The Fire Baby (33 page)

‘So did he confess?’

‘No. But then, I think now, he didn’t know his crime. Or hadn’t guessed. I wanted him to know. I wanted to punish him for making Mum do it. Telling the lie that’s done all this,
brought us here. He was dying from the thirst. I could see that. So I watched.’

‘Why don’t you give me the lighter?’ asked Dryden.

Lyndon smiled again. ‘Then I just found that guy’s body – his head stoved in. Sutton? I read it in the paper – the name. I cried… You know? I cried for that guy. I’d seen worse in the Gulf. But he looked kinda innocent. I guess he was.’

He heaved in a breath and choked on the monoxide. ‘And then I thought he must have told someone he’d gone to the pillbox. He had a family, people who cared. They’d come looking. And someone had killed him. So someone else knew Johnnie was there. They’d find out what I’d done to him. How I dragged him there, through the dust, and chained him up.

‘I had to get rid of Sutton’s body.’ He looked out at the drifting smoke and dust, untroubled by anything outside his own head.

Dryden tried to stem the fear that was constricting his throat. ‘And Freeman White took care of that. He’s on the fire crew at the base – it says it on his door. Your door.’

Lyndon tipped his head by way of assent. ‘Then Johnnie died. That was the Sunday. I just found him. Taut, like that, and reaching out for the glass.’

‘I presume we met at the pillbox,’ said Dryden, fingering the blue-black eye.

‘Another five minutes and I’d have had the body out… I was shocked, you know – shocked that he’d died so suddenly. I didn’t expect that.’

Lyndon flipped open the top of the Zippo. Dryden tried to think. ‘You can put it back together again. Your life. Lyndon’s life. She’s in the car.’ Lyndon looked up then, but outside there was now only the drifting pall of the dust,
darkening by the second. ‘She’s got something to tell you. She said there was more,’ said Dryden.

Lyndon shrugged. ‘Murder. In Texas they give you the chair,’ he said, fingering his throat. ‘Burn. That’s what they say: Let ‘em burn. Killed his own father. That’s me.’

‘But not here,’ said Dryden.

‘Civilized,’ said Lyndon, sneering. ‘But hey. They might deport me. US citizen… but then again. The final laugh on me. Well, well, he ain’t a Yank after all. So he can rot in one of our jails. Ten years… fifteen? Maybe more.’

‘She loves you. Estelle. That’s why she’s here. She doesn’t need to be.’

He held the Zippo at arm’s length and lit it once. In the gloomy penumbra of the dust storm it was a brilliant flame. ‘She wouldn’t come with me. She wouldn’t just leave. I knew it was right. She didn’t trust me. Didn’t believe. She knows that. We’ll always know that.’

He flicked the turning ignition wheel on the Zippo lighter and held it to his chest: a tender gesture of almost religious beauty. Like most moments which change people’s lives it was enacted slowly, almost mundanely. He was, Dryden knew, dead already. A cold blue flame spread over Lyndon’s sweatshirt for what seemed like a miniature eternity. Then the flame flapped like a wing and jumped silently to his arm, and the doused leather seat beside him. Lyndon raised a fluttering hand, despite himself, to ward off the heat. Then the blue flames engulfed him in what looked like a cool shroud. The colder orange flames slipped down to the bare floorboards where the petrol ran in a river towards the kitchen. A beaded curtain of heat rose, blocking the exit.

Then Lyndon began to scream. Even in the moment Dryden thought of Johnnie Roe, his vocal cords shredding in that long hot night.

But this cry was muted, contorted within the blue shroud of flame which was burning his skin. He turned his head rapidly from side to side as the heat bit in, wanting to end his life with the dignity of self-control. But the pain was too much, and the scream broke through the blue shroud and Dryden ran from it, ran anywhere, to escape the agony.

He closed the heavy wooden door behind him as the fire leapt across the room. He was in a corridor as familiar as a nightmare, at the end of which stood a front door like any other. He ran to it, his heart leaping, and turned the Yale lock to open but the door wouldn’t move. There was a Chubb below it, locked fast, and no key. So he turned to face the fire which he could hear buffeting the door he had closed. It was an odd place, he thought, to die.

‘Not here,’ he said, without conviction, as he considered the smoke slithering under the door, and then the tongues of flame which began to curl under, like searching fingers.

