The Fire Baby (8 page)

He took her hand and put it on his crotch: ‘I know a place,’ he’d said and she imagined a flat, with sophisticated lighting and a bed a mile wide. And mirrors, she thought, giggling and letting him kiss her neck.

They drove into the night along the main road, the headlights passing them leaving long dizzy, neon lines in the night air. By the time they turned down The Breach she didn’t care where they were. The stars seemed to be darting across the sky and she felt her heart racing hard, pushing against her ribs. They parked and she stumbled through the ditch grass by the moonlight, laughing as he tugged her forward, laughing as the thorns scratched her legs. And then she’d seen it for a second between the trees and she felt the grip of his fingers tearing into her wrist.

The pillbox.

Friday, 6 June

8

He’d first seen the Mollies dancing by moonlight on the water’s edge one evening soon after Laura’s accident. He’d wandered aimlessly for hours during those first weeks, trying to throw off the depression which clung to Laura’s room at The Tower like the sweet smell of lilies. The first specialists to examine his wife said the chances of her breaking out of the coma were infinitesimally small. Dryden walked in search of an answer to a question he could not dare articulate: what was to become of his life? Would it be spent in a dismal vigil beside the bed of a woman who would never speak his name again?

It was past midnight when he’d come upon them first, in the water meadows beyond the town quay. The Mollies danced, laughing, and collapsed by their narrow boat to drink and smoke. He’d written stories about them for
The Crow
, but had never thought of them as embodying a way of life, a style of escape, a glimpse of freedom. A largely female band of singers and dancers, their black and white costumes reflected the darker side of rural life in the Fens. They spent the winter nights preparing the muscular routines they would perform in spring and summer. To the rhythmic thud of a drum they danced, knees brought high and suspended for a beat, before descending with crack of boot on gravel or stone.

He’d sat with them that night around their fire. He’d even talked about the accident and Laura. They’d talked about the New Age, about living on the boat, about the river and its
life. And he’d seen Etty’s eyes in the firelight, a forthright promise that he could have another life.

They danced now in front of the Cutter Inn, a sunbaked audience of shoppers and mums with pushchairs arranged in a dutiful, even fearful, semi-circle, with the river as a backdrop to the high-stepping Mollies.

Dryden raised his beer glass to the sun. The liquid was honey coloured and already warm. He raised it again to Humph, parked by the riverside twenty yards away. The cabbie waved a small orange juice back. Humph had a headache, a big blue headache with an Ipswich Town sweatshirt. The cabbie avoided the word hangover, as if this made it impossible for him to have one, but there was no doubt his fragile state was associated with five small bottles of Ouzo consumed during an imaginary celebration in Nicos’s taverna.

‘Mollies,’ said Dryden to himself. ‘The military wing of the Morris Men,’ and drained his pint.

Dryden listened to the rhythmic thud of the drum and thought about Maggie and his promise. There had been no news from the police – he’d checked that morning when doing the regular round of calls – and he’d left another message for Major August Sondheim at Mildenhall air base. If there was nothing by nightfall he’d have to do something dramatic, even if only to salve his conscience. A tour of the north Norfolk coast in Humph’s cab loomed.

In the meantime Dryden had time to kill and a story to stand up. He had enough to run something on Wilkinson’s celery plant and the people smugglers but it needed some padding, some colourful background to bring the story alive. The Mollies were among his best contacts. By turns anarchic, naive, streetwise and mundane, they provided a vivid view of Fen life. Once he’d got the job at
The Crow
he’d tapped into
the knowledge they collected pursuing their unconventional lifestyle. Often asleep during the day, roaming at night, working out in the fields when they needed the money, they knew more about the real life beyond the town than a Panda car full of detectives.

The lead Molly, with a black hood and the hangman’s noose round her neck, stood, blindly watching, as the others danced. Decked out in coloured rags with black and white painted faces they paced out metrical steps to the thud of the drum. But the one with the noose was a study in black. Still death.

Mitch was taking pictures for the
Express.
‘Bunch o’ dykes, if you ask me,’ he whispered in his bleak Glaswegian accent, missing his own Fen pun. Mitch was short, trim and wore his fake tam-o’-shanter with no sense of irony.

‘Shall I get ye a pint, boy?’ It was Mitch’s turn, and a rare offer.

