. Even more so after she’d been slipped the date-rape drug in her drink.

  But it was a face that was most forgettable. It was odd but true that a complete set of perfect features can make a face repellent: a hymn to symmetry without a trace of character. He looked like a computer-enhanced superhero; a somewhat pathetic one, given his inability to fly the confines of a chipboard dock in a small town magistrates court.

  His lawyer stood, which was the first clue that Peter Selby had friends with wallets. This was no country circuit solicitor; the suit was navy blue, pinstripe, and cut to perfection. The legal bags were black leather and reeked of fees in excess of £400 an hour. Behind him sat two juniors armed with papers, mobile phones, and bottles of Evian.

  ‘I think we can assume Selby has wealthy friends,’ said Alf.

  The prosecuting solicitor stood slowly as two court ushers brought in four cardboard boxes and set them on the solicitor’s bench.

  For the first time Dryden noticed the group sitting behind the legal team. There were five men, four were black and smartly dressed, the fifth was white and but for the company he was keeping Dryden would have had him down as a member of the British National Party: a close-shaven head, military fatigues and an ugly botched attempt at a Union Jack tattoo on a bulging bicep.