Dryden ignored him and looked at Etty. ‘There’s some new pickers out for the harvest,’ she said. ‘They arrived the day before yesterday. My guess is their papers are phoney. They get dropped off by van for the night shifts. They don’t know exactly where they’re living and their English isn’t great, but I heard them talking. There’s a lot of languages, but English is the only one they share. They call it the silos – where they’re sleeping. They’re pretty unhappy with it as far as I can gather – no shops around, no nothing.’
‘Silos?’ said Dryden.
Etty finished her malt and licked her lips. ‘A cluster of them. It has to be Sedge Fen. The old grain works.’
39
Laura’s room was silent and flooded with light. The COMPASS machine trailed a six-foot tickertape. Dryden knew, sensing the incoherent patterns, but sat by the bed and studied the letters anyway. Half-way down, still lost in the random signals, he took Laura’s hand, knowing it was for his own comfort rather than hers. When he reached the foot of the tickertape he kept his eyes down, folded the tickertape, and kissed her once.
The messages had stopped, he knew that now. He stood by the window in flat, cheerless heat and thought about what it meant for him if she had finally retreated, back into the coma which had engulfed her after the crash in Harrimere Drain. It meant that the nightmare was coming true. A lifetime spent at the foot of a hospital bed pretending to talk to a comatose figure which used to be his wife. A dialogue of self-deception he felt he could neither face nor abandon. As in all true nightmares, escape was beyond his control.
‘If you’re not there, why do I have to be?’ he asked out loud.
He waited for an answer, feeling the anger lift his pulse rate. The silence in The Tower was complete, until he heard the caretaker in the corridor outside.
It was Ravel this time, Bolero.
‘The whistler,’ said Dryden, and kissed Laura’s hand.
Out in the corridor he heard the sound of a pail of water being slopped on to a floor. Through a door he found his way on to a cast iron spiral stairway. When the door slammed behind him the light fled, leaving him blinded. Looking down through where he imagined the open metal rungs of the steps to be he sensed rather than saw the faint glow of distant, reflected light. Edging down he stumbled repeatedly on the narrow, triangular steps.
The light came from a series of four bulbs strung, like half-hearted illuminations, along fifty yards of cellar corridor. The pools of darkness between were deep and cool, the lights picking out a brutal black and white pattern of shadow along the bare brick walls. Under the far light the caretaker was working, expertly using his weight to push the mop forwards, backwards, and forwards again.
Dryden watched from the shadows. The caretaker was perhaps sixty, tall, but with a spine bent into a curve by years of labour. A minute passed and then a kettle’s whistle blew. He straightened his back, took his mop and pail and disappeared through a doorway. The whistle died. Then the music began. Bruch, the violin concerto, swelled to fill the damp air.
Under cover of the London Symphony Orchestra Dryden walked to the door and looked in. It was a sitting room of sorts. A single table, single chair, and a single bed were the only furniture. A bookcase, made of planks on bricks, filled one wall. On the other narrow, vertical, wooden tape holders. There were hundreds, possibly thousands.
‘Quite a collection,’ said Dryden, in a pause in the Bruch.
The caretaker wheeled round, the tin cup he held shaking instantly. Dryden could only imagine what kind of life had produced a face like that. In the cellar’s half light the deep lines were as sharp as knife wounds, the eyes hooded and cast down. Without looking at Dryden he walked to the tape recorder and hit the stop button, holding his finger on it for a few seconds before speaking. It was the recorder Dryden had bought Maggie. Its predecessor, a moulded 1970s version three times as big, stood beside it still.
The voice was a revelation, pitched high, clear and pleasantly musical. I’m sorry, I thought they’d left it behind. I…’
Dryden held up his hand. ‘Keep it. It’s not important. Was there a tape inside?’
The caretaker looked puzzled. ‘A tape? Yes, yes… I’m sorry. I didn’t think… Again. I’m sorry. So sorry.’ He rummaged amongst the flotsam and jetsam of a kitchen drawer. He held up the tape, the fingers of his hand trembling clearly, and Dryden took it, turning it like a diamond in his hand.
Dryden left and as he climbed the stairs he heard the Bruch swell out again.
Outside, Inspector Newman had parked his Citroën next to Humph’s cab. They were busy ignoring each other as Dryden appeared, flopping into the passenger seat beside the policeman. ‘Anything new?’
