The Fire Baby

Dryden would recall afterwards the lack of panic in the rider’s movements. He folded something and put it in a zip-up pocket. Then he put on the helmet with the black visor and the single chrome line along the cranium and ambled to his motorbike. The engine was already purring, drizzling a stream of hot hair out of the double exhaust pipes: and then he was gone, visible only as the invisible centre of a dwindling red dust storm.

Humph got to the cab first. The seats had been slashed with a knife and his beloved fluffy dice snipped off. The contents of the glove-compartment bar had been swept to the floor, with a few breakages, and the picture of Humph’s daughters torn into pieces. A single knife scratch crossed the bonnet in an ugly zig-zag.

Dryden, who had stopped to finish his pint, came in second. He looked inside the Capri and decided to try for a laugh. ‘It’s the mark of Zorro,’ he said.

Did Humph have tears in his eyes? He looked at Dryden now. ‘You made me get out,’ he said, by way of accusation.

The newspaper cutting was taped to the windscreen with a single piece of masking tape. It was Dryden’s story about Maggie Beck.

19

Dryden sat on the roof of PK 129 long after sunset. There was no moon, but the starlight burnt through the holes punched in the night. It was the kind of sky that comets love to cross. He leant back to stare heavenwards, gently fingering the swollen skin around his black eye. But the river stank. Reduced by the heat, like a good soup, it was sixty per cent ducks’ piss with a hint of incontinent rat. The pleasure boats had fled to the moorings up-river at Ely leaving the silent waterways to slip stickily towards the sea.

Dryden lolled back in the deckchair, cradling a cup of cold black coffee, and flicked on the heavy-duty torch he’d retrieved from the tackle room. The beam cut the night like a searchlight, catching moths in a holding pattern overhead. The wind had dropped and the temperature was still in the mid-80s. A trickle of sweat slipped into his ear and gurgled like a drain. He checked his pockets: mobile phone, OS maps, notebook, binoculars, and a quarter pound of wine gums.

He picked at the damp white linen of his shirt and raised it from the skin of his chest. A tiny zephyr of breeze brought a flood of relief.

Monday night. 10.30, the pubs were still open. What did he think he was doing? One of his many vices was inertia, punctuated with sudden bouts of often ill-advised activity. He knew that such a bout was imminent. Would it help to work out why?

So far nobody had acted on the information published in the Express. He’d asked the solicitors at Gillies & Wright to leave a message on his landline if Lyndon’s father made contact. But it was still too early. The Express was delivered to most homes that evening and would be read, piecemeal, over the coming days. According to Maggie Beck’s last letter Lyndon’s father was likely to read the story. Dryden’s eyes swept the horizon. It was one of the many dramatic ironies of the Fens that it appeared to be an open landscape, when in fact it could hide so much.

Maggie’s last letter had suggested another mystery: she had planned to divulge two secrets on her deathbed. Had she died before she could say more? What remained unsaid? He knew the heart of the mystery was on Black Bank Fen and he planned to return. There was no doubt he was drawn to what he feared. He had a suspicion that water would kill him, but he lived on a boat. Even before the accident in Harrimere Drain he’d been claustrophobic. Now it was the central anxiety in his life. So two images were pulling him back to Black Bank Fen: Alice Sutton, drugged and abused in her pillbox nightmare, and the unseen hell of the smuggled people, crammed inside their black, swaying boxes. And a third. Lyndon Koskinski in his tiny, dark, breathless cell cradling the salvation that was the Zippo lighter.

So, tonight, he would visit the pillbox on Black Bank Fen.

He heard the familiar clatter of the cab’s exhaust pipe hitting the sleeping policeman on the lane which ran down to Barham’s Dock. Humph’s assaulted limousine coasted into view. He liked driving by moonlight without lights. It appealed to his sense of romance and adventure and it radically increased the admittedly slim chance that he would accidentally kill the bastard who’d run off with his wife.

Dryden pulled open the passenger door, winced again at the screech of tortured rust, and passed Humph a mug of bitumen-black coffee.

Dryden was about to close the door when he saw by the interior light track marks in the dust. Barham’s Dock was a lonely spot. Occasionally hikers walked past on the seventeen-mile path to Cambridge – otherwise traffic was restricted to migrating birds and the cows which grazed on the river bank. But this was a set of motorbike tracks in the thick moon-white dust which coated the surface of the drove.

‘Odd,’ he said out loud, and giggled inappropriately at the fear which made his skin prickle.