The Fire Baby Read online

  Then they heard it, the unmistakable sound of a highly polished limousine creeping sedately over gravel. Estelle grabbed at her throat. ‘It’s the undertakers. They just want to run through the details.’ She looked towards the rear of the house with something which again looked closer to fear than anxiety.

  Dryden made for the back door. ‘I can tell Lyndon,’ he said.

  Relief flooded over her. ‘Thanks. We should both see them. She’s his mother too.’

  15

  The dead crows, strung like beads on a line over the kitchen garden, were the only signs of life in the farmyard. It was one of the landscape’s ironies that the only sign of life was death. Black Bank, like most Fen farms, had no livestock. The soil was too precious for fodder. The peatfields stretched east to the limit of the eye, but nothing moved, nothing breathed.

  A dead landscape, and silent but for the rhythmic pounding of a basketball. Lyndon, sporting black wraparound pilot’s glasses, didn’t acknowledge Dryden’s arrival. The reflective black lenses mirrored the panorama of Black Bank Fen, an image as lifeless as the landscape itself. Then Lyndon stooped, tilted his chin and sent the ball in a loop high against the sky, from where it dropped into the hoop without touching the sides.

  Lyndon loped across the farmyard, his brilliant white Nike trainers kicking up knee-high clouds of red dust, collected the ball and thrust it with surprising force at Dryden’s midriff. He pushed the glasses up into his hair and looked around. ‘It’s like home.’

  Dryden nodded stupidly.

  ‘There,’ said Lyndon, pointing to the far eastern horizon where a turning red-black miniature twister teetered like a child’s top. Common that summer in the Saharan heat they did little harm, touching down on the earth for a few short seconds to suck up the weightless dust. Dryden always felt uneasy at the sight, which recalled a nightmare vision of a length of disembodied gut twisting in pain. This one was corkscrewing harmlessly over a field and visibly fading as it lost touch with the hot earth.

  ‘At home they could take the roof of your farm. Here they can’t get the tops off the carrots,’ said Lyndon, leaning against the barn wall with the easy grace of the natural athlete, his chest muscles filling out the all-American sweatshirt. His height, which must have been at least two inches greater than Dryden’s six feet two, didn’t make him look skinny. He flashed a smile that was a testament to the efficiency of Texan dentistry and an affluent US childhood.

  ‘This must have been a difficult time,’ said Dryden, proud of himself for finding the right opening question.

  ‘Difficult? Hell, no. I’ve just found out that the life I had was someone else’s, and that my life never got lived. I’m buried out there at that clapped-out church. I’ve visited my own graveside. Confused? Cheated? Pissed angry? You said it.’

  He grabbed the ball, ran back to the edge of the yard and shot directly at the hoop, twanging the metal and sending the ball on a zig-zag bagatelle course around the farmyard until it rolled into one of the sheds.

  ‘What sort of life was it – Lyndon’s?’ asked Dryden.

  The US ace pilot walked towards him with the hint of a military swagger and slipped the glasses down again, cloaking his eyes. ‘Great. Texas. The big country, makes this look like Central Park. San Antonio. You know it?’

  Dryden shook his head. He and Laura had made New York and New England for a week in the Fall before the accident but hadn’t fancied the South: they lynched people and drank out of beer cans so cold they stuck to your lips.

  ‘The big country,’ said Lyndon again. ‘I’m always near folks here. Kinda gets ya. It looks like a wilderness but it ain’t.’ He lifted the sweatshirt from his chest to let some air circulate.

  Dryden shrugged. ‘There are places. Go north. The fen gets deeper. You can lose yourself there. Adventurer’s Fen. That was our place. Is… our place.’

  ‘Yeah?’ said Lyndon.

  Dryden got back to his past. ‘So the life you had. In the States – there was money?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah. Loads. Grandpa Koskinski was US Navy. Big shot. Pentagon. We had three cars, a pool, tennis court with AstroTurf. A maid, a gardener, and an air-conditioning system big enough to cool an English county. That qualify as wealthy?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘But not classy, eh? That’s the thing with you British. It’s class, not money.’

  ‘Happy childhood?’ tried Dryden.

