The Fire Baby

19

Dryden sat on the roof of PK 129 long after sunset. There was no moon, but the starlight burnt through the holes punched in the night. It was the kind of sky that comets love to cross. He leant back to stare heavenwards, gently fingering the swollen skin around his black eye. But the river stank. Reduced by the heat, like a good soup, it was sixty per cent ducks’ piss with a hint of incontinent rat. The pleasure boats had fled to the moorings up-river at Ely leaving the silent waterways to slip stickily towards the sea.

Dryden lolled back in the deckchair, cradling a cup of cold black coffee, and flicked on the heavy-duty torch he’d retrieved from the tackle room. The beam cut the night like a searchlight, catching moths in a holding pattern overhead. The wind had dropped and the temperature was still in the mid-80s. A trickle of sweat slipped into his ear and gurgled like a drain. He checked his pockets: mobile phone, OS maps, notebook, binoculars, and a quarter pound of wine gums.

He picked at the damp white linen of his shirt and raised it from the skin of his chest. A tiny zephyr of breeze brought a flood of relief.

Monday night. 10.30, the pubs were still open. What did he think he was doing? One of his many vices was inertia, punctuated with sudden bouts of often ill-advised activity. He knew that such a bout was imminent. Would it help to work out why?

So far nobody had acted on the information published in the Express. He’d asked the solicitors at Gillies & Wright to leave a message on his landline if Lyndon’s father made contact. But it was still too early. The Express was delivered to most homes that evening and would be read, piecemeal, over the coming days. According to Maggie Beck’s last letter Lyndon’s father was likely to read the story. Dryden’s eyes swept the horizon. It was one of the many dramatic ironies of the Fens that it appeared to be an open landscape, when in fact it could hide so much.

Maggie’s last letter had suggested another mystery: she had planned to divulge two secrets on her deathbed. Had she died before she could say more? What remained unsaid? He knew the heart of the mystery was on Black Bank Fen and he planned to return. There was no doubt he was drawn to what he feared. He had a suspicion that water would kill him, but he lived on a boat. Even before the accident in Harrimere Drain he’d been claustrophobic. Now it was the central anxiety in his life. So two images were pulling him back to Black Bank Fen: Alice Sutton, drugged and abused in her pillbox nightmare, and the unseen hell of the smuggled people, crammed inside their black, swaying boxes. And a third. Lyndon Koskinski in his tiny, dark, breathless cell cradling the salvation that was the Zippo lighter.

So, tonight, he would visit the pillbox on Black Bank Fen.

He heard the familiar clatter of the cab’s exhaust pipe hitting the sleeping policeman on the lane which ran down to Barham’s Dock. Humph’s assaulted limousine coasted into view. He liked driving by moonlight without lights. It appealed to his sense of romance and adventure and it radically increased the admittedly slim chance that he would accidentally kill the bastard who’d run off with his wife.

Dryden pulled open the passenger door, winced again at the screech of tortured rust, and passed Humph a mug of bitumen-black coffee.

Dryden was about to close the door when he saw by the interior light track marks in the dust. Barham’s Dock was a lonely spot. Occasionally hikers walked past on the seventeen-mile path to Cambridge – otherwise traffic was restricted to migrating birds and the cows which grazed on the river bank. But this was a set of motorbike tracks in the thick moon-white dust which coated the surface of the drove.

‘Odd,’ he said out loud, and giggled inappropriately at the fear which made his skin prickle.

Humph ignored him and was silent, a subtle and contrary indication that he was prepared to talk. He turned the ignition key and the cab coughed like a camel.

‘Why?’ he said. ‘Where?’ Humph was good at questions.

‘Why? I’m haunted by a small hexagonal room,’ said Dryden. ‘Where? Black Bank Fen, follow The Breach from near the Ritz lay-by. Anything else?’

Humph saluted and flicked on the local radio, pulling the cab round in a screeching circle of grit and dust. Dryden wound down the passenger-side window. Humph never appeared to sweat in the cab, he’d noticed, but there was no missing the smell.

They hit the drove road across Black Bank Fen twenty minutes later. The Breach was unsigned, unsurfaced and deserted. They hadn’t passed another car on their entire journey. It was 10.50pm and neither had spoken, lost in worlds which were unlikely to collide.

Dryden used the torch to read the map and guided them east. Black Bank Fen lay around them like a hundred-mile stretch of the Doldrums. The occasional light of a farm cottage twinkled in the tumbling hot air like a passing round-the-world yacht. Overhead a fuel transporter heaved itself towards Mildenhall, a tiny city of lights twinkling in its loading bay as it flew overhead.

After ten minutes Dryden spotted a tall stand of pine trees which stood out, charcoal-paper black, against the sky. ‘Mons Wood,’ he said. Humph ignored him, parked up, and began to rummage among the language tapes.

Dryden guessed the pines had been planted as a windbreak after the Great War. As Humph killed the engine an owl flew from a top branch of one of the trees and failed to hoot.

As the dead engine ticked to silence Humph repeated his question. ‘Why here?’

Dryden sighed. ‘Newman has a set of pornographic pictures taken in a wartime pillbox. At night. The girl’s drugged. The pictures turned up in the Midlands in a police raid on a house used by illegal immigrants. They’re dropping groups off in the fens and finding them jobs as pickers. I talked to Etty. She’s seen lines of them crossing the countryside. Immigrants, using The Breach, crossing Black Bank Fen. I checked the map. This is the only pillbox on the fen.’

