The Fire Baby (16 page)

As the dead engine ticked to silence Humph repeated his question. ‘Why here?’

Dryden sighed. ‘Newman has a set of pornographic pictures taken in a wartime pillbox. At night. The girl’s drugged. The pictures turned up in the Midlands in a police raid on a house used by illegal immigrants. They’re dropping groups off in the fens and finding them jobs as pickers. I talked to Etty. She’s seen lines of them crossing the countryside. Immigrants, using The Breach, crossing Black Bank Fen. I checked the map. This is the only pillbox on the fen.’

It sounded daft even to Dryden. He shrugged. ‘It’s a night out.’

Humph was asleep. Tiny snores popped like a coffee percolator. That was the great thing about Humph, he was always there for you. Right there, in his seat.

Dryden got out of the car and stood in the deafening silence that only a very large open space can produce. He recalled once as a child going early to the cinema to sit and munch sweets and the weight of anxiety which had fallen on him when the lights had momentarily failed. It was as if he could sense the space with bat-like sonar. He stood now, shivering in 80 degrees of heat, his anxieties crowding round like witnesses at an accident.

The woodland around the box was thin and dry and his footsteps crackled with broken twigs and dead grass. He sensed the presence of the pillbox rather than seeing it, a hard-edged blackness within the shifting shadows beneath the pines. He picked his way forward along an animal track and met a fox coming the other way. The torchlight caught the eyes and the nose, and the shiny liquid which caked its snout and teeth. At night, by a thin beam of light, there was no way Dryden could see the colours, but he knew with the sixth-sense of the born coward that the liquid was a lipstick red.

Dryden had that strange sense which signals disaster, a sense that told him this wasn’t him, padding through a deserted stretch of Fen woodland, but someone else, someone he could safely watch from his front row cinema seat, comfortingly surrounded by an audience of several hundred representatives of the real world. The fox’s retreat had unnerved him further, and he knew that if he didn’t move quickly he’d fall down.

He could see the pillbox now, one wall catching the moonlight, decorated with the Grimm fairy-tale shadows of the pine trees. He walked quickly to the wall and touched it, confronting a fear which helped allay his anxiety. He moved carefully anti-clockwise, tracing the hexagonal outline of the box, until he came to the door. The silence was oppressive now, so he rattled it loudly, the sound helping to quell the panic which was rising in his throat. The door was iron, rusted, but with a newish-looking deadlock and stood slightly ajar. He pushed it fully open and sent a beam of light into the dark space within.

There were shadows, and out of them came a figure, head down and running. Dryden, paralysed, later recalled hoping the figure would simply run through him – an insubstantial
nightmare’s demon. As a result his head met his assailant’s with the kind of crack that is muffled only by two intervening layers of skin. A dagger of pure pain stabbed him in his black eye. What did he recall? An eyeball, white. A flash of ivory teeth beautifully arranged in tombstone order. Nothing more. Except the smell. It was what Dryden imagined carbolic would be, but with a bitter edge: up close and impersonal.

Then he did pass out. A curtain of cosy blackness fell before his eyes and he was no longer there to feel the fear. In the cab Humph dozed dreamlessly. But Dryden, plunged into the fetid well which was his unconsciousness, returned to his ever-present nightmare. Laura floated in the viscous blood, just beyond his outstretched hand. It was a river now, he could see that, and on one bank stood a pillbox. The blood oozed from the open wound of the gun portal.

Dryden was shouting Laura’s name when he came to with a start that seemed to stop his heart. The torch lay beside his head, illuminating the straw. Its beam slightly yellow, the battery fading. Had he been out for hours? If so, where was Humph?

He would have run from the pillbox if he could have stood up. But his overriding emotion was thirst, prompted by the taste of blood in his throat. Which is when he saw, by the torchlight, the glass. It was on the opposite wall, immediately below the rectangle of black, star-studded sky, that was the gunslit, on a shelf. It was exactly in the middle of the shelf, like a chalice left on an altar.

Dryden knew two things immediately; that the glass was polished and without fingerprints, and that it was completely empty. He needed water. It was really spooking him, that single, untouched glass. He held the torch beam on it. Sweat
popped from a thousand pores in tiny globes. He was panicking now, and trying to suppress the reason why.

