The Fire Baby Read online

  They zoomed dizzily over the wavebands until Humph picked up the signal.

  ‘The headlines at noon on Radio Littleport…’

  Dryden, for a decade one of Fleet Street’s sharpest reporters, listened with complete indifference to the usual tales of political intrigue, international violence, and lurid showbusiness before the station moved on to local items.

  ‘… with an entire lorryload of turnips. Meanwhile on the coast at Cromer the heatwave again brought havoc to the holiday beaches. A huge cloud of ladybirds descended on sunbathers by the pier. A spokesman for the local council’s environmental health department said the insects were breeding in huge numbers and were desperate for food. Apparently they can live quite happily on human sweat. And with that thought the time is now four minutes past twelve.’

  There was a short jingle, a digital version of Fingal’s Cave. Dryden swore at it.

  ‘This is Radio Littleport. The Voice of The Fens. And now an important announcement from East Cambridgeshire County Police Force.’

  Dryden had his reporter’s notebook ready on the window ledge. His fluid shorthand left an elegant scribble across the page. Elegant but unreadable: he was only fooling himself.

  ‘This is an urgent message for Estelle Beck, the only daughter of Maggie Beck of Black Bank Farm, near Ely. Please contact immediately The Tower Hospital, Ely, where your mother is gravely ill. I’ll repeat that –’

  Dryden clicked off the mobile without thanking Humph. He brushed away a fly which had settled on Laura’s arm. Then he walked across the large, carpeted room and folded his six-foot-two-inch frame into a hospital chair beside the room’s only other bed. In it lay the curled, wheezing body of Maggie Beck.

  ‘Why now?’ he asked nobody.

  There had been four radio appeals, each as urgent as the last. He hoped her daughter came soon. He had seen very few people dying but the symptoms were shockingly clear. She held both hands at her throat where they clutched a paper tissue. Her hair was matted to her skull. She seemed to draw her breath up from a pit beneath her, each one a labour which threatened to kill her. Her skin was dry and without tension – except for the single mark of a livid burn which cut across one side of her face in the shape of a corkscrew.

  ‘They’ll come,’ he said, hoping she’d hear.

  In the oddly detached way in which he expressed almost all his emotions Dryden had come to love Maggie Beck. When his father died in the floods of ’77 Maggie, still a teenager and newly married, had moved in to look after his mother. Dryden had been eleven. Maggie had taken the spare room and helped his mother through the few weeks before the coroner’s court inquest, and then the excruciating absence of a burial. His father had been presumed drowned, swept off the bank at Welch’s Dam, and the body never found. For his mother this had been the final burden which Maggie helped her bear. The heartache of grief without a corpse to cry over. After that they combined their sorrows in often companionable silence. Maggie had her own tragedy to carry – the air crash at Black Bank which had killed her parents and her infant son. They shouldered their grief together, farmers’ wives who didn’t want to subside under the weight of their misfortunes, at least not without a fight. They’d travelled together – day trips and weekends which took them far from the memory of their lives. He’d met her many times at Burnt Fen in his mother’s kitchen, a big woman with farmyard bones as familiar and comforting as the Aga, with that corkscrew burn like a tattoo on her face.

  Maggie knew she had cancer. The radiotherapy would last six weeks, the convalescence longer still. Dryden had gone out to Black Bank to see her and knew instantly that she expected to die. The specialists had suggested that it might be good therapy for Laura if she shared her room. Maggie said yes without a pause and raided her savings to afford The Tower’s substantial fees. She would spend her last months in comfort, for she had a task to complete before the cancer took her life. She wanted to tell her story. Dryden gave her a tape recorder so that each day she could spill out her tale to a silent audience. The story she wanted to tell, the one she wanted Laura to witness. And Laura, if she could hear, had a story to listen to.

  Dryden had visited in those first weeks and found in her a desperate insecurity. She’d hold his hand and tell him that her life had been a failure, that she’d failed Estelle, that she’d failed Black Bank. But she still hid the heart of this failure, a secret Dryden sensed was burning her from within. And then she’d turned to him one night just a week ago, as he sat with her enjoying the breeze that came through the open windows. They’d heard the cathedral clock chime midnight and she’d taken his hand and held it with the intensity of a bullclip: ‘Promise me they’ll come,’ she’d said.

