by Jim Kelly
Dryden wondered if she’d stopped breathing while she relived the memory, because she took a very sharp intake of air which nearly made her cough.
‘As I say, I knew, immediately, that it was him. And then the last truck went through, which is always a shock, like the surprise when a noise stops that’s been going all day. It only takes a few seconds before the barrier goes up. I think the noise of the all-clear signal, the beeping, woke him up. He opened his eyes and we were looking at each other. One second, then he looked away. The car drove off very quickly, and it got faster because I watched it along the straight past Christ Church and it swerved and clipped the kerb and there was a cloud of dust. So I’m sure, really, that he recognized me too.’
‘It must have been frightening,’ said Dryden. ‘If he did recognize you …’
‘He might come back,’ she said. ‘But I don’t think so, do you? It’s much simpler to just keep away, which is what he’s done, because if I’d seen him once in the last ten years I’d have known, instantly. So he doesn’t live here, or work here, or if he does he keeps himself hidden away. I don’t think he knew I’d seen him that day in nineteen ninety-nine, so he’d have been oblivious of the danger of being recognized. But he’d still keep away, wouldn’t he? That’s human nature.’
A dove clattered out of the tree above them.
‘I’m not very good at descriptions. I went in to the police station at Peterborough and we tried to make one of those ID pictures, but it was useless.’
‘PC Powell said you tried your best.’
‘It wasn’t good enough,’ she said. ‘I do recall his expression. He had plump lips. I suppose, in another place and at another time I’d have said he was handsome, but it was a face with something missing. Does that make any kind of sense? He looked lost. Not geographically, but emotionally. That might be daft.’ She laughed again. ‘Best not mention that.’ She poured herself more wine.
‘PC Powell did give me some details about the car. There was a sticker, wasn’t there, in the rear window? A black dragon, on a white circle, belching red flame. That’s unusual, and he thinks that if we get that description out to people, someone is bound to recognize it.’
‘Yes, yes, that’s true. I’d never seen it before, anywhere. It was quite …’ She made a waving action with her hand, ‘… worn out. As if it had been there a long time and had been rubbed out almost. But I saw it, very clearly. A black dragon.’
She smiled, a carbon copy of all the other smiles she’d given Dryden, and then sipped her Elysian wine. ‘Do you know why I’m doing this?’ she asked, and something in Dryden didn’t want to hear the answer, but he had to shake his head.
‘I thought that just for a day, or a week, I could make him feel as anxious as I’ve felt all these years. Afraid of what might happen next. Afraid of the world, and everything in it. If I can do that, I’ll feel that Ronald has been given a little of the justice he deserves.’
FOURTEEN
Dryden was three steps from the door of The Crow’s Brimstone Hill office when his phone buzzed with an incoming text.
It was from Laura. Story at wind farm. Urgent. Bring camera.
He opened the office, grabbed a set of three old press cameras, and set out for Coldham’s Farm. Laura had left home that morning at 5.30 a.m. in Tano to meet the BBC film crew on site. They’d paid for just one day’s access to the site for filming and she was determined the shoot would be a success. Dryden knew her well enough to know she’d have thought carefully before using that key word: urgent.
The wind farm lay a mile on the far side of town. Dryden decided to jog the distance, which wasn’t too bad once the stitch went and his heartbeat began to flatten out. He was aware that the sensation of blood coursing through his veins was unfamiliar and he made a mental note to do more exercise. One of the downsides of Humph’s ability to be on hand with the Capri at almost all hours was that he rarely had to walk anywhere.
Once he’d cleared the old council estate on the edge of Brimstone Hill, the wind farm came into view: seventeen turbines, all over 100 feet high, fifteen in one pattern, two outlying to the south. White, streamlined, strangely alien, Dryden liked them because they reminded him of the windmills he’d played with on the beach as a child, but with the added quality of elegance. The speed of the turning blades was unhurried, unlike the frantic flutter and whiz of the toys. Here the combination of scale and the stately speed was beautiful.
