The Fire Baby

Humph was Dryden’s chauffeur. There was no other way to describe it. They had shared a life of aimless motion for nearly four years since Laura’s accident. Humph had a few regular customers who paid well – early morning school runs, and late night pick-ups for club bouncers in Newmarket and Cambridge. The rest of the time he was on call for Dryden. The Crow, Dryden’s newspaper, was happy to pick up the modest bills as it made up for the fact that they appeared to have forgotten to pay their chief reporter a salary. Humph’s home life was as non-existent as Dryden’s, in his case owing to an acrimonious divorce. He had a picture of his two girls stuck on the dashboard. Dryden and Humph shared an insular view of the world, if that is possible, for the most part without sharing a word.

In the lay-by the combination of the noon sun and the exhaust pipes of fifteen heavy wagons was headily reminiscent of Athens under a smog. Amongst the lorries were two Milk Marketing Board tankers, common now on the Fen roads, converted to carry water for irrigating salad crops in the drought. The air along the roadside was a shimmering blue advert for global warming. Dryden tried a cough and produced a strangulated lead-fuelled squeak.

The Ritz T-Bar was a regular meeting place for Dryden and the crew of stragglers he counted as his ‘contacts’. He noted that Inspector Andy Newman’s car was already parked up on a grass mound at the end of the lay-by. The detective drove a clapped-out Citroën with a sticker in the window for the Welney Wildfowl Trust. Andy Newman – ‘Last Case Newman’, as he was known to his fellow officers on the force – was more interested in catching sight of a sparrowhawk than a crook. Mentally he had been on the allotment for a decade. Or in his case, in one of the hides from which he could spy on his beloved birds. He had twenty-three days to run to statutory retirement age. He wasn’t counting, but that didn’t include two days’ holiday and a doctor’s appointment.

Dryden queued for a cup of tea. The Ritz was standard issue in the mobile tea-bar world. Sugar bowl with one teaspoon and several lumps of coagulated glucose. One copy of the Sun – tied to the counter with a piece of string. A hotplate with a row of sausages sizzling in six-point harmony. And one oddity: a bird cage hung from the wooden awning in which sat a moth-eaten parrot. It was not a pretty boy.

A blackboard on the rear wall of the kitchenette read: THURSDAY’S SPECIAL – DOUBLE SAUSAGE SANDWICH 99P.

The proprietor was tall, with blond hair tinged nicotine-yellow. His conversational powers, which Dryden had tested before, were strictly limited to Premier League football, female lorry drivers and the weather in a two-mile radius of the lay-by. He kept his hands in his pockets and smoked a roll-up with the lung-pulling power of a set of doll’s house bellows. As he pushed the styrofoam cup of tea across the counter Dryden noticed the livid raised mark of a skin graft on his hand.

‘Johnnie,’ said Dryden, putting his change on the Formica top.

‘Steamin’ again,’ said Johnnie, shuffling coins between the lines of five-, ten-, twenty-, and fifty-pence pieces on the counter-top he had arranged in the long hours of boredom which came with being proprietor of the Ritz.

Dryden left it at that. He got into Newman’s car and sat pretending to sip the tea for five minutes. Newman, binoculars pressed to his face, was scanning the vast field opposite. Eventually he placed them on his lap with a sigh. ‘Herring gull,’ he said. Even his voice was tired. Knackered. Ready for retirement with the rest of him.

‘Not long now,’ said Dryden, referring to Newman’s favourite topic – retirement.

‘Nope. Not long.’

Dryden produced a single piece of white paper. It was a five-paragraph story put out by the Press Association that morning. The Crow paid for the wire service PA provided – a regular series of news stories churned out online to the terminal on the news editor’s desk. Dryden had a search mechanism on his screen which alerted him when any story came up with a headline containing the key words ‘TWITCHER(S)’, ‘BIRD(S)’, ‘RARE’ or ‘EGG(S)’.

He’d rung Newman that morning as soon as the story had appeared on the wire. It might make a paragraph in the nationals the next day, or even the local evening papers, but Dryden’s favour bought Newman the best part of a twenty-four-hour lead on his fellow enthusiasts.

‘Rare Siberian gull spotted’, ran the headline. The bird had been blown, exhausted, on to the bird reserve at Holme on the north Norfolk coast. Once the news hit the papers thousands of twitchers would descend on the spot, with enough photographic hardware to cover a Paris catwalk. This way Andy Newman got there first.