  She’d been in The Tower a month and each day Estelle had visited – until now. Each day she had come to sit with her mother. But the best days for Maggie were when she brought the American. Dryden had met him twice, by Laura’s bedside. ‘Friend of the family,’ said Maggie. A pilot, tall and slightly wasted, with the drawn features of a victim. Every day they came – until this last weekend. The doctors assured them that the end was months away, if not years. Maggie had agreed to a break, to let her daughter go. Let them both go.

  The moment they left, Maggie’s health had rapidly collapsed. The cancer cells had begun to multiply in her blood and she had felt the change within her, the subtle beginning of the process of death. She had to get Estelle back, she had something to tell her. About the secrets that had consumed her life.

  ‘Promise me you’ll find them in time,’ she said. Dryden noted the plural.

  He didn’t like telling lies. ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘The police are trying; what more can I do?’

  Her eyes pleaded with him, with a look which seemed, prematurely, to cross the divide between the living and the dead. ‘Then promise,’ she said. ‘And promise you’ll forgive me too.’

  ‘Forgive you for what?’

  Her hand fluttered, searching out the bedside table where the tape recorder stood. ‘I’ve said it here. But I must tell them too. Promise me.’

  He’d always remember the white arthritic knuckles and the parchment skin clutching his fingers. He stood, angry at the suggestion he needed a public oath to make him keep his word, and angrier still that she’d penetrated his emotional defences.

  ‘I promise.’

  She cried. The first time he’d seen her buckle after all the months of pain.

  ‘I promise,’ he said again, and by some peculiar transference of emotion he felt vividly that he’d made the promise to his mother, to her memory, to the gravestone on Burnt Fen. Even now the thought produced a fresh surge of sweat on his forehead. He was doing all he could. The police appeals, ads in the papers along the coast where Estelle and the American had gone touring. Why didn’t she ring? Why didn’t she answer her mobile phone?

  He walked back to his wife and touched her shoulder through the white linen sheet. ‘Laura?’

  Her eyes were open. Seemingly sightless, but open. He imagined she slept – why not? So she needed waking like anyone else. And he liked using her name, now that he knew for certain that on some level, however deep and however distant, she could hear him.

  The caretaker walked by in the corridor outside, dragging laundry bags and whistling the ‘Ode To Joy’, each note perfectly pitched.

  Maggie Beck turned in her bed and struggled, as she always did, not to cry out.

  Humph beeped from the cab. They had a job. Dryden had to go, back out into the world where people talked. But Dryden knew there was no real hurry. The Crow, the paper for which he was chief reporter, had a final deadline of 3.00pm.The handful of stories he had yet to file would take him an hour to knock out, probably less.

  ‘Loads of time,’ he said, sitting on the bed and taking Laura’s hand.

  They’d made the breakthrough three months ago. Dryden, unable to sleep, had spent the night on the deck of his boat at Barham’s Dock. The sunrise had driven him to walk and a fox had dogged his
tracks into town, scavenging across fields of sunburnt crops. The Tower had slept, the night nurse looking up from her studies to wave him through. He’d tried the routine a thousand times: taking her hand and beginning the endless repetition of the letters. Waiting for the tiny movement which would signal intelligent life, like a radio blip across the galaxy.

  That first time, she’d done it perfectly. L-A-U-R-A. No mistakes. He’d sat on her bed and wept for her. Wept for joy that she was somewhere. But wept most for himself, doomed perhaps to spend his life beside a hospital bed, waiting for messages from another world.

  Humph beeped again. Dryden placed the smallest finger of Laura’s right hand in his palm so that it barely touched his skin. The neurologist had shown him how. They had a machine too, the COMPASS, but Dryden liked doing it this way – the way they’d first done it. The communication was intensely personal, as though he were a lightning rod, channelling her energy to earth.

  ‘OK. Let’s concentrate.’ The specialist, the one with the dead-fish eyes, had told him to give her a warning.

  Humph beeped again and Dryden suppressed a surge of petty anger.

  ‘Loads of time.’

