The Fire Baby

The doorbell rang. She slipped on the stairs and clattered down into the hat stand. She fumbled with the latch and threw it open, knowing it was Don: two long rings and one short. It was his warning signal. To summon her from the depths of the old farmhouse. He was trying to smile, trying to hide what he felt: ‘There’s something wrong. The boy’s gone, Maggie. The boy’s gone. We have to talk to them again.’

She hated his farmer’s face then, with the cheeks nipped red by the frost.

Wednesday, 18 June

28

Dawn: the sun broke on the eastern horizon and swung a searchlight beam over the landscape. From the observation platform on which Dryden stood he looked down on the canopy of trees which seemed to cover the earth. To the east a large freshwater lake broke the sea of feathered, sunlit green; motionless except for an excited flock of flamingoes, an impossibly pink blotch on the eggshell blue water. He was the only one in the tree hide forty feet above Wicken Fen. An elephant could have ambled out of the tall rushes and drunk at the water beneath him. Exotic bird calls cut the silence which had come over the waterscape with the start of the day. Dryden felt his spirit swell at the sheer scale of the landscape below him, and the skyscape above. In spring and autumn, when dawn was later, it was a sight which brought the crowds to see the feeding: but not today. He could see the reflective flash of binoculars from some of the other hides, but he was alone in his: a sentry against a purple sky.

The grain boat was in position. The warden sat, scanning the sky. Dryden listened. Nothing. They always managed to surprise him: either early and soundless, or late and clamouring. He heard weary footsteps climbing the wooden ladder. He didn’t need to turn to know it was Andy ‘Last Case’ Newman, climbing reluctantly to their meeting, despite the promise of some on-duty birdwatching.

He got to the top and walked to the safety bar. ‘There,’ he said, pointing south. He was right. A tiny cloud, like a puff of smoke from a distant locomotive, was wheeling in towards the open water.

‘I’ve got a paper to fill,’ said Dryden. Wednesdays were tough on The Crow, with three inside news pages to fill in a circulation area as lively as Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

Newman fixed his binoculars on the distant flock. ‘I would have thought one emaciated corpse in a pillbox would do.’

‘Old news,’ said Dryden, manufacturing a yawn which turned into the real thing. He’d spent the night with Humph in the Capri and sleep had eluded him. He’d been up at dawn to check out the damage on PK 129 And he’d rung August and requested a background interview with Freeman White, Lyndon Koskinski’s fellow prisoner in Al Rasheid. He yawned again, hearing the plastic pop of the jaw joint as his muscles stretched. ‘How about confirming the ID?’

Newman dropped the glasses and gazed over the painted water. ‘Can’t do. But you know anyway, we both do. It’s got to be Johnnie Roe – mobile tea-bar owner and general low-life.’

‘Ex-wife?’

‘She only reported him missing because the cheques stopped. Johnnie had a nice house, by the way – out at Nornea on the West Fen. Vermin and cat’s pee – unusual combination, that.’

Dryden nodded. ‘You were watching the Ritz. Why?’

‘Like I said, the immigrants. We’d got most of the staging posts nailed between Felixstowe and the Midlands. A necklace, every thirty miles, like Little Chef. They picked up food, gave ’em air, and unloaded a handful for the local labour market. Then the rest went on. Or, in the case of the shipment we opened yesterday, got dumped.’

Shipment, thought Dryden, seeing the boy’s twisted arms reaching for the air. ‘Local labour market,’ he said. ‘You’d been into Wilkinson’s. Only them?’

Newman nodded to say no. ‘There were others. Same business. Itinerant labourers, high turnover. It’s perfect for them. Some of them moved on, some didn’t.’

The warden in the boat began to spread grain on the water. ‘ID on the kid in the lorry?’ Dryden tried to make the question sound as casual as possible.

Newman laughed. ‘Nobody’s talking. We haven’t got names for the ones that survived yet. But we will. The passports are fake and once they realize they’re heading back to the Channel ports, they’ll talk.’