The Fire Baby Read online

  The sun was setting on the razor-sharp edge of the horizon and cutting its throat as it slid out of sight. Dryden felt his spirits rise; a sure sign something was about to go horribly wrong.

  To the south a farmstead stood about a mile back from the road. The only way to get to it by car was over a small private cast-iron bridge across the Forty Foot Drain. A wind pump on the roof span in the evening breeze. It was the kind of place he and Laura had talked about the last time they’d talked at all. Since then it had been four years of monologue. He’d talked for both of them as she lay in her coma. Sometimes he would imagine her part of the conversation, and when the messages started he would say the words out loud, trying to recall the exact inflection of her voice, the subtle combination of a Neapolitan childhood and a north London adolescence.

  The last time they’d talked, really talked, they’d been on their favourite walk, along the bank-top by Little Ouse, past the old Victorian grain silos at Sedge Fen, then over the iron bridge to the north side and the wide desolation of Adventurer’s Fen. It had been the day before the crash in Harrimere Drain. It was their spot, the place they’d daydream about most. But there were only two houses – two pathetic brick semis built for farm workers in the 1920s. Both were criss-crossed with cracks in the brickwork, the peat beneath their flimsy foundations shrinking as the new electrical fen-land pumps sucked the moisture out of the peat below. Tiles slipped from the roof as the houses tipped forwards into the fen, the window frames twisting and splintering with the movement.

  Mist that day. A swirling soup of it which opened up for half a mile and then descended like a cotton-wool blindfold. They’d stood in the solid whiteness of the day and held each other close.

  ‘A house,’ said Dryden. ‘We should decide. Move out of London and start a family.’ He kissed her hair but she hadn’t answered, and in the long silence a crow had called from the rooftop of one of the crumbling cottages.

  He wanted to walk on, towards Adventurer’s Wood, but she pulled him back. Something was wrong. He knew it then, and he knew it now. But what? A house and a family were what they wanted, but only after: after she’d done one last series of Clyde Circus, after he’d done one more year at the News. After – the word he hated most now, after Harrimere Drain.

  What did he doubt in those final hours they were together? Her love? Commitment? Whatever it was, it had disfigured that last memory, possibly for ever.

  It wasn’t as if money was a barrier to fulfilling their dream. One of the many aunts from Campania who had emigrated with Laura’s parents to help run the family restaurant in north London had left her a nest-egg: £80,000. It was all they needed out on the fen. It sat in Laura’s trust account, getting fatter, and it sat there still, administered by the solicitors and her parents. None of Laura’s family had mentioned the bequest since shortly after the accident, an act of faith which signalled their belief that one day he and Laura would buy the house, start the family, and begin again.

  Humph flipped open the glove compartment and fished out two bottles of vodka. He collected miniatures on runs to Stansted Airport. Some of his regulars gave them as tips. He handed one to Dryden, sensing that his friend was descending into a rare bout of depression. Since Laura’s accident they had maintained an almost constant mood characterized by either irrational exuberance or mutual indifference.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Humph, repeating a few random phrases in Greek.

  They’d reached Manea. At least that’s what the sign said, otherwise you wouldn’t know. It was the archetypal Fen town. Most of the houses lined the sinuous main street with back garden views that stretched twenty miles to the horizon. Manea had a claim to fame, a railway station. Unfortunately it was three miles outside town.

  Wilkinson’s stood on the edge of Manea. A triple set of mammoth MFI-style blocks with a windswept car park full of the kind of cars which spend half their life up on bricks, and the other half breaking the speed limit. Most of the workforce, which had to support a twenty-four-hour production line, were picked up by the company coach on bleak street corners in the middle of the night.

  Humph swung the cab in off the road and met an articulated lorry coming out. The stove pipe belched black exhaust as the driver swung the wheel with his forearms so that he could roll a cigarette and light up before he hit the road. He wore the sort of vest which only lorry drivers can, the colour of dirty snow with ash highlights.

  They parked under a sign which said: Wilkinson’s Celery Ltd. UK Headquarters. Below that another sign hung from one hinge: Research Department.

