The Fire Baby (4 page)

He thought of the girl in the picture and the look of bewildered fear in her eyes. He didn’t have much pity left, even for Laura. But he had some anger.

3

The Crow’s
offices stood on Market Street between a seed wholesalers and the old town gaol. It had a single door to the street which boasted a catflap and a flip-over plastic sign which could read ‘Open’ or ‘Closed’. Inside, the floorboards were bare and behind a single counter sat Jean,
The Crow’s
half-deaf receptionist and switchboard operator. As a front lobby it hardly compared to that of the
News
, Dryden’s one-time Fleet Street employer, which had been manned by two jobsworths in quasi-military uniforms and contained a fountain and enough seating for a planeload of waiting holidaymakers.
The Crow
had three wooden chairs, a flimsy coffee table and a pile of magazines so dog-eared they had adverts priced in pounds, shillings and pence.

The Crow.
Established 1846. Circulation 17,000 and steady. The
News
, circulation 3.6 million and rising. Dryden breezed through the door, checked his watch at 1.30pm and flipped over the sign to ‘Closed’. Ely was still a member of that sleepy band of towns where some of the shops close for lunch just in case someone wants to buy something. Besides, Thursday was early closing and most of the shopkeepers had headed home for a siesta. Jean was knitting and singing to herself a tuneless ballad. Outside, Market Street cooked in the midday heat and nobody moved. The girls in the shoe store opposite had opened all the doors to assist the air conditioning, not realizing they were asking the system to cool the whole of East Anglia before it started on the inside of the shop.

He took the wooden, uncarpeted stairs three at a time and pushed open the hardboard door at the top marked, with misplaced confidence, NEWSROOM. The room on the other side wouldn’t have qualified as a cupboard on Fleet Street. Dryden had left the
News
after Laura’s crash.
The Crow
paid the bills for his floating home and gave him plenty of time to be at Laura’s bedside. The insurance company paid for The Tower, an arrangement on which they were, at present, unable to renege. Laura’s accident had resulted in a media blitz and the story had taken up the front pages of the tabloids, on and off, for a month. At the time she had been one of the principal characters in the TV soap opera
Clyde Circus.
Her condition, once diagnosed, had kept the story going. Locked In Syndrome – or LIS – was news. Victims appeared to be in a deep coma but could, at times, be entirely conscious despite their lack of movement.

Dryden had met the onslaught of Fleet Street with resignation – after all, he’d been on their side for the best part of a decade. At every opportunity during interviews he’d dropped the name of the Mid-Anglian Mutual Insurance Company into the story, praising the way they had paid up instantly for Laura to be cared for at The Tower and for treatment by some of the world’s leading coma experts. They had little choice but to go on footing the bills. But he knew it wouldn’t last. One day, probably fairly soon, a polite letter would inform him that less expensive care would be appropriate. It was a corrosive anxiety, made real by the image of Laura lying in some forgotten ante-room in an under-funded, and over-stretched, local hospital.

But for now he needed only an income to pay his bills, to be near enough to visit Laura, and to have something else to fill his days other than the image of his wife laid out beneath a single linen sheet. The position of chief reporter on
The
Crow
, offered after a month of casual shifts, had been an admirable solution to all three problems.

The newsroom’s bay window was open to the street. Outside it was lunchtime and nothing moved. Siesta, Fen-style. Across the street the local ironmonger’s had dropped its white linen blinds. Above the shops the cathedral’s Octagon Tower loomed, while crows soared in the thermals over its hot, lead-clad wooden pinnacles.

For a city centre it was a touch on the quiet side. Dryden could hear his watch tick.

The news desk was along one wall. Charlie Bracken, the news editor, was by now in the Fenman opposite administering stress relief at £2.30 a pint. Brendan had a drinker’s nose, which was not as noticeable as it might have been, because it was embedded in the middle of a drinker’s face.