As Dryden waited for his drink he squinted at the Fens on the far side of the river, a seemingly limitless expanse of sun-drenched water meadow stretching to a wobbling horizon. Humph had picked him up at 9.00am, armed with two egg sandwiches, and they’d polished off two Golden Weddings before hitting the library to read the papers. That just about completed his official duties on a Friday. This pace of life suited him in the week but he knew he would wake on Saturday morning burdened down with the time to spend, and no one to spend it with, except Humph. And for two days at least nothing to legitimately distract him from Laura’s bedside.

Something about the motionless girl with the black hood and the noose caught his eye. Even he jumped when she moved. Some kids in the crowd squealed as her dance began, threading its way between the rest of the Mollies who stood
still, only their chests rising and falling as they fought to recover breath. It was an eerie but simple trick. The black hood, made of flimsy gauze, let the dancer see her way in the bright noon sun as she danced up to the crowd, right to their faces, her knees brought to waist height, before backing off. A youth with a red face and tattooed shoulders tried to laugh it off, but the jeer died in the silence of the little crowd as the black-hooded figure swirled past.

She stopped when she got to Dryden. The drum beat climaxed and stopped dead as she raised the noose with a jolt and let her head loll on the broken neck. Snap!

It was a finale guaranteed to kill any applause. The crowd moved away with indecent haste. The Mollies were associated in local legend with what the locals called the Water Gypsies – drop-outs who lived in a line of damp, dilapidated narrow boats on the edge of town and grew vaguely exotic, and strictly illegal, substances in gaily painted decktop pots. According to whispers they indulged in pagan rituals, including naked moonlight dancing and group sex. The Water Gypsies struggled hard to live up to this reputation, but still spent more time playing Scrabble than dancing under the stars.

Dryden sipped his beer. ‘Hi,’ he said. The girl whipped the hood off and a bun of blonde hair dropped to her shoulders. She had several beautiful features, dominated by the hair, and the kind of brown eyes you can swim in. She was naturally tanned by her work – crop picking. Her figure was, like Laura’s, full and the lack of a bra always seemed to give her nipples ample opportunity to puncture her T-shirt. Etty, always just Etty, for all the Mollies who lived on the narrow boat had forgotten their surnames.

‘Dryden,’ she said, taking a gulp from his pint and wagging her tongue in the amber liquid. ‘You got my text message,
then. Nothing like a throbbing pocket, is there?’ She smiled, revealing too many teeth, and extravagant laughter lines.

Mitch, who had returned with the drinks, gave Dryden a suspicious look and excused himself.

Etty flopped into a seat while Dryden went and got her a pint of cider from the bar. She downed a third of it, when it arrived, in a single gulp. ‘The people smugglers. We saw them.’

She eyed Dryden with thinly disguised lust. What she liked most was the emotional distance, the six-foot two-inch frame, and the Early Norman features. She imagined him scanning the sky for a comet in a long-lost section of the Bayeux Tapestry. That was the key to the New Age after all – a passion for the past.

‘What’s it worth?’ she said, her eyes wide from the effects of a plump spliff. She put her hand on Dryden’s knee and let it rest there.

Dryden pretended not to notice. He’d been a journalist long enough never to show interest when a good story surfaced. It simply upped the price, even if it was being measured in pints of cider. He turned his medieval features to the sun and closed his eyes. He heard water lapping against the bank and the gentle tinkle of wine-glass toasts from one of the floating gin palaces on the far bank.

‘A Friday night. Last Friday night. We were out in the van,’ said Etty, filling the silence.

Etty and the rest of the crew from the
Middle Earth
, one of the narrow boats, ran a VW caravanette. It had curtains, which, considering what went on inside it, was a blessing for everyone.

‘There were two artics parked up by the lay-by on the A14 where the tea bar is. They let three out. They were black. Poor bastards. Imagine – around ’ere.’

They surveyed the crowd, which displayed about as much ethnic diversity as a stable of thoroughbred racehorses.

‘Time?’

She jiggled her empty pint. Dryden completed another bar run, aware as always with Etty that the more they drank the lower his defences fell. But for Humph’s brooding presence they were defences which may well have been breached some time ago.

Refilled, she took a glug. ‘One o’clock. The tea bar was closed but that creepy bloke was there who’s usually behind the counter. It looked like a drop. There were other people to meet the lorry, a group of them – all black, ’cept one. The driver was a white guy – really odd, he looked like NF to me. Shaved head, really mean looking. We buggered off in the van.’

