‘The girl?’
‘Says he can’t remember. Said it was all consensual. She led him on. Blah, blah.’
‘So he knew the cameras were running?’
‘Looks like it. Not surprised to see his bum in the frame, anyway.’
‘Occupation?’
‘Besides shagging? Long-distance lorry driver, apparently. Surprised he had the time. And, Dryden… Nothing sensational, OK? Just an appeal for information.’
‘Would I?’ It was one of Dryden’s favourite questions. The answer was ‘yes’.
There was a pause on the end of the line which was filled with birdsong.
‘Hold on,’ said Dryden, pulling up the PA wire online. Newman’s extra information warranted an update.
Dryden found a second take on the rare bird story which had run at 1. 16 pm: ‘Rare gull finds love on the beach’.
‘There’s an extra paragraph on your gull: “Ornithologists at Holme Nature Reserve on the north Norfolk coast made a further plea for twitchers not to descend on the remote spot after news leaked out that a rare Siberian gull had been spotted by enthusiasts late yesterday. They said that two of the birds, which normally spend the summer in northern Scandinavia, had now been sighted and appeared to be a breeding pair.” ’
‘Thanks,’ said Newman. ‘I might run out and do some crowd control.’
4
The Sacred Heart of Jesus was about as spiritual as a drive-in McDonald’s and twice as ugly. This was brutally apparent because that is exactly what it was built next to. The two shrines crouched like colonial monuments up against the main wire perimeter fence which surrounded USAF Mildenhall.
Dryden hardly ever went to church, haunted as he was by a disastrously ineffective Catholic education, but he was prepared to make an exception to keep his promise to Maggie Beck. The police appeals might not work. He needed to do something else, and he needed to do it quickly. He let Humph take five minutes picking a parking spot in the otherwise empty lot the church and drive-in shared. There was enough room to re-enact Custer’s last stand but Humph cruised for a few minutes considering his options.
‘Who’s paying for the petrol?’ snapped Dryden. Humph ostentatiously took his time parking precisely between two white lines marked RESERVED.
On the far side of the base fence a smoke-grey military DC-10 sat motionless on the tarmac. The only signs of life were its winking tail-lights and a steady plume of hot exhaust which turned the horizon into a smudgy line.
The church lacked frills. It was a red-brick 1950s statement of solid devotion to dull values. Inside, it was even worse. It was so bad, Dryden concluded, it could have been Roman Catholic. But it didn’t even have the candles and the pictures. The only vaguely spiritual presence was the almost tangible smell of furniture polish.
Major August Sondheim was sitting in the front pew smoking, an act of calculated sacrilege that was typical of him. He was tapping the ash on to a copy of the
August and Dryden had two meeting places: the church, or Mickey’s Bar by the other public gate to the base. The church meant August was sober and intended to stay that way until nightfall, which was a sacrifice of supreme proportions because August was a major league drunk. His CV, however, was decked with glittering prizes: degree from Stanford, West Point, Purple Heart in Korea, Pentagon in the Gulf War. Who knows when the drinking started? August was head of PR: USAF Mildenhall, with oversight of Lakenheath and Feltwell, the two other US bases which ran north on the flat, sandy, expanse of Breckland. Three air bases with the capability to destroy European civilization. An arsenal of brutal power which could be flung into a war in Europe in the time it took to press a few buttons. It was a sobering thought: unless you were August.
August didn’t look round. Sober, August could see the futility of life and the faults which made people want to live it. It didn’t make him jovial company but Dryden enjoyed the edgy intelligence which underpinned his cynicism. August drew on the cigarette and sent the nicotine coursing round a few miles of narrowing veins.
‘Well?’ There was a note of impatience, directed not at Dryden, but at the world in general. Dryden rarely wasted August’s time, which was one of the reasons the American liked him. He also admired the un-English lack of stuffiness and envied Dryden’s ability to have four drinks and go home.
Dryden had met August a year before when Fleet Street’s news desks had got hold of a story that the US military were stockpiling nuclear weapons on the base in case they needed to be shipped quickly to war zones in Iraq, Afghanistan or North Korea. A couple of the quality broadsheet newspapers rang Dryden and asked him to check it out. As a reporter Dryden had always put more store in trusting his contacts than diligent research. In the long run his copy had turned out to be more accurate that way, and he delivered it quicker. In this case he had also been hampered by an inability to spot a nuclear warhead even if it had been riveted to the roof of Humph’s cab. But he could tell when someone told him a lie. He was pretty sure August was honest: before or after closing time. August might not tell him something that was true, but he liked to think he’d never tell him something false.
Dryden had killed the story. August said they’d had a shipment on the base for twenty-four hours and now they were clean. Dryden had charged the papers three days’ money for research and surveillance and ?258 for a telephoto lens, the receipt for which Humph had forged after drinking two miniature bottles of Grand Marnier. Dryden had rung the papers and told them the base was clean. Only time, or a very nasty accident, would prove him wrong.
‘Well?’ said August again, lighting up a fresh Marlboro Light. He was tanned, with silver-grey hair swept back as though his days as a pilot had shaped his body for speed. The pupils in his blue eyes swam like coins in a fountain. An expensive French eau de cologne failed to mask the whiff of the ashtray and last night’s alcohol.
Dryden said: ‘I need some help. A woman’s dying. She wants to see her daughter. They lived at Black Bank Farm.’ Dryden held a compass in his head and never lost the ability to find north. ‘Over there,’ he said, pointing through the wooden panelling beneath the first station of the cross. ‘she’s on a break. A holiday. But her mother’s fading fast, faster than anyone thought. She’s going to die, August, very soon. The daughter is called Estelle Beck and she’s travelling with a family friend – a relative of some kind, I think. Lyndon Koskinski. He’s a US pilot here at Mildenhall.’
