The Fire Baby

And then the jailer showed his pity, smoking a single cigarette in the doorway as Lyndon tried to see out on the world. Once he saw the leaves of a cedar tree over the far wall flickering from lime green to silver grey in a breeze. And once the flag. Three green stars on a horizontal white band, a red band above, black below.

And he always made the same plea for Freeman: ‘Take him away, not me. Take him away. He needs a doctor. Look!’ And Lyndon would draw back the bandage on the forehead to reveal the purple wound, with its iridescent greenish tinge. He’d take some of the water then, and bathe away the pus and the flies.

But the jailer smoked; not cruelly, but with his back turned. There was never ever any warning of the end of the light. Just the sudden diminution of the sunburst and the rocking percussion of the iron door crashing against the jamb. And then the darkness again, and the terror of the small space he knew so well.

Tuesday, 17 June

22

Dryden held the cup of black coffee to his lips and watched the tiny tremor in his right hand translated into concentric wavelets on the surface of the liquid. He gulped the caffeine with an addict’s concentration, then picked up Humph’s flask and, tilting it, confirmed it was empty.

A surge of panic, less potent than the caffeine, made his muscles tighten. The events of the night before were still a cartoon strip of indelible, technicolour images – from the blue-spotted skin grafts on the victim’s back to the bright yellow fluorescence of the body bag in which they’d taken him away. And finally the cell in which he waited, briefly, for Newman. The cell that smelt like a cat’s tray without the comfort of the litter.

Had he slept? Humph had taken him back to PK 129 but they’d drank little bottles until dawn without speaking. Dryden rubbed his fingers in his eyes and heard the gritty squeak of dust and eyeball grating.

He looked at the ceiling and remembered where he was: church. Precisely, St Matthew’s – The Pickers’ Church on Black Bank Fen. Newman had fended off a clutch of media inquiries overnight by scheduling a press conference for 10.00am close to the site of the murder. Educated as a Catholic in a grim north London grammar school, Dryden had always found that organized religion left him with an overwhelming urge to laugh out loud. He tried it now, the echo bouncing back off the thin clapboard walls of the church.

The light inside the church was extraordinary; instead of the play of medieval shadows this was a display of sunbursts, making the charged air more substantial than the rickety church itself. The ten lancet windows on either side of the main body of the wooden ark-like nave were of plain glass, a sea green mixed with milky white. It was like sitting in a fish tank. Ten sunbeams with the concentrated energy of lasers thrust through the nave as the sun climbed into another featureless blue sky.

Despite the summer drought Dryden could still sense the damp of more than a hundred Fen winters. The smell was as cloying as a memory, and as vivid as the names in golden script above the altar. These were the vicars of the strange whitewashed wooden church on Fourth Drove, Black Bank.

St John Reginald Dawnay. M.A. Cantab. 1868–90.

Reginald Virtue May. Ph.D. Oxon. 1890–1901.

Conrad Wilton Burroughs. M.A. 1901–