The Fire Baby

Dryden felt the hairs rise on his neck. He knew immediately, but took a long second look. The last time he’d seen those eyes they’d been glazed and staring out of one of Inspector Newman’s X-rated snaps. It was the girl in the pillbox, but this version was quite different: college scarf, excited smile, and the sheepish grin that said ‘Daddy’s Girl’.

He calculated rapidly and decided Inspector Newman needed to hear first. ‘I can try to find her, Mr Sutton. Perhaps use the pic? Would that be OK?’

‘Sure, laddie. You do that. Anything comes up, ring me.’

The card said: Bob Sutton Security, The Smeeth, Wisbech. Dryden considered, not for the first time, the ability of the Fens to add a sense of mystery to English place names.

Sutton paused in the doorway letting the sunlight flood in behind him. ‘Meanwhile, I’m lookin’ too.’

Dryden wondered what Bob Sutton would do if he knew that the place to start looking for innocent Alice was under the counter at the local backstreet video shop.

10

Humph swung the Capri through the gates of The Tower and grinned as the tyres scattered the loose chippings. Dryden gave him a long-suffering look. ‘Every time? Do you have to do that every time?’ He kicked his feet out in irritation to try to find more room in the suffocating heat radiating from the cab’s labouring engine. He seemed annoyed that the standard model was not built for someone of his height. Dryden’s petulant mood was not entirely due to Humph’s idiosyncrasies. He was dreading bad news. Maggie’s life was perilously close to its end.

They parked where they always parked, about a hundred yards short of the neon-lit entrance lobby to the hospital, in a lay-by under a monkey puzzle tree. Dryden eyed the forecourt of the hospital. Most nights he delayed his visit by sitting on a wrought-iron bench on the edge of the lawn. Tonight, when he would have treasured ten minutes of solitude, there was someone there already.

Humph slipped his language tape into the deck. The imaginary Greek village was celebrating: a new taverna was opening and Nicos was looking forward to the food, a tasty platter of small delicacies. ‘Methedes,’ said Humph, spraying the dashboard with a light shower of saliva.

Dryden pushed open the cab door and noticed that a talcum of rust fell on his worn leather shoes.

He was almost past the bench when the man on it spoke. ‘Mr Dryden? Philip Dryden?’ The man stood, stepping into the pool of neon light shed by The Tower’s foyer. It was Lyndon Koskinski. Dryden felt a surge of relief that he’d managed, at least in part, to fulfil Maggie’s wishes.

Koskinski brushed down the creases on his uniform, that of a major in the US Air Force. The physique was anything but GI – there was nothing general issue about the tall wiry frame and almost complete lack of puppy-fat. He radiated a shy intelligence and a civilized reserve which made Dryden wary.

‘Hi,’ said Dryden, walking back.

The pilot’s face was handsome in the light, spare of flesh and still with a desert tan. He was bare-headed with his forage cap folded and held under one epaulette. The hair was brown-blond and longer than military regulations normally allowed: the eyes were hooded and held a permanent squint, like someone looking constantly into the glare of the sun. Dryden felt himself in the presence of a personality which habitually radiated an almost tangible sense of calm and self-possession. But Koskinski’s air of complete physical control was undermined by his hands, which fluttered awkwardly at his pockets. Dryden concluded this man liked his own company, and possibly even prized it. He felt like an emotional trespasser but pressed on, sensitive only to his own curiosity.

‘Hi, Lyndon,’ said Dryden, his tone light, insincere, and almost perfectly pitched to avoid any real emotional contact. They shook hands. Koskinski’s eyes, dimly seen beneath the heavy upper eyelids, seemed to brighten a few watts. ‘Major Sondheim got the message to me. About Maggie. We’re both back. Estelle’s up in the room.’

Dryden saw again the newspaper picture of the baby saved from the crash at Black Bank being held up by his grandparents for the Evening News’s photographer. He’d be twenty-seven now. The only survivor, with Maggie Beck, of the 1976 air crash.

Koskinski looked up at the half-moon Victorian window: ‘I phoned the base to see if I could get my treatment in the UK extended. The medics said Major Sondheim had left a message. So we came back…’

Nobody seemed in a hurry to go up to Maggie’s bedside. Dryden sat. ‘I was reading, yesterday, about the crash. The crash in ’76. She saved your life, that night. Bringing you out of the fire.’