The Fire Baby (24 page)

Humph saluted as they sailed past at a stately twenty miles an hour.

The base was home to 7,500 people; a town crowded round a single runway long enough to take the big transatlantic planes. One and a half miles of reinforced concrete scattered with scurrying hedgehogs trying to avoid the ultimate roadkill. Dryden shifted in his seat, immediately aware that his claustrophobia had kicked in as they slipped inside the high-wire cordon of the base. Military hardware dotted the horizon, from the bristling communications masts to the rocking radar dishes which swept the sky for aircraft or, worse, incoming missiles. Some of the buildings were pre-war and smacked of the great days of aviation in the 1930s: the tailplanes of the latest modern aircraft sticking out of their open doors. A now-disused mast had once anchored giant airships over the Fens before they set out for the four corners of the Empire. The more modern buildings, mostly associated with the arrival of the US Air Force in the 1950s, were squat and ugly by comparison. They swept past one of the many on-base canteens which was built of blood-red brick and boasted a single, neon sign for McDonald’s.

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11 security had been stepped up at all US bases abroad. Signposts and information boards had been taken down to confuse the enemy, and everybody else. A GI with a brutal crewcut stood
at a crossroads consulting a map. Traffic lights controlled the runway crossing. A sentry waved them on, before changing his mind and waving them down to ask where they were going.

‘On-base communications unit,’ said Dryden.

The GI looked bemused. He scanned the horizon as if August’s unit were hiding out there. Then the GI took an executive decision: ‘I’m lost, mister,’ he said, genuinely exasperated.

Dryden nodded happily. ‘I’ll ring Major Sondheim – he’s our contact.’ But there was no need. August thumped his hand on the roof and leant in on Humph’s side.

‘Hiya. Over there.’ He pointed to a group of pre-war hangars. Humph parked and began to inflate the in-flight pillow he’d bought at Stansted Airport for just such occasions.

August took Dryden by the arm and led him to a US military Jeep. It was 11.45 and August was sober, but the strain was showing. His diction was as sharp as the crease on his trousers. In the back of the Jeep was one of his junior PR staff, a woman in fatigues with a clipboard which Dryden noted with approval held a piece of clean A4 paper with nothing on it.

‘Meet the enemy, Sergeant DeWitt,’ said August. She nodded into the rear-view mirror. Even in a partial reflection Dryden could tell she was a woman of impressive credentials. Her uniform tried but failed to encompass a heart-stopping bust. August squirmed slightly in his seat in a way which answered all the questions Dryden hadn’t asked.

‘Right,’ said August, gunning the Jeep past two green lights and crossing the runway to a group of post-war three-storey dormitory buildings. Over them a water tower stood on stilts like an alien invader from the
War of the Worlds
. Behind a wire
enclosure a bunch of GIs in blotched sweatshirts played a languid game of basketball.

They drove past a ‘Shopette’, a 24-hour laundromat, a K-Mart and a drive-in McDonald’s.

‘Makes ya proud,’ said Dryden. August grinned but the woman in fatigues bristled. Through the distant perimeter wire Dryden could see the tall pines which marked Mons Wood and the edge of Black Bank Fen.

‘We have a problem,’ said August, pulling up outside one of the dormitory blocks. ‘Lyndon Koskinski has gone AWOL.’

‘I thought he was on leave.’ Dryden got out and, deserting the air conditioning in the US-built Jeep, felt the heat from the tarmac slap him in the face. Now he knew why August had agreed to his interview request: he needed help.

‘He was. But if you live on base you have to report; daily. If you leave base you have to sign out. He’s done neither for more than a week. The police – civilian at Ely – want to talk to him about his mother’s death. More precisely about his own – reported – death. Procedure, nothing suspicious, but they want him and I ain’t got him. There is also the issue of his passport. Clearly, alterations need to be made. Red tape again, I’m afraid. He’s fought for America – nobody is going to block an application for citizenship, but he needs to make it. His current passport is invalid. And a British one would take months to issue.’

‘What would happen if he tried to leave the country?’ asked Dryden.

August adjusted the forage cap held beneath his epaulette: ‘Well, technically they’d have to refuse exit permission. But he might get through – we haven’t put a stop on the passport number. But we’ll have to if we can’t talk to him soon.’

‘Have you tried out at Black Bank?’

‘Ms Beck? She says she hasn’t seen him since her mother’s funeral.’