Dryden tried the coffee machine. It took a variety of foreign coins which
The Crow’s
staff collected on holiday. The editor, Septimus Henry Kew, always referred to this as a principal staff benefit. It was probably the only one. Thursday was press day, as well as early closing, so by 3.00pm the newsroom would be as full as it ever got. Three subs, the news editor, the editor and Splash, the office cat.
The Crow
had two reporters, Dryden and his junior side-kick Garry Pymoor. In the midday silence Dryden could hear Garry coming up Market Street. He’d had a bout of meningitis at the age of four and the result had been the complete loss of his sense of balance. The cure was simple, the doctors told him, and his shoes were fitted with metal ‘blakeys’ so that he could bang them on the pavement when he walked. The result was a kind of stereo sonar which allowed his ears to function properly as stabilizers. Garry thudded through the front door, plodded up the stairs and flopped into his desk.

The junior reporter made sure the editor was not behind
his smoked glass partition and lit up a cigarette. The newsroom was officially non-smoking. He flipped open his notebook. ‘What’s a Fen Blow?’ he asked, sniggering. Dryden considered the obscene answer Garry was hoping for but thought better of it. The post-adolescent junior reporter had hormones that humped each other.

‘It’s a dust storm, Garry. In dry weather the fields in the Black Fen can lose their topsoil. Dry peat is effectively weightless. If a strong wind hits during a period when there’s no crop cover a field can literally take off, and once airborne the dust cloud can travel for miles.’

Garry nodded. ‘There’s one coming. I did police calls from the magistrates’ court. They said they’d got one out on the Fens to the west, near Manea, coming east.’

‘Great. Phone Mitch. I’ve got a job that way – I’ll keep an eye out.’ Mitch was
The Crow’s
photographer. He was a miniature Scotsman with a passion for fake tam-o’-shanters. Fen Blows made good pix but poor stories. Unless they hit town the only damage they did was to farmers’ incomes, which even for a paper like
The Crow
was a minority interest given that automation, and chronically low wages, had taken thousands of farm workers out of the fields.

‘And there was more on the Beck appeal,’ added Garry.

Dryden had told no one at
The Crow
that Laura was sharing a room with Maggie Beck. He tried to keep his emotional life separate from work. In fact he tried to keep it separate from the rest of his life. But he found it hard to disguise his interest in the increasingly frantic appeals being made by the police for Estelle to return home. His promise to Maggie haunted him. Was he doing enough to track her down? Would she get back in time?

‘They’ve had nothing from the radio appeals. Police say she could be dead in twenty-four hours. Apparently they think
the daughter is away on holiday – north Norfolk coast. So they’ve contacted the tourist boards, RNLI, B&B
S
– the lot.’

‘Fine,’ said Dryden. ‘Knock out two pars for the front page. And three on the dust storm.’

‘According to someone at Black Bank – one of the farm hands – she’s travelling with some Yank.’

‘Name?’

Garry laboriously leafed through his notebook. ‘Kos-kinski. Lyndon. Apparently he’s based at Mildenhall on temporary leave or something…’

Dryden saw again the tall, willowy pilot standing by Maggie’s bed. ‘Knock it out,’ he said, and booted up his own PC. He wrote quickly and fluently in perfect, objective reportese. He had a court case about a man who stole cabbages at night and an appeal for a lost snake.

Then his phone rang: ‘Hell – oo…’ Inspector Newman’s voice always sounded as if it was ten feet away from the phone.

Dryden could hear evidence of birdsong in the background and guessed Newman had it on his PC’s Screensaver.

‘A bit more. The stud. His face. It’s on the records. Although his face wasn’t to camera most of the time. East Midlands Police have picked him up. Coupla hours ago, at his flat. Few hundred videos in the spare room – Vice Squad are checking them out now.’

Dryden scratched a note as Newman spoke. ‘Name? Charge?’

‘Can’t release. No charges yet.’

‘Local?’

‘Rushden.’

‘The girl?’

‘Says he can’t remember. Said it was all consensual. She led him on. Blah, blah.’

‘So he knew the cameras were running?’

‘Looks like it. Not surprised to see his bum in the frame, anyway.’

‘Occupation?’

‘Besides shagging? Long-distance lorry driver, apparently. Surprised he had the time. And, Dryden… Nothing sensational, OK? Just an appeal for information.’

‘Would I?’ It was one of Dryden’s favourite questions. The answer was ‘yes’.

There was a pause on the end of the line which was filled with birdsong.

‘Hold on,’ said Dryden, pulling up the PA wire online. Newman’s extra information warranted an update.

Dryden found a second take on the rare bird story which had run at 1. 16 pm: ‘Rare gull finds love on the beach’.