‘Were they putting them back in the lorries?’

Etty nodded, slurping down the cider and letting her eyes swim over the Fen horizon. ‘Last thing we saw they were all back on except a group of them – half a dozen maybe. They went off overland. East from the lay-by, across Black Bank Fen. Like a chain-gang.’

9

The phone was black, Bakelite, and bang in the middle of the news desk. When it rang everyone jumped. Luckily it rang very rarely. It had been installed nearly fifty years earlier by Sextus Henry Kew, the present editor’s father and then sole proprietor of
The Crow.
It had no dial, and its twin sat on a shelf on the public side of the counter below. When Dryden first arrived a small metal label had sat beneath the phone marked ‘Complaints’. He had snipped the wire one evening after a brief drinking bout with Humph, and then stolen the label, which had reappeared in Dryden’s boat, neatly screwed to the panel above the toilet roll in the loo.

The editor, ever vigilant on behalf of his heritage, had spotted the fault within a week. Thereafter Septimus Henry Kew would pick up the receiver, every Friday, and check the dialling tone as he opened up the office. Dryden had suggested mice were gnawing through the cable. Henry sent Garry out for a trap, and called an electrician. ‘The readers,’ said Henry, recalling an aphorism of his father’s, ‘must be heard.’

When the black phone rang, it was every man for himself.

It rang.

Garry, confidence buoyed up by his normal Friday lunch-time diet of four pints of India Pale Ale, picked up his own phone immediately and dialled an imaginary outside number, leaning back in his seat and closing his eyes as if steeling himself for a particularly difficult interview. Charlie Bracken, the news editor, flinched. Charlie had got the job on the
basis of Henry’s bizarre concept of inverse qualification. Being the news editor demanded an ability to make hard decisions under pressure: it took Charlie twenty minutes each morning to decide which side of the bed to get out of. But when the black phone rang he knew exactly what to do. He had his coat on in seconds and was heading for the stairs. ‘Ciggies,’ he said, patting a pocket.

Now that this week’s edition of
The Crow
had gone, ‘ciggies’ was code for the Fenman bar, which stood opposite
The Crow’s
offices and offered customer-friendly opening hours. They wouldn’t be seeing Charlie again that day.

The phone rang again. Dryden failed to move, befuddled by the effects of a liquid lunch of his own at the Cutter and Etty’s frank offer of an afternoon of sex on water. He had also been trying to work out why he was so unsettled by the news that the people smugglers used Black Bank Fen. Just when he was trying to put Maggie Beck out of his mind, the scene of the 1976 air crash seemed to be haunting him.

The phone rang again. If it rang four times Henry would be out of his office. Dryden, who liked nothing but a quiet life, walked over and picked up the receiver, leaving a slight imprint of sweat on the cool black Bakelite. Despite having spent more than a decade as a reporter, Dryden retained a deep-seated fear of meeting any member of that mythical but terrifying group: the readers. He had long since realized that advancement in his profession relied on the simple truth that journalists wrote newspapers for other journalists to read. The readers? Who cared what they thought? Who cared, that was, until they turned up on your doorstep demanding to talk to a reporter.

‘Hi. Newsroom. Philip Dryden speaking.’ He always hit a confident tone. That way he had plenty of room for what was, inevitably, an occasion for abject apology.

‘Hello now. I didnae think this thing would actually work,’ said a voice dipped daily in nicotine. ‘The name’s Sutton. Bob. It’s no’ really a complaint about yon paper. It’s the polis I’m after complaining about.’

‘I’ll be right down,’ said Dryden, who loved little more than landing a well-judged boot upon the idle rump of the local constabulary. He clattered down the newsroom steps with enthusiasm. Bob Sutton turned out to be the human incarnation of the Tate & Lyle sugar man: a cube of muscle with arms and legs hung from the corners of a barrel chest. Each fist resembled a solid two-pound bag of sugar. He wore a cheap security man’s jacket in black. He was in his forties, with sandy thinning hair and a dollop of an accent which Dryden guessed originated somewhere on the Clyde; somewhere with a big crane. He would have looked menacing if he hadn’t clearly spent most of the last twenty-four hours crying. He rubbed butcher’s fingers into reddened eye sockets.