19
Dryden sat on the roof of
Dryden lolled back in the deckchair, cradling a cup of cold black coffee, and flicked on the heavy-duty torch he’d retrieved from the tackle room. The beam cut the night like a searchlight, catching moths in a holding pattern overhead. The wind had dropped and the temperature was still in the mid-80s. A trickle of sweat slipped into his ear and gurgled like a drain. He checked his pockets: mobile phone, OS maps, notebook, binoculars, and a quarter pound of wine gums.
He picked at the damp white linen of his shirt and raised it from the skin of his chest. A tiny zephyr of breeze brought a flood of relief.
Monday night. 10.30, the pubs were still open. What did he think he was doing? One of his many vices was inertia, punctuated with sudden bouts of often ill-advised activity. He knew that such a bout was imminent. Would it help to work out why?
So far nobody had acted on the information published in the
Maggie’s last letter had suggested another mystery: she had planned to divulge two secrets on her deathbed. Had she died before she could say more? What remained unsaid? He knew the heart of the mystery was on Black Bank Fen and he planned to return. There was no doubt he was drawn to what he feared. He had a suspicion that water would kill him, but he lived on a boat. Even before the accident in Harrimere Drain he’d been claustrophobic. Now it was the central anxiety in his life. So two images were pulling him back to Black Bank Fen: Alice Sutton, drugged and abused in her pillbox nightmare, and the unseen hell of the smuggled people, crammed inside their black, swaying boxes. And a third. Lyndon Koskinski in his tiny, dark, breathless cell cradling the salvation that was the Zippo lighter.
So, tonight, he would visit the pillbox on Black Bank Fen.
He heard the familiar clatter of the cab’s exhaust pipe hitting the sleeping policeman on the lane which ran down to Barham’s Dock. Humph’s assaulted limousine coasted into view. He liked driving by moonlight without lights. It appealed to his sense of romance and adventure and it radically increased the admittedly slim chance that he would accidentally kill the bastard who’d run off with his wife.
Dryden pulled open the passenger door, winced again at the screech of tortured rust, and passed Humph a mug of bitumen-black coffee.
Dryden was about to close the door when he saw by the interior light track marks in the dust. Barham’s Dock was a lonely spot. Occasionally hikers walked past on the seventeen-mile path to Cambridge – otherwise traffic was restricted to migrating birds and the cows which grazed on the river bank. But this was a set of motorbike tracks in the thick moon-white dust which coated the surface of the drove.
‘Odd,’ he said out loud, and giggled inappropriately at the fear which made his skin prickle.
Humph ignored him and was silent, a subtle and contrary indication that he was prepared to talk. He turned the ignition key and the cab coughed like a camel.
‘Why?’ he said. ‘Where?’ Humph was good at questions.
‘Why? I’m haunted by a small hexagonal room,’ said Dryden. ‘Where? Black Bank Fen, follow The Breach from near the Ritz lay-by. Anything else?’
Humph saluted and flicked on the local radio, pulling the cab round in a screeching circle of grit and dust. Dryden wound down the passenger-side window. Humph never appeared to sweat in the cab, he’d noticed, but there was no missing the smell.
They hit the drove road across Black Bank Fen twenty minutes later. The Breach was unsigned, unsurfaced and deserted. They hadn’t passed another car on their entire journey. It was 10.50pm and neither had spoken, lost in worlds which were unlikely to collide.
Dryden used the torch to read the map and guided them east. Black Bank Fen lay around them like a hundred-mile stretch of the Doldrums. The occasional light of a farm cottage twinkled in the tumbling hot air like a passing round-the-world yacht. Overhead a fuel transporter heaved itself towards Mildenhall, a tiny city of lights twinkling in its loading bay as it flew overhead.
After ten minutes Dryden spotted a tall stand of pine trees which stood out, charcoal-paper black, against the sky. ‘Mons Wood,’ he said. Humph ignored him, parked up, and began to rummage among the language tapes.
Dryden guessed the pines had been planted as a windbreak after the Great War. As Humph killed the engine an owl flew from a top branch of one of the trees and failed to hoot.
As the dead engine ticked to silence Humph repeated his question. ‘Why here?’
Dryden sighed. ‘Newman has a set of pornographic pictures taken in a wartime pillbox. At night. The girl’s drugged. The pictures turned up in the Midlands in a police raid on a house used by illegal immigrants. They’re dropping groups off in the fens and finding them jobs as pickers. I talked to Etty. She’s seen lines of them crossing the countryside. Immigrants, using The Breach, crossing Black Bank Fen. I checked the map. This is the only pillbox on the fen.’
It sounded daft even to Dryden. He shrugged. ‘It’s a night out.’
Humph was asleep. Tiny snores popped like a coffee percolator. That was the great thing about Humph, he was always there for you. Right there, in his seat.
Dryden got out of the car and stood in the deafening silence that only a very large open space can produce. He recalled once as a child going early to the cinema to sit and munch sweets and the weight of anxiety which had fallen on him when the lights had momentarily failed. It was as if he could sense the space with bat-like sonar. He stood now, shivering in 80 degrees of heat, his anxieties crowding round like witnesses at an accident.