Then the door imploded with a silent percussion which popped his ears. In slow motion the wood became kindling. Then a tumbling fireball swept towards him and as he turned his back on it he was yelling – Humph said that later – yelling for water. Then he yelled for anything that would stop the pain which was eating into his back. As he screamed he imagined the worst because he could not see: imagined the flame digging in to the bones of the spine, uncovering them by burning away the thin layers of flesh and muscle. Firing the bone like human pottery.

Which is when he thought of Laura. It was the coolness of her bed which called him. The lack of fire and warmth. The iciness which he desperately craved now. He wanted to be by her bedside for ever, forever cool, under the falling snowflakes which he could summon up when his eyes were closed. They could lie together in a drift, the antithesis of fire.

‘Please, God, let her see me again,’ he said, and gagging on the gases, he dropped to his knees.

It wasn’t his own death that scared him. It was the idea that she’d think he’d left her again, left her like he had in Harrimere Drain, in the flooded car. There were many things he had said since the crash, but only one thing had he repeated each night at The Tower: ‘I’ll be back.’

‘Please, God,’ he said, silently this time. ‘Let her see me again.’

When he opened his eyes he was an inch from the lock. It was the Chubb: gold, and oddly icy. He put his lips to it and the kiss was as cold as Laura’s skin. So he pulled the chain at his neck and the key rose, and he put the key in the lock and even in the screaming chaos of the house in which he should have died he heard it effortlessly tumbling, the locksmith’s wheels falling nicely into their allotted slots.

Then he thanked God, shouted his name, and pulling the door towards him, fell out, back into the world which wasn’t on fire, his arms flailing in a fiery semaphore.

43

When he came to, Estelle was kneeling, holding him, with his back to the dust storm. Ahead the house still burned, a single column now of cherry-red flame fifty feet high. The pain along his spine was distant, but he knew that it was shock which had dulled it, and that it was blossoming slowly, but relentlessly. The dust storm blew, and somewhere in the hiss of the cloud in which they existed he could hear Humph, up close, on a mobile. ‘Yup. Quickly. It’s serious,’ he said, and Dryden wondered how the cabbie had hurt himself. Dryden was unmoved by the fact that he was still alive. He glugged air, choked on the carbon monoxide, but glugged some more. Estelle’s eyes were locked on the burning house, while she held her sweatshirt to her mouth to block the fumes.

Dryden’s chest heaved. ‘You knew,’ he said. He took what air he could. ‘Lyndon died thinking he’d killed Johnnie Roe. Thinking he died of thirst. But that’s not right, is it?’

She didn’t try to deny it. ‘No.’

Dryden closed his eyes but could still see the brilliant outline of the house on his retinas. ‘You’d been there – to the pillbox. At Maggie’s funeral you said Johnnie had been tortured like Tantalus. It was too perfect a description. None of the reports had the details. But you knew…’

She watched the fire with the same intensity Lyndon had reserved for the Zippo lighter.

Humph’s voice floated into their world. ‘They’re coming,’ he said, and was gone.

She coughed back the fumes. ‘He disappeared – after the night Mum died. He knew about Johnnie then, from the tapes. He came past a couple of times and we met at the hospital – to clear away her things. Freeman came too. But I knew Lyndon was struggling, struggling, with all of it. We had to talk. He just wanted to go back home – as if nothing had happened. It was crazy. He was crazy. It wasn’t something you could just forget. Then I saw the lights one night – out at Mons Wood. And the Land Rover, in the trees.’

‘You found Johnnie?’

‘Yes. In Mum’s pillbox, she’d talked about it on the tapes. Where she’d met Johnnie. And I knew then that Lyndon had taken him there. I’d thought of revenge too. But what could I do? Then, suddenly, he was there. And I had that power, of life and death, given to me without asking. So I went back the next night with some of the chemicals they use for the fields. Weedkiller. Dad… Don, Don always said they were lethal, and to keep them away from kids because they were tasteless. Like water. And colourless. We kept supplies locked up at Black Bank. I thought if Johnnie Roe was that desperate, he could drink that. So I filled the glass with the poison and I gave it to him.’

Dryden said nothing, trying not to see Johnnie’s body twisted on the pillbox floor.

‘He started screaming. Saying it burnt him inside. So I left.’ She turned to Dryden and he sensed she’d taken a decision. She smiled. ‘I don’t regret it. I never have. I just wish I’d told Lyndon. Why didn’t we talk? I wouldn’t go back with him. We couldn’t get past that. So we hid in silence and then he left.’

