The Fire Baby (30 page)

He pressed his forehead against the floor and spoke into the dust. ‘Cheated,’ he said.

He’d waited that first time too. By the Ritz, in the Wilkinson’s van, half a mile along the main road by an emergency telephone. He’d waited all night for Emmy with the bag, so that he’d have something to eat while they took him to the old airfield. Something for comfort. An excuse really, an excuse to see his son after nearly eighteen long months of lonely exile. And just after midnight a lorry had swung into the lay-by and the driver killed the lights. But Jimmy didn’t move. He knew the warnings the smugglers had given. That the police would run a lorry too one day, to catch the middle-men. So he waited for the driver to unload, for Johnnie Roe to appear from the Ritz. But the minutes had slipped by and nobody had come. And so the lorry had powered out, the gears crashing angrily.

So Jimmy left the bag with the presents behind the Ritz, hanging from the door handle, and went to work. Smiling to work. The next evening the bag still hung there, like a head in a noose. So he switched to day shifts and watched each night from the van. He’d thought how much he loved his son, and how stupid he had been to entrust his life to the people smugglers. To the skinhead.

Two days gone. On the Friday night the square man full of muscles had parked up and examined everything like a policeman. He’d held open the top of the Tesco bag with a pen, using a miniature spotlight to look inside. With a bunch of keys he’d worked on the Ritz’ locks until the back door had jumped open. Inside, he’d made the unit rock as he searched, the spotlight occasionally shooting out through the gap around the serving hatch. Outside, he’d found something on the ground. Jimmy
sensed the excitement as the man squatted down on his haunches in the dust and then, straightened, had walked carefully eastwards towards the fen. Jimmy had feared for Emmy then. What did the man want? What had he found? And then the square man had returned to his car. Swiftly, as though a decision had been made. Not tonight, perhaps. But the next night he’d come again, and this time he’d brought a larger torch, and a rucksack, and he’d taken the bag, Emmy’s bag, and walked off across Black Bank Fen.

So Jimmy followed, taking the car jack from the boot to keep his courage hot. Across Black Bank Fen, behind the square man with the Tesco bag that held his son’s life. Across Black Bank Fen until they reached Mons Wood, and the pillbox in the moonlight.

Was Emmy inside? Jimmy waited as the square man went in and he listened, hoping with such a violent intensity to hear his son’s voice that he conjured it up. He heard ‘Papa’. He heard ‘Help’; an hallucination more powerful than any sound he’d ever really heard. So he called out Emmy’s name – but it was the square man who came out. And he had blood on his hands. He wouldn’t have killed him if the muscled man hadn’t been so strong. He hit him with the jack from the car, across the chest. But the fool ducked and took the blow across the forehead and just grunted, standing there, stupidly. Even in the moonlight Jimmy saw the shock in his eyes. So Jimmy hit him again and recognized the sound; the sticky soft crunch of the cranium folding into the brain. That’s how his father had killed the cow a lifetime ago, a single blow, destroying the head and turning the eyes white.

So he left him in the grass and ran inside but Emmy wasn’t there. Only the man from the Ritz. The man with the cigarette hair, strung out across the floor, reaching for the empty glass. Pathetically he thought Jimmy had come to save him. So he begged for the glass. Begged for the water. There was blood around the man’s mouth which trickled as he spoke. Jimmy guessed the square man had hit him. A bruise, oddly green in the moonlight, was rising quickly over the man’s cheek and eye, distorting his face.

The contents of the Tesco bag had been dumped on the straw floor. Jimmy looked down at them stupidly and the man from the Ritz saw his chance.

‘I told him. I don’t know – don’t know whose they are. I missed the lorry. Tuesday. I missed it. Perhaps it was for them? I don’t know.’ Then his eyes turned again to the glass on the shelf and he almost whispered it this time. ‘A drink?’

So Jimmy asked him where Emmy had gone. Where they’d all gone. What was the plan if the drop was missed? Was there a plan? But he wouldn’t say, or he didn’t know. And then when Jimmy didn’t give him the water he made something up, babbling rubbish to win himself the water. Jimmy had felt anger then, and humiliation. He felt a fool, manipulated always by the white men who ran his life, the men who had lost his son. A simple bargain they had failed to keep. They’d taken the money and his son. The anger made him swoon.