Coldham’s was an open site, with each turbine enclosed by a security fence at the base, but with open grassland between them, and a road snaking past from east to west. From half a mile away it was clear something was wrong. He stopped running to massage his stitch and took the opportunity to try and memorise what he could see. The way to write a decent news story when you were short on facts, and you never knew when that might happen, was to take pictures with your eyes. At all costs, remember detail.
Usually all the turbines in a wind farm were angled in precisely the same direction to catch the wind, and most turned at the same gentle pace. But today several were pointing in random directions, half a dozen were motionless despite the wind, and one was revolving at high speed. It was clear that the computer-controlled system which operated the unmanned facility was either malfunctioning or inoperative.
He ran on a further hundred yards and stopped again. Close enough now, he could pick out the sound of that one fast-spinning turbine, the blades slicing through the air. The road that led through the wind farm had been closed off with an emergency barrier. Beyond, parked in a circle like a Wild West wagon train, was the BBC film unit: several caravans, a mobile editing suite, two outside broadcast camera units, a canteen, plus all the cars for the production staff, and a luxury coach, presumably laid on to link the site to the BBC offices in Norwich. It was, almost literally, a media circus.
Dryden’s eye found Laura instantly, walking from one of the make-up caravans towards the mobile café. He had that ability, to spot her in a crowd amongst hundreds. He knew her walk, the slight hesitation before each footfall, and the set of the head, chin up, and fixed, never scanning from side to side. Coldham’s Farm itself, the old house, was the backdrop to the scene, beyond the turbines. Dryden noticed that the BBC had imported some livestock to bring the landscape alive; a flock of geese were penned in by one of the vans.
A man in a linen suit was walking briskly to meet Dryden as he approached, the thin cloth of the trouser legs flapping furiously in the wind. Occasionally a gust would edge him off the beeline he was making for the reporter, because the wind had picked up, and now they were clear of town, it was strong enough to flatten out the grass in random patches, as if an invisible giant was putting down footprints. There was something about the relaxed shoulders of the approaching figure, the easy smile, the sober suit, that shouted public relations.
‘Hi. I’m Dominic Slater, I do press and media for Aeolian.’ He nodded at Dryden’s cameras. ‘Press?’
Laura had filled Dryden in on the background to Aeolian the night before. The company owned several wind farms in the Fens. Its green credentials were impressive. It ran a workers’ co-op based in Cornwall, and liaised closely with the RSPB to reduce bird kill in the turbines at sea.
‘Problem?’ asked Dryden.
‘You are?’
‘Sorry. Philip Dryden, from The Crow.’ The light of battle went out of Slater’s eyes. Dryden could imagine what he was thinking: local press, small impact, who cares what he writes? Which was why most decent press officers were ex-national newspaper reporters. They knew that Fleet Street relied on people like Dryden, reliable local stringers who could alert them to stories. The good news was that if Slater was stupid enough to think Dryden didn’t matter, he’d be off his guard.
The PR spread his arms wide. ‘It’s early days. We’ve got technicians on their way, but it looks like we’ve been targeted by metal thieves. Cables have been lifted, and some bits of machinery in some of the turbines. They’ve got into eight of them
, right up into the gondolas. Just walked in, as well, because the security doors don’t seem to have been a problem. Which is a bit worrying.’
Dryden tried to calculate rapidly what this fresh bout of metal theft meant for the inquiry into the murder at Christ Church. If there was a violent gang war going on in the West Fens, then one side still had, apparently, the time and nerve to pick off a wind farm. It was possibly an indication of the cash that they could generate by selling rare metals on the open scrap market. There was another possibility. The raid may have been long planned. The thieves could have decided to strike quickly before moving out of the area. Whoever they were, they weren’t amateurs: Slater had made it clear they’d used considerable expertise to get through the turbine security systems.
‘What about that one?’ asked Dryden, nodding at the turbine now revolving at a speed just short of becoming a blur.
