Dryden took a card from his shirt pocket.
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
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
‘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.
