The Fire Baby (18 page)

Newman pressed on. ‘I am prepared to release details of this man’s death but one aspect must remain under embargo until you are otherwise directed to print it. Agreed?’

This was standard procedure in murder cases. The police
often withheld details in order to weed out cranks who rang up to confess to the killing. Dryden had not been told to keep anything out of his reports except his own name – and the fact that an empty glass had been found at the scene. So whatever Newman had to say it had to be something which the pathologist had found, or the scene of crime team. The rest of the press pack nodded wearily. ‘Bound to be the best bit,’ said Yarr, yawning and revealing a sliver of yellow-green cabbage caught between yellow incisors.

‘Fine,’ said Newman. ‘The cause of death is to be ascertained, but at the moment we are working on the theory that he was poisoned.’

That did it. Silence.

‘With?’ asked Dryden, surprised. The pathologist at the scene had guessed he died of thirst.

Newman flicked through some notes. ‘Samples are at the lab but the stomach contained benomyl, carbendazim, and thiophanate-methyl. Fungicidal weedkiller to you lot. But this wasn’t the garden variety. Industrial strength. Usually sold for crop spraying.’

Mike Yarr, a typical wireman, took a perfect note in 200-wpm Pitman shorthand. He weighed eight stone soaking wet and drank Guinness in buckets. His eyes were marbled like a pickled egg. ‘And he drank it, did he?’ he asked.

‘Yup,’ said Newman, still reading. ‘Which was hardly surprising, given his condition.’

‘Which was?’ asked Dryden, remembering the empty pint glass on the shelf below the pillbox window.

‘Severely dehydrated,’ said Newman. ‘The pathologist who got to him first on site reckoned he hadn’t had any fluid for at least six days. It was eighty-two degrees in the box at two o’clock this morning. In the day – a hundred and twenty,
possibly more. In the pathologist’s words, the victim’s body tissue was about as moist as a Jacob’s cracker.’

‘But it didn’t kill him?’ asked Joey Forward. Joey was scratching his beer belly, his fingernails screeching on the white nylon shirt.

‘No. But it would have. I won’t go into the specific details, but let’s say it would have been a race between gagging on his own swollen tongue or drowning in his own stomach juices. His last meal had been taken even longer ago than his last drink. Two sausages with beans: pork.’

Several full english breakfasts rearranged themselves in the room. There was another fart, but this time nobody laughed.

‘When was his last drink – the poison cocktail – taken?’ It was Mike Yarr again.

‘About twenty-four hours before his body was found. Pathologist at the scene believed he would have died within an hour of drinking the poison. But in his case it would have been quite a long hour.’

‘And the body – found by a farmer it says ’ere,’ said Yarr, now ostentatiously reading a copy of the
Mail.
‘No name given here.’

‘Those details we are withholding – for the time being – while investigations continue.’

The press corps examined Dryden, and he examined a wine gum he’d found in his pocket.

‘Further points of interest – and you can use all this, gentlemen. The victim was naked above the waist but fragments of clothes were found amongst ashes in the pillbox.’

‘What kinda clothes?’ said Forward.

‘White linen. With traces of animal fat. Tomato ketchup.’

‘Suggesting?’ said Yarr.

‘Anything you like. Now. There was also a lot of loose
change on the floor, more than a tenner’s worth in coppers and silver.’

Newman pinned a black and white photograph to the incident room board. It showed a narrow-bladed seven-inch knife sticking horizontally out of a wooden door jamb. The hilt was gilded and decorated with raised, geometrical patterns.

‘And this. No traces of blood and no knife wounds on the victim. The designs are Arabic.’

‘Fingerprints?’ said a voice from the back.

Newman thought for a second. ‘Yes. Partial prints. We’re putting them through the computer now. I’ll keep you up to date on any developments.’ ‘Plus,’ he added, putting up another print. A plastic Tesco bag with its contents, presumably, laid out in military rows on the green baize of the pool table for the picture. Torch, pre-packed sandwich, apple, two motoring magazines, a small cassette player with earphones and two bottles of mineral water. And a cheap metallic picture frame. The quality wasn’t good enough to see the subject of the photo which sat inside, slightly off-centre, with one corner folded down.

Dryden leant forward in his chair. ‘The snap?’

