The Fire Baby (3 page)

Humph beeped again. Dryden placed the smallest finger of Laura’s right hand in his palm so that it barely touched his skin. The neurologist had shown him how. They had a machine too, the COMPASS, but Dryden liked doing it this way – the way they’d first done it. The communication was intensely personal, as though he were a lightning rod, channelling her energy to earth.

‘OK. Let’s concentrate.’ The specialist, the one with the dead-fish eyes, had told him to give her a warning.

Humph beeped again and Dryden suppressed a surge of petty anger.

‘Loads of time.’

He counted to sixty and then coughed self-consciously: ‘OK. We’re starting. A, B, C, D, E, F…’ and on, a full two seconds for each. He felt the familiar tingle of excitement as he got nearer: ‘J, K, L’ – and there it was, the tiny double movement.

It didn’t always happen. One out of five, six perhaps. They’d always got the next bit wrong until Dryden had hit upon the idea of beginning at M and running through the alphabet rather than starting at A. He moved on, with the two-second gaps, but she missed it. Two tiny movements – but on the B.

He felt irritation, then guilt. The neurologist had explained how difficult it must be. ‘It’s about as easy as playing chess in your head. She’s learnt to combine certain muscle movements, small tremors in the tissue, to produce this timed response. We have no way of knowing how much time she needs for each letter. How long she has to concentrate.’

He did the rest to spite Humph. L-B-U-S-A. Three letters right, two just a place away in the alphabet.

He felt fierce pride and love burn, briefly, at her achievement. The specialist, an expert from one of the big London teaching hospitals who had treated his wife like a specimen preserved in a Victorian museum jar, had told him to be patient – a word which always prompted in Dryden an internal scream. Laura’s messages were halting, disjointed, sometimes surreal. He must wait to see if she would ever emerge from the confused penumbra of coma.

‘Patience,’ he said out loud. A virtue, if it was one, of which he had no trace.

2

Humph parked up in a lay-by three miles east of Ely. It was a lay-by like all lay-bys, distinguished by nothing. The A14 east–west trunk road linking the coastal port of Felixstowe with the industrial cities of the Midlands was punctuated by them. At this hour – lunchtime – it was a canyon of HGVs ticking over and spewing carbon monoxide into hot air already laced with cheap grease from the Ritz T-Bar.

‘Coffee. Four sugars,’ said the cabbie, unfolding a five-day-old copy of the
Financial Times
with casual familiarity. He played the stock market in the way that many people play the horses. He lost a lot; but when he ran out of things to read the
FT
made a snug, pink blanket.

Humph was Dryden’s chauffeur. There was no other way to describe it. They had shared a life of aimless motion for nearly four years since Laura’s accident. Humph had a few regular customers who paid well – early morning school runs, and late night pick-ups for club bouncers in Newmarket and Cambridge. The rest of the time he was on call for Dryden.
The Crow
, Dryden’s newspaper, was happy to pick up the modest bills as it made up for the fact that they appeared to have forgotten to pay their chief reporter a salary. Humph’s home life was as non-existent as Dryden’s, in his case owing to an acrimonious divorce. He had a picture of his two girls stuck on the dashboard. Dryden and Humph shared an insular view of the world, if that is possible, for the most part without sharing a word.

In the lay-by the combination of the noon sun and the
exhaust pipes of fifteen heavy wagons was headily reminiscent of Athens under a smog. Amongst the lorries were two Milk Marketing Board tankers, common now on the Fen roads, converted to carry water for irrigating salad crops in the drought. The air along the roadside was a shimmering blue advert for global warming. Dryden tried a cough and produced a strangulated lead-fuelled squeak.

The Ritz T-Bar was a regular meeting place for Dryden and the crew of stragglers he counted as his ‘contacts’. He noted that Inspector Andy Newman’s car was already parked up on a grass mound at the end of the lay-by. The detective drove a clapped-out Citroën with a sticker in the window for the Welney Wildfowl Trust. Andy Newman – ‘Last Case Newman’, as he was known to his fellow officers on the force – was more interested in catching sight of a sparrowhawk than a crook. Mentally he had been on the allotment for a decade. Or in his case, in one of the hides from which he could spy on his beloved birds. He had twenty-three days to run to statutory retirement age. He wasn’t counting, but that didn’t include two days’ holiday and a doctor’s appointment.

