The Fire Baby (32 page)

Dryden thought
Mum?
but asked: ‘And you’ve no idea where he is?’

‘He took the Land Rover and went. Said he’d find somewhere to think. Rent, I guess. He didn’t have any friends outside the base. He just wanted to go somewhere that wasn’t here, somewhere that wasn’t the air force. He wanted space. He said he knew a place… out there.’ She looked out over Black Bank Fen as another lightning bolt zig-zagged down into a stand of trees.

Dryden counted the seconds before the thunder struck, 1–2–3–4, and then the rumble which made his joints vibrate. She was still looking out. ‘He said you’d told him of a place he could go.’

‘Me?’

‘To be on his own. That’s what he said… a place you loved. Somewhere like Texas – somewhere he could be free.’

Dryden saw it then as he’d seen it last; the black peat of
Adventurer’s Fen stretching out to the reed beds by the river. ‘Does he have a mobile?’ he said.

‘Yes. But he never answers. Just listens to the messages.’

‘Ring him. Ring him quickly. Tell him about the last tape. And tell him we’re coming.’

The jailer cried, that last time, when Johnnie asked him what he’d done to deserve the torture of the pillbox.

‘Just tell me,’ said Johnnie, as though the answer marked the only difference between the real world and the hellish distortions of his hexagonal cell.

‘I’m being punished. I know that. I’m going to die here. Tell me why.’

Lyndon took the decision then. He’d planned to stay silent, but the appeal was so direct, and he had such an overwhelming answer, he knelt before his victim and took his face in his hands.

‘What do you see?’ he said, feeling his nails puncture Johnnie’s bristled flesh.

Johnnie felt his life hinged here: in an airless pillbox where he’d once made love to Maggie Beck. His jailer’s voice, he noticed, was American. It surprised him, where the educated cadences did not.

‘I can’t see the glass,’ he said. Lyndon’s head obscured the diamondlike beauty of the water on the shelf
.

Lyndon dug his thumbs into the sallow dehydrated flesh. ‘What do you see?’ he said again, knowing now he would have to give his father the answer. And he knew why he’d avoided speaking until now, for he felt an urge to be tender, to cradle the head of the man who had run into the flames of Black Bank to save his son.

He fought it back, and thought instead of his mother, tortured too by the knowledge that to save her son she must give his life away. ‘Think of a mirror,’ said Lyndon.

Johnnie tried to think. His mind screamed for water, for the glass beyond the jailer’s eyes. His head swam and those eyes filled his world.

‘My eyes?’ he said, knowing instantly he was right, feeling his heart contract with dread.

‘I’m your son,’ said Lyndon, and let him, brutally, fall to the ground.

Johnnie fainted then, the thirst beginning to destroy his brain, as it had ravaged his flesh.

When he came to the pain had gone. His mind floated free, and he could consider what he knew with shocking clarity. ‘You can’t be,’ he said, angry that the jailer should torment him further. ‘Matty died. In the fire.’

‘Maggie switched us. Me and the American kid. She did it to cheat you. Because of what you were.’

Lyndon stood and Johnnie noticed that his fingers shook violently and a nerve in his lean, tanned face was in spasm.’You made her do it, and it’s destroyed my life. Our lives.’ He showed Johnnie the wedding ring on his finger, balled his fist, and hit him hard. The cartilage of Johnnie’s nose collapsed, pushing up towards the brain, and the blood flowed out in gouts.

But this time Johnnie didn’t pass out. He sat back on his haunches despite the cramp in his legs. ‘What was I?’ said Johnnie, trying hard to remember how he’d lost Maggie, how he’d lost the life he could have had.

‘You took pictures. Making love to Maggie. Was it in here? Or did that come later?’

Johnnie remembered then, and felt ashamed that he had forgotten this crime, rather than all the others. ‘Later,’ he said, looking at the water in the glass as the thirst returned.

Lyndon hated him then, not because of what he’d done to Maggie, but because he couldn’t know what he’d done to him. So he wrapped his bleeding hand in his T-shirt, took the glass, stood before his father, and drank it dry.

42

They drove towards Adventurer’s Fen under a rotting sky. The drought was dying, overblown with heat, and ants had invaded the dashboard of the Capri, in anticipation of the final storm. The lightning-struck pine tree burned beside the road as they left Black Bank, the crackling static fire in counterpoint to the dull rolls of thunder. Dryden had the window down, and as they pulled past the memorial stone to the victims of the 1976 air crash, he felt a wind on his cheek. For the first time that summer it carried the taste of rain.

