The Fire Baby (5 page)

‘Well?’ said August again, lighting up a fresh Marlboro Light. He was tanned, with silver-grey hair swept back as though his days as a pilot had shaped his body for speed. The pupils in his blue eyes swam like coins in a fountain. An expensive French eau de cologne failed to mask the whiff of the ashtray and last night’s alcohol.

Dryden said: ‘I need some help. A woman’s dying. She wants to see her daughter. They lived at Black Bank Farm.’ Dryden held a compass in his head and never lost the ability to find north. ‘Over there,’ he said, pointing through the wooden panelling beneath the first station of the cross. ‘she’s on a break. A holiday. But her mother’s fading fast, faster
than anyone thought. She’s going to die, August, very soon. The daughter is called Estelle Beck and she’s travelling with a family friend – a relative of some kind, I think. Lyndon Koskinski. He’s a US pilot here at Mildenhall.’

Dryden took a card from his shirt pocket.
Major Lyndon Koskinski. c/o PO Box 569, Mildenhall USAF.

August nodded, trying not to think about families. His wife had left him ten years earlier, but in more conventional circumstances than Dryden’s. With dreadful predictability he’d come home to their clapboard house in Georgetown to find she’d flown to Hawaii with the family accountant. She’d remembered to take two things with her, their twelve-year-old daughter and her cheque book. The girl was called April and she must be a woman now, but whenever August thought her image might pop into his mind he conjured up a glass of Bourbon instead.

August stood and stretched. ‘So there’s a story in this, is there? Deathbed plea from dying mom – that kinda thing.’

‘I guess. But she asked me to do this. There may be a story, sure. It’s not the only reason I do things. I am capable of independent action. I’m bound,’ said Dryden. It was an odd phrase, but he meant it.

They walked to the door, their shoes slapping on the cheap wooden parquet flooring. There was a table to one side with a small pile of orders of service in the middle, some books for sale, and a small box with a slit in the top for coins. August shook it and was surprised to hear money inside.

‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘People are honest round here. Gives you the creeps.’

Dryden had spotted a locked door beside a utilitarian concrete font. August looked the other way as Dryden retrieved the brass key around his neck and tried it in the lock.

‘No go,’ said Dryden, genuinely surprised as he always was not to have unlocked Laura’s secret.

‘You’re mad,’ said August, with envy.

5

Dryden had been turning the microfiche for several minutes, struggling to focus on the tumbling blur of newsprint and headlines, before he finally caught sight of the picture for which he had been searching. Black and white, grainy even then, it smacked of an age when newspaper drama was still monochrome and flares were in fashion. It was from the
Cambridge Evening News
of 2 June 1976. A front-page picture showed a pall of smoke shrouding a distant line of poplars, while in the foreground the tail-fin of a plane stuck up from a field of wreckage. The fuselage lay twisted, melted like the cellophane from a pack of cigarettes incinerated in an ashtray. A house, clearly demolished by the impact of the falling aircraft, was blackened stone, with a few tortured beams exposed to the sky, and the single pine in the kitchen garden a narrow spear of blackened wood. A figure stood in the foreground with a clipboard, a respectful distance from what was, after all, a grave.

The caption was in the best traditions of stark news reporting: ‘The scene yesterday of the Black Bank air disaster in which 12 died.’

Dryden looked up from the microfiche as the cathedral bell tolled 4 o’clock. He had decided to refresh his memory about the crash at Black Bank Farm. Maggie Beck’s life had been unremarkable but for this tragedy, which had swept away her parents and her only son in a catastrophic accident. Dryden sensed that the torment of her dying was linked to this one traumatic event.

An ice-cream van played a version of ‘Greensleeves’ on a distant estate. Dryden’s medieval features remained immobile as he closed his eyes. His ten-year-old self had not been far away that night in 1976. He remembered the blast rocking the old farmhouse at Burnt Fen. Did he remember the orange glow in the sky and his father holding him at the open attic window? Or was it a family memory inherited? They hadn’t gone to gawp the next day with the others, but he’d saved the pictures and the newspapers until they’d been replaced by other obsessions.

He opened his eyes and went back to I June 1976.

PLANE CRASH KILLS 12.

The headline was set above the black and white picture of the scene of the crash. Below it a strap aimed at pathos: ‘Mother saves baby from flames but sees her own son die’.