The back seat of the car was nearly obscured by Newman’s photographic equipment. He’d clearly been up to the coast in pursuit of the Siberian gull.
‘If you count an ID on the body in the fire house at Mildenhall, yes,’ he said. ‘This is unofficial, OK?’ Dryden nodded. ‘Bob Sutton. Teeth gave it away – military work. We got the X-rays from Singapore. He was a Red Cap. Perfect match. Wife’s upset.’
‘Getaway. Some people, eh?’
Newman refused to take the bait. ‘Which sort of cuts him out as number one suspect for torturing and killing Johnnie Roe.’
‘Why does it rule him out? He had a great motive. His only daughter had been lured into that pillbox, raped, abused. She’d been drugged, and for all he knew at that time murdered as well. He must have thought Johnnie Roe knew where she was. Perhaps he was trying to get it out of him.’
‘So who killed Sutton?’
‘You tell me. But he’s still my call on Roe’s torturer,’ said Dryden, watching Humph tear open a pre-wrapped sandwich.
‘Great,’ said Newman, viewing the cabbie with distaste. ‘Two killers, not one.’
As he got out Dryden tried a last question: ‘The bag in the pillbox. The picture, the food. It was Emmy Kabazo’s?’
‘Yup. Dad identified it for us during questioning before his release on bail. Doesn’t put him in there though, does it? And it’s Bob Sutton’s prints on the knife, anyway. Work that one out.’
Jimmy Kabazo hugged himself and thought of Emmy, his son. He smelt his hair and the memory quickened his heartbeat. Then he lifted the rifle barrel to his lips and kissed the cool stock, leaving two lips of condensation on the dull yellow gunmetal. He watched the lips fade and then whispered ‘Emmy’ as he lowered his eye to meet the icy metal oval of the gunsight. The target crosshair swam slightly through a tear, and then cleared to reveal a crisp cross.
He swept the telescopic sight across the familiar contours of Sedge Fen. The main silos stood in an urban cluster rising out of the black peat flatlands. The Victorians had built them, and the New Elizabethans had let them rot. Each, empty now, was an open throat to the sky. The crows circled in the early morning heat, rising from their roosts inside.
At the foot of the silos clustered the little agricultural city which had been Sedge Fen. Storage sheds, machine shops, offices, canteens, a first-aid block and the charge hands’ tied cottages. And at the edge of the complex, beneath an elevated and dilapidated conveyor belt, the loading bays where the produce had been dumped into the railway trucks for Ely Dock, and then London. Through the gunsight Jimmy watched a rat investigate some rotting grain sacks, its long tail stiff and silvery.
He shivered, not because the cool morning air was warming, but because he knew he would use the gun today. It would be Emmy’s last revenge: the skinhead.
He’d botched his first revenge. Jimmy sobbed with the memory, the tears welling again. He thought of Emmy, and the body in the mortuary that was all that was left of Emmy, and the pain doubled him up. He clutched his arms around his chest and waited for the despair to subside. He looked around him, but the room was comfortless. Red brick stripped of plaster, the concrete base where the diesel pump had stood, and the single window through which the sun poured on to the dusty floor. It had provided him wi
th the perfect eyrie. A lonely water pumping station, long abandoned, far enough away to avoid their perfunctory patrols, but within range. Well within range.
He pressed his forehead against the floor and spoke into the dust. ‘Cheated,’ he said.
He’d waited that first time too. By the Ritz, in the Wilkinson’s van, half a mile along the main road by an emergency telephone. He’d waited all night for Emmy with the bag, so that he’d have something to eat while they took him to the old airfield. Something for comfort. An excuse really, an excuse to see his son after nearly eighteen long months of lonely exile. And just after midnight a lorry had swung into the lay-by and the driver killed the lights. But Jimmy didn’t move. He knew the warnings the smugglers had given. That the police would run a lorry too one day, to catch the middle-men. So he waited for the driver to unload, for Johnnie Roe to appear from the Ritz. But the minutes had slipped by and nobody had come. And so the lorry had powered out, the gears crashing angrily.
So Jimmy left the bag with the presents behind the Ritz, hanging from the door handle, and went to work. Smiling to work. The next evening the bag still hung there, like a head in a noose. So he switched to day shifts and watched each night from the van. He’d thought how much he loved his son, and how stupid he had been to entrust his life to the people smugglers. To the skinhead.