‘There’s an extra paragraph on your gull: “Ornithologists at Holme Nature Reserve on the north Norfolk coast made a further plea for twitchers not to descend on the remote spot after news leaked out that a rare Siberian gull had been spotted by enthusiasts late yesterday. They said that two of the birds, which normally spend the summer in northern Scandinavia, had now been sighted and appeared to be a breeding pair.” ’

‘Thanks,’ said Newman. ‘I might run out and do some crowd control.’

4

The Sacred Heart of Jesus was about as spiritual as a drive-in McDonald’s and twice as ugly. This was brutally apparent because that is exactly what it was built next to. The two shrines crouched like colonial monuments up against the main wire perimeter fence which surrounded USAF Mildenhall.

Dryden hardly ever went to church, haunted as he was by a disastrously ineffective Catholic education, but he was prepared to make an exception to keep his promise to Maggie Beck. The police appeals might not work. He needed to do something else, and he needed to do it quickly. He let Humph take five minutes picking a parking spot in the otherwise empty lot the church and drive-in shared. There was enough room to re-enact Custer’s last stand but Humph cruised for a few minutes considering his options.

‘Who’s paying for the petrol?’ snapped Dryden. Humph ostentatiously took his time parking precisely between two white lines marked RESERVED.

On the far side of the base fence a smoke-grey military DC-10 sat motionless on the tarmac. The only signs of life were its winking tail-lights and a steady plume of hot exhaust which turned the horizon into a smudgy line.

The church lacked frills. It was a red-brick 1950s statement of solid devotion to dull values. Inside, it was even worse. It was so bad, Dryden concluded, it could have been Roman Catholic. But it didn’t even have the candles and the pictures. The only vaguely spiritual presence was the almost tangible smell of furniture polish.

Major August Sondheim was sitting in the front pew smoking, an act of calculated sacrilege that was typical of him. He was tapping the ash on to a copy of the
Wall Street Journal
laid out at his feet.

August and Dryden had two meeting places: the church, or Mickey’s Bar by the other public gate to the base. The church meant August was sober and intended to stay that way until nightfall, which was a sacrifice of supreme proportions because August was a major league drunk. His CV, however, was decked with glittering prizes: degree from Stanford, West Point, Purple Heart in Korea, Pentagon in the Gulf War. Who knows when the drinking started? August was head of PR: USAF Mildenhall, with oversight of Lakenheath and Feltwell, the two other US bases which ran north on the flat, sandy, expanse of Breckland. Three air bases with the capability to destroy European civilization. An arsenal of brutal power which could be flung into a war in Europe in the time it took to press a few buttons. It was a sobering thought: unless you were August.

August didn’t look round. Sober, August could see the futility of life and the faults which made people want to live it. It didn’t make him jovial company but Dryden enjoyed the edgy intelligence which underpinned his cynicism. August drew on the cigarette and sent the nicotine coursing round a few miles of narrowing veins.

‘Well?’ There was a note of impatience, directed not at Dryden, but at the world in general. Dryden rarely wasted August’s time, which was one of the reasons the American liked him. He also admired the un-English lack of stuffiness and envied Dryden’s ability to have four drinks and go home.

Dryden had met August a year before when Fleet Street’s news desks had got hold of a story that the
US
military were stockpiling nuclear weapons on the base in case they needed
to be shipped quickly to war zones in Iraq, Afghanistan or North Korea. A couple of the quality broadsheet newspapers rang Dryden and asked him to check it out. As a reporter Dryden had always put more store in trusting his contacts than diligent research. In the long run his copy had turned out to be more accurate that way, and he delivered it quicker. In this case he had also been hampered by an inability to spot a nuclear warhead even if it had been riveted to the roof of Humph’s cab. But he could tell when someone told him a lie. He was pretty sure August was honest: before or after closing time. August might not tell him something that was true, but he liked to think he’d never tell him something false.

Dryden had killed the story. August said they’d had a shipment on the base for twenty-four hours and now they were clean. Dryden had charged the papers three days’ money for research and surveillance and £258 for a telephoto lens, the receipt for which Humph had forged after drinking two miniature bottles of Grand Marnier. Dryden had rung the papers and told them the base was clean. Only time, or a very nasty accident, would prove him wrong.