Newman put a third print up on the board – it was the photograph blown up. A dog, a mongrel, with a piece of rope round its neck. There was a cheap plastic water bowl at its feet. In the background was a sluggish river, mulligatawny brown, and some tropical vegetation floating by. It was an astonishingly mundane image. A childhood pet perhaps?

Someone yawned. ‘Well, it ain’t the Thames, is it?’ said a voice at the back.

‘No,’ said Newman. ‘Our guess is tropical Africa, south of the Sahara. Which narrows it down to an area about twice the size of Europe.’

‘So what do we think happened?’ asked Yarr.

Newman shrugged. ‘He was tied to the wall. Left. Tortured? His wrist was broken in the manacle. Skin very badly cut. And the pathologist says his vocal cords were in shreds.’

‘Shouting?’ said Dryden, knowing he was wrong.

‘Possibly, but the pathologist said the damage was violent. Screaming, more like,’ said Newman.

Dryden closed his eyes and tried to imagine what that would have sounded like. A human voice, shredded, echoing across Black Bank Fen. And then he tried to imagine who would have heard it.

23

As the press left Black Bank Fen in a caravan of cars Dryden checked his answerphone. There was one message: ‘Hi. It’s Gillies & Wright, solicitors. You asked to know. Someone has contacted the office with a claim to Maggie Beck’s five thousand pounds. Name… Richard G. Mere. A farm labourer from Manea. We can’t check it against the name Mrs Beck gave us until tomorrow when the will is read. Then we’ll know if it’s a genuine claim. But it looks good – I’ve dropped a copy of his letter in at
The Crow.
He certainly knew Mrs Beck and the farm.’

Dryden slapped the dashboard.
‘The Crow
, chop, chop.’ He’d phone Estelle from the office and tell her a claim had been made. Lyndon should be told as well – after all, it was his father. And the will? Had Maggie left Black Bank to her son, or her daughter?

They led the cavalcade along The Breach and watched the rest of the press turn south towards Cambridge and London. The Capri turned north towards Ely, where the cathedral’s distant image was already buckling in the heat of the day. A cloud was so unusual that summer that when a large shadow dashed across the landscape Dryden watched its flight like a hawk. Peering up through the Capri’s windscreen his eyes filled with cobalt. ‘Blue sky,’ he said, a seagull crossing it with motionless wings. Humph pulled the cab up by the side of the road. Dryden got out and scanned the horizon. The sun was behind them but it wasn’t a cloud which had blotted it out. It was a column of smoke, rising from the fen just
west of the city, and widening as it rose into a chef’s hat a mile high.

‘Jesus,’ he said. It looked like an oil painting from hell.

Dryden rang Mitch, who was still at the scene of Johnnie Roe’s murder. ‘I guess it’s a field fire. On the peat. But it’s a biggy – get as close as you can, Mitch – I want to see the burn marks on that bloody hat of yours. The pix are for
The Crow
on Friday – so no rush.’

Humph slung the cab off the main road and headed south along a drove made of concrete slabs; the tyres thudding over the cracks as they traced a zig-zag route around parched fields.

‘It’s the old airfield,’ said Dryden, already tasting the smoke in his mouth.

Witchford Aerodrome had been a Lancaster bomber base in the war. Dryden had done a colour piece the year before after a farmer had ploughed up the remains of a German Heinkel which had come down in a raid. It had buried itself in the soft, wet peat of the winter of 1941. Dryden had been there when they’d got the pilot out of his sticky grave. He could see now the splayed bones of one of the hands in the mud, caressed by worms.

But Witchford’s days of glory were long gone. Now the old hangars and conning tower were derelict and deserted except on Saturdays and Tuesdays, when the grass runways were used for car boot sales. The weekend sale was for general goods – white elephant and tatty; the Tuesday market for antiques or items which might be mistaken for antiques in a poor light. Entry was for ‘trade’ only – dealers, restorers, and general London or Brighton sharks. Hundreds jostling for the chance to buy 1920s china, Edwardian furniture, and First World War medals. As the cab got closer they could see the parked ranks of cars through a mirage of tumbling
hot air at the base of the column of smoke. The drove road ran through a derelict section of the old perimeter fence and then across a mile of parched grass towards the runways. Heading towards them was a crowd of a couple of hundred bargain hunters pursued by the drifting, noxious cloud of straw smoke. And they were coming at quite a speed, most of them holding handkerchiefs or clothing to their mouths.

