The Fire Baby

Etty sniffed the tenner Dryden had given her and secreted it amongst the underclothes which surrounded her. ‘I was actually looking for some more information,’ said Dryden, sipping his own malt.

The bloke with the erection and one of the girls shuffled off towards the forward cabin, presumably to conclude unfinished business.

But Etty had sharpened up, overcoming the effects of whatever she’d been smoking. ‘About…’

‘Johnnie Roe. The people smugglers. They used to use the Ritz, but now that’s closed down. And they had people living up at the old air base at Witchford. The police are on to that too. So – unless they’ve stopped the lorries, which I doubt, they must be operating out of somewhere else. Any idea where?’

‘Why would we know…?’ It was Etty’s partner. He was thin, with sandy hair, and a pointy beard like Catweazel. He began to roll a plump spliff. When he lit it he took about a centimetre off the beard, and there was a faint smell of old-fashioned barbers in the air.

Dryden ignored him and looked at Etty. ‘There’s some new pickers out for the harvest,’ she said. ‘They arrived the day before yesterday. My guess is their papers are phoney. They get dropped off by van for the night shifts. They don’t know exactly where they’re living and their English isn’t great, but I heard them talking. There’s a lot of languages, but English is the only one they share. They call it the silos – where they’re sleeping. They’re pretty unhappy with it as far as I can gather – no shops around, no nothing.’

‘Silos?’ said Dryden.

Etty finished her malt and licked her lips. ‘A cluster of them. It has to be Sedge Fen. The old grain works.’

39

Laura’s room was silent and flooded with light. The COMPASS machine trailed a six-foot tickertape. Dryden knew, sensing the incoherent patterns, but sat by the bed and studied the letters anyway. Half-way down, still lost in the random signals, he took Laura’s hand, knowing it was for his own comfort rather than hers. When he reached the foot of the tickertape he kept his eyes down, folded the tickertape, and kissed her once.

The messages had stopped, he knew that now. He stood by the window in flat, cheerless heat and thought about what it meant for him if she had finally retreated, back into the coma which had engulfed her after the crash in Harrimere Drain. It meant that the nightmare was coming true. A lifetime spent at the foot of a hospital bed pretending to talk to a comatose figure which used to be his wife. A dialogue of self-deception he felt he could neither face nor abandon. As in all true nightmares, escape was beyond his control.

‘If you’re not there, why do I have to be?’ he asked out loud.

He waited for an answer, feeling the anger lift his pulse rate. The silence in The Tower was complete, until he heard the caretaker in the corridor outside.

It was Ravel this time, Bolero.

‘The whistler,’ said Dryden, and kissed Laura’s hand.

Out in the corridor he heard the sound of a pail of water being slopped on to a floor. Through a door he found his way on to a cast iron spiral stairway. When the door slammed behind him the light fled, leaving him blinded. Looking down through where he imagined the open metal rungs of the steps to be he sensed rather than saw the faint glow of distant, reflected light. Edging down he stumbled repeatedly on the narrow, triangular steps.

The light came from a series of four bulbs strung, like half-hearted illuminations, along fifty yards of cellar corridor. The pools of darkness between were deep and cool, the lights picking out a brutal black and white pattern of shadow along the bare brick walls. Under the far light the caretaker was working, expertly using his weight to push the mop forwards, backwards, and forwards again.

Dryden watched from the shadows. The caretaker was perhaps sixty, tall, but with a spine bent into a curve by years of labour. A minute passed and then a kettle’s whistle blew. He straightened his back, took his mop and pail and disappeared through a doorway. The whistle died. Then the music began. Bruch, the violin concerto, swelled to fill the damp air.

Under cover of the London Symphony Orchestra Dryden walked to the door and looked in. It was a sitting room of sorts. A single table, single chair, and a single bed were the only furniture. A bookcase, made of planks on bricks, filled one wall. On the other narrow, vertical, wooden tape holders. There were hundreds, possibly thousands.

‘Quite a collection,’ said Dryden, in a pause in the Bruch.