‘Yeah. Not sure. They’re all fitted with default safety systems, so that if there’s no control they should feather so they don’t turn, and there’s a braking system, too. But that one’s just running wild.’
Dryden had his hands in his pockets but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t use the quote.
He let Slater talk for a while, got his card and mobile number, and then left him to deal with incoming calls on his phone.
While he was on the site, Dryden thought he’d get a snap of the star of Sky Farm, an actor who’d just been nominated for a Bafta for an earlier role in an ITV drama.
But Laura found Dryden first. ‘The turbines are bust,’ she said.
‘I can see. What about the shoot?’
‘Fine. We’re done. We just lined up the cameras to catch the ones that were working. We’re fine.’ Dryden could see how the stress was stretching her skin across her cheekbones. ‘And we can come back and do a few long shots when it’s all fixed.’
‘Where’s your male lead? I could take a snap.’
Laura led him over and introduced him to the star, whom Dryden didn’t recognize. After three minutes Dryden was reminded why he hated interviewing actors. He prided himself on being able to get under an interviewee’s skin, to capture something about his subject’s real motivation. He always forgot that most actors didn’t have a real character, being merely a collection of facades. Having concocted ten good questions, he was exasperated to discover that the actor didn’t have one good answer.
He was halfway through a dozen portrait shots with the wind farm in the background when he heard a shout. Everyone turned to look north: the out-of-control turbine was trailing smoke from its gondola. Slater stood at its base, looking up, on a mobile.
Dryden took some still shots, then used his phone to get video footage.
As the first yellow flame appeared, the PR started running. By the time he got to his silky-black BMW the gondola was fully alight. It crossed Dryden’s mind that he didn’t know what was actually burning – not metal, so what? Perhaps the gondolas were plastic, or fibreglass.
‘Can you film it?’ he asked Laura. ‘I can try with the mobile but the quality’s poor.’
The turbine gondola was ablaze now, like a struck match. One of the turbine blades sheared at the base within a minute, falling, a dead weight, less than fifty yards from the turbine shaft. The fire above spurted, like a faulty firework, pieces of machinery flying out, but landing well short of the crowd.
It struck Dryden then that the thieves had made an error of judgement in targeting the wind farm. Their other sources of precious and semi-precious metal were low profile: water pipes, manhole covers, church roofs. This was high impact, visible, and would make the local, if not the national news. The police would respond by rapidly switching resources into hunting them down. Coupled with the murder at Christ Church, it had turned a series of petty thefts into a major news story.
Then a windscreen broke on one of the parked cars beyond the unit. Dryden imagined a nut or bolt, a screw, thrown clear of the revolving hub of the turbine. He grabbed Laura and they ran with the rest of the crew to the perimeter of the farm, two hundred yards upwind of the turbine.
A crewman had brought his gear with him, a hand-held equipoise camera, plus telephoto lens. He set up a tripod and continued filming. One of the two remaining blades sheared and flew downwind, striking the blades of the next turbine and wrapping around it, like a sweet wrapper in the wind.
Laura was watching, fascinated, but smiling. ‘I can write this in. It’s great stuff.’
‘It’s an ill-wind …’ said Dryden.
Laura shook her head. ‘The cynical press.’
The police arrived in the form of PC Powell’s blue panda. Dryden borrowed binoculars off one of the crew and focused on the base of the burning turbine. A set of steps led up to a circular gallery, and a single door. Rather than a conventional lock, it had an electronic keypad. So not keys at all but coded numerical passwords, presumably unique to each turbine.
As he tried to focus on the security pad, the door itself blew open, blasted out by the pressure within, and a gout of flame licked out like a dragon’s tongue.
FIFTEEN
Dryden left the front door of the office open and took the stairs in sets of two, leaving the inner door ajar. A breeze blew through the window, once he had it propped open, but the heat was still unbearable. He thought he could hear tar bubbling on the flat roof above his head. A thermometer he’d put up on the wall in the heatwave of early summer now read eight-five degrees Fahrenheit, which just made him feel hotter. He stood on a chair so he could catch the breeze in his face. In the distance he could see the stricken wind turbine, smoke trailing away to the south. Its damaged neighbour was motionless, one blade broken.
