The Fire Baby Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE FIRE BABY

  Praise for Jim Kelly

  ‘A significant new talent’ Sunday Times

  ‘The sense of place is terrific: the fens really brood. Dryden, the central character, is satisfyingly complicated … a good atmospheric read’ Observer

  ‘A sparkling star newly risen in the crime fiction firmament’ Colin Dexter

  ‘Kelly is clearly a name to watch… a compelling read’ Crime Time

  ‘Beautifully written… The climax is chilling. Sometimes a book takes up residence inside my head and just won’t leave. The Water Clock did just that’ Val McDermid

  ‘An atmospheric, intriguing mystery, with a tense denouement’ Susanna Yager, Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Excellent no-frills thriller with a real bite. 4 stars’ FHM

  ‘A story that continuously quickens the pulse… makes every nerve tingle. The suspense here is tight and controlled and each character is made to count in a story that engulfs you while it unravels’ Punch

  ‘Kelly’s evocation of the bleak and watery landscapes, provide a powerful backdrop to a wonderful cast of characters’ The Good Book Guide

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jim Kelly is a journalist. He lives in Ely with the writer Midge Gillies and their young daughter. He is the author of five novels: The Skeleton Man, The Coldest Blood, The Moon Tunnel, The Fire Baby and The Water Clock, which was shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey Award for best novel of 2002. He is currently at work on his new mystery, Death Wore White, featuring DI Peter Shaw (who is introduced in The Skeleton Man).

  In 2006 Jim Kelly was awarded the Dagger in the Library by the Crime Writers’ Association for a body of work giving ‘greatest enjoyment to crime fiction readers’

  To find out more about Jim Kelly and other Penguin crime writers, go to www.penguinmostwanted.co.uk

  The Fire Baby

  JIM KELLY

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published by Michael Joseph 2004

  Published in Penguin Books 2005

  This edition published 2007

  6

  Copyright © Jim Kelly,2004

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-141-00934-6

  For John

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank Beverley Cousins, my editor, for providing inspiration and advice in perfect measures, Faith Evans, for her determination to elevate the quality of writing in The Fire Baby, and Trevor Horwood, for creative and meticulous copy-editing. This book again centres on the case of a car-accident victim locked in a coma. I am grateful for the welcome extended to me by the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability, Putney, and am happy to point out that donations can be made through its website: www.rhn.org.uk. I would like to thank Donald and Renee Gillies, and Jenny Burgoyne for helping with the text. Darren Fox, of Ely Fire Station, provided technical advice on the properties of fire. The US Air Force let me tour Mildenhall base, a privilege for which I am grateful. The oddities of the East Anglian weather system were expertly explained to me by Weather-quest, the forecasting company at the University of East Anglia. Midge Gillies, my wife, stepped in brilliantly to break the occasional logjam of ideas.

  The Landscape of the Fens is, of course, real but topographical and historical details have been occasionally altered for the sake of the plot. All characters are entirely fictitious and any resemblance to real persons is entirely coincidental.

  Tuesday, 1 June 1976 – The Great Drought

  East of Ely, above the bone-dry peatfields, a great red dust storm drifts across the moon, throwing an amber shadow on the old cathedral. Overhead a single, winking plane crosses the star-spangled sky. Flight MH336, just airborne from the US military base at Mildenhall, flies into the tumbling cauldron of dust.

  The diamond-hard sand begins to shred the turning turbines and the dislodged blades scythe each other like spinning knives. The fuselage dips as the engine suffocates, and begins a descent of such violence that the passengers float, despite their seatbelts, in a weightless fall towards their deaths.

  At precisely 11.08 pm, according to the pilot’s watch recovered at the scene, the fuselage buries itself in the soft earth. The distant cathedral tower shudders with the impact and the crows, roosting on the Octagon Tower, rise in a single cloud. Heads turn ten miles away at Littleport with the earthy thud of the crash, followed by the crackling combustion of the airfuel.

  A fireball marks the point of impact at Black Bank Farm. Here there is too much sound to hear. At the heart of the fire a cold white eye burns where 50,000 gallons of kerosene turns to gas in a single second. Then the flames come, licking the stars.

  At the foot of the vast white pillar of rising smoke the air crackles with the heat. And in the ashes of what had been Black Bank Farm she stands alone. Her, and the baby.

  They are the only ones alive. Her, and the baby.

  The family died at the table: her mother caught in the act of drowning in a flame, her father’s blackened arm still stretched towards his throat. His last words will stay with her to her deathbed: ‘The cellar, Maggie. A celebration.’ She’d gone to get the bottle, leaving Matty in his cot by the empty fireplace. Celebration: a family christening to come, now that Matty had a father.

  In the dry damp of the stone cellar she heard it coming. Machines, like people, can pretend to scream. But the pretence was gone in the final wail of the failing engines, the ripping metal, and the blow of the impact.

