The Fire Baby

the slip I don’t rate his chances. He has to report at Ely twice a day – 9.00am and 5.00pm. They’ll pick him up later.’

Dryden walked back to The Crow wondering where Jimmy Kabazo would go and, more to the point, what he would do next. If the death of his son had been an accident someone had been reckless in dumping the van. If the van had been deliberately dumped then the driver had effectively left them all to die. Did Jimmy know the truth? And did he know who was responsible?

When he got back to the office there was twenty minutes to the deadline so he knocked out the remand on Selby. There’d been a fire at a school on the edge of town and Garry was attempting to write the story which would be that week’s splash on the front page. His narrow forehead was furrowed while his fingers remained motionless, poised a few inches above the PC’s keyboard. Dryden wandered over and looked at what he’d written. It was a hopeless scramble of facts and bad English lashed together with doubtful punctuation.

‘Why don’t you try this…?’ said Dryden. ‘Police have launched a countywide hunt for child saboteurs after fire swept through a secondary school yesterday leaving a million-pound trail of damage.’

Garry nodded, tapping it out.

‘Then mention the school’s name in the second half of the story – that way readers don’t turn off at the start if they don’t come from Ely.’

Garry lit a cigarette, the panic which had made it impossible for him to write coherently instantly replaced by misplaced confidence. Dryden helped himself to some coffee and stood by the window looking down on Market Street. It was shadowless and shimmering mirages made the occasional late shopper appear to dance in the tumbling air. Dryden’s thoughts were just as insubstantial but dominated by images of the bright scarlet blood dripping from the crowbar Jimmy Kabazo had wielded at the City Mortuary. Dryden feared that the next time Jimmy drew blood the victim wouldn’t live to see the bandage. Paying Jimmy’s bail must have been a real quandary for the smugglers. They needed him out of police custody to make sure he didn’t talk. But once freed he would be out to avenge Emmy’s death. Dryden guessed the number one target was the skinhead driver Jimmy had described at the airfield. He was undoubtedly the tattooed yob who had sat through the stud’s appearance and was now lolling in the back of the Jag. The only real question was whether the skinhead would be Jimmy’s first victim, or his last.

36

In Dryden’s imagination a wounded Lancaster trailed black smoke behind a shattered tail, while Glenn Miller played on the Home Service. It was summer: summer 1940. The Battle of Britain. Overhead, fighter aircraft left a white cat’s cradle hanging in the blue skies. But if Dryden had actually been there in that pivotal summer he would have been too scared to do what he was doing now, which was putting his feet up on the wooden verandah rail and listening in his head to Glenn’s giddy dance numbers. Humph was in the parked cab about fifty yards away across the grassy overgrown runway. Dryden had an overwhelming urge to call him Ginger.

He’d been at Barham’s Dock supervising the cleaning of the PK 129 when he’d taken the call from August. A press conference had been set up to deal with enquiries over the fire-house fatality. ‘Is it linked to Black Bank?’ asked Dryden, knowing it must be.

‘Who knows?’ said August, and Dryden could tell he was sober. ‘We may never even know who chummy was. Anyway – one o’clock at the new press centre at the old RAF huts.’

Dryden checked his watch: 12.50pm. USAF Mildenhall lay on the far side of the wire, laid out like a giant picnic blanket. He was sitting outside Hut B: Squadron A. The sign smacked of a simpler world, a world where you could spot a swastika at 3,000 feet and Dame Vera Lynn at 100 yards. The huts had been in use since the September 11 attacks on New York. Outside the perimeter wire, they offered a convenient place for community and press liaison without testing the security on the main gates. The hut next to Dryden had been used for base staff education on water conservation. A huge poster twenty yards long shouted ‘Don’t be a waterhog!’

Dryden felt the globes of sweat forming on his forehead and turned his eyelids up to receive the ritual shower of imaginary snow flakes. He thought about his floating home awash with river water and asked himself again the pressing question: Why did someone so desperately want him to stop writing about Maggie Beck? Was it Freeman White? And if it was, why was it Freeman White? Freeman and Lyndon were close, a relationship fused during their incarceration in Al Rasheid. Was Dryden a threat to Lyndon Koskinski? Or were the attacks on Humph’s cab and PK 129 somehow linked to the murder of Johnnie Roe, or even to the people smugglers?

His brain swam, unable to compute the interlocking facets of three stories which had become fixed in a baffling embrace. Was there any way forward? He sensed that if he could find the last tape that Maggie made before her death he could begin to unravel the truth. He would visit The Tower that night, and begin his own enquiries.

When he opened his eyes it was to see a crocodile of walkers making its way across the grass runway from Gate B. Her Majesty’s Press had arrived en masse, and were being escorted by Sergeant DeWitt, August’s statuesque assistant. The bedraggled group were hot, bad-tempered and in search of a decent story. Sergeant DeWitt promised cold drinks, a buffet lunch, and best of all – alcohol.

Inside, the old hut had been turned into a mini-conference centre. Plush seats with flip-down note tables were set in rows. A generous spread of sandwiches and nibbles had been laid on a new pine table down one side of the room. A dozen bottles of wine had been provided – although Dryden noted with suspicion the usual trick: they’d been opened and then re-corked, the contents thereby being unlikely to bear any relation to the labels. On the opposite side of the room an identical table had a series of six PCs linked up to the internet with the base website permanently online: USAF Mildenhall: The US Gateway to Europe.

August had invited Inspector Andy Newman along to take questions too. Technically the base was sovereign US soil while the 120-year lease ran its course. In practice a suspicious death on a US air base had attracted the interest of the Home Office in London and the US Embassy. Discreet calls had been made to secure the cooperation of the local constabulary in clearing up the crime as quickly as possible. Newman’s first job was to settle nerves at HQ in Histon that the killing was not a terrorist act. Post-September 11 nerves amongst the top brass were still frayed.

Joey Forward, the local man for the East Anglian Daily News, played idly with his trouser zip as he considered his first question. ‘So, this body that was burnt up – like a cinder the camera man said. Nasty business. Any ideas, sergeant?’ He studied a briefing pack they’d all picked up on the way in.

‘Major. Major August Sondheim. The murder victim…’

‘Murder?’ cut in Dryden. ‘Why so sure?’

‘All windows and doors on the fire house were locked from the outside. We don’t know if the man died inside, or was dead before the fire was lit… we never will, I’m afraid. We’ll be lucky to get an ID off the dental records. Not