In the rear-view mirror Dryden watched Estelle. She’d left a message for Lyndon telling him about the last tape, about her adoption. ‘We’re OK. It’s OK,’ she’d said, but none of them, least of all her, believed it now. Her eyes told Dryden what she feared. That if they found Lyndon on Adventurer’s Fen, they’d find him dead. That the real tragedy was that he’d risked so much for nothing. Had done so much which could not be undone.

Dryden’s mobile rang, the signal splintered by the storm: ‘Hi. Police have just issued a statement…’ It was Garry. The signal broke, then made contact again. ‘Newman is out there now.’

‘Repeat that. Lost most of it,’ said Dryden.

‘They’ve found a body at Sedge Fen. At the old processing works under the silos. Gunshot to the head, apparently; high-calibre rifle. Guy at the station says they think it’s linked to the people smuggling…’

‘Arrests?’

‘Kabazo. Your mate from the mortuary. Gave himself up at the scene. Sergeant said he was as happy as Larry. They found him standing over the corpse.’

‘Get out there. Ring Mitch. He needs to get out anyway, the drought’s breaking. These lightning strikes will start fires – some will spread. And there’s a wind. These fields are like moondust – there’s bound to be a blow or two as well. Tell him to get some shots at Sedge Fen and then cruise round. Got that?’

Garry was gone, lost in a hail of static.

They drove north on the old Aio past fields the colour of sackcloth. Before Southery they turned east beneath a sky beginning to boil with clouds. To the east, coming towards them on an angled path, Dryden spotted the first Fen Blow – a dust storm a mile high and rolling forward like a giant tumbleweed from an outsized Western. It rolled across the sun and a burnished gold shadow dashed across the landscape.

Humph suddenly slowed the Capri, swung it off the metalled road and hit the shingle of a drove road. A small copse of half-hearted pines was a sheaf of fire in the middle of Adventurer’s Fen. The rest lay before them as it had always done in Dryden’s dreams: 300 acres of blissful solitude and beauty. To the north and west the Little Ouse was its boundary, edged by fields of reed marsh. To the east lay the razor-sharp edge of Thetford Forest, the ancient border between the black peat of the fen and the sandy brecklands.

A single drove road ran down to the river past Flightpath Cottages. A hogweed grew from an upstairs bedroom window and both doors had crumpled in the damp of the last winter. Two ‘For Sale’ boards stood at crazy angles in the peat.

‘I guessed wrong,’ said Dryden, amazed that intuition had led him astray.

‘There!’ said Estelle, at the moment he saw it too. Leaning between Dryden and Humph she pointed down the drove road to the edge of the reed marsh. It was a new house, despite the old reclaimed bricks. It was roofed in slate and an old-style wooden verandah appeared to surround it at ground level. At the southeast corner a tower rose above the second floor, a tiny folly. A kitchen garden had gone to seed on the south side. A gate stood, but no fence. Dryden’s heartbeat quickened, but he kept at bay the knowledge that it was with recognition.

Humph rattled down the rutted track to within a hundred yards of the house and then pulled up as the Capri’s suspension groaned and cracked under the strain. The white Land Rover, until now hidden behind the house, had come into view.

‘Tell him I love him,’ said Estelle, terrified, Dryden guessed, at what she would find inside the house. ‘Tell him it’s OK.’

Dryden swung the door out and in the oppressive silence heard the rust scrape.

He leant back in through the open passenger window. ‘I’ve got something to tell him. Something he still doesn’t know,’ she said. ‘If he’s alive, tell him that.’

Humph struggled out on the driver’s side, sure testimony that he thought Dryden was about to do something stupid. Dryden nodded to the Capri. ‘Stay with her.’ Humph simply raised a finger and pointed east to where the forest edge had stood a minute earlier. Not now. The tumbling front of the dust storm rolled out from the trees towards them. Dryden felt his guts liquidize and in the panic of the moment he simply repeated himself. ‘Stay with her.’