The landline was ringing but he ignored it.
Switching on the laptop, he found BBC News 24. And there it was: Turbine 13, Coldham’s Farm, burning like a giant sparkler. The TV crew had got the footage straight to the newsroom in Norwich via Wi-Fi, and from there it had gone national in minutes. Which was why his landline was ringing.
The BBC would sell on the footage. The media world was dominated by an insatiable demand for moving pictures. He imagined people watching it in some deadbeat Midwest town, or a South African township, or a petrol station in the outback. The BBC would sell words, too, a ‘fat caption’ as it was called in the trade. But Dryden could provide more: he’d collected quotes out at the site. And he could write in a reference to the metal thieves and the murder hunt, all of which added to the picture’s media shelf-life. He needed to bash it all out and get it to the Press Association, the main UK-based wire service, making sure they credited The Crow. Brimstone Hill was always going to be world famous for a day. This was that day.
He cut the ringing phone and rang out, clipping on headphones so he could lean back in his chair.
Vee Hilgay picked up on the first ring in The Crow’s main office in Ely. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Philip. You’re famous. Well – Brimstone Hill is. I didn’t call because I knew you’d be out there.’ She was the only person left in the world who called him Philip, other than Laura.
They talked through the newslist for the Friday edition. By the end of the week there was every chance there would be charges in the Christ Church murder case, so that would give them a lead story, even if it was dry as dust due to legal restrictions on what they could print.
‘Let’s build up the whole metal theft story, the wider picture,’ said Dryden. ‘Anything you’ve got, let me have. If a nut and bolt goes missing, chuck it in. We need to throw the story forward. Check out other wind farms in the area. There’s that huge one out towards Chatteris – ring them. Then there’s the pylons. Do they ever get targeted? Ring the power companies for me, will you – increased security around pylons, et cetera, risk of death. You know the score.
‘There’s one thing on this story we might have over the competition,’ he went on. ‘The thieves got the doors open on the turbines without forcing them. They’re controlled by security touchpads, a numerical square, ten numbers,
two symbols, I think. So that suggests this might be an inside job, or at the very least it suggests they had someone on the inside. Let’s keep that to ourselves. The police might withhold that, too, while they check the staff, suppliers, security guards. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.’
He heard Vee scratching out a note and reminded himself she’d only been a journalist for just over eight months. He should slow down, give her time, let her learn.
He took a deep breath and tried to release the stress in his neck. ‘This time next week we’ll be desperate for stuff, so anything that can keep – keep.’
But there were some stories that had to run. The coroner’s warning on the illicit moonshine being top of the list. All the competition would run with it, and it was right on their doorstep: hell, it was their doorstep.
‘One other thing,’ said Vee. ‘A child’s gone missing from the Cromwell.’
The Cromwell was one of Ely’s two comprehensives: a big, brutal, concrete campus on the far side of the ring road. Dryden had done a story there only a week earlier on a sixth former winning a national maths competition – a story he’d got off Humph, who’d heard it from Grace, who was in the same school.
‘All a bit weird,’ said Vee. ‘And sad. I don’t know if you’ll want this in the paper.’
Dryden’s spirits flagged. While Vee had taken to the trade of journalism with alacrity, she was never going to develop the necessary mindset that went with it – not cynicism exactly, but a kind of brutal scepticism. If she felt it was worth telling Dryden the story, it was worth putting in the paper.
‘He got into one of the chemistry labs,’ continued Vee. ‘I rang the head and it seems the boy was a scholar. Head was willing to talk, but off the record. He was studying chemistry, maths and double maths. Apparently he just wrote in chemical symbols all day. Brilliant with it, predicted A-star grades across the board. Reading between the lines, he had personality issues. Anyway, he applied for Cambridge and they turned him down after interview. Head says he wasn’t surprised. On the other hand the boy was devastated.’