Two days gone. On the Friday night the square man full of muscles had parked up and examined everything like a policeman. He’d held open the top of the Tesco bag with a pen, using a miniature spotlight to look inside. With a bunch of keys he’d worked on the Ritz’ locks until the back door had jumped open. Inside, he’d made the unit rock as he searched, the spotlight occasionally shooting out through the gap around the serving hatch. Outside, he’d found something on the ground. Jimmy sensed the excitement as the man squatted down on his haunches in the dust and then, straightened, had walked carefully eastwards towards the fen. Jimmy had feared for Emmy then. What did the man want? What had he found? And then the square man had returned to his car. Swiftly, as though a decision had been made. Not tonight, perhaps. But the next night he’d come again, and this time he’d brought a larger torch, and a rucksack, and he’d taken the bag, Emmy’s bag, and walked off across Black Bank Fen.
So Jimmy followed, taking the car jack from the boot to keep his courage hot. Across Black Bank Fen, behind the square man with the Tesco bag that held his son’s life. Across Black Bank Fen until they reached Mons Wood, and the pillbox in the moonlight.
Was Emmy inside? Jimmy waited as the square man went in and he listened, hoping with such a violent intensity to hear his son’s voice that he conjured it up. He heard ‘Papa’. He heard ‘Help’; an hallucination more powerful than any sound he’d ever really heard. So he called out Emmy’s name – but it was the square man who came out. And he had blood on his hands. He wouldn’t have killed him if the muscled man hadn’t been so strong. He hit him with the jack from the car, across the chest. But the fool ducked and took the blow across the forehead and just grunted, standing there, stupidly. Even in the moonlight Jimmy saw the shock in his eyes. So Jimmy hit him again and recognized the sound; the sticky soft crunch of the cranium folding into the brain. That’s how his father had killed the cow a lifetime ago, a single blow, destroying the head and turning the eyes white.
So he left him in the grass and ran inside but Emmy wasn’t there. Only the man from the Ritz. The man with the cigarette hair, strung out across the floor, reaching for the empty glass. Pathetically he thought Jimmy had come to save him. So he begged for the glass. Begged for the water. There was blood around the man’s mouth which trickled as he spoke. Jimmy guessed the square man had hit him. A bruise, oddly green in the moonlight, was rising quickly over the man’s cheek and eye, distorting his face.
The contents of the Tesco bag had been dumped on the straw floor. Jimmy looked down at them stupidly and the man from the Ritz saw his chance.
‘I told him. I don’t know – don’t know whose they are. I missed the lorry. Tuesday. I missed it. Perhaps it was for them? I don’t know.’ Then his eyes turned again to the glass on the shelf and he almost whispered it this time. ‘A drink?’
So Jimmy asked him where Emmy had gone. Where they’d all gone. What was the plan if the drop was missed? Was there a plan? But he wouldn’t say, or he didn’t know. And then when Jimmy didn’t give him the water he made something up, babbling rubbish to win himself the water. Jimmy had felt anger then, and humiliation. He felt a fool, manipulated always by the white men who ran his life, the men who had lost his son. A simple bargain they had failed to keep. They’d taken the money and his son. The anger made him swoon.
So he left the glass on the ledge. And then he ran, hearing the man’s screams diminish slowly, until he could only imagine them in the silence of the fields.
The humiliation came back now, fresh and powerful. He stood, and took up his post at the open window again, pulling the gunsight to his eye and training it on the loading bays. ‘It’s where he sleeps,’ he said, out loud this time. The skinhead who had driven the lorry. The skinhead the black men paid to do the job. His hatred for the skinhead made him vomit, heaving up over his chin, but at least the taste of the bile stopped him shaking, so he put the crosshairs of the gunsight over the red door they always used, and waited, counting the seconds into minutes.
He thought of Emmy’s body in the morgue, but this time there were no tears. He’d kissed him that one last time and although his skin had been cold, as the barrel on the gun was cold, he’d made him a promise as the lips touched his cheek. The skinhead. Then the red door opened and he led them out, the metal in his teeth catching the sun. A truck must be coming. The skinhead blinked in the sunlight and spread his arms wide in an embrace of life, while the others went to flag the truck in off the drove road. Arms wide, his face to heaven; the skinhead grinned and rubbed his hands in his short, cropped hair. So Jimmy put the crosshairs on his neck, waited a second to make sure they were both still, pulled the trigger, and sent him to hell in a spurt of bright, arterial blood.
