The Fire Baby

up to date on any developments.’ ‘Plus,’ he added, putting up another print. A plastic Tesco bag with its contents, presumably, laid out in military rows on the green baize of the pool table for the picture. Torch, pre-packed sandwich, apple, two motoring magazines, a small cassette player with earphones and two bottles of mineral water. And a cheap metallic picture frame. The quality wasn’t good enough to see the subject of the photo which sat inside, slightly off-centre, with one corner folded down.

Dryden leant forward in his chair. ‘The snap?’

Newman put a third print up on the board – it was the photograph blown up. A dog, a mongrel, with a piece of rope round its neck. There was a cheap plastic water bowl at its feet. In the background was a sluggish river, mulligatawny brown, and some tropical vegetation floating by. It was an astonishingly mundane image. A childhood pet perhaps?

Someone yawned. ‘Well, it ain’t the Thames, is it?’ said a voice at the back.

‘No,’ said Newman. ‘Our guess is tropical Africa, south of the Sahara. Which narrows it down to an area about twice the size of Europe.’

‘So what do we think happened?’ asked Yarr.

Newman shrugged. ‘He was tied to the wall. Left. Tortured? His wrist was broken in the manacle. Skin very badly cut. And the pathologist says his vocal cords were in shreds.’

‘Shouting?’ said Dryden, knowing he was wrong.

‘Possibly, but the pathologist said the damage was violent. Screaming, more like,’ said Newman.

Dryden closed his eyes and tried to imagine what that would have sounded like. A human voice, shredded, echoing across Black Bank Fen. And then he tried to imagine who would have heard it.

23

As the press left Black Bank Fen in a caravan of cars Dryden checked his answerphone. There was one message: ‘Hi. It’s Gillies & Wright, solicitors. You asked to know. Someone has contacted the office with a claim to Maggie Beck’s five thousand pounds. Name… Richard G. Mere. A farm labourer from Manea. We can’t check it against the name Mrs Beck gave us until tomorrow when the will is read. Then we’ll know if it’s a genuine claim. But it looks good – I’ve dropped a copy of his letter in at The Crow. He certainly knew Mrs Beck and the farm.’

Dryden slapped the dashboard. ‘The Crow, chop, chop.’ He’d phone Estelle from the office and tell her a claim had been made. Lyndon should be told as well – after all, it was his father. And the will? Had Maggie left Black Bank to her son, or her daughter?

They led the cavalcade along The Breach and watched the rest of the press turn south towards Cambridge and London. The Capri turned north towards Ely, where the cathedral’s distant image was already buckling in the heat of the day. A cloud was so unusual that summer that when a large shadow dashed across the landscape Dryden watched its flight like a hawk. Peering up through the Capri’s windscreen his eyes filled with cobalt. ‘Blue sky,’ he said, a seagull crossing it with motionless wings. Humph pulled the cab up by the side of the road. Dryden got out and scanned the horizon. The sun was behind them but it wasn’t a cloud which had blotted it out. It was a column of smoke, rising from the fen just west of the city, and widening as it rose into a chef’s hat a mile high.

‘Jesus,’ he said. It looked like an oil painting from hell.

Dryden rang Mitch, who was still at the scene of Johnnie Roe’s murder. ‘I guess it’s a field fire. On the peat. But it’s a biggy – get as close as you can, Mitch – I want to see the burn marks on that bloody hat of yours. The pix are for The Crow on Friday – so no rush.’

Humph slung the cab off the main road and headed south along a drove made of concrete slabs; the tyres thudding over the cracks as they traced a zig-zag route around parched fields.

‘It’s the old airfield,’ said Dryden, already tasting the smoke in his mouth.

Witchford Aerodrome had been a Lancaster bomber base in the war. Dryden had done a colour piece the year before after a farmer had ploughed up the remains of a German Heinkel which had come down in a raid. It had buried itself in the soft, wet peat of the winter of 1941. Dryden had been there when they’d got the pilot out of his sticky grave. He could see now the splayed bones of one of the hands in the mud, caressed by worms.

But Witchford’s days of glory were long gone. Now the old hangars and conning tower were derelict and deserted except on Saturdays and Tuesdays, when the grass runways were used for car boot sales. The weekend sale was for general goods – white elephant and tatty; the Tuesday market for antiques or items which might be mistaken for antiques in a poor light. Entry was for ‘trade’ only – dealers, restorers, and general London or Brighton sharks. Hundreds jostling for the chance to buy 1920s china, Edwardian furniture, and First World War medals. As the cab got closer they could see the parked ranks of cars through a mirage of tumbling hot air at the base of the column of smoke. The drove road ran through a derelict section of the old perimeter fence and then across a mile of parched grass towards the runways. Heading towards them was a crowd of a couple of hundred bargain hunters pursued by the drifting, noxious cloud of straw smoke. And they were coming at quite a speed, most of them holding handkerchiefs or clothing to their mouths.

Humph pulled up and killed the engine. The silence was filled by a distinct sound Dryden knew well: panic, with crackling grass as a background motif.

Coughing, screaming, laughing and crying the crowd parted to sweep past Humph’s Capri and kept going.

Through the drifting red-brown smoke Dryden could see two fire tenders working their way towards the seat of the fire in a field beyond the car boot sale. Through the purple-red flames Dryden could make out the shape of a bright yellow combine harvester. They were death traps in hot weather, with sparks flying and enough grease and oil caked to the machinery to make sure the chaff and straw caught fire with a satisfying BOOM! The top soil had caught alight as well, a common danger that summer. The peat fields of the Black Fen were essentially a huge open fireplace waiting for a light. As Dryden watched the fire advancing traffic-light orange flames flared at the edges of the dense Brown-Windsor smoke.

The fleeing crowd re-grouped beyond the flimsy remains of the wartime perimeter fence, as if the criss-cross wiring was a magic shield against the drifting pall of smuts and dust.

Dryden grabbed a rag from the cab boot, poured the contents of a bottle of mineral water over it, covered his face and set off for the parked cars. Ten years on Fleet Street had taught him the value of on-the-spot reportage. If there was a story here he needed to go and get it. Even as he did it he knew it was an act of bravado designed, like so many, to conceal a profound level of physical cowardice. Humph had no such demons to struggle with. He sat happily watching the fire spread, munching a diet chicken sandwich.