‘So you want me to interview the roommate. Run the story with an appeal for Lyndon to come forward and help the police clear up loose ends. Bit of a heart-sob piece. That it?’

August didn’t answer, but led the way. The block smelt of carbolic and old trainers, an oddly reminiscent aroma which made Dryden uneasy. A pilot sat on the stairs, his head between his legs, breathing deeply. A pool of sweat was spreading on the concrete step. He didn’t look up as they climbed to the top floor.

‘Exercise,’ said Dryden: ‘Why do people do it?’

August stopped in front of one of the dried-blood-red dormitory doors marked:

R145

Major Lyndon Koskinski

Capt Freeman White

Base Fire Team

August knocked smartly like he owned the place. Lyndon’s roommate was black, with grey curly hair and watery brown eyes. He was a big man, heavily built, with the manner of someone who finds it tiresome to carry around their own bones. Dryden and August sat on one bunk, White opposite. His bed was covered in several layers of newspaper in the middle of which was a jumble of oily machinery: cogs, cables and bolts. His fingers showed the grease where he’d been working.

And there was the wound. Lyndon Koskinski had said he’d been injured ejecting from their plane over Iraq. A welt about six inches long had healed on White’s skull but could still be traced from his right cheekbone up into the hairline.
The right eye was cloudy and Dryden guessed from the way he held his head to one side that it was blind.

‘Mechanic, eh?’ asked Dryden.

‘I ain’t seen Lyndon for days,’ he said, ignoring the question. His face was a smooth ebony black, polished like a banister, and impossible to date.

Dryden tried to recall the stature of the motorcyclist who had vandalized Humph’s cab. The height was right. The shoulders maybe.

‘We weren’t that close, you know…’ He spread two huge hands on his knees. ‘Guy’s got a life to lead, yeah? He wanted time. Space.’

August folded a knee flat over the other. ‘But you were in Iraq together. You had to ditch. That’s right, isn’t it?’

White glanced up at a picture pinned above Lyndon’s pillow. An F-111 on a hot white runway somewhere sandy where the tide never came in. He had a hi-tech flying helmet under his arm. White was next to him and they wore the expansive smiles people often affect just before they think they might get killed.

Dryden flipped open a notebook

‘Yeah. Lyndon was the pilot that day – I was navigating. We bailed out, got separated…’

‘How come?’ said Dryden standing and looking at the snapshots pinned to a cork board.

‘We parachuted down a few miles from each other. I got picked up right off by a field patrol. Republican Guard. I’d hit the canopy on the way out when we ejected. Made a mess of my head. I don’t remember that much about it. They was happy guys though, you know? Jumpin’. Lyndon came down over the horizon. They sent a squad of the local militia after him – took ‘em a week to find him. We both ended up in Al Rasheid. Some cell. It was grim, you can guess.’

‘So you had that in common,’ said August. ‘Eight weeks together in that cell. That was a bond. You must feel close, no?’

‘Sure,’ said White, beginning to rearrange the cogs and bolts on the newspaper. ‘Lyndon saved my life in there. Fed me, gave me his water, kept the wounds clean. I really don’t remember a lot – but I’d be dead otherwise.’ Dryden sensed he hadn’t wanted to say this, but couldn’t help himself.

‘So you owe him your life. That’s a big debt,’ said Dryden, probing.

White ignored him again. ‘Three months ago he was great, when we got back. He was going Stateside once he’d got his weight back. Then he went out to the farm – Black Bank. You know…?’ Dryden and August nodded.

‘That seemed to go OK. He was kinda pleased. He loves his grandparents. That’s dem.’ He pointed at a colour snap of Lyndon on a beach. The grandparents stood stiffly on either side. She’d been beautiful once, he looked distinguished now, but nobody touched anybody else. ‘Maggie was really pleased to see him. I went out too, a coupla times. I guess she wanted to get close.’

‘He saw a lot of them?’ asked Dryden, looking through the small barred window. A platoon of junior airmen were drilling while an orderly with a ladder was painting a white line down the side of a Nissen hut.

‘Yeah. He stayed out there – they gave him a room. Food was good, that’s what he wanted. It got him off the base. He looked great. Got a tan, this summer of yours is unreal.’

Dryden sat on the bunk beside him. ‘It’s a one-off. Even we don’t believe it. So – then Maggie died.’

