by Jim Kelly
Dryden jogged to join them, trying to keep his footing on the gravel.
‘Stop there,’ said one of them, when he was fifty feet away. ‘It’s dangerous. One of these goes over it could take the rest with it.’
‘Local paper,’ said Dryden. ‘Just wondered what had happened? A word?’
One of the two men who hadn’t shouted walked forward to meet him.
As he picked his way over the gravel Dryden saw the rail beneath the nearest truck had shifted about three feet out, so that the wheels were sunk in the stones.
‘Derailed?’ asked Dryden.
‘My name’s Henderson. You are?’ He had a suit beneath the Day-Glo jacket.
‘Philip Dryden, editor of The Crow, Ely.’
‘Right. I’m chief engineer for Railtrack Peterborough. Nothing on the record – OK?’
‘Sure. I just need to know what’s happening.’
‘Some oik’s nicked the holding pins. Half a mile of ’em. Hundreds missing. Maybe a thousand.’
‘Metal pins? So thieves, then?’
‘Yes – metal thieves, again. Usually they target signal boxes, points and stations. But the holding pins are steel. Worth bugger all unless you go for bulk. You know what they say, if it’s not nailed down … Well, this time they were nailed down, and they’ve nicked them anyway.’
‘Anyone hurt?’
‘Nope. But it’s a mess.’
‘How long till the track’s open, and the road?’
Henderson rubbed a hand over his face. ‘I’d be amazed if we’re clear in a week.’
‘A week?’
Anger flashed in Henderson’s eyes. ‘Well. You work the fucker out.’ He spread his arms out to encompass the stranded train.
‘Fair point,’ said Dryden, stepping back, trying to look sympathetic. He’d always found that just shutting up was as good a tactic as any when people were under stress.
Henderson actually gritted his teeth. ‘We can’t just uncouple the train into three sections because then these trucks in the middle will spill over and then we’ll have to drag them back up a ten-foot embankment. We’ll need to get some heavy gear in to lift them off the rails. Problem is we’re in the middle of a field of sodding cabbages …’
‘It’s kohlrabi,’ said Dryden.
Dryden never heard Henderson’s reply.
He was looking directly west. Living in the Fens, surrounded by US airbases and military hardware, he’d often imagined the worst: a nuclear strike, perhaps, or an accident in a bomb bay. He’d see the sudden ripping light, a horizontal glare, like a crack in the sky, and then the mushroom cloud appearing like a watermark from hell. It would be the last thing he’d ever see. No time, even, to run to the crèche. So now his body reacted instantly: his pulse raced, his breath held.
Light travels faster than sound so he’d seen that first: a very bright yellow flame on the horizon, and it had a very precise shape, which stayed on his retina. It formed a narrow vertical bar, like the letter I. And then the yellow turned red, with just a flash of purple between, like some bizarre set of traffic lights from a nightmare.
Then the shock hit him. Not an explosion at all. Not even a proper sound, but simply the sound waves, hitting his eardrums. It was the noise that a pressure cylinder would make as the gauge hits DANGER, just a second before it blows. It was the sound of splitting, as if the fabric of something metallic had been torn in two.
The blast actually knocked him down, in a kind of slow-motion collapse. It wasn’t so much the force of the explosion as the surprise of it. Everything was glacial for that few seconds. Everything seemed inevitable, and inescapable, as if they were all trapped in the moment.
When Dryden got to his feet he was deaf, which confused him as he’d heard no bang, and there was blood running from a gash in his cords. He started to walk towards one of the other men, but his knees went. Henderson had kept his feet and was shouting, his mouth distorted but producing no sound.
They were all looking back to where they’d seen the explosion. Henderson took out his mobile. One of the other men was taking pictures with an iPhone. The point of fire had gone. In the sky, over Barrowby Airfield, there was a single black cloud shaped like an exclamation mark. Dryden’s ears switched back on and he heard alarms: car alarms, fire alarms, the school bell, and, intermittent, but distinctive, the bell of Christ Church itself, ringing out a ragged tocsin.