Dryden queued for a cup of tea. The Ritz was standard issue in the mobile tea-bar world. Sugar bowl with one teaspoon and several lumps of coagulated glucose. One copy of the
Sun –
tied to the counter with a piece of string. A hotplate with a row of sausages sizzling in six-point harmony. And one oddity: a bird cage hung from the wooden awning in which sat a moth-eaten parrot. It was not a pretty boy.

A blackboard on the rear wall of the kitchenette read:
THURSDAY’S SPECIAL – DOUBLE SAUSAGE SANDWICH 99P.

The proprietor was tall, with blond hair tinged nicotine-yellow. His conversational powers, which Dryden had tested before, were strictly limited to Premier League football, female lorry drivers and the weather in a two-mile radius of
the lay-by. He kept his hands in his pockets and smoked a roll-up with the lung-pulling power of a set of doll’s house bellows. As he pushed the styrofoam cup of tea across the counter Dryden noticed the livid raised mark of a skin graft on his hand.

‘Johnnie,’ said Dryden, putting his change on the Formica top.

‘Steamin’ again,’ said Johnnie, shuffling coins between the lines of five-, ten-, twenty-, and fifty-pence pieces on the counter-top he had arranged in the long hours of boredom which came with being proprietor of the Ritz.

Dryden left it at that. He got into Newman’s car and sat pretending to sip the tea for five minutes. Newman, binoculars pressed to his face, was scanning the vast field opposite. Eventually he placed them on his lap with a sigh. ‘Herring gull,’ he said. Even his voice was tired. Knackered. Ready for retirement with the rest of him.

‘Not long now,’ said Dryden, referring to Newman’s favourite topic – retirement.

‘Nope. Not long.’

Dryden produced a single piece of white paper. It was a five-paragraph story put out by the Press Association that morning.
The Crow
paid for the wire service PA provided – a regular series of news stories churned out online to the terminal on the news editor’s desk. Dryden had a search mechanism on his screen which alerted him when any story came up with a headline containing the key words ‘TWITCHER(S)’, ‘BIRD(S)’, ‘RARE’ or ‘EGG(S)’.

He’d rung Newman that morning as soon as the story had appeared on the wire. It might make a paragraph in the nationals the next day, or even the local evening papers, but Dryden’s favour bought Newman the best part of a twenty-four-hour lead on his fellow enthusiasts.

‘Rare Siberian gull spotted’, ran the headline. The bird had been blown, exhausted, on to the bird reserve at Holme on the north Norfolk coast. Once the news hit the papers thousands of twitchers would descend on the spot, with enough photographic hardware to cover a Paris catwalk. This way Andy Newman got there first.

‘Thanks,’ he said, stuffing the paper in the glove compartment. He always seemed mildly embarrassed by what, Dryden had to admit, was a not very subtle process of police bribery. They had long since dispensed with any pretence that their relationship was anything other than cynical: Newman got the tips and Dryden got a story. It was as simple as that.

Newman retrieved a large brown envelope which had been stashed in the Citroën’s glove compartment. Dryden gingerly extracted some photographic prints from it. ‘They’re X-rated,’ said Newman, as he raised his binoculars to watch a flock of flamingoes rising from the distant waters of the Wicken Fen nature reserve.

And so they were. Twenty prints, black and white. Two bodies. One female. Her face was to the camera in a few, the eyes glazed. Dryden guessed she’d been drugged. The man’s face was crueller. A professional. A pornstar’s body. Hairless and smooth. But ugly. They were always ugly in these pictures, whatever they looked like.

She’d have been beautiful anywhere else. Blonde, bright eyes, leggy. Dryden guessed twenty – perhaps younger. The stud was older, late twenties; the cynical smile added another couple of decades. But it was the room that left Dryden uneasy. Walls, but no right angles. Bare concrete. Graffiti: layers of it, decades of it. Coats and clothes on the floor, and under that, what? Straw, perhaps.

The camera angle never changed. It was outside looking
in, through a narrow horizontal slit. Night time. A peeping Tom by arrangement, looking in and recording everything.

Dryden put them back in the envelope and fished in his trouser pockets for the pear drops he’d bought that morning. He hardly ever ate a decent meal, preferring instead to graze on the crop he could harvest from his pockets. He wound the window down but it made no impression on the stifling heat. A fly head-butted the windscreen without enthusiasm.

