The woodland around the box was thin and dry and his footsteps crackled with broken twigs and dead grass. He sensed the presence of the pillbox rather than seeing it, a hard-edged blackness within the shifting shadows beneath the pines. He picked his way forward along an animal track and met a fox coming the other way. The torchlight caught the eyes and the nose, and the shiny liquid which caked its snout and teeth. At night, by a thin beam of light, there was no way Dryden could see the colours, but he knew with the sixth-sense of the born coward that the liquid was a lipstick red.
Dryden had that strange sense which signals disaster, a sense that told him this wasn’t him, padding through a deserted stretch of Fen woodland, but someone else, someone he could safely watch from his front row cinema seat, comfortingly surrounded by an audience of several hundred representatives of the real world. The fox’s retreat had unnerved him further, and he knew that if he didn’t move quickly he’d fall down.
He could see the pillbox now, one wall catching the moonlight, decorated with the Grimm fairy-tale shadows of the pine trees. He walked quickly to the wall and touched it, confronting a fear which helped allay his anxiety. He moved carefully anti-clockwise, tracing the hexagonal outline of the box, until he came to the door. The silence was oppressive now, so he rattled it loudly, the sound helping to quell the panic which was rising in his throat. The door was iron, rusted, but with a newish-looking deadlock and stood slightly ajar. He pushed it fully open and sent a beam of light into the dark space within.
There were shadows, and out of them came a figure, head down and running. Dryden, paralysed, later recalled hoping the figure would simply run through him – an insubstantial nightmare’s demon. As a result his head met his assailant’s with the kind of crack that is muffled only by two intervening layers of skin. A dagger of pure pain stabbed him in his black eye. What did he recall? An eyeball, white. A flash of ivory teeth beautifully arranged in tombstone order. Nothing more. Except the smell. It was what Dryden imagined carbolic would be, but with a bitter edge: up close and impersonal.
Then he did pass out. A curtain of cosy blackness fell before his eyes and he was no longer there to feel the fear. In the cab Humph dozed dreamlessly. But Dryden, plunged into the fetid well which was his unconsciousness, returned to his ever-present nightmare. Laura floated in the viscous blood, just beyond his outstretched hand. It was a river now, he could see that, and on one bank stood a pillbox. The blood oozed from the open wound of the gun portal.
Dryden was shouting Laura’s name when he came to with a start that seemed to stop his heart. The torch lay beside his head, illuminating the straw. Its beam slightly yellow, the battery fading. Had he been out for hours? If so, where was Humph?
He would have run from the pillbox if he could have stood up. But his overriding emotion was thirst, prompted by the taste of blood in his throat. Which is when he saw, by the torchlight, the glass. It was on the opposite wall, immediately below the rectangle of black, star-studded sky, that was the gunslit, on a shelf. It was exactly in the middle of the shelf, like a chalice left on an altar.
Dryden knew two things immediately; that the glass was polished and without fingerprints, and that it was completely empty. He needed water. It was really spooking him, that single, untouched glass. He held the torch beam on it. Sweat popped from a thousand pores in tiny globes. He was panicking now, and trying to suppress the reason why.
He knew the body was there. In the moonlight its pale form had begun to emerge, like secret writing, from the straw-lined confusion of the pillbox floor. He rolled the torch in the straw and let the light give the corpse all three dimensions. It cast a shadow now, low and lifeless across the straw, and it was the shadow of a man. And for this victim there was to be no fourth dimension: time had fled for ever.
The body wore jeans, no socks, but the torso was naked. One arm was outstretched behind the torso where it was manacled to the pillbox wall. The rest of the body was in a ball, except for the other arm which stretched out forwards along the floor, towards the shelf and the single, empty glass. The index finger was outstretched again, as in one of Michelangelo’s touching angels. The chain to the wall was taut and still appeared to be supporting part of the weight of the corpse.
Why reach out for an empty glass? Easy. It hadn’t been empty once.
Dryden stood and circled the body until his back was to the shelf. He could see the top of the head now, tucked down into the straw, and the thinning blond hair was tainted with the yellow of cigarette smoke. The fox must have eaten from a wound on the leg where the manacle had cut in. Dryden puked, gagging until he could breathe.
His head swam and he knew with certainty that he was about to pass out. The darkness came but he went into it carrying a single image: the victim’s skin. It looked unnaturally dry and parched and across the outstretched arm and the arched back it was streaked with livid patches of discoloured flesh: flesh pitted and blue like a Christmas turkey’s. He recalled, instantly, his last visit to the Ritz and the cup of coffee placed on the counter by the owner, the vacuous empty conversation, and the hand that held the cup, crossed with raised purple skin grafts.
20
The beam of light from the pillbox gunslit shone out across Black Bank Fen like the lantern beam of a landlocked lighthouse. Dryden had watched from the Capri as first the scene of crime team, and then the pathologist, had picked their way through the edge of Mons Wood towards the box. The interior now, he knew, would be bathed in the super-light of halogen lamps. The body was still in situ, awaiting the medics who sat patiently in the ambulance drawn up on The Breach, its emergency beacon pulsing silently. Humph offered him a malt whiskey and he took it thankfully. His throat was dry with fear, and his guts were still churning.
There was a sharp tap on the near-side window which made them both jump. Inspector Andy Newman’s head appeared: ‘OK. When you’re ready.’ The detective took him under the arm, partly to keep him on the narrow path marked out by the forensic team’s white flags, and partly to hold him up. ‘Just talk me through it, Philip, step by step, OK?’
It was the first time Newman had ever used his first name and he was pathetically grateful for the kindness, and at the same time aware of how visibly he must be radiating anxiety.
‘I met the fox here,’ said Dryden, and Newman gave him an old-fashioned look.
‘Mr Tod, was it? Peter Rabbit not at home?’ Their laughter drew resentful looks from the forensic team combing the woodland. Newman placed a hand on his shoulder to stem the almost hysterical escalation of good humour. ‘A fox, Philip?’
‘No. Yes. Seriously – a fox. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought it had blood on its snout.’
A man appeared at Newman’s shoulder in a head-to-foot plastic shell-suit. The policeman did the introductions with exaggerated care: ‘Dr Beaumont – Home Office pathologist – this is Philip Dryden, chief reporter on