  He counted to sixty and then coughed self-consciously: ‘OK. We’re starting. A, B, C, D, E, F…’ and on, a full two seconds for each. He felt the familiar tingle of excitement as he got nearer: ‘J, K, L’ – and there it was, the tiny double movement.

  It didn’t always happen. One out of five, six perhaps. They’d always got the next bit wrong until Dryden had hit upon the idea of beginning at M and running through the alphabet rather than starting at A. He moved on, with the two-second gaps, but she missed it. Two tiny movements – but on the B.

  He felt irritation, then guilt. The neurologist had explained how difficult it must be. ‘It’s about as easy as playing chess in your head. She’s learnt to combine certain muscle movements, small tremors in the tissue, to produce this timed response. We have no way of knowing how much time she needs for each letter. How long she has to concentrate.’

  He did the rest to spite Humph. L-B-U-S-A. Three letters right, two just a place away in the alphabet.

  He felt fierce pride and love burn, briefly, at her achievement. The specialist, an expert from one of the big London teaching hospitals who had treated his wife like a specimen preserved in a Victorian museum jar, had told him to be patient – a word which always prompted in Dryden an internal scream. Laura’s messages were halting, disjointed, sometimes surreal. He must wait to see if she would ever emerge from the confused penumbra of coma.

  ‘Patience,’ he said out loud. A virtue, if it was one, of which he had no trace.

  2

  Humph parked up in a lay-by three miles east of Ely. It was a lay-by like all lay-bys, distinguished by nothing. The A14 east–west trunk road linking the coastal port of Felixstowe with the industrial cities of the Midlands was punctuated by them. At this hour – lunchtime – it was a canyon of HGVs ticking over and spewing carbon monoxide into hot air already laced with cheap grease from the Ritz T-Bar.

  ‘Coffee. Four sugars,’ said the cabbie, unfolding a five-day-old copy of the Financial Times with casual familiarity. He played the stock market in the way that many people play the horses. He lost a lot; but when he ran out of things to read the FT made a snug, pink blanket.

  Humph was Dryden’s chauffeur. There was no other way to describe it. They had shared a life of aimless motion for nearly four years since Laura’s accident. Humph had a few regular customers who paid well – early morning school runs, and late night pick-ups for club bouncers in Newmarket and Cambridge. The rest of the time he was on call for Dryden. The Crow, Dryden’s newspaper, was happy to pick up the modest bills as it made up for the fact that they appeared to have forgotten to pay their chief reporter a salary. Humph’s home life was as non-existent as Dryden’s, in his case owing to an acrimonious divorce. He had a picture of his two girls stuck on the dashboard. Dryden and Humph shared an insular view of the world, if that is possible, for the most part without sharing a word.

  In the lay-by the combination of the noon sun and the exhaust pipes of fifteen heavy wagons was headily reminiscent of Athens under a smog. Amongst the lorries were two Milk Marketing Board tankers, common now on the Fen roads, converted to carry water for irrigating salad crops in the drought. The air along the roadside was a shimmering blue advert for global warming. Dryden tried a cough and produced a strangulated lead-fuelled squeak.

  The Ritz T-Bar was a regular meeting place for Dryden and the crew of stragglers he counted as his ‘contacts’. He noted that Inspector Andy Newman’s car was already parked up on a grass mound at the end of the lay-by. The detective drove a clapped-out Citroën with a sticker in the window for the Welney Wildfowl Trust. Andy Newman – ‘Last Case Newman’, as he was known to his fellow officers on the force – was more interested in catching sight of a sparrowhawk than a crook. Mentally he had been on the allotment for a decade. Or in his case, in one of the hides from which he could spy on his beloved birds. He had twenty-three days to run to statutory retirement age. He wasn’t counting, but that didn’t include two days’ holiday and a doctor’s appointment.

  Dryden queued for a cup of tea. The Ritz was standard issue in the mobile tea-bar world. Sugar bowl with one teaspoon and several lumps of coagulated glucose. One copy of the Sun – tied to the counter with a piece of string. A hotplate with a row of sausages sizzling in six-point harmony. And one oddity: a bird cage hung from the wooden awning in which sat a moth-eaten parrot. It was not a pretty boy.