He knew the body was there. In the moonlight its pale form had begun to emerge, like secret writing, from the straw-lined confusion of the pillbox floor. He rolled the torch in the straw and let the light give the corpse all three dimensions. It cast a shadow now, low and lifeless across the straw, and it was the shadow of a man. And for this victim there was to be no fourth dimension: time had fled for ever.

The body wore jeans, no socks, but the torso was naked. One arm was outstretched behind the torso where it was manacled to the pillbox wall. The rest of the body was in a ball, except for the other arm which stretched out forwards along the floor, towards the shelf and the single, empty glass. The index finger was outstretched again, as in one of Michelangelo’s touching angels. The chain to the wall was taut and still appeared to be supporting part of the weight of the corpse.

Why reach out for an empty glass? Easy. It hadn’t been empty once.

Dryden stood and circled the body until his back was to the shelf. He could see the top of the head now, tucked down into the straw, and the thinning blond hair was tainted with the yellow of cigarette smoke. The fox must have eaten from a wound on the leg where the manacle had cut in. Dryden puked, gagging until he could breathe.

His head swam and he knew with certainty that he was about to pass out. The darkness came but he went into it carrying a single image: the victim’s skin. It looked unnaturally dry and parched and across the outstretched arm and the arched back it was streaked with livid patches of discoloured flesh: flesh pitted and blue like a Christmas turkey’s. He
recalled, instantly, his last visit to the Ritz and the cup of coffee placed on the counter by the owner, the vacuous empty conversation, and the hand that held the cup, crossed with raised purple skin grafts.

20

The beam of light from the pillbox gunslit shone out across Black Bank Fen like the lantern beam of a landlocked lighthouse. Dryden had watched from the Capri as first the scene of crime team, and then the pathologist, had picked their way through the edge of Mons Wood towards the box. The interior now, he knew, would be bathed in the super-light of halogen lamps. The body was still in situ, awaiting the medics who sat patiently in the ambulance drawn up on The Breach, its emergency beacon pulsing silently. Humph offered him a malt whiskey and he took it thankfully. His throat was dry with fear, and his guts were still churning.

There was a sharp tap on the near-side window which made them both jump. Inspector Andy Newman’s head appeared: ‘OK. When you’re ready.’ The detective took him under the arm, partly to keep him on the narrow path marked out by the forensic team’s white flags, and partly to hold him up. ‘Just talk me through it, Philip, step by step, OK?’

It was the first time Newman had ever used his first name and he was pathetically grateful for the kindness, and at the same time aware of how visibly he must be radiating anxiety.

‘I met the fox here,’ said Dryden, and Newman gave him an old-fashioned look.

‘Mr Tod, was it? Peter Rabbit not at home?’ Their laughter drew resentful looks from the forensic team combing the woodland. Newman placed a hand on his shoulder to stem
the almost hysterical escalation of good humour. ‘A fox, Philip?’

‘No. Yes. Seriously – a fox. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought it had blood on its snout.’

A man appeared at Newman’s shoulder in a head-to-foot plastic shell-suit. The policeman did the introductions with exaggerated care: ‘Dr Beaumont – Home Office pathologist – this is Philip Dryden, chief reporter on
The Crow
, Ely. He found the body, Doc. An hour ago.’

Beaumont had the eyes of the true professional: intelligent, alert, even excited, but certainly inured to death by the sight of a thousand corpses before his thirtieth birthday. ‘Mr Dryden is right, inspector. There are clear signs of animal activity around, on, and to some extent in the body.’

Newman refused to ask the obvious question.

‘Most of those injuries being inflicted after death,’ finished Dr Beaumont, a smile suggesting itself through his eyes. ‘Shall we?’ he added, turning back towards the pillbox as though he was ushering forward dinner guests.

A scene of crime tent had been erected over the entrance to the pillbox, and here Newman and Dryden donned blue plastic suits. Then Dr Beaumont led them into the pillbox. The most striking feature of the victim’s body was the tautness of the limbs. The chain which linked the manacled hand to the wall was still taking the full weight of the corpse. It was as if death had struck at the exact moment the victim had stretched out to the edge of physical endurance.

‘Cut the chain,’ said Beaumont, and a scene of crime officer stepped forward with bolt cutters. Beaumont put an arm under the corpse’s chest and took the weight. ‘OK – now.’

