The Fire Baby (21 page)

Dryden filled his lungs with ozone but failed to eradicate the lingering aroma of cooked pig. Humph, silent, looked out to sea. He liked the beach, principally because there was so much to look at before you needed to get out of the car. ‘Gonna swim?’ he said, scrambling in the glove compartment for a miniature bottle of gin. He’d bought a large bottle of tonic and a lemon at a roadside service station. He produced two plastic cups and sliced the lemon with a Swiss Army knife marginally smaller than a fork-lift truck.

‘Sorry, no ice,’ he said, trying pathetically to cheer Dryden up.

‘What’s Emmy short for?’ asked Dryden.

Humph gave him the drink, and sipped his own. ‘Emerson? Emmanuel?’

Dryden gulped the drink, failing to blot out the double image of Emmy’s corpse and Johnnie Roe’s skin grafts. Then he rooted in the Capri’s boot for his swimming shorts and a towel. He wanted the North Sea to dilute whatever was left on his skin of the odour of rotting flesh. And worse, much worse. He walked off into the dunes to change, then ran towards the sea, a sprint which turned into a long-distance run. The water was a Mediterranean blue but the temperature of meltwater off a snow-covered roof. That was the problem with the Norfolk coast, the ice-cream vans were manned by Norwegians. Dryden’s testicles jockeyed violently for re-entry to his body.

The shock helped. He managed to dislodge from memory the sight of that single, juvenile arm stretching up to the light. But the slick of putrid pork fat still lapped at the edge of consciousness. Thankfully the fizzing white spume of the waves gave off a cleansing rush of ozone.

He sat in the dunes and thought about being there with Laura four summers ago. They’d talked about the two cottages they’d seen, on Adventurer’s Fen: Flightpath Cottages. Derelict and sodden with damp they would cost less to knock down than restore. It had been a discouraging day and Laura had seemed distant, preoccupied by some inner anxiety she seemed reluctant to share. The cottages weren’t right, they’d agreed that. And there had been something mean and pinched about the man who’d shown them round. But they shared a view which redefined the concept of panoramic. The wide snaking river running north, the reed beds to the east and west, and the deep cut of the Thirty Foot Drain
providing the final defence against the outside world. And Laura’s reticence seemed coupled with another emotion, just below the surface, like the snaking green weed of the river. Excitement? Perhaps. Dryden sensed a coiled spring of elation somewhere within her, something brimming towards the surface but constantly hidden from him. He was growing impatient with their search and suspicious that Laura was avoiding the commitment the house, the home, would symbolize. She’d hugged her secret to herself, for that is what Dryden knew it to be that day, like a lonely child. It was a bad memory, but one of the last ones with any vividness before the crash in Harrimere Drain which had changed their lives for ever.

The memory didn’t improve his mood. He felt depression sweeping over him like a cold front over a trawler at sea. He took evasive action, retrieving a white folded piece of paper sticking out of his trouser pocket. It was the printout from Laura’s COMPASS machine that he had failed to read the night before. Now he laid it in the sand and put two pebbles at either end to hold it firm.

He saw the name but didn’t recognize it, even though he felt his skin goosebump, despite the eighty-degree heat. Until now Laura’s messages could have been simply the product of her unique view on the world. A view of hospital visitors whispering and discussing family secrets around the deathbed of Maggie Beck. But this? This was a warning.

WATCH WHITE

He knew that if he concentrated on something else the memory would come back. He watched a trawler running in on the gravy-brown tide, while on the beach a child stuck lollipop sticks into the tops of sandcastles.

Then he had it: Freeman White, Lyndon Koskinski’s
fellow prisoner in Al Rasheid jail. Koskinski had said he was stationed at Mildenhall, undergoing medical treatment.

They were back at The Tower within an hour. Dryden sensed now that Laura had been at the centre of what had happened to Maggie Beck in the last days of her life. The life she had recorded on tape.

He climbed the stairs to Laura’s room. The COMPASS machine was silent but a length of tickertape hung motionless in the room’s fetid air. She was getting more expert at using the machine, Dryden could see that now. The gibberish was probably all involuntary movements. But when the message came it was separate and clear.

