‘Unbearable,’ he said out loud, and the heat seemed to intensify.
Eleven fifty-nine, and one minute to the news. He flipped open his mobile and rang Humph’s business number: Humphrey H. Holt, licensed mini-cabs for all occasions. Not quite all occasions. In fact, hardly any occasions at all. Humph’s cab, a battered Ford Capri, looked like it had been retrieved from a dump on the outskirts of Detroit.
Dryden’s face, normally stonily impassive, creased with pleasure as he watched the cabbie start awake and fumble for the mobile.
‘It’s me,’ he said, unnecessarily. They knew each other’s voices better than they knew their own. ‘Put the radio on. Local. Last item. I need to hear.’
They zoomed dizzily over the wavebands until Humph picked up the signal.
‘The headlines at noon on Radio Littleport…’
Dryden, for a decade one of Fleet Street’s sharpest reporters, listened with complete indifference to the usual tales of political intrigue, international violence, and lurid showbusiness before the station moved on to local items.
‘… with an entire lorryload of turnips. Meanwhile on the coast at Cromer the heatwave again brought havoc to the holiday beaches. A huge cloud of ladybirds descended on sunbathers by the pier. A spokesman for the local council’s environmental health department said the insects were breeding in huge numbers and were desperate for food. Apparently they can live quite happily on human sweat. And with that thought the time is now four minutes past twelve.’
There was a short jingle, a digital version of Fingal’s Cave. Dryden swore at it.
‘This is Radio Littleport. The Voice of The Fens. And now an important announcement from East Cambridgeshire County Police Force.’
Dryden had his reporter’s notebook ready on the window ledge. His fluid shorthand left an elegant scribble across the page. Elegant but unreadable: he was only fooling himself.
‘This is an urgent message for Estelle Beck, the only daughter of Maggie Beck of Black Bank Farm, near Ely. Please contact immediately The Tower Hospital, Ely, where your mother is gravely ill. I’ll repeat that –’
Dryden clicked off the mobile without thanking Humph. He brushed away a fly which had settled on Laura’s arm. Then he walked across the large, carpeted room and folded his six-foot-two-inch frame into a hospital chair beside the room’s only other bed. In it lay the curled, wheezing body of Maggie Beck.
‘Why now?’ he asked nobody.
There had been four radio appeals, each as urgent as the last. He hoped her daughter came soon. He had seen very few people dying but the symptoms were shockingly clear. She held both hands at her throat where they clutched a paper tissue. Her hair was matted to her skull. She seemed to draw her breath up from a pit beneath her, each one a labour which threatened to kill her. Her skin was dry and without tension – except for the single mark of a livid burn which cut across one side of her face in the shape of a corkscrew.
‘They’ll come,’ he said, hoping she’d hear.
In the oddly detached way in which he expressed almost all his emotions Dryden had come to love Maggie Beck. When his father died in the floods of ’77 Maggie, still a teenager and newly married, had moved in to look after his mother. Dryden had been eleven. Maggie had taken the spare room and helped his mother through the few weeks before the coroner’s court inquest, and then the excruciating absence of a burial. His father had been presumed drowned, swept off the bank at Welch’s Dam, and the body never found. For his mother this had been the final burden which Maggie helped her bear. The heartache of grief without a corpse to cry over. After that they combined their sorrows in often companionable silence. Maggie had her own tragedy to carry – the air crash at Black Bank which had killed her parents and her infant son. They shouldered their grief together, farmers’ wives who didn’t want to subside under the weight of their misfortunes, at least not without a fight. They’d travelled together – day trips and weekends which took them far from the memory of their lives. He’d met her many times at Burnt Fen in his mother’s kitchen, a big woman with farmyard bones as familiar and comforting as the Aga, with that corkscrew burn like a tattoo on her face.
Maggie knew she had cancer. The radiotherapy would last six weeks, the convalescence longer still. Dryden had gone out to Black Bank to see her and knew instantly that she expected to die. The specialists had suggested that it might be good therapy for Laura if she shared her room. Maggie said yes without a pause and raided her savings to afford The Tower’s substantial fees. She would spend her last months in comfort, for she had a task to complete before the cancer took her life. She wanted to tell her story. Dryden gave her a tape recorder so that each day she could spill out her tale to a silent audience. The story she wanted to tell, the one she wanted Laura to witness. And Laura, if she could hear, had a story to listen to.
Dryden had visited in those first weeks and found in her a desperate insecurity. She’d hold his hand and tell him that her life had been a failure, that she’d failed Estelle, that she’d failed Black Bank. But she still hid the heart of this failure, a secret Dryden sensed was burning her from within. And then she’d turned to him one night just a week ago, as he sat with her enjoying the breeze that came through the open windows. They’d heard the cathedral clock chime midnight and she’d taken his hand and held it with the intensity of a bullclip: ‘Promise me they’ll come,’ she’d said.
She’d been in The Tower a month and each day Estelle had visited – until now. Each day she had come to sit with her mother. But the best days for Maggie were when she brought the American. Dryden had met him twice, by Laura’s bedside. ‘Friend of the family,’ said Maggie. A pilot, tall and slightly wasted, with the drawn features of a victim. Every day they came – until this last weekend. The doctors assured them that the end was months away, if not years. Maggie had agreed to a break, to let her daughter go. Let them both go.
The moment they left, Maggie’s health had rapidly collapsed. The cancer cells had begun to multiply in her blood and she had felt the change within her, the subtle beginning of the process of death. She had to get Estelle back, she had something to tell her. About the secrets that had consumed her life.
‘Promise me you’ll find them in time,’ she said. Dryden noted the plural.
He didn’t like telling lies. ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘The police are trying; what more can I do?’
Her eyes pleaded with him, with a look which seemed, prematurely, to cross the divide between the living and the dead. ‘Then promise,’ she said. ‘And promise you’ll forgive me too.’
‘Forgive you for what?’