  The staircase was steel and ran in a zig-zag tower up the outside of the main block. At the top was a door with no handle but an entryphone, so he pressed the button and after ten seconds of crackle he heard the lock turn automatically. He pushed the door open and walked down a long neon-lit corridor to another single door, which was half glazed with milky-white glass reinforced with chicken wire. There was a strong smell of disinfectant and his shoes stuck to the featureless cream lino.

  He knocked once and walked in before anyone could stop him. A man in a shabby suit stood up from the only desk. He was a bit like a stick of celery himself. About six feet six, with white hair and narrow shoulders. ‘Mr Dryden? Ashley Wilkinson. Don’t think I can help you any more than I did on the phone. But sit down.’

  Behind his desk was a plate-glass window, a good ten feet long and five feet high, looking down on to the shop floor. The light, entirely artificial, had the flat depressing effect usually reserved for deserted seaside aquaria. Dryden expected to see a bored shark cruising over the three identical production lines. On the conveyor belts salad crops, a livid lichen green, shuffled forward between lines of workers in bleach-white overalls.

  Meat-eaters’ hell, thought Dryden.

  It was the celery shed. Tractors brought the crop in off the fields and dumped it down chutes at the far end from Ashley Wilkinson’s office where it tumbled on to conveyor belts. By the time it got to the other end it was cleaned, trimmed, and neatly packaged. Radio I blared from a crackly tannoy system and the workers, each with a white plastic hairnet, moved with that odd combination of listlessness and physical economy born of the production line.

  Dryden decided to be nice, a little-used tactic in his repertoire, and one invariably unsuccessful. But the blood-red sunset had lit up his mood. ‘I understand West Midlands Police have been making enquiries. Illegal immigrants. I’m told two men have been arrested and removed to the Home Office detention centre outside Cambridge…’ Dryden flicked open his notebook until he reached a page which contained an illegible shorthand note of three tips for the weekend’s race meeting at Newmarket. ‘Two West Africans I understand. Sierra Leone.’

  Wilkinson didn’t look wildly interested in the geography of the Dark Continent.

  ‘Sub judice,’ said Wilkinson. This, Dryden recalled, was ‘fuck off’ in Latin.

  ‘This is all for my background, Mr Wilkinson. No names.’ Dryden shut his notebook, slipped a large rubber band round it, and lobbed it on to Wilkinson’s desk.

  ‘Your numbers are wrong. They had papers. There’s no suggestion we knew they’d come through Felixstowe. We’ll check the references next time,’ said Wilkinson.

  Dryden noted the disguised admission. ‘Where were they living?’

  ‘Police never found out. Out there somewhere – plenty of places.’

  ‘Good workers?’

  ‘Fine. Darn sight better than the locals.’ Wilkinson looked down through the plate glass at his workforce. ‘Lazy bastards, most of ’em.’ British management at its motivational best, thought Dryden, as he produced another miniature pork pie from his pocket and popped it, whole, into his mouth.

  Outside, the musical wallpaper was interrupted as a voice cut in: ‘Mr Wilkinson to the loading bay. Mr Wilkinson to the loading bay.’

  ‘I’ll show you out.’ Dryden noted relief in the voice, and made a silent bet with himself that the call had been pre-arranged to cut short
his visit.

  ‘Ever been done before for employing illegal immigrants?’

  But Wilkinson was already hitting numbers on a mobile phone. Interview over.

  A door led out of the office to an observation balcony, from which a stairway dropped down to the shopfloor. They made their way between the production lines, watched by every worker in the shed. In a whites-only fastness like the Fens, the workforce looked like an outpost of the Notting Hill Carnival. Three women working together on the first line were black. Almost the entire second line was ethnic Chinese. ‘Cheap labour,’ thought Dryden. But he said: ‘Mind if I have a chat with one of the workers?’

  Wilkinson hesitated. Dryden decided to push his luck: ‘I could always just hang around by the gate and catch them on the way home.’

  ‘This is Jimmy Kabazo,’ said Wilkinson, leading him over to a half-partitioned office at the side of one of the production lines. ‘He’s the day-shift foreman. Talk to him, if you like. He’ll show you out too.’

  Jimmy was black. Night black. Dryden guessed he was Nigerian.

