The Fire Baby

Dryden had been turning the microfiche for several minutes, struggling to focus on the tumbling blur of newsprint and headlines, before he finally caught sight of the picture for which he had been searching. Black and white, grainy even then, it smacked of an age when newspaper drama was still monochrome and flares were in fashion. It was from the Cambridge Evening News of 2 June 1976. A front-page picture showed a pall of smoke shrouding a distant line of poplars, while in the foreground the tail-fin of a plane stuck up from a field of wreckage. The fuselage lay twisted, melted like the cellophane from a pack of cigarettes incinerated in an ashtray. A house, clearly demolished by the impact of the falling aircraft, was blackened stone, with a few tortured beams exposed to the sky, and the single pine in the kitchen garden a narrow spear of blackened wood. A figure stood in the foreground with a clipboard, a respectful distance from what was, after all, a grave.

The caption was in the best traditions of stark news reporting: ‘The scene yesterday of the Black Bank air disaster in which 12 died.’

Dryden looked up from the microfiche as the cathedral bell tolled 4 o’clock. He had decided to refresh his memory about the crash at Black Bank Farm. Maggie Beck’s life had been unremarkable but for this tragedy, which had swept away her parents and her only son in a catastrophic accident. Dryden sensed that the torment of her dying was linked to this one traumatic event.

An ice-cream van played a version of ‘Greensleeves’ on a distant estate. Dryden’s medieval features remained immobile as he closed his eyes. His ten-year-old self had not been far away that night in 1976. He remembered the blast rocking the old farmhouse at Burnt Fen. Did he remember the orange glow in the sky and his father holding him at the open attic window? Or was it a family memory inherited? They hadn’t gone to gawp the next day with the others, but he’d saved the pictures and the newspapers until they’d been replaced by other obsessions.

He opened his eyes and went back to I June 1976.

PLANE CRASH KILLS 12.

The headline was set above the black and white picture of the scene of the crash. Below it a strap aimed at pathos: ‘Mother saves baby from flames but sees her own son die’.

Dryden turned the knob on the side of the microfiche reader and the page slid down. Most of the nationals were agreed on the main facts by the second day. The death toll put it on the front page of the broadsheets. The coverage was objective and largely avoided criticism of the US Air Force. It was thirteen years before the Berlin Wall would come down and still the height of the Cold War. The US was a trusted ally in a conflict which was, despite the absence of actual warfare, very real. None the less, the facts spoke for themselves. The Met Office at Norwich had issued warnings that night that dust storms would criss-cross the Fens. Light aircraft at Cambridge were grounded, but the tower at USAF Mildenhall let MH 336 begin its journey on schedule. In the aftermath of the crash the Civil Aviation Authority ruled, as an urgent priority, that all aircraft using the aerodrome should have filters fixed to air-intake valves.

The tabloids put the issue of blame to one side and concentrated instead on the personal tragedies of those who died. Dryden chose the Daily Mirror for an in-depth account, and had read it twice before he identified exactly what it was that was tugging at his memory. On board that night, according to the Mirror’s man on the spot, was the pilot, Captain Jack Rigby, his co-pilot and three servicemen travelling home on compassionate leave with their wives and children. One couple, Captain Jim Koskinski and his wife Marlene, were travelling with their two-week-old baby son, Lyndon. Marlene’s father had died two days earlier in a car crash in San Antonio. The USAF had a transport flight booked – carrying field equipment stored in Manila back to Texas – and they owed young Jim a favour after fifty straight bombing missions in the last months of the war in Vietnam. The transporter had limited passenger capacity, but they offered to fly the family home.

‘Koskinski,’ said Dryden, out loud. The librarian, a stunning redhead with a figure far better than any of those described in the romantic fiction section, looked up and scowled. Dryden scowled back.

‘Lyndon Koskinski,’ he said, louder still. The Becks’ family friend, the man now travelling with Estelle. The man he had to find.

Dryden discovered a half-eaten sausage roll in his jacket pocket and munched it, remembering he’d had nothing substantial since the ritual egg sandwich with Humph that morning.