‘Yeah. Then she died and, well, he kinda collapsed.’ They left the silence for him to fill. ‘He came back the next morning. Brought his stuff.’

‘Stuff?’ August leant back against the wall. Dryden appreciated the classic interview technique. Relax when things get interesting.

‘Clothes. Books. Everything he’d taken. I asked him what was up. He said Maggie had died, that everything was different. Then he shut up. Packed a kit-bag with his washing stuff and fresh clothes and went. Didn’t say goodbye, didn’t say anything.’

Dryden spoke from the window: ‘Did he leave anything valuable – anything that you knew was precious to him?’

White shook his head. Dryden was looking through the window when he saw the box. He guessed it was made from an exotic hardwood, almost ruby red, and constructed in a carved fretwork like a confessional screen.

‘That’s nice,’ said Dryden being careful not to touch it. ‘Middle Eastern?’

‘Yup. Aden, the souk – what a hole. Anyway, good for presents, I guess.’ White looked at his watch. ‘I’m due on duty, gentlemen. Flying a desk. Then physio.’ Neither Dryden nor August believed him, but they stood anyway.

Dryden thought,
There’s always one more question.
‘And you’ve not had contact with Lyndon at all – telephone, text, letter… nothing?’

‘Like I said. Nothin’. Nothin’ for days.’

‘Can I?’ said August, pointing to the bathroom.

‘Sure.’ White made himself busy collecting some papers while Dryden looked around. He waited until August pulled the chain and then he stepped in close and picked up one of the fly-wheel cogs on the bed.

‘Motorcycle?’ he asked.

White looked him in the eyes. ‘Yup.’

‘Thought so,’ said Dryden, tossing the cog into White’s hands. ‘Dangerous things. You should be careful.’

August appeared, so he grabbed White’s hand. ‘Thanks. You’ve been really helpful.’

Back in the Jeep August set out the ground rules. ‘There’s no hiding the fact Koskinski’s gone AWOL, I know that. But he deserves some sympathy too. Two months in a cell can mess up anyone’s head. Then he gets home and discovers he isn’t who he thought he was. He gets a mother twenty-seven years after he was made an orphan.’

Dryden held his hands up. ‘I hear you. No problem. I never planned to label him Most Wanted Man.’

‘You can quote White, but no name, OK? Just a friend on base. Pilot – you can say that in The Crow this week. Yup?’

Dryden felt a line had been crossed. ‘I can say what I bloody well like, when I like. But, as it happens, I won’t name him, and yes, it will be in this week’s paper. OK?’

‘I owe you a drink,’ said August, but really he owed it to himself, so they drove in silence to Mickey’s Bar.

32

The primary school at Barrowby Drove was on the wrong side of the Sixteen Foot Drain. A graceless iron bridge crossed the snot-green water. The main building was a postwar prefab which appeared to be entirely constructed of asbestos sheeting. The heat outside was ninety degrees and rising; inside, under a corrugated iron roof, it must have been higher. As soon as Dryden went through the door the heat hit him, just before the smell did.

‘Fen kids,’ he said, trying to shut his nostrils by willpower. Humph was in the cab outside baking, but at least he was pot-roast; this was cabbage and socks.

Dryden was standing in an ante-room full of pegs marked with names. He’d gone to a similar school himself on Burnt Fen, fifteen kids from six families, and he’d smelt of cabbage too. There were about thirty names here, but very few surnames. Family inter-marriage wasn’t a crime out here, it was a necessity.

Dryden peeked through a glass porthole into the single classroom. The classroom of the future, much trumpeted by the government, had missed the Fens by about eighty years. This could have been a Victorian snapshot: five rows of wooden single-unit desks with bench seats, a roll-round blackboard with triple dusters with retread felt, and a large map of the world. At least India had been removed from the Empire.

But the teacher looked thoroughly modern: Estelle Beck was at the front of the class perched precariously on the
teacher’s desk, her legs up in the lotus position. On the blackboard were some mathematical symbols Dryden didn’t dwell on. Every head in the class was down, tiny fists holding pencils in cack-handed grips.

She didn’t look much like a teacher and she certainly didn’t look like a teacher who should be at Barrowby Drove. She was wearing sports gear and an array of pencils stuck out of her hair like punk spikes.

Dryden knocked and every head turned except hers. The silence dissolved in excited whispers as Estelle beckoned him inside. By the time he got to the front the class was in a state of nearly hysterical agitation.