The Fire Baby

‘Date,’ she whispered, and brushed a kiss across his cheek. He’d smelt it then, and kicked himself later for not stopping her. Not the vodka but something else, the drug sweating out through her skin.

The moon hung over the Pine Tree like a giant sunlamp. The car suited him, she thought, opening the silver-grey door and catching the sickly scent of the air freshener. Alfa Romeo? Perhaps, she told the police later, but she couldn’t be sure.

She got in the car, aware of her long legs, the tight jeans around her bum, and the tight T-shirt which tucked under her breasts. She couldn’t stop thinking about her body, and his, together. It almost happened then. In the car park in the long knife-blade shadows of the pines.

He took her hand and put it on his crotch: ‘I know a place,’ he’d said and she imagined a flat, with sophisticated lighting and a bed a mile wide. And mirrors, she thought, giggling and letting him kiss her neck.

They drove into the night along the main road, the headlights passing them leaving long dizzy, neon lines in the night air. By the time they turned down The Breach she didn’t care where they were. The stars seemed to be darting across the sky and she felt her heart racing hard, pushing against her ribs. They parked and she stumbled through the ditch grass by the moonlight, laughing as he tugged her forward, laughing as the thorns scratched her legs. And then she’d seen it for a second between the trees and she felt the grip of his fingers tearing into her wrist.

The pillbox.

Friday, 6 June

8

He’d first seen the Mollies dancing by moonlight on the water’s edge one evening soon after Laura’s accident. He’d wandered aimlessly for hours during those first weeks, trying to throw off the depression which clung to Laura’s room at The Tower like the sweet smell of lilies. The first specialists to examine his wife said the chances of her breaking out of the coma were infinitesimally small. Dryden walked in search of an answer to a question he could not dare articulate: what was to become of his life? Would it be spent in a dismal vigil beside the bed of a woman who would never speak his name again?

It was past midnight when he’d come upon them first, in the water meadows beyond the town quay. The Mollies danced, laughing, and collapsed by their narrow boat to drink and smoke. He’d written stories about them for The Crow, but had never thought of them as embodying a way of life, a style of escape, a glimpse of freedom. A largely female band of singers and dancers, their black and white costumes reflected the darker side of rural life in the Fens. They spent the winter nights preparing the muscular routines they would perform in spring and summer. To the rhythmic thud of a drum they danced, knees brought high and suspended for a beat, before descending with crack of boot on gravel or stone.

He’d sat with them that night around their fire. He’d even talked about the accident and Laura. They’d talked about the New Age, about living on the boat, about the river and its life. And he’d seen Etty’s eyes in the firelight, a forthright promise that he could have another life.

They danced now in front of the Cutter Inn, a sunbaked audience of shoppers and mums with pushchairs arranged in a dutiful, even fearful, semi-circle, with the river as a backdrop to the high-stepping Mollies.

Dryden raised his beer glass to the sun. The liquid was honey coloured and already warm. He raised it again to Humph, parked by the riverside twenty yards away. The cabbie waved a small orange juice back. Humph had a headache, a big blue headache with an Ipswich Town sweatshirt. The cabbie avoided the word hangover, as if this made it impossible for him to have one, but there was no doubt his fragile state was associated with five small bottles of Ouzo consumed during an imaginary celebration in Nicos’s taverna.

‘Mollies,’ said Dryden to himself. ‘The military wing of the Morris Men,’ and drained his pint.

Dryden listened to the rhythmic thud of the drum and thought about Maggie and his promise. There had been no news from the police – he’d checked that morning when doing the regular round of calls – and he’d left another message for Major August Sondheim at Mildenhall air base. If there was nothing by nightfall he’d have to do something dramatic, even if only to salve his conscience. A tour of the north Norfolk coast in Humph’s cab loomed.

In the meantime Dryden had time to kill and a story to stand up. He had enough to run something on Wilkinson’s celery plant and the people smugglers but it needed some padding, some colourful background to bring the story alive. The Mollies were among his best contacts. By turns anarchic, naive, streetwise and mundane, they provided a vivid view of Fen life. Once he’d got the job at The Crow he’d tapped into the knowledge they collected pursuing their unconventional lifestyle. Often asleep during the day, roaming at night, working out in the fields when they needed the money, they knew more about the real life beyond the town than a Panda car full of detectives.

The lead Molly, with a black hood and the hangman’s noose round her neck, stood, blindly watching, as the others danced. Decked out in coloured rags with black and white painted faces they paced out metrical steps to the thud of the drum. But the one with the noose was a study in black. Still death.

Mitch was taking pictures for the Express. ‘Bunch o’ dykes, if you ask me,’ he whispered in his bleak Glaswegian accent, missing his own Fen pun. Mitch was short, trim and wore his fake tam- o’-shanter with no sense of irony.

‘Shall I get ye a pint, boy?’ It was Mitch’s turn, and a rare offer.

As Dryden waited for his drink he squinted at the Fens on the far side of the river, a seemingly limitless expanse of sun-drenched water meadow stretching to a wobbling horizon. Humph had picked him up at 9.00am, armed with two egg sandwiches, and they’d polished off two Golden Weddings before hitting the library to read the papers. That just about completed his official duties on a Friday. This pace of life suited him in the week but he knew he would wake on Saturday morning burdened down with the time to spend, and no one to spend it with, except Humph. And for two days at least nothing to legitimately distract him from Laura’s bedside.

Something about the motionless girl with the black hood and the noose caught his eye. Even he jumped when she moved. Some kids in the crowd squealed as her dance began, threading its way between the rest of the Mollies who stood still, only their chests rising and falling as they fought to recover breath. It was an eerie but simple trick. The black hood, made of flimsy gauze, let the dancer see her way in the bright noon sun as she danced up to the crowd, right to their faces, her knees brought to waist height, before backing off. A youth with a red face and tattooed shoulders tried to laugh it off, but the jeer died in the silence of the little crowd as the black-hooded figure