  ‘Follow me, sir,’ he said, the voice pitched high and singsong. Jimmy was short and wiry with tight-curled hair and the kind of smile that could hide any emotion. He wore the regulation Wilkinson’s white overalls with a laminated badge: ‘Foreman’.

  Dryden told him what he’d heard about the police raid. The smile never flickered: ‘Yeah. Bad news for the rest of us.’

  ‘Police?’

  Jimmy nodded, still beaming. ‘They bin round. Yeah. Times. Everyone upset now. We’re legal. We got the papers. They left a poster – you want to see it?’

  ‘Why not?’ said Dryden, and followed Jimmy down the production line and into a small staffroom. There was the girlie calendar, of course, with Miss June’s thighs spread to reveal an anatomical level of detail. Some dried-out tea-bags stained the worktop while a spoon stuck up out of a tin of powdered milk. On the table the Mirror was open at the racing pages.

  Kabazo closed the door to reveal the police poster.

  £500 REWARD

  Police at Ely and Peterborough are investigating the illegal entry into the United Kingdom of immigrants lacking correct documentation. Several lines of enquiry are ongoing and arrests are imminent. A reward of £500 is offered for any information leading to further arrests and conviction of any person involved in the organization or execution of such activity. Contact may be made via the dedicated freephone hotline number below or by e-mail. All information will be treated in the strictest confidence. Immunity from prosecution will be considered in exceptional circumstances.

  Issued on behalf of the chief constables of the

  East Cambridgeshire, East Midlands and

  West Midlands Police Forces

  An 0800 number and an e-mail address followed.

  ‘Tempted?’ said Dryden.

  Kabazo tried a smile. ‘It’s not a joke.’

  ‘Sorry. You’re right. Any interest in the reward among the workers?’

  Kabazo picked up a wooden chair effortlessly with one hand and swivelled it round so that he could straddle it. ‘Not that I hear; it’s a dull place. Nothin’ happens at all.’

  ‘How d’ya hear about it – about Wilkinson’s?’

  ‘Good news travels fast.’ He must have been joking, but it was difficult to tell.

  ‘Family local?’ asked Dryden, enjoying himself.

  ‘Some,’ said Jimmy, biting his lip.

  They talked about life in the shed. The six o’clock start, the mindless work, the wages. ‘The worst thing is the windows,’ said Kabazo, meaning the lack of them. ‘The summer goes, the winter comes, we don’t know. They ship in the stuff from abroad. We just work. Always the same.’

  They shook hands. ‘See you again,’ said Dryden, somehow knowing he would.

  Outside, Humph was asleep in the cab. Dryden leant on the roof and ate a packet of mushrooms he’d sneaked into the glove compartment and followed that with some small but perfectly formed Scotch eggs. He chased them down with a Grand Marnier. Now he felt even better. The evening sky was a stunning bowl of rose-tinted blue. He fished around for another miniature in the glove compartment and settled on a second Grand Marnier.

  About a mile away an HGV cut the landscape as it powered its way on the arrow-straight back roads towards the Midlands. Dryden imagined the dark, fetid interior of the container and wondered what, or who, was on board.

  7

  Dryden drank some more on the way back to Ely while Humph, enthused by the general air of gaiety, made a spirited attempt to knock a passing postman off his bike on the edge of town on the off-chance it might be his ex-wife’s lover. The cabbie wound down the window as the postman’s bike mounted the pavement and embedded itself in a hawthorn fence: ‘Bastard!’

  There was deep, satisfied silence between them. ‘It wasn’t him, was it?’ said Dryden.

  ‘Nope,’ said Humph happily.

  They parked up at The Tower. Dryden’s life was largely marked by random motion, but at the end of each day he came back to Laura. He grinned stupidly at the nurse at reception, making a half-hearted attempt to hide the effects of the alcohol, and tried not to skip to the lifts.

  He walked to Laura’s bed, touched her arm briefly as he always did, and checked Maggie, who was asleep, curled in the same tortured ball as before. Then he stood over the COMPASS machine, running a finger along its cream metallic paintwork. The specialists had brought it in two months ago. It consisted of a PC and computer keyboard. On the screen was an alphabet grid.