‘It’s a pillbox,’ said Newman, lowering the binoculars and putting them carefully in a box lined with immaculate green baize.

Dryden nodded as if he knew what the detective was talking about.

‘Is that a clue?’ asked Dryden, fighting off an urge to yawn. Sometimes Dryden was aware that of the two he got the poorer bargain in their little game of bribery. Newman had to find a story at very short notice to get his tips, and sometimes the Fenland underworld failed to come up with anything even moderately exciting.

‘Not really,’ said Newman, already trying to work out if he could lose himself for a few hours driving north to Holme over lunch to get a snap of the Siberian gull. ‘There were thirty thousand built in the late thirties, forties. There’s probably ten thousand left. Most look like the one in the pictures. There’s a club – apparently – which spots them.’

Dryden imagined Newman joining up. ‘People should get out more.’

‘They did,’ said Newman, nodding at the brown envelope. ‘The pictures turned up in a house in Nottingham. A raid – illegal immigrants.’

One of the HGVs shuddered past, drowning out for a second the whine of the cars on the A14. Dryden felt one of the small bones in his ear vibrate in tune with the diesel engine.

‘Operation Ironside,’ said Newman. ‘April 1940. They thought the Germans were going to invade on the east coast. Plan was to blow up the sluices at Denver and flood the Fens. The Isle of Ely was the HQ for the region post-invasion. So they built pillboxes. About a hundred and fifty of them across the region, mostly around the edge of the island and on the old cliff-line.’

Newman handed Dryden the binoculars and pointed north across a field of dry peat soil to a windbreak of poplars.

It took Dryden a minute to find it. One of its six sides caught the sun. The narrow machine-gun slit a jet-black shadow like an ugly mouth.

‘That one?’

‘Nope. Roof’s collapsed.’

Dryden looked again through the binoculars. One side had crumbled and the roof did indeed sit at an angle on top. While pillboxes came in many guises, this he knew was the standard design. Hexagonal, single-storey, with gunslits on up to four of the sides. A door would be located to the ‘rear’ depending on the engineer’s guess as to the direction of attack. Once inside with the door locked a small group of soldiers could hold out for days, even weeks. Dryden had been inside a few in the Fens covering a variety of stories from devil worship to juvenile drug taking. Most were squalid, with ash-covered floors, and all the detritus of low-life from used syringes to discarded condoms. One had been daubed with the signs of the zodiac.

Dryden didn’t believe in ghosts or devils but some places, he felt, radiated evil. He could sense it now, even across the open fields of a summer’s day, a palpable sense of menace focused on the pillbox.

‘And there’s this,’ added Newman.

One of the prints Dryden had ignored was a blow-up of
part of the wall. He’d thought it was just a duff picture but now he could see faintly stencilled letters neatly set out by a wall bracket.

‘It probably held a phone,’ said Newman. ‘The number identifies the pillbox. At least it would if we had the records. Which we haven’t.’

‘But?’ There had to be more.

‘The first three numbers give the area: 103. Isle of Ely. Local TA boys still use them for orienteering.’

Dryden didn’t move. He considered the 150 or more pillboxes circling the city, each, perhaps, protecting its own sordid secrets. ‘So what’s the story? More to the point, what’s the crime?’

Newman got out and leant on the Citroën’s baking roof. Dryden followed suit and they faced each other over the hot metal. ‘We’re looking for anyone who’s seen anything unusual around a pillbox. Cars at night. Lights. Clothing left in them. Kids might have seen something. The crime? My guess is the girl’s drugged. She’s somebody’s daughter, somebody’s girlfriend.’

Dryden let the sun bake his upturned face for a few seconds. He thought about the girl in the pictures, considering the six grubby walls pressing in, and the stench of decay: ‘Could she be missing?’

‘It’s possible. You can say we’ve got the national police force computer on the job and the missing persons files have been scoured.’

What a place to be trapped, thought Dryden: his claustrophobia made his pulse race at the thought. Six walls, pressing in. He remembered Harrimere Drain and the vanishing air pocket in which he and Laura had been trapped. The car, forced off the road by an oncoming driver, had plunged into the icy water of the deep ditch. He had been pulled clear by
the other driver, letting himself rise through the dark water towards the air above. As consciousness faded he had told himself then, and always, that he had given Laura up to get help, but he knew others doubted his motives. Had he simply fled the nightmare of the underwater cell? The panic-stricken retreat of the coward?