  Sometimes she wished she had died then, as she should have.

  Instead she saw the light and heard the sound that was the fire, the dripping fire, falling through the floorboards. The liquid fuel from the tanks, the quicksilver light that saved her life. So she found the stairs and climbed up to count the dead, hung, like game, from the burning rafters. Then the real horror, in the tiny swaddled bundle with the blackened limbs.

  Outside, with her secret in her arms, she felt him kicking, and nudging with the jerky half-conscious movements only a child can make.

  Even here, in what had been the kitchen garden, she felt the heat prickling her skin. She smelt her hair singe, as the black hanging threads turned to ash-white corkscr
ews. A lock ignited, and burnt into her cheek. She had a lifetime to feel the pain, but even now it terrified her with the slow, insidious intimation that the worst was yet to come.

  A fire in her blood. And the baby’s.

  A silent fire. The only sound a flapping inside her ear, like a pigeon’s wings.

  She took a limping step towards the coolness of the night. These ashes weren’t cold like the ones in the grate at Black Bank. These were white with heat, an ivory crust beneath which breathed the cherry embers. She smelt flesh burn and knew, with the clarity of shock, that it was hers.

  And then she saw him. A hundred yards from the house, shielding his face from the heat with an out-turned palm.

  He’d been waiting to join the celebration. Her father had been confident Maggie would change her mind that night ‘Come at eleven. She’ll come round for Matty’s sake. It’s the baby. She’ll come round.’

  And with the intuition of a lover Maggie knew where he’d been, knew where he’d been waiting in the night. The old pillbox. Their pillbox; the concrete hexagonal space that she had once dreamed of in the damp and guilty night, the place where they’d made Matty come to life.

  She heard a siren then. The first. From the base. They’d be at Black Bank soon, but not soon enough to save him. Not soon enough to save him from the life she planned for him in those few seconds. It was the best decision of her life. And the quickest. Taken in the time it takes to light a match.

  And then they were together. So she smiled as she trembled. The yellow-blue light of the kerosene was in his eyes and briefly she remembered why she’d loved him once. But she saw that he looked only down, at the baby. His finger turned back the fold in the blanket. He saw the face for the first time, the tiny red wandering tongue. And the fool smiled too.

  ‘Our boy,’ he said, wishing it was so. ‘He’s safe. Our boy.’

  She let him believe it for another second.

  ‘Dead,’ she said, and pulled the blanket back to let him see the stencilled blue capital letters on the soft linen: USAF: AIR CONVOY.

  He looked at the ruined farmhouse then: ‘Dead? You can’t be sure.’

  He looked at the blanket again. ‘I’ll get him,’ he said. ‘stay here.’ She watched him run into the flames, until they closed behind him, like the hushed velvet curtains of a crematorium.

  Saturday, 14 June 2003 – 27 years later

  The single glass of water stood like an exhibit on the pillbox shelf. When the sun reached the western horizon it shone directly into the hexagonal room through the gunslit and caught the liquid, sending a shifting rainbow of incredible beauty across the drab concrete walls.

  It haunted him now. He could see it with his eyes closed. Its cool limpid form was held for ever in his memory: but then he knew that for ever, for him, was not a long time. As the heat rose towards midday he could see the level of water drop, and he sucked in air to catch the memory of the moisture.

  It was his life now, trying to reach the glass. But he knew, even as he stretched and felt the handcuffs cut into his wrist, that he would never touch it. He’d marked the full extent of his passion on the floor. On the first day he’d stretched out and left a line in the sand, three feet short of the far wall. By the third day he’d stretched until he heard his joints crack, a sickening pop of cartilage disengaged.

  The next day he won six inches in a single panic-stricken lunge, the pain of which had made him swoon. When he came to, the blood had dried and the cut at his wrist showed the glint of bone, like a gash of knuckle glimpsed on the butcher’s counter. That night the fox came for the first time, circling, sniffing death.

  His jailer noted his efforts to reach the glass with obvious satisfaction, smoothed clean the sand and re-filled the glass with bright water from the sparkling plastic bottle. Then he took the carved knife from its place, sticking out of the door jamb, and held it to his victim’s throat. A minute, maybe two, then he returned it, unblooded.

  There was something familiar about the jailer. Something in the way he leant against the concrete wall by the glass and smoked. Something in the downcast eyes.

  He yearned to hear his voice, but the jailer hadn’t spoken.

  The routine was silently the same. He’d hear first his footsteps on the tinder-dry twigs beneath the pines. The iron door pushed open, the glass re-filled. Then he’d stand and smoke. A packet sometimes. How long does that take? An hour? Two?

  Sometimes he came twice a day, the sound of his car suddenly loud as it parked beyond the trees he could see through the guns lit. But he’d always go without answering the questions. And then once at night. He was afraid then, for the first time, that the jailer would kill him before the thirst did. His tormentor was drunk, and the storm lantern put tiny red flashes in his eyes, but still he said nothing.