  ABCD

  EFGH

  IJKLMN

  OPQRST

  UVWXYZ

  The concept was simple, and familiar to anyone with a modern remote control. A small electronic trigger was placed in Laura’s hand which she could use to navigate the grid and highlight individual letters. Clicking on a highlighted letter printed it on a tickertape which chugged out of the COMPASS.

  The first problem was random erratic movements and mishits on the trigger. These distorted the printout record. The second problem was much bigger. Laura was not ‘conscious’ in any accepted understanding of the word, although she could clearly see the COMPASS screen, if only intermittently. She drifted in and out of Dryden’s world to bring an occasional message; few made sense. For Dryden this had made her recovery painfully frustrating. On one level she was ‘back’, back from the coma which had so completely enveloped her after the crash in Harrimere Drain. But her visits were swift, unannounced, and often cryptic. A long line of tickertape lay folded in a neat concertina at Dryden’s feet, ready to be deciphered.

  He’d met Laura while working for the News on Fleet Street. Her father owned a north London Italian café, Napoli, where the regular clientele squeezed themselves down a long corridor from the café counter to a small room with six tables decked out in checked tablecloths. The food was simple but sublime: fresh figs, golden balls of mozzarella, piquant ragu, and pungent Parma ham, all washed down with the Vesuvio her father prized. One evening Dryden had found himself in the suburbs on a job, doorstepping a politician who’d had to resign over allegations of fraud. He’d sneaked into the Napoli while the police were inside the house taking a statement. Hurrying, he’d spilt his pasta course into his lap. Laura had helped mop up the mess in an oddly erotic dance of embarrassment. Love, as Dryden liked to recall it, at first fumble. Despite Laura’s long apprenticeship in food she had kept her figure, and avoided the fate of her plump aunts, by smelling food rather than eating it herself. While her mother helped run the business she had brought up three younger brothers, and cooked most of their meals, without adding an unnecessary pound.

  So each evening Dryden tried to fill her room with the aromas of the past. It was a ritual he found deeply satisfying. Beside Laura’s bed stood a bottle of the same Vesuvio, the cork drawn and replaced. On a plate he put fresh fruit, cutting the figs to let them breathe. He poured out a glass of the wine and set it down beside her. And he lit one cigarette,
a Gauloise, which he knew would remind her of their honeymoon. Then he would chat for half an hour. About his day, about Humph’s planned Greek holiday, about what he’d seen in the world outside The Tower. Then he’d tear off the tickertape, and take it out to Humph’s cab.

  Tonight inspiration failed him: ‘Maggie’s dying.’ He let the silence hang, as he often did, trying not to rush and fill the gap where Laura’s voice should be. ‘You must know too. But the doctors… they say days. We’re trying to get Estelle back. Back in time, I guess. Forgive me, it’s been a distraction…’

  He stood and walked to the wall beside Laura’s bed. The nurses had put up a cork-board and Dryden had pinned up most of the messages she’d been able to send using the COMPASS machine. He’d cut out the letters that made sense from the background jumble. He was acutely moved by the fact that he understood each as only a lover can.

  SGDFDYFYJF FLIGHTPATI SGD PK ABI YCND

  He ran his finger along it, enjoying again the thrill of deciphering this opening message. The first time she had used the COMPASS to say anything other than her name. It said so many things about how well she was, at least in her mind. But for the missed H at the end the single word was perfect: Flightpath. Flightpath Cottages; the now derelict houses they’d discovered together on Adventurer’s Fen. A vision of where the future could be, if Laura recovered. A home, a family, and everything they’d wanted before the accident in Harrimere Drain.

  SHSHFT ROSA SDGDU

  Rosa was her mother. He’d photocopied the tickertape and sent it to Turin, where her parents had retired. He could only imagine the tears that had flowed. And he’d taken a copy to the family restaurant in north London, which was now run by Laura’s three brothers. They’d embraced him, cried, and promised to visit soon. When they came the brothers crowded in to Laura’s room with their families, while the children ran riot. When their time was over Dryden stood with them outside on the lawns, waiting while the kids climbed into the cars. There were tears then, too, and bitterness that this should have happened to Laura. Of all people. That was the phrase that Dryden always heard echoing around the family: of all people.