Dryden turned the knob on the side of the microfiche reader and the page slid down. Most of the nationals were agreed on the main facts by the second day. The death toll put it on the front page of the broadsheets. The coverage was objective and largely avoided criticism of the US Air Force. It was thirteen years before the Berlin Wall would come down and still the height of the Cold War. The US was a trusted ally in a conflict which was, despite the absence of actual warfare, very real. None the less, the facts spoke for themselves. The Met Office at Norwich had issued warnings that night that dust storms would criss-cross the Fens. Light aircraft at Cambridge were grounded, but the tower at USAF Mildenhall let MH 336 begin its journey on schedule. In the aftermath of the crash the Civil Aviation Authority ruled, as an urgent priority, that all aircraft using the aerodrome should have filters fixed to air-intake valves.

The tabloids put the issue of blame to one side and concentrated instead on the personal tragedies of those who
died. Dryden chose the
Daily Mirror
for an in-depth account, and had read it twice before he identified exactly what it was that was tugging at his memory. On board that night, according to the
Mirror’s
man on the spot, was the pilot, Captain Jack Rigby, his co-pilot and three servicemen travelling home on compassionate leave with their wives and children. One couple, Captain Jim Koskinski and his wife Marlene, were travelling with their two-week-old baby son, Lyndon. Marlene’s father had died two days earlier in a car crash in San Antonio. The USAF had a transport flight booked – carrying field equipment stored in Manila back to Texas – and they owed young Jim a favour after fifty straight bombing missions in the last months of the war in Vietnam. The transporter had limited passenger capacity, but they offered to fly the family home.

‘Koskinski,’ said Dryden, out loud. The librarian, a stunning redhead with a figure far better than any of those described in the romantic fiction section, looked up and scowled. Dryden scowled back.

‘Lyndon Koskinski,’ he said, louder still. The Becks’ family friend, the man now travelling with Estelle. The man he had to find.

Dryden discovered a half-eaten sausage roll in his jacket pocket and munched it, remembering he’d had nothing substantial since the ritual egg sandwich with Humph that morning.

Overhead he heard the familiar rumble of a transatlantic air tanker flying into Mildenhall, the air base from which the fateful flight had taken off that summer’s evening more than a quarter of a century earlier. The aerodrome had opened as an RAF base in 1934 but by the fifties the Americans had moved in in force. By the time of the Black Bank crash the base, with its outliers at Lakenheath and Feltwell, was already
the US ‘gateway to Europe’. Today, with 100,000 passengers a year and billions of gallons of fuel ferried in to support US operations in the former Yugoslavia, the Mediterranean and the Near East, it was an exotic American township of nearly 7,500 people.

The sight of a shadow dashing across the Fens as one of the giant B-52s flew in to Mildenhall was now as familiar as the turning sails of a windmill had once been. And up there, beyond the clouds and on the edge of the stratosphere, something else circled. Two airborne command centres were kept aloft in a shift pattern providing a permanent flying nerve-centre from which a putative war in Europe would be waged. From this impossibly distant metal cylinder the US would direct the death rites of a continent. By that time, Dryden comforted himself, he’d be a small pile of radioactive ashes beneath an atomized cloud of best bitter.

He dragged himself back to the night of the Black Bank air crash, trying to imagine the scene as the transatlantic flight took off that June night. He’d been up in one of the new transporters that summer, a Lockheed Starburst, on a facility trip from Lakenheath, just north of Mildenhall. Passenger space was small and cramped, the noise terrifying, the porthole view obscured by racks for kit and stores. But that night in 1976 most of the passengers on flight MH336 would have been just happy to be flying home. Marlene, though, would have been struggling with two competing emotions, grief for her father and the coming ordeal of the funeral, and her excitement and pride in showing her mother the new boy. For Jim, Vietnam behind him for at least a period of extended leave, the flight must have offered a rare opportunity to collapse into sleep, haunted perhaps, thought Dryden, by the rhythmic thud of turning helicopter rotor blades.

Dryden saw the scene as the dust storm hit the aircraft. All the servicemen would have heard the sudden change in the engine noise, the metal of the turbine blades screaming as they were shredded in the diamond-hard dust. He tried to shut out the image of the aircraft stalling, the fuselage tilting violently, nose down, into a dive, a sickening spiral fall into the black peat below. A savagely short journey, but not short enough for Marlene and Jim, joined, Dryden imagined, in a single embrace across the tiny body of their infant son Lyndon.

