The Fire Baby (17 page)

Dryden sat quietly for a minute, studying her face in the blazing moonlight. He stood and went to the window. Below, the caretaker was sweeping the forecourt. Clearly an insomniac,
he whistled happily. Beethoven again, perhaps ‘The Emperor’, thought Dryden. In the cab Humph read his language primer by the courtesy light.

He turned back to the room. It had changed since his visit the evening before. Estelle and Lyndon must have been in to ferry out Maggie’s stuff, large amounts of which had accumulated in her final weeks. A bookcase had been filled with gifts from family, neighbours and friends and a wardrobe had held clothes for when she was judged well enough to walk in the grounds of The Tower. The cardboard box in which Dryden had stored Maggie’s tapes had been emptied shortly after her death, the box left under the bed. Her life, in her own words, was back at Black Bank. The cupboard stood open and empty. The only thing left of Maggie’s in the room was the tape recorder on the window ledge.

Dryden sat down by Laura’s bed and examined her hands, which lay lifeless on the single sheet. The image he was trying to suppress seemed to be etched on his retinas – the outstretched hand of the corpse in the pillbox and those undulating, angry, skin grafts. Who had killed Johnnie Roe? Had Bob Sutton’s inquiries disrupted the trade in pornography? Had the crooks behind the business come looking for Johnnie? Or had Sutton got there first?

Quietly he stood and walked to the COMPASS machine. For once his curiosity seemed dimmed. He stuffed the tickertape in his pocket unread, and went back to the cab.

SHFYTJF SHDURIT DHEOFJO DJDO

GHGEIKOW WATCHWHITE KRUBBYO

ASAIUDSJ HD UCANSEETIERIVERGHHUJI

Over the months he’d learned the telltale signs. The tiny sounds which said the light was coming.

First there was the outer gate. A rusted hinge grated. Not like the others he could hear at dawn and dusk. The hundreds of iron doors opening and closing in the prison of Al Rasheid.

This one had a note. He’d played cornet at high school. Was it a G? Perhaps. Middle register. Pleasing.

He had only a few seconds then to prepare. He had to close his eyes, he must, because the pain would be sweeping, a burning poker of agony thrust into his eye sockets and down into his brain. That first time the nerve ends had sizzled, like tiny caterpillars shrivelled on a hotplate.

But he had to open his eyes to savour the light, to relieve the human inkwell of darkness which was his life. An absence of light so total he sometimes forgot what sight was. So to ready his eyes he pressed his fingers into the sockets, producing the dancing colours which helped prepare for the light, even though they danced now with a half-hearted flickering voltage.

After the rusted hinge came the dog biscuit. He knew the dog, Atta, lived at the end of his corridor. Many people kicked him; some, surreptitiously, patted and fussed him. But only the jailer gave him the biscuit. He imagined the dog tossing the biscuit and crunching it further each time it was caught. A joyless meal which made the jailer laugh each time.

Then came the keyhole. There must have been a disc of metal covering the keyhole on the outside. The jailer flipped it up to insert the key and for a second a magical key-shaped beam crossed the cell and fell on the wall.

So he’d moved Freeman there, to catch the light. Freeman, who’d survived like he had, drifting down inert to the desert. Lyndon blamed himself for the injury. He’d panicked, hitting the button for the ejector seats before his co-pilot was ready. So he’d caught the canopy with his head, breaking the skin and the skull, and blackening his eyes. He held Freeman’s head in his hands sometimes, tenderly, feeling for the fractures beneath the skin, and the sickening click of the cranial plates which had been dislodged by the cockpit canopy.

But when the keyhole light fell on Freeman’s face his eyes never opened. For eighteen days they’d been in this solitary silence. And Freeman hadn’t moved; even though Lyndon gave him most of his food and cleaned the head wound with the water he craved so much to drink. But Freeman White lay still, stiller with each passing day. One day soon, Lyndon knew, the keyhole light would find his eyes forever open.

The jailer knew his business and the key turned in the lock and the door flew open with military swiftness. The light engulfed them. Direct sunlight. Lyndon’s eyes hurt so much he always cried out, while he scrabbled to his knees beside Freeman’s body.