So he left the glass on the ledge. And then he ran, hearing the man’s screams diminish slowly, until he could only imagine them in the silence of the fields.

The humiliation came back now, fresh and powerful. He stood, and took up his post at the open window again, pulling the gunsight to his eye and training it on the loading bays. ‘It’s where he sleeps,’ he said, out loud this time. The skinhead who had driven the lorry. The skinhead the black men paid to do the job. His hatred for the skinhead made him vomit, heaving up over his chin, but at least the taste of the bile stopped him shaking, so he put the crosshairs of the gunsight over the red door they always used, and waited, counting the seconds into minutes.

He thought of Emmy’s body in the morgue, but this time there were no tears. He’d kissed him that one last time and although his skin had been cold, as the barrel on the gun was cold, he’d made him a promise as the lips touched his cheek. The skinhead. Then the red door opened and he led them out, the metal in his teeth catching the sun. A truck must be coming. The skinhead blinked in the sunlight and spread his arms wide in an embrace of life, while the others went to flag the truck
in off the drove road. Arms wide, his face to heaven; the skinhead grinned and rubbed his hands in his short, cropped hair. So Jimmy put the crosshairs on his neck, waited a second to make sure they were both still, pulled the trigger, and sent him to hell in a spurt of bright, arterial blood.

Friday, 20 June

40

Dryden had considered playing Maggie’s last tape on the Capri’s deck. Did he have the right? Technically it was Maggie’s testament, and it had been left for Estelle and Lyndon to hear. But he couldn’t wait. He’d try Estelle at Black Bank first, then he’d play it. Still he had one other option to try to find his own answers to the mystery of Black Bank. What he needed was to talk to someone who had been there in 1976, but was prepared to tell the truth now about the Beck family, and its secrets.

Tracking Constance Tompkins down had been easy enough. Estelle was not answering calls at Black Bank and Johnnie Roe’s ex-wife had offered him few details. But she must, he reasoned, be close by to have attended Maggie’s funeral. He’d checked with a contact at County Hall and they’d traced her through the files on the county library service. She had emigrated, but she was back now, and drawing a pension. They were happy enough to give Dryden the address once he explained that Maggie Beck’s children wanted to contact their great-aunt.

Which had led him here: Fenlandia. The wooden sign on the stone gate post said ‘Rest Home’, and Dryden felt a familiar surge of nausea at the euphemism. The house stood somewhere in a stand of pine trees at the end of a dreary, dead-end lane out of town. An unnecessary and undiplomatic sign added: DEAD SLOW in letters so large they were hard to read.

Dryden left Humph ordering a bottle of make-believe
retsina at Nicos’s taverna and crunched his way up the gravel drive until the building came into view. He was surprised to find it was ultra-modern, boasted two satellite dishes and solar-powered roof panels. In a nod to the more traditional model it had a large conservatory along the building’s frontage, overlooking lawns. Wisteria drooped from the eaves in a splash of washed-out purple and ivory.

‘Wisteria,’ said Dryden happily, thinking it was the perfect plant to reserve for old age.

A line of Lloydloom wicker chairs stood in firing-squad formation behind the smudge-free glass of the conservatory. All were empty except one. He’d rung ahead and the woman who had answered the phone said Mrs Constance Tompkins would love to see him. But she might not say much: ‘Mrs Tompkins is with us sometimes, and sometimes not. She’s happy either way.’

The rest of the residents were in a TV lounge at the rear. The heat was stifling, but try as he might Dryden could not detect the tell-tale odour of stale urine. Faintly disappointed not to have his prejudices confirmed he talked loudly to everyone he met on the assumption they were deaf. The woman who ran Fenlandia wore a dark suit and could have been a director of a City insurance company. She led Dryden to the conservatory at a military pace.

Mrs Tompkins was reading a novel with rapt concentration. The paperback cover was frayed and stained, a Penguin Classic from the sixties, lovingly re-read. She didn’t look up when they arrived and, while she might have been deaf, Dryden suspected she was just ignoring him.