So Humph ducked back into the Capri and Dryden was
alone when the dust fell. At first it merely shimmered over his skin, accompanied by a slight fall in the light level. A hissing of minute particles of dry earth seemed to fill Adventurer’s Fen. Then the light clipped again, the sun disappeared, and the wind began to drive the dust into his eyes, nose and ears. The house had disappeared but the path remained at his feet. Dryden staggered down it, away from where the car had been. He choked once, then stopped, doubled over, and filled his lungs with the air close to the ground. For a minute, less, he ran in a void of orange-brown dust. Then the façade of the house appeared, like cheap scenery, a one-dimensional grey, featureless outline. He threw himself against the door and tried the handle, knowing it was locked. He took another breath from below his knees but this time it too was clogged with dust. The muscles at the back of his knees fluttered with fear. He needed to find a door that opened. The windows, if they were all like the one beside the front door, were double-glazed and locked.

He sensed the lightning bolt before it struck and turned to see it plummet through the gloom, followed by the frenzied crackle of trees burning.

He began to skirt the house, cupping his hands at the first window to the right of the door to view a sitting room, furnished cheaply, with rugs on the polished floorboards, job-lot pictures and unmatched lightshades. There was no sign of life. ‘Rented,’ he said out loud, pressing his forehead against the window for coolness and sucking in air by pressing his lips to the glass. He left the kiss on the pane and moved on, past another locked door, and round the far corner. The wind here dropped and looking up he could see the weight of the dust storm tumbling over the pitch of the roof. He could smell the earth now, a stringent aroma of blood and rotted wood. The smell of the grave.

French windows extended the length of the verandah at the back of the house. Lyndon Koskinski sat inside, unmoving, on a cheap white sofa. In one hand he held a mobile phone, in the other his GI Zippo lighter. Both hands rested on his lap and his eyes appeared to be closed. The rest of the room was sparsely furnished. A three-shelf bookcase held some cheap volumes, a coffee table a single mug. To one side of the French windows a door stood open. Dryden slipped through and into the kitchen, and closed the door behind him. He gulped the relatively clean air but a layer of dust already covered the MFI fittings and the lino felt gritty under his feet. As soon as he closed the door the hissing stopped, the dust soundlessly pounding the double-glazed window.

The next door was glazed and opened easily into the room with the white sofa. Lyndon didn’t turn his head but Dryden saw that a curtain of sweat gave his lean face an oddly reflective sheen. But his eyes were open now, although they were empty of light.

‘Lyndon,’ said Dryden, and nothing moved.

He took a step forward and caught the smell. He guessed it was petrol – but aircraft fuel was possible. The fumes were rising and billowing out from the sofa. Dryden could see now that it was soaked, the damp dark stain only lightening at the armrests and behind Lyndon’s head. Dryden breathed in deeply and felt a wave of fume-induced nausea which almost knocked him down.

‘Things have changed,’ he said, trying to control his voice.

Lyndon blinked again, slowly like a lizard, but did not turn from the view from the window. ‘I know. Estelle told me everything.’ He held up the mobile and let it drop in his lap. An empty spirit bottle lay in the folds of the sofa.

‘It changes things,’ Dryden said again.

‘For Johnnie Roe? He’s still dead.’ He laughed then, and made a frighteningly good job of it. ‘The only thing that’s changed is that he died for nothing.’

‘And you killed him.’ As Dryden said it he knew it must be true. The motives were compelling and multiple. Johnnie Roe was the father who had denied him a life, a mother, and finally a wife.

Lyndon smiled then, and Dryden knew the end was near. He fingered the Zippo lighter expertly at his chest. ‘Yes. I suppose I did. I never planned to. At first I just wanted to hurt him. You know?’ Dryden nodded stupidly. He didn’t know. He didn’t want to know.

‘Hurt him bad. My life – everything, was down to him. Losing Mum was down to him. Al Rasheid was down to him. So I thought I’d recreate it for him. The prison. My cell. I enjoyed that.’

‘What did you want?’

‘At the beginning I wanted him to confess. We’d listened to the tapes. Maggie told us why she’d given me away. But I wanted to hear him say it. Tell me what he’d done to make her do it.’

‘You used the knife,’ said Dryden, recalling the intricately decorated Arab dagger.

Lyndon nodded, almost distracted by the memory. ‘I got it in Aden – in the Souk, with Freeman.’

Dryden nodded. ‘And the manacles? The chain you used?’

‘Mine. The jailer at Al Rasheid gave me the key when the invasion of Baghdad began. They let all the prisoners free. He was scared, I guess. It was a final gesture. I walked out.’