It sounded daft even to Dryden. He shrugged. ‘It’s a night out.’

Humph was asleep. Tiny snores popped like a coffee percolator. That was the great thing about Humph, he was always there for you. Right there, in his seat.

Dryden got out of the car and stood in the deafening silence that only a very large open space can produce. He recalled once as a child going early to the cinema to sit and munch sweets and the weight of anxiety which had fallen on him when the lights had momentarily failed. It was as if he could sense the space with bat-like sonar. He stood now, shivering in 80 degrees of heat, his anxieties crowding round like witnesses at an accident.

The woodland around the box was thin and dry and his footsteps crackled with broken twigs and dead grass. He sensed the presence of the pillbox rather than seeing it, a hard-edged blackness within the shifting shadows beneath the pines. He picked his way forward along an animal track and met a fox coming the other way. The torchlight caught the eyes and the nose, and the shiny liquid which caked its snout and teeth. At night, by a thin beam of light, there was no way Dryden could see the colours, but he knew with the sixth-sense of the born coward that the liquid was a lipstick red.

Dryden had that strange sense which signals disaster, a sense that told him this wasn’t him, padding through a deserted stretch of Fen woodland, but someone else, someone he could safely watch from his front row cinema seat, comfortingly surrounded by an audience of several hundred representatives of the real world. The fox’s retreat had unnerved him further, and he knew that if he didn’t move quickly he’d fall down.

He could see the pillbox now, one wall catching the moonlight, decorated with the Grimm fairy-tale shadows of the pine trees. He walked quickly to the wall and touched it, confronting a fear which helped allay his anxiety. He moved carefully anti-clockwise, tracing the hexagonal outline of the box, until he came to the door. The silence was oppressive now, so he rattled it loudly, the sound helping to quell the panic which was rising in his throat. The door was iron, rusted, but with a newish-looking deadlock and stood slightly ajar. He pushed it fully open and sent a beam of light into the dark space within.

There were shadows, and out of them came a figure, head down and running. Dryden, paralysed, later recalled hoping the figure would simply run through him – an insubstantial nightmare’s demon. As a result his head met his assailant’s with the kind of crack that is muffled only by two intervening layers of skin. A dagger of pure pain stabbed him in his black eye. What did he recall? An eyeball, white. A flash of ivory teeth beautifully arranged in tombstone order. Nothing more. Except the smell. It was what Dryden imagined carbolic would be, but with a bitter edge: up close and impersonal.

Then he did pass out. A curtain of cosy blackness fell before his eyes and he was no longer there to feel the fear. In the cab Humph dozed dreamlessly. But Dryden, plunged into the fetid well which was his unconsciousness, returned to his ever-present nightmare. Laura floated in the viscous blood, just beyond his outstretched hand. It was a river now, he could see that, and on one bank stood a pillbox. The blood oozed from the open wound of the gun portal.

Dryden was shouting Laura’s name when he came to with a start that seemed to stop his heart. The torch lay beside his head, illuminating the straw. Its beam slightly yellow, the battery fading. Had he been out for hours? If so, where was Humph?

He would have run from the pillbox if he could have stood up. But his overriding emotion was thirst, prompted by the taste of blood in his throat. Which is when he saw, by the torchlight, the glass. It was on the opposite wall, immediately below the rectangle of black, star-studded sky, that was the gunslit, on a shelf. It was exactly in the middle of the shelf, like a chalice left on an altar.

Dryden knew two things immediately; that the glass was polished and without fingerprints, and that it was completely empty. He needed water. It was really spooking him, that single, untouched glass. He held the torch beam on it. Sweat popped from a thousand pores in tiny globes. He was panicking now, and trying to suppress the reason why.

He knew the body was there. In the moonlight its pale form had begun to emerge, like secret writing, from the straw-lined confusion of the pillbox floor. He rolled the torch in the straw and let the light give the corpse all three dimensions. It cast a shadow now, low and lifeless across the straw, and it was the shadow of a man. And for this victim there was to be no fourth dimension: time had fled for ever.

The body wore jeans, no socks, but the torso was naked. One arm was outstretched behind the torso where it was manacled to the pillbox wall. The rest of the body was in a ball, except for the other arm which stretched out forwards along the floor, towards the shelf and the single, empty glass. The index finger was outstretched again, as in one of Michelangelo’s touching angels. The chain to the wall was taut and still appeared to be supporting part of the weight of the corpse.

Why reach out for an empty glass? Easy. It hadn’t been empty once.

Dryden stood and circled the body until his back was to the shelf. He could see the top of the head now, tucked down into the straw, and the thinning blond hair was tainted with the yellow of cigarette smoke. The fox must have eaten from a wound on the leg where the manacle had cut in. Dryden puked, gagging until he could breathe.

His head swam and he knew with certainty that he was about to pass out. The darkness came but he went into it carrying a single image: the victim’s skin. It looked unnaturally dry and parched and across the outstretched arm and the arched back it was streaked with livid patches of discoloured flesh: flesh pitted and blue like a Christmas turkey’s. He recalled, instantly, his last visit to the Ritz and the cup of coffee placed on the counter by the owner, the vacuous empty conversation, and the hand that held the cup, crossed with raised purple skin grafts.