The Fire Baby

Airport flotsam littered the landscape. Nissen huts from the war held hay and sugar beet and just short of Black Bank they saw their first Stars-&-Stripes, flying from a Dallas-style bungalow complete with a triple-doored garage which could have held the fleet cars of a platoon of travelling salesmen. And the Mildenhall Stadium. A dog track boasting US fast-food outlets, a bar with draught Schlitz, and popcorn stalls. Six days a week it was deserted, but its car park was big enough to take an incoming B-52 bomber.

With the sun now up, and the dust kicked airborne, they could have been anywhere west of the Mississippi. Dryden expected to see a wagon train threading its way across country surrounded by twenty thousand head of longhorn.

Black Bank Farm stood on a wide plain of Fen peat which stretched to the edge of sight. The farm’s façade had survived the air crash which had killed Maggie Beck’s family, but the stone had been burnt a deep carbon black. Foursquare, with a central doorway and Georgian windows, it faced south across a small kitchen garden. To the east end of the old house were the remains of a single pine tree, a pencil-black fossil, distorted into a twisted tapered finger. A new kitchen block stood to the west, an unadorned example of seventies utility, and beyond that a large steel-framed barn. A line of poplars grew in a natural shield at the rear of the house, protecting it against the north winds. The sash windows had perished on the night of the air crash, to be replaced with single-pane double-glazing which managed to unsettle the building’s otherwise classic proportions. Dryden felt it looked like what it was: a house with an ugly past.

Humph pulled up short of a cattle grid by a sign: ‘Black Bank Farm Ltd: Salad Crops’.

‘Bit grim,’ he said, and laughed. He really enjoyed other people’s misfortunes.

‘I’ll walk from here,’ said Dryden, throwing open the passenger-side door. Humph didn’t argue.

Dryden squinted east into the rising sun: 9.04am. The sweat popped on his forehead and he felt a rivulet of salty water begin a long journey down his back. Just inside the gate was a large granite memorial stone which listed the victims of the 1976 crash: the three UK civilians first, then the nine US citizens.

WILLIAM VINCENT BECK

CELIA MAUD BECK

MATTHEW ‘MATTY’ BECK

CAPT. JACK RIGBY

MAJOR WILLIAM H. HOROWITZ

MAJOR JIM KOSKINSKI

MARLENE MARY-JANE KOSKINSKI

CAPT. MILO FEUKSWANGER

LT RENE FEUKSWANGER

AIRMAN JOHN DWIGHT MURPHY

KYLIE PATRICIA MURPHY

JOHN MURPHY, JNR.

IN MEMORIAM, it said simply, followed by the date. Dryden fished in his pocket and found a round beach stone he’d picked up the last time he and Humph had run out to the coast. He put it on the top of the memorial and walked on.

Ahead of him he heard the engines first, and looking up from the dust saw the B-52 rise, heaving itself out of the distant haze like a swimmer breasting the pool. Its four turbines screamed and the pregnant black belly seemed to rear straight out of the fields: a nightmare crop. Dryden looked directly up as it went overhead, and saw the undercarriage enfold itself into the fuselage with a satisfying mechanical thud. It was so close he could see winking safety lights inside the undercarriage bay as they switched from red to green before the doors closed.

And then it was gone. A stream of grey fumes uncurling in the warm morning air.

He stood in the sudden silence before the front door of Black Bank Farm, which was green, varnished, and massive. Dryden looked at it from the gate of the kitchen garden and thought Dogs.

In the full litany of Dryden’s fears dogs were not in the same class as water, enclosed spaces, heights, authority, or emotional attachment. But they moved faster than all of these, and the bone-white teeth and chopped-meat gums had always held a potent power to terrify. Dogs stood, growling, in a long queue of terrifying dangers which pursued him with tenacity. But nothing he was afraid of was as frightening as looking like a coward, even to himself. This fear ruled all others and produced occasional acts of misunderstood courage which had earned him an unwarranted reputation for valour. So he pushed the gate open and walked up the path. Which is when he actually got to hear the dogs. Their claws skittered on quarry tiles on the far side of the door. Dryden knew what they were thinking. They were thinking they could smell fear, and they were right.

He knocked, praying it wouldn’t open.

But it did. Estelle Beck leant against the door jamb in US combat fatigues which Dryden guessed had cost her half a week’s salary. Her T-shirt carried a single Stars & Stripes across her bust.

She held a large Alsatian, the size of a small horse, by the collar while eating a tomato.