Friday, 20 June
40
Dryden had considered playing Maggie’s last tape on the Capri’s deck. Did he have the right? Technically it was Maggie’s testament, and it had been left for Estelle and Lyndon to hear. But he couldn’t wait. He’d try Estelle at Black Bank first, then he’d play it. Still he had one other option to try to find his own answers to the mystery of Black Bank. What he needed was to talk to someone who had been there in 1976, but was prepared to tell the truth now about the Beck family, and its secrets.
Tracking Constance Tompkins down had been easy enough. Estelle was not answering calls at Black Bank and Johnnie Roe’s ex-wife had offered him few details. But she must, he reasoned, be close by to have attended Maggie’s funeral. He’d checked with a contact at County Hall and they’d traced her through the files on the county library service. She had emigrated, but she was back now, and drawing a pension. They were happy enough to give Dryden the address once he explained that Maggie Beck’s children wanted to contact their great-aunt.
Which had led him here: Fenlandia. The wooden sign on the stone gate post said ‘Rest Home’, and Dryden felt a familiar surge of nausea at the euphemism. The house stood somewhere in a stand of pine trees at the end of a dreary, dead-end lane out of town. An unnecessary and undiplomatic sign added: DEAD SLOW in letters so large they were hard to read.
Dryden left Humph ordering a bottle of make-believe retsina at Nicos’s taverna and crunched his way up the gravel drive until the building came into view. He was surprised to find it was ultra-modern, boasted two satellite dishes and solar-powered roof panels. In a nod to the more traditional model it had a large conservatory along the building’s frontage, overlooking lawns. Wisteria drooped from the eaves in a splash of washed-out purple and ivory.
‘Wisteria,’ said Dryden happily, thinking it was the perfect plant to reserve for old age.
A line of Lloydloom wicker chairs sto
od in firing-squad formation behind the smudge-free glass of the conservatory. All were empty except one. He’d rung ahead and the woman who had answered the phone said Mrs Constance Tompkins would love to see him. But she might not say much: ‘Mrs Tompkins is with us sometimes, and sometimes not. She’s happy either way.’
The rest of the residents were in a TV lounge at the rear. The heat was stifling, but try as he might Dryden could not detect the tell-tale odour of stale urine. Faintly disappointed not to have his prejudices confirmed he talked loudly to everyone he met on the assumption they were deaf. The woman who ran Fenlandia wore a dark suit and could have been a director of a City insurance company. She led Dryden to the conservatory at a military pace.
Mrs Tompkins was reading a novel with rapt concentration. The paperback cover was frayed and stained, a Penguin Classic from the sixties, lovingly re-read. She didn’t look up when they arrived and, while she might have been deaf, Dryden suspected she was just ignoring him.
‘I’ll leave you alone for a few minutes,’ said the proprietor, touching Mrs Tompkins on the arm. ‘This is the man I mentioned, Connie. From the newspaper.’
She carried on reading pointedly until she finished a chapter. Then she folded the book and put her reading glasses away. She looked sprightlier than she had at Maggie’s funeral, but Dryden guessed she must be seventy-five, perhaps more. She looked like Queen Mary, but in colour. If there was a family resemblance with Estelle he couldn’t see it, except, perhaps, around the darting, playful eyes.
‘Hello,’ she said, and laughed. Dryden felt he’d made a misjudgement somewhere, sometime, about seventy-five-year-olds. ‘You want to know about Maggie, don’t you? I read the piece.’ She pulled a copy of The Crow from the side of the cushions she sat on. ‘It’s got your name on it.’
Dryden sat down. Outside, the sunshine was burning the grass lawn quietly to stubble. The antimacassar on the seat oozed lavender water; he suddenly felt very tired. It took an effort of will to summon up the first question. ‘Maggie died before she could tell Matty why she did what she did. I think she planned to tell him. She left some tapes – about her life. Estelle says she never explained, at the beginning at least, why she swapped the children. We know she wanted to give Matty a new life, but what was wrong with the one she could have given him herself? Matty should know – it’s what Maggie would have wanted. Do you know, Mrs Tompkins?’
The Fire Baby Page 23