  Lyndon took some steps back and squatted down on his haunches in the dust. He took out the Zippo lighter from his pants pocket, flicked it open and lit it once, before holding the cool chrome case to his forehead. Dryden caught a faint whiff of lighter fuel on the hot breeze.

  ‘You can’t miss what you don’t know – that’s what they say here, yeah? Well, I missed ‘em. I thought they died here,’ he said, running his fingers through the red dust. ‘Mum and Dad. Jim and Marlene. I know their faces better than I know my own. But they’re always the same age. Twenty-seven years ago, right here. But guess what – they’re total strangers. I might as well have your picture in my wallet.’

  ‘Maggie had kept in touch?’ asked Dryden, sensing a tailspin into depression.

  ‘Yeah. Christmas, birthdays, pictures of Estelle, that kind of thing. I think my grandparents were grateful and they felt some compassion for her. I guess they’d seen what the crash had done to her life. They went to Matty’s funeral. They felt… implicated in some way.’

  ‘But this visit. This was the first time you’d met your mother.’

  He nodded. Watching the twister grow faint, fading in the east. Dryden should have thought longer about the next question: ‘And your sister…’

  ‘Half sister,’ he said, too quickly. ‘Different dads. Not that I knew either of them.’

  ‘You know about Maggie’s letter? About your father?’

  He nodded. ‘Sure. Means nothing. Nothing means nothing. Brother, sister, father, mother. You tell me. Who can I trust?’

  He flicked the Zippo one last time and, standing, pocketed it. ‘I’ve had enough of the past. I’ll leave the rest of the questions for Estelle. And that’s a good question, isn’t it? Why the questions…?’

  ‘Maggie wanted me to write her story. You saw the letter. I just want to get things right. But no more questions… Except one,’ he nodded at the Zippo lighter. ‘Ex-smoker?’

  ‘Ex most of the time,’ he said. ‘Not always.’ Lyndon walked off towards the barn to fetch the basketball and Dryden followed. Inside, out of the blinding light, something crouched in the shadows.

  It was a Land Rover. Dryden knew nothing about cars except that they killed people. But this looked expensive, a 1970s gem, lovingly restored. The metal top had been taken down and the leather seats showed a lifetime’s wear. The paintwork was cream-white, the blue letters UN emblazoned on the bonnet and side doors.

  Lyndon took off the dark glasses. ‘It’s a 1973 model. In great shape. I got her off a guy on the base who couldn’t afford to take her home. They’d used it for the peace keepers in Bosnia – so I left the colour. Kinda history, I guess.’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Dryden said, noting that the bonnet was still hot and the red dust of the fens lay in a film over the paintwork.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ said Lyndon. ‘Class. Makes a Jeep look cheap.’

  Dryden changed tack. ‘I passed the memorial to the Black Bank victims. I guess they’ll have to make some changes.’

  Lyndon smiled then, and flipped the Zippo open to watch the flame. ‘And I used to think, you know, that I could have died here in the crash with my folks. I used to think that would have been better. And now look – I did.’

  ‘But they weren’t your parents.’

  ‘It wasn’t my life. That’s the real point, isn’t it? If she hadn’t given me away I’d have had another life. A life that didn’t have three garages, a college education, West Point, and a cell in Al Rasheid. None of it.’

  ‘But what would it have had? Your other life?’

&
nbsp; ‘Her.’ He looked back towards the farmhouse. ‘But she chose differently. Which is something I have to live with.’

  They walked back outside. ‘The hearse has arrived,’ he said. ‘Estelle said to say.’

  Lyndon slipped his glasses into his sweatshirt pocket and held out his hand. ‘Do you have family, Dryden? Brothers, sisters?’

  ‘Only child,’ said Dryden.

  ‘Me too. I guess I always will be – despite what Maggie said. You can’t change a life with a few words, Dryden. It shouldn’t change things. I’m the same person. She’s the same person – Estelle. What does it change?’

  Dryden didn’t answer, but he thought, Everything.

  16

  Humph dropped Dryden in Market Street and he took the steps up to the newsroom three at a time. He felt a sense of elation now that he was able to discharge his debt to Maggie Beck. The story had hung over him for ten days since her death at The Tower. And there was some real excitement at the prospect of writing what he knew would be a wonderful tale. It was childish really. He’d been a reporter for more than a decade but he still got a buzz from the job. It was like drinking lager through a straw.