‘I’ll leave you alone for a few minutes,’ said the proprietor, touching Mrs Tompkins on the arm. ‘This is the man I mentioned, Connie. From the newspaper.’

She carried on reading pointedly until she finished a chapter.
Then she folded the book and put her reading glasses away. She looked sprightlier than she had at Maggie’s funeral, but Dryden guessed she must be seventy-five, perhaps more. She looked like Queen Mary, but in colour. If there was a family resemblance with Estelle he couldn’t see it, except, perhaps, around the darting, playful eyes.

‘Hello,’ she said, and laughed. Dryden felt he’d made a misjudgement somewhere, sometime, about seventy-five-year-olds. ‘You want to know about Maggie, don’t you? I read the piece.’ She pulled a copy of
The Crow
from the side of the cushions she sat on. ‘It’s got your name on it.’

Dryden sat down. Outside, the sunshine was burning the grass lawn quietly to stubble. The antimacassar on the seat oozed lavender water; he suddenly felt very tired. It took an effort of will to summon up the first question. ‘Maggie died before she could tell Matty why she did what she did. I think she planned to tell him. She left some tapes – about her life. Estelle says she never explained, at the beginning at least, why she swapped the children. We know she wanted to give Matty a new life, but what was wrong with the one she could have given him herself? Matty should know – it’s what Maggie would have wanted. Do you know, Mrs Tompkins?’

She’d been looking out at the pine trees until then, but now she turned, and smiled again.

‘I’m letting go of the past now, Mr Dryden,’ she said, leaning forward and tapping his knee with her book. ‘It’s very therapeutic’

‘But you went to the funeral…’

He had her then. He could tell she wasn’t sure if he’d been there. ‘Do you know? Why she did it?’ he asked, and knew instantly that she did. There was pain in her face and he sensed she was tumbling back, towards a period of her life that Dryden guessed had been humiliating – the poor relative
taken in out of charity, into an insidious order which put an unmarried woman at the bottom of a tiny social pyramid.

‘Maggie was a sweet girl. I don’t think Johnnie was all bad, either. Rudderless sort of man, lost, and angry about something. I knew they were seeing each other. He’d done some work on the farm as a picker. She’d been protected at Black Bank, perhaps over-protected. It was a very old-fashioned place, as I’m sure you can imagine. I found it so… stifling.’

Dryden watched Connie’s bright eyes dancing over the lawn.

‘I watched her several times that summer, she’d leave the house in the evening and set out across country. I don’t think she thought I was a threat to her so she didn’t seem to care that I knew. Assignations,’ she added, hugging herself. ‘Romantic, I thought then, so I said nothing.’

The pain showed again, even after nearly thirty years. ‘She told no one about the baby until she had to. She was very brave about that. She told me first – I think she wanted advice about what to do and how to break it to my brother. She was very matter-of-fact about it, and I think then she believed Johnnie would be her husband. He was scared, of course, but I felt he wanted the child too.’

She let a silence begin to lengthen. A gong sounded discreetly from somewhere within Fenlandia.

‘Morning coffee,’ said Miss Tompkins, with relief. A woman in a white nurse’s uniform brought a tray. Dryden noted the superior biscuits.

‘You like it here?’ he said, taking one.

‘As Maurice Chevalier said in a different context, Mr Dryden, it’s better than the alternative.’

‘Must be expensive though?’

‘Very. I married late and well. Ideal,’ she smiled. She
slurped coffee and pressed on. ‘Then something happened – to Maggie. She stopped seeing Johnnie.’

‘This was when, exactly? Sorry – if you can remember.’

‘Oh – I can remember all right. It was her birthday – Maggie’s. It was 1976, she’d be sixteen then. February the tenth.’

She stopped then, lost again in the past. ‘It was her birthday?’ prompted Dryden.

‘Yes. Yes. I’d been at Black Bank five years, five wasted years, five years of my life. I’m angry about that, even now. But Maggie had spent her whole life there. It was remarkable she was as normal as she was. I saw her grow up in those years, from a child to a mother in that time. Very little perturbed that child. She was innocent, I know, that’s what my brother said when they found out she was pregnant, but innocence isn’t stupidity. She was never that.’