The Fire Baby

and

West Midlands Police Forces

An 0800 number and an e-mail address followed.

‘Tempted?’ said Dryden.

Kabazo tried a smile. ‘It’s not a joke.’

‘Sorry. You’re right. Any interest in the reward among the workers?’

Kabazo picked up a wooden chair effortlessly with one hand and swivelled it round so that he could straddle it. ‘Not that I hear; it’s a dull place. Nothin’ happens at all.’

‘How d’ya hear about it – about Wilkinson’s?’

‘Good news travels fast.’ He must have been joking, but it was difficult to tell.

‘Family local?’ asked Dryden, enjoying himself.

‘Some,’ said Jimmy, biting his lip.

They talked about life in the shed. The six o’clock start, the mindless work, the wages. ‘The worst thing is the windows,’ said Kabazo, meaning the lack of them. ‘The summer goes, the winter comes, we don’t know. They ship in the stuff from abroad. We just work. Always the same.’

They shook hands. ‘See you again,’ said Dryden, somehow knowing he would.

Outside, Humph was asleep in the cab. Dryden leant on the roof and ate a packet of mushrooms he’d sneaked into the glove compartment and followed that with some small but perfectly formed Scotch eggs. He chased them down with a Grand Marnier. Now he felt even better. The evening sky was a stunning bowl of rose-tinted blue. He fished around for another miniature in the glove compartment and settled on a second Grand Marnier.

About a mile away an HGV cut the landscape as it powered its way on the arrow-straight back roads towards the Midlands. Dryden imagined the dark, fetid interior of the container and wondered what, or who, was on board.

7

Dryden drank some more on the way back to Ely while Humph, enthused by the general air of gaiety, made a spirited attempt to knock a passing postman off his bike on the edge of town on the off-chance it might be his ex-wife’s lover. The cabbie wound down the window as the postman’s bike mounted the pavement and embedded itself in a hawthorn fence: ‘Bastard!’

There was deep, satisfied silence between them. ‘It wasn’t him, was it?’ said Dryden.

‘Nope,’ said Humph happily.

They parked up at The Tower. Dryden’s life was largely marked by random motion, but at the end of each day he came back to Laura. He grinned stupidly at the nurse at reception, making a half-hearted attempt to hide the effects of the alcohol, and tried not to skip to the lifts.

He walked to Laura’s bed, touched her arm briefly as he always did, and checked Maggie, who was asleep, curled in the same tortured ball as before. Then he stood over the COMPASS machine, running a finger along its cream metallic paintwork. The specialists had brought it in two months ago. It consisted of a PC and computer keyboard. On the screen was an alphabet grid.

ABCD

EFGH

IJKLMN

OPQRST

UVWXYZ

The concept was simple, and familiar to anyone with a modern remote control. A small electronic trigger was placed in Laura’s hand which she could use to navigate the grid and highlight individual letters. Clicking on a highlighted letter printed it on a tickertape which chugged out of the COMPASS.

The first problem was random erratic movements and mishits on the trigger. These distorted the printout record. The second problem was much bigger. Laura was not ‘conscious’ in any accepted understanding of the word, although she could clearly see the COMPASS screen, if only intermittently. She drifted in and out of Dryden’s world to bring an occasional message; few made sense. For Dryden this had made her recovery painfully frustrating. On one level she was ‘back’, back from the coma which had so completely enveloped her after the crash in Harrimere Drain. But her visits were swift, unannounced, and often cryptic. A long line of tickertape lay folded in a neat concertina at Dryden’s feet, ready to be deciphered.

He’d met Laura while working for the News on Fleet Street. Her father owned a north London Italian cafe, Napoli, where the regular clientele squeezed themselves down a long corridor from the cafe counter to a small room with six tables decked out in checked tablecloths. The food was simple but sublime: fresh figs, golden balls of mozzarella, piquant ragu, and pungent Parma ham, all washed down with the Vesuvio her father prized. One evening Dryden had found himself in the suburbs on a job, doorstepping a politician who’d had to resign over allegations of fraud. He’d sneaked into the Napoli while the police were inside the house taking a statement. Hurrying, he’d spilt his pasta course into his lap. Laura had helped mop up the mess in an oddly erotic dance of embarrassment. Love, as Dryden liked to recall it, at first fumble. Despite Laura’s long apprenticeship in food she had kept her figure, and avoided the fate of her plump aunts, by smelling food rather than eating it herself. While her mother helped run the business she had brought up three younger brothers, and cooked most of their meals, without adding an unnecessary pound.

So each evening Dryden tried to fill her room with the aromas of the past. It was a ritual he found deeply satisfying. Beside Laura’s bed stood a bottle of the same Vesuvio, the cork drawn and replaced. On a plate he put fresh fruit, cutting the figs to let them breathe. He poured out a glass of the wine and set it down beside her. And he lit one cigarette, a Gauloise, which he knew would remind her of their honeymoon. Then he would chat for half an hour. About his day, about Humph’s planned Greek holiday, about what he’d seen in the world outside The Tower. Then he’d tear off the tickertape, and take it out to Humph’s cab.

Tonight inspiration failed him: ‘Maggie’s dying.’ He let the silence hang, as he often did, trying not to rush and fill the gap where Laura’s voice should be. ‘You must know too. But the doctors… they say days. We’re trying to get Estelle back. Back in time, I guess. Forgive me, it’s been a distraction…’