And then the jailer showed his pity, smoking a single cigarette in the doorway as Lyndon tried to see out on the world. Once he saw the leaves of a cedar tree over the far wall flickering from lime green to silver grey in a breeze. And once the flag. Three green stars on a horizontal white band, a red band above, black below.

And he always made the same plea for Freeman: ‘Take him away, not me. Take him away. He needs a doctor. Look!’ And Lyndon would draw back the bandage on the forehead to reveal the purple wound, with its iridescent greenish tinge. He’d take some of the water then, and bathe away the pus and the flies.

But the jailer smoked; not cruelly, but with his back turned. There was never ever any warning of the end of the light. Just the sudden diminution of the sunburst and the rocking percussion of the iron door crashing against the jamb. And then the darkness again, and the terror of the small space he knew so well.

Tuesday, 17 June

22

Dryden held the cup of black coffee to his lips and watched the tiny tremor in his right hand translated into concentric wavelets on the surface of the liquid. He gulped the caffeine with an addict’s concentration, then picked up Humph’s flask and, tilting it, confirmed it was empty.

A surge of panic, less potent than the caffeine, made his muscles tighten. The events of the night before were still a cartoon strip of indelible, technicolour images – from the blue-spotted skin grafts on the victim’s back to the bright yellow fluorescence of the body bag in which they’d taken him away. And finally the cell in which he waited, briefly, for Newman. The cell that smelt like a cat’s tray without the comfort of the litter.

Had he slept? Humph had taken him back to
PK 129
but they’d drank little bottles until dawn without speaking. Dryden rubbed his fingers in his eyes and heard the gritty squeak of dust and eyeball grating.

He looked at the ceiling and remembered where he was: church. Precisely, St Matthew’s – The Pickers’ Church on Black Bank Fen. Newman had fended off a clutch of media inquiries overnight by scheduling a press conference for 10.00am close to the site of the murder. Educated as a Catholic in a grim north London grammar school, Dryden had always found that organized religion left him with an overwhelming urge to laugh out loud. He tried it now, the echo bouncing back off the thin clapboard walls of the church.

The light inside the church was extraordinary; instead of the play of medieval shadows this was a display of sunbursts, making the charged air more substantial than the rickety church itself. The ten lancet windows on either side of the main body of the wooden ark-like nave were of plain glass, a sea green mixed with milky white. It was like sitting in a fish tank. Ten sunbeams with the concentrated energy of lasers thrust through the nave as the sun climbed into another featureless blue sky.

Despite the summer drought Dryden could still sense the damp of more than a hundred Fen winters. The smell was as cloying as a memory, and as vivid as the names in golden script above the altar. These were the vicars of the strange whitewashed wooden church on Fourth Drove, Black Bank.

St John Reginald Dawnay. M.A. Cantab. 1868–90.

Reginald Virtue May. Ph.D. Oxon. 1890–1901.

Conrad Wilton Burroughs. M.A. 1901–

That open ended dash said it all. For more than thirty years they’d fought to save the pickers from Methodism – and lost. They even called it ‘The Pickers’ Church’, but they still wouldn’t come. More than 2,000 of them had lived on the fen according to the census taken at the turn of the century, living along the dykes and banks in skewiff homes which creaked in the wind. Then the Great War swept the men away. Even the evangelical Methodists retreated, closing the Bethel, and falling back into the Fen towns. With peace the machines came and the Revd Conrad Burroughs melted into the past, without the time, or energy perhaps, to pause and mark the date.

The church, and its tiny bell tower, had sagged with the years into the rich peat soil. For more than eighty years the building had limped on as a machine store, estate office, and
finally a community centre. A single pool table stood on the altar, a razor-blade slash exposing the chipboard beneath the sun-bleached green baize.

Dryden laughed out loud again, enjoying the atmosphere of ingrained disappointment.

Inspector Andy ‘Last Case’ Newman, arranging papers on a trestle table, looked up. ‘That’s them.’