  Up the wooden steps and through the door marked NEWSROOM he found the Express in full flow – the deadline was an hour away at noon. Copies would be on the street at going-home time and delivered with the evening newspapers to homes in Ely and the surrounding villages. The Express’s circulation was 13,000 and as weak as a dying man’s pulse. Twenty years earlier they’d sold 25,000 – more than two copies for every household in the town.

  Charlie Bracken, the news editor, looked pathetically pleased to see his chief reporter back in time. He let rip a tremendous beer-sodden burp by way of greeting.

  ‘You got it?’

  Dryden nodded and chucked the family picture he’d got from Black Bank into the darkroom where Mitch was printing up a landscape shot of another Fen Blow for the front page.

  ‘Picture too,’ he told Charlie.

  ‘Great. It’s the splash, kid. Human interest stuff, eh?’ Charlie picked up his jacket and headed for the door. ‘Ciggies,’ he told nobody.

  Dryden sat at his PC and knocked out the story in ten minutes.

  By Philip Dryden

  Chief Reporter

  A deathbed confession by an Ely woman has rewritten the history of one of the Fen’s most famous disasters.

  The crash of a US Air Force transporter on to a farmhouse at Black Bank, near Ely, in 1976 left twelve people dead and only two survivors.

  Until now they were thought to be the farmer’s daughter, Maggie Beck, and a newborn child being flown home with its parents to Texas.

  Ms Beck, then 16, walked out of the wreckage of the farm, where both her parents were killed, carrying the baby. She said her own two-week-old son Matty had died with the rest of her family.

  But on Friday night at The Tower Hospital, Ely, Mrs Beck told close relatives, shortly before her death, that she had swapped the children.

  After the crash her son was flown to the US and brought up by the parents of the US pilot who died in the crash – Major Jim Koskinski.

  The boy – Lyndon Koskinski – became a pilot in the US Air Force and, having kept in touch since the 1976 crash, was visiting the Beck family home when his mother fell seriously ill with cancer.

  He was at her bedside when she died.

  Major Koskinski is on leave from the USAF after active service in Iraq, where he was forced to bail out of his aircraft while patrolling the no-fly zone in January and spent two months in a Baghdad gaol before coalition forces liberated the city.

  He spoke exclusively to the Express about his feelings.

  ‘I’m a US pilot. That’s my life. This doesn’t change anything, shouldn’t change anything. I do feel cheated and angry. And lost. I can’t imagine why she did it. We never had a chance to speak.

  ‘Yes, I’m confused. Who wouldn’t be? I’ve just visited my own grave,’ he said. It now appears the grave marked Matty Beck at St Matthew’s Church, Black Bank, is that of Lyndon Koskinski.

  Dryden, who’d decided to leave his notebook in his pocket during his discussion with Lyndon, made the quotes up. He didn’t so much rely on his own memory as the poor memories of others.

  Military police at USAF Mildenhall will be investigating the original crash records to see how Mrs Beck was able to fool doctors and officials at the time.

  Ely police will be informed of the confession and will have to re-open the inquest into the reported death of Matty Beck in 1976. But detectives indicated that they are unlikely to take the case any further, given the length of time involved and the death of Mrs Beck.

  Before her death Mrs Beck left instructions that the father of Matty Beck should be allowed to contact his son now that the truth had been told about the events at Black Bank in 1976.

  She has made provision for him to inherit a sum of £5,000 if he contacts solicitors Gillies & Wright of Ely. They are in a position to verify his claim.

  Dryden re-read it once, made some small changes, and filed it to the news-desk computer basket with a note attached to make sure the subs left the last two paragraphs. He would track the story down electronically later to make sure they had respected his instructions.

  He was pleased: it was a good story, and now that he had written it he saw how clearly one question still hung over Black Bank Farm: why did Maggie Beck give her son away?

  Charlie Bracken had not returned and was clearly administering emergency stress relief in the Fenman bar opposite The Crow’s offices. The rest of the team was hard at work. Garry was exploring his nose with a Biro and behind his glass partition Septimus Henry Kew, editor in chief, was reading the proofs for the edition. Either he was distinctly unimpressed with his news editor’s efforts, or he was sniffing cocaine.