SHDUTUF F GKO GLDJUCN TAPESECORDER

FDHGFI FHGO SHSYGFKF DHDYWISJ SJSOSOJ

He felt the hair on his neck prickle. She was one letter out. He should have noticed before, the tape deck Estelle and Lyndon had left on the window ledge was gone.

The nurse on duty at the desk in the foyer seemed mildly affronted that Dryden could suggest one of the staff was a thief.

‘I can’t imagine anyone has taken it,’ she said, a practised smile revealing sharp teeth.

‘So where is it?’

‘Perhaps Mrs Beck’s family took it?’

‘They said they left it, it’s mine. But I’ll double check,’ said Dryden. ‘In the meantime, perhaps you could ask around. If it turns up, no questions will be asked – OK? Otherwise, I guess it’s the police.’

He showed his teeth back.

Then he told Humph to take him home. They drove in silence to Barham’s Dock where
PK 129
lay motionless under a large moon.

‘Drink?’ asked Dryden, getting out, and not looking back.

He knew something was wrong before he reached the boat. It lay low in the water and he could see now that the bow was much lower than the stern. Some of the pots in which he grew herbs on the deck had spilled on to the bank.

He heard Humph behind him. ‘Shit.’

About three foot of black, stinking river water lay inside the main cabin. A crude siphon pump had been set up to draw the river water up, over the bulwarks, and into the cabin well. He plucked one end of the pipe from the river and climbed aboard. He submerged the pipe in the water in the wheelhouse and then flipped one end of the pipe back overboard, reversing the flow and beginning the long task of draining the boat dry. Peeking through the forward portholes he saw debris floating: a picture of Laura’s parents in Turin, some plastic plates, and a half-full bottle of malt whisky, bobbing cork up.

They edged on board, aware that
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had a dangerous list to port. Humph found the newspaper cutting – identical to the one left on the Capri’s windscreen. It was pinned to the chart board in the galley. Pinned with a carving knife.

The childless house had mocked Maggie Beck from the first day: the day they’d driven through the military monotony of the Forestry Commission estates. The windows mocked her with their identical views of pine trees and sandy paths. And the ivory dress mocked her too, even now, from its crêpe-paper package above the wardrobe. She longed for the view across Black Bank Fen, wondering at the same time how she could miss, so much, something she had hated so much. The memory of an amphitheatre sky haunted her claustrophobic life. She longed for a horizon, a distant view of miniature people, a cloud casting a shadow half a county away.

She’d married Don two years ago. The best wedding picture was in the front room over the gas fire. He could have been her dad, she knew that’s what everyone was saying behind their hands. Sometimes she wished he was. Then she could have shared the memory, the memory of the falling star that had taken Matty away.

Why had she married him? Children, security, kindness, decency. Four powerful reasons she knew now did not add up to love.

She went to the front room and touched Matty’s picture: the one she’d taken when he was a week old. She loved this image, the one she saw every day, but she loved her secret more. So she ran, up the stairs, to the laundry room where the chest was. It was burnt too, like her cheek, and she ran her finger down the scar with an almost sensual caress. She lifted it open and slipped her hand down beside the old clothes until she found the waxed wallet that held the air-letters. They’d started to arrive last year on Lyndon’s first birthday. She’d had to ask, by registered letter. She’d lost Matty, they knew that, she only asked to see how the boy she’d saved was growing. And he was growing. Her favourite showed him naked, just two, standing in a lake with a smile like a searchlight and a plastic Captain Hook cutlass.

She flipped it over but she knew the inscription, knew all the inscriptions: ‘Tokebee, Michigan. Summer 78. London plays pirates.’

That’s all she had until now: pictures of a memory. Until now. She checked her watch: 9.38.

Where was Don? He should be here, they’d agreed that, together. She ran to the nursery and checked the temperature: 74°F, just like the book had said. She rested her hand on the blanket in the cot and felt the familiar surge of grief of loss, the almost overwhelming conviction that she could feel his body warmth even now, two years later.

