The Fire Baby

‘Ex most of the time,’ he said. ‘Not always.’ Lyndon walked off towards the barn to fetch the basketball and Dryden followed. Inside, out of the blinding light, something crouched in the shadows.

It was a Land Rover. Dryden knew nothing about cars except that they killed people. But this looked expensive, a 1970s gem, lovingly restored. The metal top had been taken down and the leather seats showed a lifetime’s wear. The paintwork was cream-white, the blue letters UN emblazoned on the bonnet and side doors.

Lyndon took off the dark glasses. ‘It’s a 1973 model. In great shape. I got her off a guy on the base who couldn’t afford to take her home. They’d used it for the peace keepers in Bosnia – so I left the colour. Kinda history, I guess.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ Dryden said, noting that the bonnet was still hot and the red dust of the fens lay in a film over the paintwork.

‘Yes, it is,’ said Lyndon. ‘Class. Makes a Jeep look cheap.’

Dryden changed tack. ‘I passed the memorial to the Black Bank victims. I guess they’ll have to make some changes.’

Lyndon smiled then, and flipped the Zippo open to watch the flame. ‘And I used to think, you know, that I could have died here in the crash with my folks. I used to think that would have been better. And now look – I did.’

‘But they weren’t your parents.’

‘It wasn’t my life. That’s the real point, isn’t it? If she hadn’t given me away I’d have had another life. A life that didn’t have three garages, a college education, West Point, and a cell in Al Rasheid. None of it.’

‘But what would it have had? Your other life?’

‘Her.’ He looked back towards the farmhouse. ‘But she chose differently. Which is something I have to live with.’

They walked back outside. ‘The hearse has arrived,’ he said. ‘Estelle said to say.’

Lyndon slipped his glasses into his sweatshirt pocket and held out his hand. ‘Do you have family, Dryden? Brothers, sisters?’

‘Only child,’ said Dryden.

‘Me too. I guess I always will be – despite what Maggie said. You can’t change a life with a few words, Dryden. It shouldn’t change things. I’m the same person. She’s the same person – Estelle. What does it change?’

Dryden didn’t answer, but he thought, Everything.

16

Humph dropped Dryden in Market Street and he took the steps up to the newsroom three at a time. He felt a sense of elation now that he was able to discharge his debt to Maggie Beck. The story had hung over him for ten days since her death at The Tower. And there was some real excitement at the prospect of writing what he knew would be a wonderful tale. It was childish really. He’d been a reporter for more than a decade but he still got a buzz from the job. It was like drinking lager through a straw.

Up the wooden steps and through the door marked NEWSROOM he found the Express in full flow – the deadline was an hour away at noon. Copies would be on the street at going-home time and delivered with the evening newspapers to homes in Ely and the surrounding villages. The Express’s circulation was 13,000 and as weak as a dying man’s pulse. Twenty years earlier they’d sold 25,000 – more than two copies for every household in the town.

Charlie Bracken, the news editor, looked pathetically pleased to see his chief reporter back in time. He let rip a tremendous beer-sodden burp by way of greeting.

‘You got it?’

Dryden nodded and chucked the family picture he’d got from Black Bank into the darkroom where Mitch was printing up a landscape shot of another Fen Blow for the front page.

‘Picture too,’ he told Charlie.

‘Great. It’s the splash, kid. Human interest stuff, eh?’ Charlie picked up his jacket and headed for the door. ‘Ciggies,’ he told nobody.

Dryden sat at his PC and knocked out the story in ten minutes.

By Philip Dryden

Chief Reporter

A deathbed confession by an Ely woman has rewritten the history of one of the Fen’s most famous disasters.

The crash of a US Air Force transporter on to a farmhouse at Black Bank, near Ely, in 1976 left twelve people dead and only two survivors.

Until now they were thought to be the farmer’s daughter, Maggie Beck, and a newborn child being flown home with its parents to Texas.

Ms Beck, then 16, walked out of the wreckage of the farm, where both her parents were killed, carrying the baby. She said her own two-week-old son Matty had died with the rest of her family.

But on Friday night at The Tower Hospital, Ely, Mrs Beck told close relatives, shortly before her death, that she had swapped the children.

After the crash her son was flown to the US and brought up by the parents of the US pilot who died in the crash – Major Jim Koskinski.

The boy – Lyndon Koskinski – became a pilot in the US Air Force and, having kept in touch since the 1976 crash, was visiting the Beck family home when his mother fell seriously ill with cancer.