The Fire Baby

At the foot of the silos clustered the little agricultural city which had been Sedge Fen. Storage sheds, machine shops, offices, canteens, a first-aid block and the charge hands’ tied cottages. And at the edge of the complex, beneath an elevated and dilapidated conveyor belt, the loading bays where the produce had been dumped into the railway trucks for Ely Dock, and then London. Through the gunsight Jimmy watched a rat investigate some rotting grain sacks, its long tail stiff and silvery.

He shivered, not because the cool morning air was warming, but because he knew he would use the gun today. It would be Emmy’s last revenge: the skinhead.

He’d botched his first revenge. Jimmy sobbed with the memory, the tears welling again. He thought of Emmy, and the body in the mortuary that was all that was left of Emmy, and the pain doubled him up. He clutched his arms around his chest and waited for the despair to subside.He looked around him, but the room was comfortless. Red brick stripped of plaster, the concrete base where the diesel pump had stood, and the single window through which the sun poured on to the dusty floor. It had provided him with the perfect eyrie. A lonely water pumping station, long abandoned, far enough away to avoid their perfunctory patrols, but within range. Well within range.

He pressed his forehead against the floor and spoke into the dust. ‘Cheated,’ he said.

He’d waited that first time too. By the Ritz, in the Wilkinson’s van, half a mile along the main road by an emergency telephone. He’d waited all night for Emmy with the bag, so that he’d have something to eat while they took him to the old airfield. Something for comfort. An excuse really, an excuse to see his son after nearly eighteen long months of lonely exile. And just after midnight a lorry had swung into the lay-by and the driver killed the lights. But Jimmy didn’t move. He knew the warnings the smugglers had given. That the police would run a lorry too one day, to catch the middle-men. So he waited for the driver to unload, for Johnnie Roe to appear from the Ritz. But the minutes had slipped by and nobody had come. And so the lorry had powered out, the gears crashing angrily.