He re-focused on the microfiche with tired eyes. The only survivor from amongst the air passengers had been Lyndon Koskinski, aged thirteen days. Maggie Beck had found him in the rubble of the farmhouse, still secure in a travelling cradle strapped into his seat. She’d walked out of the flames with him wrapped in a USAF blanket, having seen her own child trapped, and clearly dead, in the ashes of the farmhouse. She’d saved Lyndon’s life, thought Dryden, and now he was here to see hers end.

The next day – 3 June 1976 – the
Cambridge Evening News
had a picture of Maggie Beck coming out of the mortuary at Cherry Hinton. The caption caught the horror of the moment: ‘Maggie Beck leaves the city mortuary after identifying the bodies of her parents, William and Celia Beck, and her 15-day-old son Matthew John’.

The good news came two days later. James Koskinski, Snr, and his wife Gale were shown holding their grandson at a photocall at USAF Mildenhall. They had flown the Atlantic to take custody of the child, saved from the ashes of Black Bank. ‘We have met Miss Beck and extended our thanks for her courage in saving Lyndon’s life,’ said Koskinski, according to the
Daily Telegraph.
Both tried and failed to deliver a smile for the cameras. They didn’t look
thrilled to be parents again, and certainly not a few days before the funeral of their only child Jim. They flew home with their grandson, and two coffins.

Inquests on all those killed were held on the same day.
The Crow’s
reports were the most detailed, but given the cataclysmic forces involved in the disaster the verdicts – of accidental death – were a foregone conclusion. The heat of the crash had made most post-mortem examinations on the passengers impossible and irrelevant. Dental records were required for formal identification of most victims.

President Gerald Ford sent a message of condolence which was read at the military service of remembrance at Mildenhall’s bleak, brutal, 1950s chapel on the base perimeter. All US personnel killed in the crash were flown home for burial or cremation. An official USAF inquiry cleared the pilot of any negligence but severely admonished the air traffic controllers at Mildenhall and the senior officer in command of the base. He finished his tour of duty in the UK, and then returned to a desk job in the Pentagon.

Maggie’s parents were buried at the church on Black Bank Fen. It had been their last wish, according to an interview with William Beck’s sister, Constance, shortly before the funeral.
The Crow
carried a brief report of the ceremony itself with a single-column heading: ‘Crash victims buried within sight of home’. An honour guard from USAF Mildenhall escorted the coffins to the graveside. Matthew John, known as ‘Matty’, was cremated at his mother’s request.

The Revd John Peters, team vicar for the parish of Feltwell Anchor, which embraced Black Bank, delivered a eulogy at the Becks’ funeral, fully recorded in
The Crow.
‘They were transported from here to eternity in an instant,’ he told the congregation. Dryden wondered how often Maggie Beck had relived the few seconds which had destroyed her life.

6

Dryden lowered the window of the Capri and let the breeze buffet his ear. It was evening time but the heat of the day still made the cab stink. Hot plastic, socks, and sump oil merged in an odour that Humph liked to call ‘Home’. The promise Dryden had made to Maggie Beck weighed heavily on him, but he felt he had done everything he could, short of touring the north Norfolk coast himself on the off-chance he could spot her missing daughter. In the meantime he had a job to do, which meant he had to find a decent story for the next edition of the
Ely Express, The Crow’s
downmarket tabloid sister paper.

Dryden had spent many hours that summer scanning the national papers for stories to follow up in the Fens. The so-called ‘silly season’ had struck early that year. Nobody could be bothered to make news in the heat, or even make it up. Last week
The Crow
had splashed on the drought for the sixth time in a row. From ‘It’s a scorcher!’ to ‘Mains water to be cut’ the soaring temperatures had dominated everything.

The Crow’s
meagre editorial budget did not stretch to a full set of national papers each day so Dryden spent an hour in the library every afternoon. He’d begun to spot the pattern in the first days of May. The odd paragraph here and there but, essentially, always the same story. Police raids on lorry parks on the motorways. Illegal immigrants in small, bedraggled groups. Mainly sub-Saharan West African in origin, all Francophone. They probably crossed the Med
from the North African coast to the ports of the South of France. Then north to the Channel and via container ship to Felixstowe where they could be shipped across country by lorry. Some had got out en route for the West Midlands. At night, in roadside lay-bys, welcomed by silence and fear.