TWENTY-TWO
Dryden ran because it was a kind of release, a way to turn the fear into movement, and dissipate the tension. The air was still ringing with bells and klaxons. On the horizon the strange, black, vertical cloud still hung over Barrowby Airfield.
Humph had brought the Capri forward to the level crossing barriers on the wrong side of the road, executing a swift U-turn, so that he was ready to escape the traffic. The passenger-side door was open.
‘What is it?’ said the cabbie, already accelerating away.
‘No idea.’ Voices still sounded odd, so Dryden tried to pop his ears, swallowing hard. ‘Something over on the old airfield, an explosion. Maybe fuel? Could that be it? A long-forgotten dump for aviation fuel? Or petrol stored in the unit that renovated cars?
‘I felt it through the tyres, the shock,’ said Humph. ‘Barrowby’s two miles away. That’s one hell of a bang.’
As they took the sharp bend by Christ Church the random sound of the bell grew louder. Dryden looked up and saw it still swinging wildly in its small brick arch on the roof. Opposite, outside Brimstone House, Jock Donovan stood in the road, his hands pressed to his ears.
Somewhere they heard a fire engine siren, but it was behind them, beyond the level crossing, and Dryden realized they’d be trapped there and that they’d have to drive back, taking the long way round to Barrowby Airfield.
The cab took the T-junction by The Jolly Farmers at fifty mph. The entrance barriers to Barrowby Airfield were up.
When Humph killed the engine there was total silence. Not a bird, not a grasshopper, not a bee. It was as if the landscape was in shock. The airfield itself, usually dotted with rabbits, was deserted. Not even a butterfly moved. Not even a brimstone.
There had been no sound, and now there was no smoke. It was as if the force of the blast had blown out the fire. But the location of the explosion was obvious. The roll-up door to Barrowby Oilseed’s industrial unit was buckled but still in place; the roof, low-pitched corrugated iron, was twisted and blackened, revealing rafters of charred timber. Fifty yards away the large white van lay on its side, wheels towards the blast, but the paintwork untouched.
There was something moving on the ground, in front of the burnt-out lock-up.
Dryden ran to the spot and knelt by the head of a man who lay spreadeagled, face down, on the concrete. Most of his clothes had been blown off, leaving him with torn boxers, a sleeve of a shirt and a single shoe. An odd detail, the laces were undone. In one hand he still held a dog lead. The other, naked foot trembled slightly, and the man’s hands were clawing at the concrete, but only slowly, as if in a dream. His white skin was dotted with tattoos.
Dryden turned him on to his back. It was Will Brinks, the man who’d photographed the Funeral Owl. Dryden had last seen him standing in the travellers’ field at Third Drove with a dog on the lead. Now he kept shaking his head as if trying to dislodge something in an ear. Then he went to scream, his mouth stretching wide.
‘There’s an ambulance coming,’ said Dryden quickly, holding the young man’s head in his hands, a palm to each cheek. Brinks watched his lips but didn’t seem to understand. Dryden was horrified to see a thin trickle of bright red blood leave the corner of his mouth.
Humph arrived. ‘Ambulance is at Coldham’s Cross. It’ll be a minute, maybe five. The derailment’s screwed up the roads.’
The cabbie held a plastic bottle of water but he didn’t offer it because he was looking around Brinks’ body, his mouth hanging open.
‘Jesus,’ he said. There were fifty-pound notes everywhere. If the
wind had been the slightest zephyr they’d have been gone. But they just lay there, as if pinned to the dry grass. Dryden thought then how odd it was, that the wind had gone, as if the blast had blown it out too, like a candle.
Dryden picked up one note: it was crisp, flat, new issue.
He took the bottle from Humph and pressed it to Brinks’ lips but the water just brimmed over his chin.
Brinks seemed to pass out then, laying his head back on the concrete, his eyes shut. The blast had revealed parts of his skin that were usually covered up, and turning him over Dryden had noted bird tattoos: owls, eagles, hawks. But the most daring had been the long-necked swan in flight on his back, which stretched from his left hip up until the outstretched bill reached his hairline, the only inch of design that would have shown if he’d been clothed.
Dryden left Humph pressing the bottle to Brinks’ lips and walked away to the Barrowby Oilseed lock-up.
