The Fire Baby

On the tape Andreas, his imaginary friend from Thessa-loniki, asked him the time. Humph repeated the question and gave an answer in what he understood to be elegant Greek.

Then he asked Dryden a question, a rare enough occurrence in itself. ‘Why Wilkinson’s?’

It was a processing and packaging plant for celery, one of several small-time businesses which had sprung up on the Black Fen. They employed a silent workforce several thousand strong. The big operators, like Shropshire’s outside Ely, had multi-million pound premises and a workforce recruited from agricultural colleges across Europe. To compete, places like Wilkinson’s had to cut corners. That meant cheap labour and safety regulations stretched to breaking point.

‘Illegal immigrants,’ said Dryden, reaching into his pocket and extracting two-thirds of a miniature pork pie gently dusted with fluff. Humph was steering using his elbows as he tore the cellophane off a diet sandwich. He loved diet sandwiches: hundreds of them. ‘Who says?’

Dryden was guessing. He’d recognized long ago that his interest in the people smugglers went beyond a story. Claustrophobia was one of the many things that terrified him. The thought of being entombed in a container lorry was a cliché of hell, but no less real for that.

He flipped down the sun-shade as the car turned due west on the old road by the Forty Foot Drain – a drove known with affection by the locals as the Fen Motorway. A large reflective sign shouted: 5 DEAD, 18 INJURED in the last TWO years. Dryden considered briefly the chilling horror behind those bald statistics: at least three of those killed had drowned in their cars.

The sun was setting on the razor-sharp edge of the horizon and cutting its throat as it slid out of sight. Dryden felt his spirits rise; a sure sign something was about to go horribly wrong.

To the south a farmstead stood about a mile back from the road. The only way to get to it by car was over a small private cast-iron bridge across the Forty Foot Drain. A wind pump on the roof span in the evening breeze. It was the kind of place he and Laura had talked about the last time they’d talked at all. Since then it had been four years of monologue. He’d talked for both of them as she lay in her coma. Sometimes he would imagine her part of the conversation, and when the messages started he would say the words out loud, trying to recall the exact inflection of her voice, the subtle combination of a Neapolitan childhood and a north London adolescence.

The last time they’d talked, really talked, they’d been on their favourite walk, along the bank-top by Little Ouse, past the old Victorian grain silos at Sedge Fen, then over the iron bridge to the north side and the wide desolation of Adventurer’s Fen. It had been the day before the crash in Harrimere Drain. It was their spot, the place they’d daydream about most. But there were only two houses – two pathetic brick semis built for farm workers in the 1920s. Both were criss-crossed with cracks in the brickwork, the peat beneath their flimsy foundations shrinking as the new electrical fen-land pumps sucked the moisture out of the peat below. Tiles slipped from the roof as the houses tipped forwards into the fen, the window frames twisting and splintering with the movement.

Mist that day. A swirling soup of it which opened up for half a mile and then descended like a cotton-wool blindfold. They’d stood in the solid whiteness of the day and held each other close.

‘A house,’ said Dryden. ‘We should decide. Move out of London and start a family.’ He kissed her hair but she hadn’t answered, and in the long silence a crow had called from the rooftop of one of the crumbling cottages.

He wanted to walk on, towards Adventurer’s Wood, but she pulled him back. Something was wrong. He knew it then, and he knew it now. But what? A house and a family were what they wanted, but only after: after she’d done one last series of Clyde Circus, after he’d done one more year at the News. After – the word he hated most now, after Harrimere Drain.

What did he doubt in those final hours they were together? Her love? Commitment? Whatever it was, it had disfigured that last memory, possibly for ever.

It wasn’t as if money was a barrier to fulfilling their dream. One of the many aunts from Campania who had emigrated with Laura’s parents to help run the family restaurant in north London had left her a nest-egg: £80,000. It was all they needed out on the fen. It sat in Laura’s trust account, getting fatter, and it sat there still, administered by the solicitors and her parents. None of Laura’s family had mentioned the bequest since shortly after the accident, an act of faith which signalled their belief that one day he and Laura would buy the house, start the family, and begin again.