  He’d speak before the end came. He felt sure of that. But he wanted to know now. Know now for which of his crimes he was being punished.

  Nine Days Earlier Thursday, 5 June

  1

  Philip Dryden looked down on the taxi cab parked on the neat shingle forecourt of The Tower Hospital. In the front seat was a large sleeping figure encircled by an Ipswich Town sweatshirt. The driver’s delicate hands were clasped neatly over an ample tummy. The slumbering cabbie’s tiny mouth formed a perfect O.

  ‘How can he stand it?’ Dryden asked, turning to the figure laid out under a single white linen sheet on the hospital bed. ‘It’s eighty-four degrees. He’s parked in the full sunlight. Fast asleep. All that meat. Cooking.’

  The figure on the bed didn’t move. Its immobility was a constant in his life, like the heat of that summer, and equally oppressive. He turned back to the large Victorian half-circle window and put his forehead to the glass.

  Heat. Inescapable heat, like a giant duvet over the Fens. He felt a rivulet of sweat set out from his jet-black hair and begin a zig-zag journey across his face. His features were architectural. Precisely, Early Norman. The head of a knight, perhaps, from a cathedral nave, or illuminated on a medieval parchment. Illuminated but impassive; a dramatic irony which nicely summed him up.

  He tipped his head back and turned his face to the ceiling. He had a powerful imagination and he focused it now, as he had done a thousand times that suffocating summer, on conjuring up a snow storm. The ice-cold flakes fell on his upturned eyelids. He listened to them falling in the silence, punctuated only by the tick of the bedside clock.

  When he opened them it was 11.57 precisely. Three minutes.

  He closed his eyes again and tried to wish the heat away. The Tower was on Ely’s only hill. A precious hundred feet above the limitless expanse of the Black Fens which stretched in a parched panorama to the distant wavy line of the horizon. A tractor, wobbling in a mirage, trundled across a field slightly smaller than Belgium.

  He looked down at Laura. His wife had been in The Tower nearly four years since the accident at Harrimere Drain. Dryden had met the other driver on a lonely fen road head on, swerved over the verge, and the two-door Corsa had plunged into twenty feet of water in the roadside dyke. Harrimere Drain. Whenever Dryden saw the sign he could feel the seatbelt cutting across his chest and the dull, distant, double click of his collar bones breaking.

  He’d been dragged to safety, but Laura, unseen on the back seat, had been left behind. He tried never to imagine what she must have thought when she regained consciousness. Alone, in the dark, in pain, and gasping for breath in a remorselessly diminishing pocket of damp air.

  Three hours later the emergency services got her out. She was in the coma then. Locked In Syndrome: LIS. Locked away from the horror of those 180 minutes of total isolation, locked away from the knowledge that she’d been abandoned, locked away from him.

  The clock flipped over a number: 11.58. Dryden pulled at the frayed linen collar of his white shirt and fingered the gold chain around his neck. He pulled on it until the single brass Chubb-lock key came out into his hand. The car crash had been two days before his thirty-thir
d birthday and he hadn’t got back to their flat in London until a month later. That’s when he found his present where she knew he’d stumble on it, in the top drawer of their desk. A single white envelope, a card showing a black and white landscape shot of the Fens near Ely, and a newly cut key. The inscription on the card read ‘Love, Laura’; nothing else.

  He’d tried the locks in the flat first, then her parents’ café and flat, but nothing. He tried the local locksmiths in the North London suburb where they lived but none could recall a visit from the Italian girl with the copper hair. He’d tried the two cottages out on Adventurer’s Fen they’d inspected during their long debates about moving out, starting a family. But the doors were rotten and the keyholes rusted. Ivy obscured the sign engraved in the bricks: Flightpath Cottages.

  How many other locks had he tried since Laura’s accident? A thousand? Two? But nothing. Only Laura knew which door the key opened, and she hadn’t spoken since the night of the crash. It was a mystery which tormented him subtly because it seemed the perfect symbol of his life since the accident. That he should have the key, but not the door. An answer without a question.

  ‘Unbearable,’ he said out loud, and the heat seemed to intensify.

  Eleven fifty-nine, and one minute to the news. He flipped open his mobile and rang Humph’s business number: Humphrey H. Holt, licensed mini-cabs for all occasions. Not quite all occasions. In fact, hardly any occasions at all. Humph’s cab, a battered Ford Capri, looked like it had been retrieved from a dump on the outskirts of Detroit.

  Dryden’s face, normally stonily impassive, creased with pleasure as he watched the cabbie start awake and fumble for the mobile.

  ‘It’s me,’ he said, unnecessarily. They knew each other’s voices better than they knew their own. ‘Put the radio on. Local. Last item. I need to hear.’