Humph pulled up and killed the engine. The silence was filled by a distinct sound Dryden knew well: panic, with crackling grass as a background motif.

Coughing, screaming, laughing and crying the crowd parted to sweep past Humph’s Capri and kept going.

Through the drifting red-brown smoke Dryden could see two fire tenders working their way towards the seat of the fire in a field beyond the car boot sale. Through the purple-red flames Dryden could make out the shape of a bright yellow combine harvester. They were death traps in hot weather, with sparks flying and enough grease and oil caked to the machinery to make sure the chaff and straw caught fire with a satisfying BOOM! The top soil had caught alight as well, a common danger that summer. The peat fields of the Black Fen were essentially a huge open fireplace waiting for a light. As Dryden watched the fire advancing traffic-light orange flames flared at the edges of the dense Brown-Windsor smoke.

The fleeing crowd re-grouped beyond the flimsy remains of the wartime perimeter fence, as if the criss-cross wiring was a magic shield against the drifting pall of smuts and dust.

Dryden grabbed a rag from the cab boot, poured the contents of a bottle of mineral water over it, covered his face and set off for the parked cars. Ten years on Fleet Street had taught him the value of on-the-spot reportage. If there was
a story here he needed to go and get it. Even as he did it he knew it was an act of bravado designed, like so many, to conceal a profound level of physical cowardice. Humph had no such demons to struggle with. He sat happily watching the fire spread, munching a diet chicken sandwich.

Dryden walked 200 yards towards the blaze, his eyes streaming as the smoke swirled around him, before a fireman emerged from the gloom in full breathing gear, and grabbed Dryden by the arm muttering: ‘Idiot. Follow me.’ Dryden tried to say ‘Press’ but the breath of air he would have used turned out to be 60 per cent carbon monoxide. The fireman led him to a door in one of the vast 1930s aircraft hangars and pushed him in with enough force to leave him flat on his face. ‘Stay in there,’ he said, fading back into the smoke.

The open door faced west so the drifting smoke was slipping harmlessly round the building. Dryden lay still, catching his breath. He heard a muffled thud which could have been a car exploding, the echo bounded around him like a giant ping-pong ball. The hangar had skylights but the thick smoke from the field fire was cutting out the sun. Somewhere very close he heard the crackle of tinder-dry grass burning.

He stood and surveyed the building, which must have been nearly eighty yards long and a hundred feet high. The hangar’s floor wasn’t entirely empty. In one corner an old RAF fire tender stood, a leftover prop from a Will Hay film. Along one wall aeroplane tyres had been stored in tall rubber stacks. The decaying carcasses of trapped birds littered the floor, and an oil slick ran from a punctured tank like blood from a head wound.

Up against the vast closed hangar doors a white van was parked. Dryden walked over and put his hand on the bonnet.

‘Still warm,’ he said. The side of the van was painted a light green with a white-lettered sign: ‘Wilkinson’s For Celery’. On the passenger seat there was a clipboard and a mobile phone. He peeked inside the windows in the tailgate doors and estimated there were about fifty boxes of fresh celery neatly packed in cellophane. He looked round the hangar again, but it was still empty.

Where was the driver? In the far wall, which was almost obscured by piled tyres, there was a single door marked ‘Flight Group’. Dryden pushed it open and looked down a long corridor listening. He could hear music, African, with a solid rock beat.

He inched open the second door to find a Nissen hut: a curved corrugated iron roof over a concrete floor. The windows were all skylights again and high enough to give no view. Moss and lichen had covered them anyway, giving the whole room a sickly green tint. Rows of iron bedsteads crowded against the side walls. The springs were rusted and shot. At the far end Jimmy Kabazo, the foreman from Wilkinson’s celery plant, stood watching him.

Dryden walked in and decided to try easy informality. ‘Hiya.’

Jimmy turned and tried a door in the end wall, indicating that this ploy had failed. It was locked and when he turned back the smile had returned. He bent down and turned off a portable CD player. Dryden noticed that not all the beds were bare. Two or three on each side had sleeping bags on them, and fresh twenty-first century rubbish under them, from sandwich wrappers to tin cans and empty crisp packets. A modern Calor gas heater stood in the middle, with four plastic milk-bottle crates drawn up as seating.

Dryden picked one of the bare beds and sat where the pillow should have been, bringing his legs up off the floor.
‘Looking for someone?’ he asked, nodding to the sleeping bag on the next bed.