a piece of flesh left on him.’
Mike Yarr, the PA wireman, was working a piece of gristle out of his teeth, having hastily eaten a beef sandwich. He burped loudly without covering his mouth.
‘Murder then,’ he said, still working at his teeth. ‘Any link with the Black Bank killing?’
August shrugged. ‘Local CID investigating, gentlemen. Inspector Andy Newman will take your questions on that.’
There was a short but audible groan.
Newman stood and pinned a large Ordnance Survey map on the display board at the front of the conference room. Red circles marked the pillbox in Mons Wood and the fire house on the air base.
‘For any strangers who may have wandered in, we are here,’ said Newman, pointing to the old RAF huts marked outside the base’s perimeter wire. ‘Clearly, two such incidents within five miles of each other give us cause for concern, gentlemen. At the moment we will be operating two incident rooms and two enquiries – but I shall head both. I shall keep Major Sondheim’s superiors briefed at all times. If there are links, I can assure you we will not miss them.’
‘Timing on the ID?’ said Dryden.
Newman consulted some notes. ‘It has to be forty-eight hours. This is no ordinary medical examination. The inside of the fire house is essentially a crematorium. We are dealing with bones and ashes.’
‘Any clues at the site?’ said Forward.
August shot the cuffs on his uniform. ‘All I can say is that there are no fingerprints on the metallic locks. The victim was male. Lot of bridgework on the teeth, which might help with the ID. Oh – and a metallic cylinder by the body could be the core of a heavy-duty torch.’
‘Racial type?’ asked Dryden.
‘Indeterminate,’ said August, who was beginning to lose a battle with a raging thirst. He fingered a bottle of Buxton water he’d brought into the briefing. Dryden might have been imagining it but the fluid inside seemed to leave a suspicious film on the inside of the bottle.
‘Anyone missing on the base?’ asked Forward, wandering over to the food to add to a plate already resembling International Rescue’s Tracey Island.
August didn’t miss a beat. ‘No member of the base complement is unaccounted for. Nor outside civilian staff.’
Lyndon Koskinski, of course, was neither: a nice distinction.
August ploughed on before anyone could delve deeper. ‘As to timing. The last fire exercise was two weeks ago. The building was cleared then. So any time between then and now.’
Mike Yarr had been told by PA’s news desk in London to get a terrorist line on the killings. That would ensure the copy was used nationwide. ‘Clearly there are concerns about terrorist attacks, Major. Can you comment on that?’ he asked.
August sighed. ‘We are ever vigilant here at USAF…’As August began to run through a tedious prepared line on the terrorist threat Dryden stood, stacked a paper plate with individual miniature pork pies and sat before one of the PC screens. He’d pulled the cork on a bottle of red wine and poured himself a large glass. The PC was logged on to the USAF Mildenhall site. He scrolled on through the site to the official ‘Welcome’ from the President, short statements from the USAF and RAF commanders on the base, and fifteen pages of on-base sport which proved to be fifteen too many. Local baseball teams lined up for pictures. Endless league tables read like a roll-call of Middle America from the Big Rock Busters to the New Jersey Fliers. The social pages pointed up a production of
And finally ‘Noticeboard’ – a message page dominated by vital events.
B Block Stateside congrats to Jaynette and Mike on the arrival of Mike Jnr. Go Fella!
Friends of Michael J. Doherty, base medic 1975–2000 will want to know that he died peacefully in his sleep here at home in Salt Lake on June 5. A long illness bravely borne.
Then he saw it. He read it three times before shutting the PC down to think. Then he booted it back up and took a verbatim note.
This is a long shot but it’s a message for the love birds. I was really privileged to be the witness – I guess it was the uniform that made you choose me. But look – the snapshots are great, especially the ones in the white Land Rover, and I thought that maybe one day you might want to share the memory after all. So just e-mail me and I’ll send them online, if that’s OK. The guy at the register office said I should do it this way coz you’d mentioned the base. So, no names! But e-mail me if you want to remember Cromer – I always will.
Dryden called up a fresh e-mail form and hit REPLY. The PC automatically reprinted the sender’s e-mail address: jon.cummings@norfolkconstab_cromer.
He typed:
It was great to hear from you. We’d still like to keep our secret here but we’d love the pictures. Please send them to the e-mail below – it’s a friend who’s online and he’s got a color printer. And thanks for being there!
Dryden added his own hotmail address and poured himself another large glass of red wine.
He wondered how many white Land Rovers there were in the Fens and was appalled by the consequences if there was only one. He rejoined his colleagues and tried to smile at August’s bad jokes. August was smiling too, but by then the Buxton water bottle was empty.
37
If he hadn’t tried to track down Johnnie Roe’s wife he’d have never known the dog track was there. This was Thursday night out, Fen-style. The stadium was a little cauldron of