  A blackboard on the rear wall of the kitchenette read: THURSDAY’S SPECIAL – DOUBLE SAUSAGE SANDWICH 99P.

  The proprietor was tall, with blond hair tinged nicotine-yellow. His conversational powers, which Dryden had tested before, were strictly limited to Premier League football, female lorry drivers and the weather in a two-mile radius of the lay-by. He kept his hands in his pockets and smoked a roll-up with the lung-pulling power of a set of doll’s house bellows. As he pushed the styrofoam cup of tea across the counter Dryden noticed the livid raised mark of a skin graft on his hand.

  ‘Johnnie,’ said Dryden, putting his change on the Formica top.

  ‘Steamin’ again,’ said Johnnie, shuffling coins between the lines of five-, ten-, twenty-, and fifty-pence pieces on the counter-top he had arranged in the long hours of boredom which came with being proprietor of the Ritz.

  Dryden left it at that. He got into Newman’s car and sat pretending to sip the tea for five minutes. Newman, binoculars pressed to his face, was scanning the vast field opposite. Eventually he placed them on his lap with a sigh. ‘Herring gull,’ he said. Even his voice was tired. Knackered. Ready for retirement with the rest of him.

  ‘Not long now,’ said Dryden, referring to Newman’s favourite topic – retirement.

  ‘Nope. Not long.’

  Dryden produced a single piece of white paper. It was a five-paragraph story put out by the Press Association that morning. The Crow paid for the wire service PA provided – a regular series of news stories churned out online to the terminal on the news editor’s desk. Dryden had a search mechanism on his screen which alerted him when any story came up with a headline containing the key words ‘TWITCHER(S)’, ‘BIRD(S)’, ‘RARE’ or ‘EGG(S)’.

  He’d rung Newman that morning as soon as the story had appeared on the wire. It might make a paragraph in the nationals the next day, or even the local evening papers, but Dryden’s favour bought Newman the best part of a twenty-four-hour lead on his fellow enthusiasts.

  ‘Rare Siberian gull spotted’, ran the headline. The bird had been blown, exhausted, on to the bird reserve at Holme on the north Norfolk coast. Once the news hit the papers thousands of twitchers would descend on the spot, with enough photographic hardware to cover a Paris catwalk. This way Andy Newman got there first.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, stuffing the paper in the glove compartment. He always seemed mildly embarrassed by what, Dryden had to admit, w
as a not very subtle process of police bribery. They had long since dispensed with any pretence that their relationship was anything other than cynical: Newman got the tips and Dryden got a story. It was as simple as that.

  Newman retrieved a large brown envelope which had been stashed in the Citroën’s glove compartment. Dryden gingerly extracted some photographic prints from it. ‘They’re X-rated,’ said Newman, as he raised his binoculars to watch a flock of flamingoes rising from the distant waters of the Wicken Fen nature reserve.

  And so they were. Twenty prints, black and white. Two bodies. One female. Her face was to the camera in a few, the eyes glazed. Dryden guessed she’d been drugged. The man’s face was crueller. A professional. A pornstar’s body. Hairless and smooth. But ugly. They were always ugly in these pictures, whatever they looked like.

  She’d have been beautiful anywhere else. Blonde, bright eyes, leggy. Dryden guessed twenty – perhaps younger. The stud was older, late twenties; the cynical smile added another couple of decades. But it was the room that left Dryden uneasy. Walls, but no right angles. Bare concrete. Graffiti: layers of it, decades of it. Coats and clothes on the floor, and under that, what? Straw, perhaps.

  The camera angle never changed. It was outside looking in, through a narrow horizontal slit. Night time. A peeping Tom by arrangement, looking in and recording everything.

  Dryden put them back in the envelope and fished in his trouser pockets for the pear drops he’d bought that morning. He hardly ever ate a decent meal, preferring instead to graze on the crop he could harvest from his pockets. He wound the window down but it made no impression on the stifling heat. A fly head-butted the windscreen without enthusiasm.

  ‘It’s a pillbox,’ said Newman, lowering the binoculars and putting them carefully in a box lined with immaculate green baize.

  Dryden nodded as if he knew what the detective was talking about.