She cried at the funeral. Cried openly for the little boy she didn’t know, and secretly for the little boy she’d sent to live another life 5,000 miles away. Her lover’s tears were real. They burst out of him like a spring and he’d knelt in the red dust and wept like a child who can find no logic in the world’s cruelty. It was the only time she’d felt like touching him since the night she’d seen the pictures. The pictures of her. She could have reached out, told him even then, and ended those tears. But she kept her secret, and bathed instead in his grief
.

The doorbell rang. She slipped on the stairs and clattered down into the hat stand. She fumbled with the latch and threw it open, knowing it was Don: two long rings and one short. It was his warning signal. To summon her from the depths of the old farmhouse. He was trying to smile, trying to hide what he felt: ‘There’s something wrong. The boy’s gone, Maggie. The boy’s gone. We have to talk to them again.’

She hated his farmer’s face then, with the cheeks nipped red by the frost.

Wednesday, 18 June

28

Dawn: the sun broke on the eastern horizon and swung a searchlight beam over the landscape. From the observation platform on which Dryden stood he looked down on the canopy of trees which seemed to cover the earth. To the east a large freshwater lake broke the sea of feathered, sunlit green; motionless except for an excited flock of flamingoes, an impossibly pink blotch on the eggshell blue water. He was the only one in the tree hide forty feet above Wicken Fen. An elephant could have ambled out of the tall rushes and drunk at the water beneath him. Exotic bird calls cut the silence which had come over the waterscape with the start of the day. Dryden felt his spirit swell at the sheer scale of the landscape below him, and the skyscape above. In spring and autumn, when dawn was later, it was a sight which brought the crowds to see the feeding: but not today. He could see the reflective flash of binoculars from some of the other hides, but he was alone in his: a sentry against a purple sky.

The grain boat was in position. The warden sat, scanning the sky. Dryden listened. Nothing. They always managed to surprise him: either early and soundless, or late and clamouring. He heard weary footsteps climbing the wooden ladder. He didn’t need to turn to know it was Andy ‘Last Case’ Newman, climbing reluctantly to their meeting, despite the promise of some on-duty birdwatching.

He got to the top and walked to the safety bar. ‘There,’ he said, pointing south. He was right. A tiny cloud, like a
puff of smoke from a distant locomotive, was wheeling in towards the open water.

‘I’ve got a paper to fill,’ said Dryden. Wednesdays were tough on
The Crow
, with three inside news pages to fill in a circulation area as lively as Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

Newman fixed his binoculars on the distant flock. ‘I would have thought one emaciated corpse in a pillbox would do.’

‘Old news,’ said Dryden, manufacturing a yawn which turned into the real thing. He’d spent the night with Humph in the Capri and sleep had eluded him. He’d been up at dawn to check out the damage on
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And he’d rung August and requested a background interview with Freeman White, Lyndon Koskinski’s fellow prisoner in Al Rasheid. He yawned again, hearing the plastic pop of the jaw joint as his muscles stretched. ‘How about confirming the ID?’

Newman dropped the glasses and gazed over the painted water. ‘Can’t do. But you know anyway, we both do. It’s got to be Johnnie Roe – mobile tea-bar owner and general low-life.’

‘Ex-wife?’

‘She only reported him missing because the cheques stopped. Johnnie had a nice house, by the way – out at Nornea on the West Fen. Vermin and cat’s pee – unusual combination, that.’

Dryden nodded. ‘You were watching the Ritz. Why?’

‘Like I said, the immigrants. We’d got most of the staging posts nailed between Felixstowe and the Midlands. A necklace, every thirty miles, like Little Chef. They picked up food, gave ’em air, and unloaded a handful for the local labour market. Then the rest went on. Or, in the case of the shipment we opened yesterday, got dumped.’

Shipment
, thought Dryden, seeing the boy’s twisted arms reaching for the air. ‘Local labour market,’ he said. ‘You’d been into Wilkinson’s. Only them?’

Newman nodded to say no. ‘There were others. Same business. Itinerant labourers, high turnover. It’s perfect for them. Some of them moved on, some didn’t.’

The warden in the boat began to spread grain on the water. ‘ID on the kid in the lorry?’ Dryden tried to make the question sound as casual as possible.

Newman laughed. ‘Nobody’s talking. We haven’t got names for the ones that survived yet. But we will. The passports are fake and once they realize they’re heading back to the Channel ports, they’ll talk.’