They heard cars bumping along the drove road. Her Majesty’s Press was on parade. There was plenty of interest. Dryden had filed early morning pars for the late editions of the Fleet Street papers, and a full story for the first editions of the local evening papers in Cambridge, Norwich and Peterborough. He’d left an answerphone message for Charlie Bracken telling him he was at the press conference and would be in the office by ten. Then he’d called Mitch and told him to get some scene of crime pix at the pillbox, if he could get near.

Newman had pinned the cuttings from the nationals to a large board by the church door marked ‘Incident Room: PRESS’.

‘Pillbox Killing Baffles Police’, was Dryden’s favourite, from the
Mirror.
Although ‘Gruesome Pillbox Killing in Fens’, from the
Daily Mail
, had more lip-smacking sensationalism.

There was a small room to the left of the church doors where the local branch of Darby and Joan met. Newman’s sergeant, Peter Crabbe, was making tea. Half a dozen uniformed coppers were trooping in having spent the early hours combing the fields for evidence. A woman PC was sticking photos and maps to the main incident room board. Nobody appeared to be in a hurry.

‘You’ll miss all this excitement,’ said Dryden, smiling.

Newman was sitting on a plastic chair, tilted back, examining a swifts’ nest in the roof.

Dryden stood. Even now, as the sun began to rise above the treeline, the cotton of his shirt stuck to his back where it had touched the pew. ‘So why here? Why not use the nick in Ely? It’s a long way for the press to come.’

Newman parked an ample backside on what had been the wooden altar rail. It creaked like a door in the wind. ‘Exactly. Some peace and quiet – once I’ve got rid of you lot.’

Dryden considered this explanation more than sufficient. ‘I’m a key witness. I can haunt the place. I might even have done it.’

‘I wouldn’t push your luck. I’ve managed to get through an entire career without a miscarriage of justice. But I could just fit one in…’

The press arrived. They shuffled in like the extras from
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
The man from the
East Anglian Daily News
, Joey Forward, was the best dressed, and he had his flies open. PA’s man, Mike Yarr, appeared to have his pyjamas on under a jumper. The rest headed for the free coffee. They all knew each other, so nobody said hello, a subtle indication that there were no strangers in their sad little world.

Dryden had one more chance for a private question. ‘What about the porno shots? Is it the same pillbox?’

Newman showed his irritation by pulling at the tight collar which had helped turn his face red. ‘Too early, Dryden. Looks the same – but then most of ’em do.’

Dryden knew he was bluffing. The military code-number Newman had spotted on the pictures could be easily matched if it was the same pillbox. He kicked himself for panicking the night before and not checking the walls before he’d rushed back to the cab to phone the police.

‘Are you looking for Bob Sutton?’ He knew Sutton’s search for his daughter’s rapist must make him a leading suspect.

Newman’s patience snapped. ‘For Christ’s sake, just wait, Dryden. Patience. It’s a virtue. Look it up.’

The press pack, fired up by mugs of Nescafé, took their places. In the mid-morning heat there was indeed a whiff of something unwashed, something, Dryden noticed with satisfaction, that liked a drink. He felt a twinge of admiration for his trade.

Newman flicked open a manila folder. Someone farted loudly and the press giggled. Newman adjusted his reading glasses and wished, with an almost religious intensity, that he was in the metaphorical bird-hide of his retirement, removed to a world where communication was not only inessential, but a liability.

‘The body of a white male was found last night in a Second World War pillbox about half a mile from this church. He was manacled to the wall.’

‘We can read the papers. Tell us something we don’t know.’ It was Mike Yarr. The PA needed fresh information to wire to its customers, mainly evening newspapers with first editions which went to press before noon. But for now Yarr was gyrating a pencil in his ear. ‘Like an ID.’

‘Enquiries are continuing into the identity of the victim. We expect a positive ID this afternoon. I can tell you he appears to be between forty and fifty years of age. Now, if I may continue…’ There was some irritable shifting in chairs and some dark looks at Dryden. Most of the press pack suspected he knew more than he’d given away in his copy for the dailies – they feared being scooped again, and this time on a story they’d been sent to cover.