The Fire Baby

‘He has a room. We don’t keep tabs. As I said, we owe him. He has accumulated leave and the medics wouldn’t let him back anyway. The base commander has requested an interview, as have the local police. Clearly there’s the issue of the paternity – which affects nationality. I can’t imagine it’s an insuperable problem. But who knows? Bureaucracy can kill. He needs the passport checked – that kind of thing. There’s the issue of the crime that Maggie committed. But there seems little to gain from anyone taking that any further.’

‘Grandparents been in touch?’

August flipped the coaster on the table top and siphoned up an inch of whiskey. ‘They’re anxious to talk to him. I’ve taken a call. It’s clear they don’t know about Maggie’s confession. They’ve been informed of her death.’

Dryden tried again. ‘Medical treatment, you said. Anything specific?’ August stood, indicating that it was time to change bars.

‘Claustrophobia,’ he said, and gave Dryden a genuinely happy smile. Six bourbons, thought Dryden, that’s all it takes.

26

Dryden walked to the Capri with the light steps of someone propelled by alcohol. Humph was holding his mobile, which had a text message from Inspector Andy Newman. It read simply: ‘Sardine’. Dryden told Humph to head north to the coast to West Lynn, Gifford’s Haulage Yard. The raid had been on the cards for weeks and Newman had promised Dryden the story once the police decided to go in. Code name Operation Sardine. But Dryden’s expectations were low, he’d been on similar outings which had produced a string of dull down-page stories. The idea was to catch the people smugglers with their cargo on board, but so far all they’d found had been empty containers and parked-up cabs. But now, at least, Dryden’s interest in this illicit trade had quickened. The pillbox on Black Bank Fen was at the centre of the operation, and Jimmy Kabazo was waiting for a consignment to be dropped with his son on board. And then there was the porn. Bob Sutton had discovered that the import/export of the pictures was running parallel with the people smuggling. And Bob Sutton was still out there.

They drove north in companionable silence. Humph was still sulking after the attack on his beloved cab. He’d put masking tape on the seats and the fluffy dice had been re-attached to the rear-view mirror. The cabbie had acquired a tape of Greek balalaika music from Ely Market and he played it now, aware that it would drive Dryden to despair.

Gifford’s lorry park was the size of six football pitches; acres of bleak concrete, enlivened by nearly two hundred HGV containers. A modern-day maze. A Saharan heat haze was already rising from the baking metal boxes and the smell of blistering paint was like a heady drug on the air. Dryden mistook a heavy sense of foreboding for the beginnings of a hangover.

The northern perimeter fence of Gifford’s ran beside the beach. The sea was the only thing moving in the landscape, sucking at a bank of baked mud. The coast appeared a featureless foreshore on the estuary of the Ouse, except for the plastic cartilage skull of a conger eel which stuck up like a pagan symbol from the beach and was collecting early morning flies.

Dryden, pressing his face against the diamond-weave electric fence, picked up an electric charge which made his watch run backwards for a week. Humph, sitting in the cab, was beginning a Greek conversation with Eleni. The great Romantic, thought Dryden, trapped in a 1974 Ford Capri with soiled swinging dice and surrounded by the corrosive aroma of old socks.

‘Claustrophobia,’ said Dryden out loud to nobody, kicking the wire fencing. That’s local journalism for you, he thought, unbearable excitement in exotic locations. He felt tired and drained. The black eye throbbed and made him feel bilious. The pillbox murder had shocked him far more than he had admitted, even to himself. People smugglers and porn pushers made his flesh crawl. He had no interest in meeting them and a positive fear of them trying to meet him. The newspaper cutting left on the Capri’s windscreen was a clear enough warning to leave the story of Black Bank Fen to history. He felt threatened, confused, but most of all defeated by his inability to see clearly how events were linked. But he had little doubt that they were.

Then the dogs arrived. At least that prompted a sharp emotion: fear. Three vans pulled up and half a dozen uniformed coppers spilt out. Inspector Andy Newman arrived in an unmarked police car. Unfortunately he was marked, having had ‘copper’ inscribed on his forehead at birth.

One of the uniformed PCs rolled up the backs of the three vans: Dryden counted fourteen dogs, and every one an Alsatian with a regulation string of saliva hanging from custard yellow canines. ‘Dogs,’ he said, to Newman. ‘I don’t like dogs.’

‘Who cares?’ said Newman, looking at a map upside down.