Ten feet from the metal roll-up door he could feel the heat and smell ash. He had to lift the side door to the lock-up off its buckled hinges to get it open a few inches. If there was someone inside could they have survived? He pulled the door out with his full weight and it fell down, so that he had to stand quickly aside. Waiting a moment for the ash to settle, he stepped into a strange, viscous darkness like velvet. Something kept brushing his skin and he dabbed at it, realizing it was ash in the air.
He stood for a moment waiting for his eyes to penetrate the scene, with the help of a little light creeping in through the burnt rafters. The first thing that materialized was a stretch of black concrete wall which seemed to sparkle like quartz. Touching the surface, running his fingers back and forth, he looked at traces of blood on the tips. His blood. The wall was embedded with tiny shards of shattered glass.
A metal bench ran down the middle of the unit with machinery on top: iron, aluminium, steel. But all of it was partly melted, even the table itself, sagging and distorted. Dryden could feel the heat now, still radiating, almost burning his skin, and when he held a hand near the edge of the table, just an inch away, he had to whip it back as the pain pulsed in his arm.
He walked to the back wall of the unit and looked up. There was a small gap in the ruptured roof so that he could see sky framed by wooden rafters, each of which was charcoal black, and smoking very slightly. Light was fading from the clouds above, the sunset approaching. Under his feet the broken glass was a foot deep, a silica snowdrift, sucking in the light, so that the rest of the room seemed darker.
One more step and he was on the far side of the bench.
Two things happened quickly, in surreal succession. First he was blinded by a direct ray of sunlight. There must have been a hole in the metal roll-up door, because the setting sun was shining straight into his eyes from the west; the light beam, unbroken, was like a searchlight seeking him out. It was the last few seconds of the day, concentrated like a laser beam, preternaturally bright.
He put up a hand to block it out and then he saw what was on the floor at his feet: a scene from the museum at Pompeii. Three bodies, frozen in melodramatic poses on the floor: one leaning back against the wall, a hand up to shield his eyes, echoing Dryden; another, back turned, hunched forward so that the head was between the knees; the third flat out, arms straight up as if about to enter the water in an Olympic dive. Each one frozen stiff, as if in black ice.
Each was dead. Of that there was not a doubt.
Where he could see skin it was charred, ridged like wood which has smouldered all night in the grate. There were clothes but it was difficult to see where they ended and the skin began. The brunt of the heat had caught their faces, at least the two faces he could see. Flesh had burnt away leaving full sets of teeth, the incisors too long, stretching down where they should have been veiled by lips and cheeks. He looked for eyes but there were none. The Olympic diver had his mouth open; jaw-breakingly wide, and Dryden saw that he had no throat.
He could feel adrenaline in his blood and realized he hadn’t breathed since he’d seen them. A second? A minute? At that his knees buckled and he knelt in the glass, ignoring the pain. One breath wasn’t enough; he tried to suck in another, then another, but nothing seemed to fill his lungs. The slimmest strand of smoke rose from the victim with his hand up before his face. It circled the victim’s fingers as if he was smoking the butt end of an unseen cigarette.
Dryden’s vision buckled and he had to reach out for the edge of the bench and only remembered at the last second not to grip its red-hot surface so that he fell sideways, under the bench, into more glass. Scrabbling in the glass, he felt panic rising in his throat. His feet, kicking out, made no noise, even though he felt them striking the wall, and the metal stanchions of the workbench.
Then two hands, gloved, stiff, grasped him under the armpits and dragged him away, out through the door, his feet trailing, into the evening light. Air rushed into his lungs as if there had been none inside the lock-up. Sweet air, unblemished by the sickly smell.
He must have passed out, because when he came round a fire officer was beside him, kneeling on the grass, his face sooty where the visor had not protected it. His name was Bevan, a senior officer from Ely. A walkie-talkie cackled in his front pocket.
Dryden’s head was supported on a rolled-up blanket. He guessed Humph had given them the dog rug from the back of the Capri because it smelt of Boudicca.
A paramedic appeared and gave Dryden a sweet drink in a bottle.
‘Sorry,’ said Dryden. ‘I went in. I thought someone might be alive.’