They watched the house burn. ‘Now Lyndon’s gone too,’ said Dryden, shaking badly as the shock subsided. The pain
was making it difficult for him to think: a pulsing electric pain, branching out from his spinal cord.

‘I had something to tell him,’ said Estelle, and she let her hands drop to her stomach, where they cradled the flesh. Dryden’s head swam, but he knew she was rocking, rocking gently to the sound of the fire.

He knew then why Laura had told him there was another baby.

‘A child,’ he said, and she turned to him again.

‘I wanted to tell him that I didn’t go.’

‘Go where?’

‘The hospital. The last time we spoke we decided. I wouldn’t go with him so he said that it would be best if the child wasn’t born. I wanted to hurt him then, for being brutal. So I said OK. I said I would get rid of the child. He must have died thinking I had. That’s terrible, isn’t it? Terrible that he died not knowing there’s still a baby.’

Humph appeared before them and the green tinge of sickness on his face told Dryden everything he didn’t want to know. ‘Your back,’ he said. ‘There’s some burns. They’ll be here soon, so sit.’

Dryden nodded and leant on Estelle. The dust storm had vanished as quickly as it had descended on Adventurer’s Fen. In the silence the house crackled like kindling.

‘Lyndon. How did he die?’ she said, standing and taking a step towards the fire.

‘The lighter. Petrol, I think. It was over very quickly.’

She twisted her head back in despair: ‘Oh Jesus! We never escaped, did we? Any of us. From that fire. From this.’

And she started to walk towards the flames. Dryden stood, felt the fen sweep around him in a dizzy vision, and lunged after her. He clutched at Estelle’s arm and then his knees buckled and he brought her down into the dust with him.
The front of the house was charcoal black, but where the door had been a sheet of ruby-red flame still burnt like a shimmering curtain of beads.

‘The child can escape,’ he said, and blacked out.

Postscript

As the ambulance took Dryden away from Adventurer’s Fen the rain fell. Fizzing droplets turned to tiny clouds of gas over the burning forest and dripped from the open rafters of the house that Laura had built. The house she had built for them.

It hadn’t just been her secret; she’d shared it with her parents. Six months before the accident at Harrimere Drain they’d come back from Italy, from retirement, on a visit. She wanted to take the money left to her in trust to build the house Dryden wanted, for the family they both wanted. She took them out to the spot and let them feel the thrill of the secret too. The secret she hugged to herself that last summer, even as she understood the shadow it cast over Dryden. But with her parents she agreed to keep the secret, at least for a few more weeks, until his birthday.

After Laura’s accident her parents flew back to be at her side in The Tower, and after the weeks in which she might have died had passed, they asked Dryden what he wanted to do with the money in the trust fund. They’d agreed a plan on the flight: if he said he wanted the money they’d tell him about the house on Adventurer’s Fen. If not, they’d rent it, bank the money as an investment, and keep the secret in the hope that when Laura came out of the coma she, and Dryden, could enjoy the surprise – at last. It was a sound investment, and a clever compromise. Dryden had told them to invest the money safely. He carried the key she’d given him, and they carried Laura’s secret.

Which is why Dryden’s key was made to fit a lock in a house which should have existed only in a dream.

Andy ‘Last Case’ Newman retired happily a month after the deaths on Adventurer’s Fen. All three killings, of Bob Sutton, Johnnie Roe, and Winston the people smuggler, appeared on his file as solved. Lyndon Koskinski was Johnnie’s presumed killer. Dryden and Estelle kept her secret to themselves. Newman was commended by the Chief Constable. He moved to the north Norfolk coast and shortly afterwards identified a new sub-species of Arctic Tern:
Borealis Newmanii.

Estelle gave birth to a baby girl on Christmas Day at Black Bank Farm. She was christened Margaret at St Matthew’s. Dryden was invited and they stood before Lyndon’s grave in the churchyard afterwards. He’d been buried with Maggie and Don. Dryden, hospitalized after the burns he received at Adventurer’s Fen, had only just escaped a wheelchair.

‘What will you tell her?’ he’d asked.

‘Everything,’ said Estelle, hugging the baby.

Lyndon’s onetime grandparents in Austin had sent a wreath, which carried a small flag: a white star on a blue background with broad stripes of white and red – the flag of the Lone Star State. But there was no message. Privately, they approached the parish authorities responsible for St Matthew’s and paid over an endowment of L500 for the upkeep of all the graves, in perpetuity.