The Fire Baby

‘Thanks,’ he said, stuffing the paper in the glove compartment. He always seemed mildly embarrassed by what, Dryden had to admit, was a not very subtle process of police bribery. They had long since dispensed with any pretence that their relationship was anything other than cynical: Newman got the tips and Dryden got a story. It was as simple as that.

Newman retrieved a large brown envelope which had been stashed in the Citroën’s glove compartment. Dryden gingerly extracted some photographic prints from it. ‘They’re X-rated,’ said Newman, as he raised his binoculars to watch a flock of flamingoes rising from the distant waters of the Wicken Fen nature reserve.

And so they were. Twenty prints, black and white. Two bodies. One female. Her face was to the camera in a few, the eyes glazed. Dryden guessed she’d been drugged. The man’s face was crueller. A professional. A pornstar’s body. Hairless and smooth. But ugly. They were always ugly in these pictures, whatever they looked like.

She’d have been beautiful anywhere else. Blonde, bright eyes, leggy. Dryden guessed twenty – perhaps younger. The stud was older, late twenties; the cynical smile added another couple of decades. But it was the room that left Dryden uneasy. Walls, but no right angles. Bare concrete. Graffiti: layers of it, decades of it. Coats and clothes on the floor, and under that, what? Straw, perhaps.

The camera angle never changed. It was outside looking in, through a narrow horizontal slit. Night time. A peeping Tom by arrangement, looking in and recording everything.

Dryden put them back in the envelope and fished in his trouser pockets for the pear drops he’d bought that morning. He hardly ever ate a decent meal, preferring instead to graze on the crop he could harvest from his pockets. He wound the window down but it made no impression on the stifling heat. A fly head-butted the windscreen without enthusiasm.

‘It’s a pillbox,’ said Newman, lowering the binoculars and putting them carefully in a box lined with immaculate green baize.

Dryden nodded as if he knew what the detective was talking about.

‘Is that a clue?’ asked Dryden, fighting off an urge to yawn. Sometimes Dryden was aware that of the two he got the poorer bargain in their little game of bribery. Newman had to find a story at very short notice to get his tips, and sometimes the Fenland underworld failed to come up with anything even moderately exciting.

‘Not really,’ said Newman, already trying to work out if he could lose himself for a few hours driving north to Holme over lunch to get a snap of the Siberian gull. ‘There were thirty thousand built in the late thirties, forties. There’s probably ten thousand left. Most look like the one in the pictures. There’s a club – apparently – which spots them.’

Dryden imagined Newman joining up. ‘People should get out more.’

‘They did,’ said Newman, nodding at the brown envelope. ‘The pictures turned up in a house in Nottingham. A raid – illegal immigrants.’

One of the HGVs shuddered past, drowning out for a second the whine of the cars on the A14. Dryden felt one of the small bones in his ear vibrate in tune with the diesel engine.

‘Operation Ironside,’ said Newman. ‘April 1940. They thought the Germans were going to invade on the east coast. Plan was to blow up the sluices at Denver and flood the Fens. The Isle of Ely was the HQ for the region post-invasion. So they built pillboxes. About a hundred and fifty of them across the region, mostly around the edge of the island and on the old cliff-line.’

Newman handed Dryden the binoculars and pointed north across a field of dry peat soil to a windbreak of poplars.

It took Dryden a minute to find it. One of its six sides caught the sun. The narrow machine-gun slit a jet-black shadow like an ugly mouth.

‘That one?’

‘Nope. Roof’s collapsed.’

Dryden looked again through the binoculars. One side had crumbled and the roof did indeed sit at an angle on top. While pillboxes came in many guises, this he knew was the standard design. Hexagonal, single-storey, with gunslits on up to four of the sides. A door would be located to the ‘rear’ depending on the engineer’s guess as to the direction of attack. Once inside with the door locked a small group of soldiers could hold out for days, even weeks. Dryden had been inside a few in the Fens covering a variety of stories from devil worship to juvenile drug taking. Most were squalid, with ash-covered floors, and all the detritus of low-life from used syringes to discarded condoms. One had been daubed with the signs of the zodiac.

Dryden didn’t believe in ghosts or devils but some places, he felt, radiated evil. He could sense it now, even across the open fields of a summer’s day, a palpable sense of menace focused on the pillbox.

‘And there’s this,’ added Newman.

One of the prints Dryden had ignored was a blow-up of part of the wall. He’d thought it was just a duff picture but now he could see faintly stencilled letters neatly set out by a wall bracket.