Bevan nodded. ‘Me too.’
‘I saw the explosion. It didn’t make a noise. And the smoke just stopped, like it was a bomb. And …’
Bevan put a hand on his shoulder to stop the words. ‘It was a bomb,’ he said. ‘Sort of. The perfect explosion, like your Christmas pudding. All the fuel is used up in the ignition, there’s nothing left for the sound. That’s what the bang is, the energy left over after the explosion. There was nothing left after this one; well, very little. As I said, the perfect blast.’
‘The oil, they made oil, from rapeseed?’ asked Dryden, trying to sit up.
‘Not in there they didn’t.’
The fireman offered him an empty bottle to sniff. The yellow label showed reeds in a woodcut design.
‘Best fuel in the world,’ said Bevan. ‘One-hundred-and-twenty per cent proof alcohol. It’s moonshine. Once the fumes build up to more than three per cent of the air by volume, it can just explode. Delicious, I’m sure, but lethal.’
Dryden saw only the back-stretched corpse, the throat burnt away.
TWENTY-THREE
By midnight the old airfield was floodlit, a ring of scene-of-crime lamps around the industrial units, a helicopter circling above with a searchlight. The intensity of the beam was blinding, so that the distant fen beyond looked featureless and bleak. Emergency vehicles, including a set of vans from the police forensic unit at Wisbech, a single fire engine, a brace of police squad cars, and several CID estates, were dotted around the old runway. The judder of a digital printer came from a mobile incident room. The fire engine was drawing water from the Twenty Foot, two hoses snaking off behind the lock-ups.
The whole site had been sealed off. A TV crew was at the barrier gates, and a clutch of reporters, but no statement had been issued beyond a terse 100 words on a single sheet of A4 handed round by a uniformed PC. They’d given Dryden a copy: four victims, three dead, one in intensive care at Wisbech Hospital, an ongoing investigation. Nothing more. A second helicopter appeared, a commercial one, with a camera fixed in the open door. It was quickly grounded, according to the medic who kept checking on Dryden’s condition, in order to leave the airspace clear for emergency services.
The three bodies had been taken away at ten o’clock. Forensic officers had completed the in situ examination of the corpses; Dryden watched them bring the victims out of the side door. A detail haunted him: the body bags had hinted at the stiff death poses within – one almost a
ball, one the fully stretched diver, another triangular, perhaps the kneeling man, shielding his eyes. It was as if he could see through the mask of the black material to what lay beneath.
The medic who tended Dryden told him the survivor was gravely ill. Both of his lungs had collapsed, and he referred to him – twice – in the past tense, which indicated that the professionals didn’t expect him to last the night. The shock wave had also broken three ribs, dislocated a shoulder, and ruptured his spleen.
‘Does that hurt?’ asked Dryden, and was relieved to see the medic smile. He could only imagine what it had been like. He’d felt the shock wave two miles away. Will Brinks had been fifty yards from the explosion.
Dryden’s own condition was curious. He’d suffered shock, and a brief period of unconsciousness, which had left him elated and desperately tired, so that intermittently he would wake up, to discover he’d been asleep. His eyelids were scratchy and painful. While he tried hard to arrange his thoughts in a logical sequence, nothing quite seemed to make sense. He noted with a strange objectivity that the little finger on his left hand was vibrating like a tuning fork. Every time he thought about the scene inside the lock-up he felt his throat constrict.
A uniformed constable gave him a blanket and asked him to stay at the scene to give a statement. Dryden told the constable he knew the name of the man who was in intensive care, and his address, but he was told to include that in the statement. A somewhat obvious instruction. Dryden added that the man had a dog, and had been holding the lead. It was, he thought, a mongrel, but mainly Doberman Pinscher.
The constable left him with a renewed instruction to stay put. They gave him a folding chair to sit on. He felt like an idiot, sitting wrapped in a blanket, bathed in halogen lights. But sticking around was what he wanted to do; because this was where the story was. Three dead, one dying, made an exploding wind turbine look like an outbreak of fly-tipping, even if the fatal blast proved to be an accident. Soon it would be midnight, press day would dawn, and The Crow would have the inside story.