The Fire Baby Read online

  Dryden’s favourite was the simplest. It’s straightforwardness an echo of the life they had lost.

  SGDHFYU MY HAIR SHDSIDK

  He had then, and he did it now, because he was lost for words. He raised her head and ran the brush back through the auburn hair, feeling the warmth of her body through the nape of the neck. He kissed her once and left.

  Humph was waiting in the Capri in the midst of an Athenian street wedding. Three tiny empty bottles of Ouzo were lined up on the dashboard. Humph wasn’t a drunk driver, which meant they were going to be parked for a long time.

  Dryden got in the cab but left the door open. Humph gave him a miniature bottle of Greek brandy and went back to the wedding. Dryden read the tickertape and spotted the four attempts at LAURA. The tickertape had a digital timecheck along one side. All four had come just after seven o’clock that night.

  Then he saw it. At 8.08: a burst of nonsense with those two words. His hair stood on end despite the fact that he told himself it must be a bizarre, random chance.

  PDGUT WLGHJKOR T HISKFOT HJKKDHSGSI

  THGYUS GHJYOU JNKOWFGH THEY

  WHISPERKKJTNFMR

  AEWGHCMI GKIAKA JEJUOIFK

  But even as he tried to dismiss it he had to ask himself: did she mean the nurses? Visitors? And what, he wondered, did they whisper about?

  He led her through the trees to the cast-iron door and even as the blood pumped in her ears she noticed that when he turned the key in the lock it clicked over with a barely audible, oily ease. She remembered later, on the park bench, thinking that he’d been there before. That he’d done it all before, with others. She knew that now, when it was too late.

  That was the first time that night she’d felt like crying for help, and the last time she could have. She watched his body move ahead of her with a sinuous sexuality which had struck her dumb despite the fear. She’d never craved sex like that, never found its promise so intoxicating. And only now, looking back, did she understand that it was the drug which had made her blood run hot.

  But before the drugs she’d seen him, she had to admit that, and called him over with her eyes. He’d breezed through the door of The Pine Tree that Monday night with an easy, athletic, grace. Mondays: the quietest night of the week, with a few locals and the quiz team. She was bored, and she must have radiated that, like a lighthouse seeking a ship.

  She got closer, collecting the glasses, close enough to see the tail of a tattooed dragon that curled around his collar bone before plunging back beneath the white cotton top. And the face. A face she’d seen a thousand times and never, the face of a comic book hero, her very own Action Man. Blond cropped hair, and pale fingers with spotless nails. She wondered then what he might do. And there was another question: how could he be interested in her? How could someone so beautiful, so clean, so perfect, be interested in her?

  She should have known when he made the call, on his mobile, walking away from the bar, cupping his hand to smother the words. He winked then, something which normally made her laugh at men. But she just beamed, stupidly, knowing already that something wasn’t right, but not caring now she sensed that his body could be hers.

  She washed the glasses, served the locals, and pretended to laugh at their jokes, but watched him at the end of the bar. She hated the Pine Tree, she told him that. Hated it, but needed it to pay the university bills, for the clubs, and the clothes, and the holiday to Spain with the girls in her house.

  ‘University?’ he’d said, smiling.

  ‘Yeah. East London. It’s great’ she said, shouting to herself to shut up.

  ‘The heat,’ he’d said, his smile confined to his red lips. ‘You want a drink?’

  She’d taken for a vodka and tonic and left the drink on the bar beside him as she worked, returning, sipping, feeling lots of things which should have made her run. She’d been confused then, getting the change wrong a couple of times with the locals. And she dropped a glass: ‘sack the juggler,’ they’d all laughed. She felt her legs buckle but thought it was the vodka and the heat of the night.

  He licked his lips and she sipped another drink and heard her laughter, overloud, in between the CD tracks. She sang too and the locals laughed again, eyeing the stranger at the bar. She never really drank much, even in the clubs, which is why she didn’t taste it, didn’t catch the metallic edge which laced the vodka.

  She asked Mike, the landlord, to lock up and do the ashtrays. He was a friend of her dad’s from way back when they were together in the army in the Far East. But he’d been upstairs all night with his feet up in front of the telly. So he hadn’t seen, hadn’t sensed, as he surely would have, her disorientation.

  ‘Date,’ she whispered, and brushed a kiss across his cheek. He’d smelt it then, and kicked himself later for not stopping her. Not the vodka but something else, the drug sweating out through her skin.

  The moon hung over the Pine Tree like a giant sunlamp. The car suited him, she thought, opening the silver-grey door and catching the sickly scent of the air freshener. Alfa Romeo? Perhaps, she told the police later, but she couldn’t be sure.

  She got in the car, aware of her long legs, the tight jeans around her bum, and the tight T-shirt which tucked under her breasts. She couldn’t stop thinking about her body, and his, together. It almost happened then. In the car park in the long knife-blade shadows of the pines.

  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 Hump
h, 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.