  Dryden checked his watch: nearly noon. He picked up the phone and ran through the usual litany of last-deadline calls to the emergency services. The fire brigade had two fires, less than average in that incendiary summer. The first had started in a lock-up garage on the edge of town, swept through a nearby allotment and gutted two council houses. The smell of burnt vegetables apparently hung, even now, in the air over the Jubilee Estate.

  ‘Anyone hurt?’

  ‘Nah,’ said the control-room operator. ‘It was mid-morning. Mum at work, kids at school, Dad’s a travelling salesman. Nice to come home to, though – a real fire,’ he said, laughing at the old joke.

  ‘Cause?’ asked Dryden.

  ‘Kids. Mucking about round the garages. They found some matches, traces of lighter fuel… but I doubt anyone can be nailed for it. The other one’s a bit different.’

  Dryden heard the inexpert two-finger tapping of a PC keyboard. ‘Here we are. Register Office – at Chatteris. Someone broke in, smashed the place up, set fire to the filing cabinets – destroyed all the records. Every last one.’

  ‘Bloody hell. Someone’s honeymoon went wrong.’ Dryden took the details for a par in the Stop Press. With almost telepathic timing the phone rang again as he put it down. It was Jean. ‘Dryden!’

  Dryden felt his ear-drum pink like an overloaded loudspeaker.

  ‘There’s a girl here to see you.’ Jean had taken up a voluntary unpaid job as Dryden’s chaperone. ‘Shall I tell her to go away?’

  Dryden took the stairs four at a time on the way down, missed the last one and went flying. The girl helped him get up.

  ‘Hi,’ said Dryden. She was tall, leggy, with blue eyes and dyed blonde hair held up in an untidy coconut top. She didn’t look eighteen but the last time Dryden had seen her she’d been posing in Inspector Andy Newman’s illicit porn shots. Alice Sutton was holding a cutting from last week’s edition of the Express. It was Dryden’s story on her: Father’s Plea Over Missing Girl, with her picture, across two columns. He’d run it dead straight without any link to Newman’s pillbox porn story which he’d got into The Crow. But he’d left Newman a message telling him the ID of his snapsho
t star.

  ‘It’s about this,’ she said.

  Dryden nodded. He took her over to an alcove where they conducted interviews. Jean watched with eagle eyes from the switchboard.

  ‘You turned up?’

  She nodded. ‘I’ve been to the police. OK. It’s all over. I told them everything. I want to leave it at that.’

  Dryden shrugged. ‘Sure. And your dad?’

  Which is when the tears started to flow. Dryden put his arm round the girl and he felt Jean’s eyes boring into the back of his head. Jean was one of those extraordinary people who live entirely moral lives. A hospital visitor, she had spent many hours beside Laura’s bed in the months after the accident, when Dryden had been too traumatized to endure lengthy visits. She’d read Laura books, knitted her a bedspread and believed, far more vehemently than Dryden, that her coma would one day end in a miracle return to full consciousness. She was determined that when that time came Dryden would be in the perfect position to resume his married life. She was a woman with a romantic mission and nobody, least of all Dryden, would be allowed to get in her way.

  She appeared now beside them. ‘Tea?’ she asked, and Dryden nodded.

  ‘We can’t find him,’ said Alice, as soon as Jean was out of earshot.

  ‘We?’

  ‘Mum. I got back last night. She said he’d gone a couple of days ago – on Saturday. Said he knew what was going on. Who’d done those things to me, and taken the pictures. Jesus,’ she said, burying her face in her hands. ‘The pictures.’

  ‘How did he get to see them? The police normally keep that kind of thing pretty much under wraps.’

  ‘He had friends, didn’t he? He has friends everywhere, that’s how he does his job. He got an attachment by e-mail. That made it worse. He said they’d be all over the net, just like real porn.’

  ‘How’d he take it?’ asked Dryden, wishing he hadn’t.

  ‘Mum said he sparked out. Broke some furniture. He wouldn’t let Mum see them, carried them with him so she wouldn’t get close. Then he drank some whisky on his own. All night, Mum said.’