The chain sheered and bounded back to the wall while
the torso of the corpse slumped forward the last two inches to the straw floor.

Beaumont got close to the victim’s face, still unseen and tucked beneath the shoulders, and examined it with a pencil torch and a forensic scalpel. He filled several plastic bags with minute traces of hair, blood and skin.

Newman walked across the floor between two white chalk lines until he got to the shelf under the gunslit. ‘And this was like this? Empty?’ he said, tapping the glass with a ballpoint.

‘Yup,’ said Dryden, wishing he could drink some water now.

‘Let’s turn him over,’ said Beaumont, and the room suddenly filled with the forensic team. They flipped the corpse over and he lay, awkwardly, like a crab with his limbs raised.

It was the owner of the Ritz. His mouth was stretched open in a frozen scream, the eyes tinged pink with broken blood-vessels. The skin was caked in what looked like salt, with a rim of rime around the thin, blotched lips. The nose had been destroyed by a violent blow which had folded the cartilage back into the skull.

‘I think we can assume that death was unnatural,’ said Beaumont, scribbling notes.

Dryden knelt and examined the face. ‘What are those?’

They directed one of the halogen lamps on to the face. On each cheek and across the chin were a series of livid puncture marks, with blue bruising around each.

Beaumont didn’t answer but used a gloved finger to slightly massage the skin.

Newman lifted the chain which had secured the victim to the wall, using the ballpoint looped through one of the heavy iron links. The manacle contained a single lock and was smeared with blood and skin tissue where the man had
lunged forward towards the glass and injured his wrist. The other end was looped through an iron ring in the wall and secured with a simple padlock.

‘That’s interesting,’ said Newman, turning the pencil torch on the manacle. A line of script had been stencilled into the metal.

Dryden shrugged. ‘An African language? Indian? Arabic? It’s not European, that’s clear.’

The ambulance team arrived with a bright neon-yellow body bag.

Dryden waited outside, watching the stars turn above, while the corpse was removed.

‘Any sign of the killer?’ he asked Newman, as they walked back to the Capri.

Newman shook his head. ‘There are some tyre marks further down the drove. Looks like a four-wheel drive. You can’t remember anything about him at all? The bloke who bowled you over.’

Dryden shrugged.

Beaumont came out, peeling off the white surgical gloves he had worn to examine the body.

‘The punctures in his face; any idea?’ said Dryden.

The pathologist consulted his notes. He held out his right hand: ‘Three puncture marks on the left cheek.’ He held out his left hand: ‘Four on the right.’ He stepped forward and held Dryden’s face in a grip with his fingertips, gently applying pressure. ‘My guess is someone held him like this, and then went on applying the force. Some of the nails dug in. The thumbs raised bigger welts, to the centre, the fingers less so, trailing off towards the neck.’

Dryden looked into Beaumont’s eyes. He could see the irises widening as they accommodated the drop in light level outside the pillbox.

‘Then he hit him?’ said Dryden.

Beaumont nodded, releasing his grip. ‘Yes. Hard. Some of the cartilage has been forced back into the brain.’

‘Did it kill him?’

‘No. No, I don’t think so. I think he died of thirst.’

21

Dryden, released from police questioning at 12.30am, got Humph to drive him straight to
The Crow.
He filed stop-press single pars to all the broadsheets and most of the tabloids for the Tuesday morning’s late editions. He’d agreed with Inspector Newman to withhold most of the details – but there was enough there to flog the story: wartime pillbox, semi-naked corpse, partly eaten by wild animals. What more did they want? Newman had signed-off a form of words to cover how the body was found: the time was withheld, and the discovery attributed to a local farmer – name also withheld.

Having finished filing he woke Humph to drive him to The Tower. There was no way either of them would sleep so they shared what was left of Humph’s Greek picnic and rammed that home with a couple of Metaxa 3-star brandies. He brought Humph up to speed on the investigation by reading out the copy he had filed. The cabbie listened, whistled once, and settled down to sleep.

Dryden decided it was visiting time. Laura’s breath whistled like a cat’s. Dryden, and the nursing staff, had long since agreed that her sleeping time should be respected, and despite her open eyes the room was darkened, and the COMPASS machine turned off, between 10.00pm and 7.00am.