The Fire Baby

22

Dryden held the cup of black coffee to his lips and watched the tiny tremor in his right hand translated into concentric wavelets on the surface of the liquid. He gulped the caffeine with an addict’s concentration, then picked up Humph’s flask and, tilting it, confirmed it was empty.

A surge of panic, less potent than the caffeine, made his muscles tighten. The events of the night before were still a cartoon strip of indelible, technicolour images – from the blue-spotted skin grafts on the victim’s back to the bright yellow fluorescence of the body bag in which they’d taken him away. And finally the cell in which he waited, briefly, for Newman. The cell that smelt like a cat’s tray without the comfort of the litter.

Had he slept? Humph had taken him back to PK 129 but they’d drank little bottles until dawn without speaking. Dryden rubbed his fingers in his eyes and heard the gritty squeak of dust and eyeball grating.

He looked at the ceiling and remembered where he was: church. Precisely, St Matthew’s – The Pickers’ Church on Black Bank Fen. Newman had fended off a clutch of media inquiries overnight by scheduling a press conference for 10.00am close to the site of the murder. Educated as a Catholic in a grim north London grammar school, Dryden had always found that organized religion left him with an overwhelming urge to laugh out loud. He tried it now, the echo bouncing back off the thin clapboard walls of the church.

The light inside the church was extraordinary; instead of the play of medieval shadows this was a display of sunbursts, making the charged air more substantial than the rickety church itself. The ten lancet windows on either side of the main body of the wooden ark-like nave were of plain glass, a sea green mixed with milky white. It was like sitting in a fish tank. Ten sunbeams with the concentrated energy of lasers thrust through the nave as the sun climbed into another featureless blue sky.

Despite the summer drought Dryden could still sense the damp of more than a hundred Fen winters. The smell was as cloying as a memory, and as vivid as the names in golden script above the altar. These were the vicars of the strange whitewashed wooden church on Fourth Drove, Black Bank.

St John Reginald Dawnay. M.A. Cantab. 1868–90.

Reginald Virtue May. Ph.D. Oxon. 1890–1901.

Conrad Wilton Burroughs. M.A. 1901–

That open ended dash said it all. For more than thirty years they’d fought to save the pickers from Methodism – and lost. They even called it ‘The Pickers’ Church’, but they still wouldn’t come. More than 2,000 of them had lived on the fen according to the census taken at the turn of the century, living along the dykes and banks in skewiff homes which creaked in the wind. Then the Great War swept the men away. Even the evangelical Methodists retreated, closing the Bethel, and falling back into the Fen towns. With peace the machines came and the Revd Conrad Burroughs melted into the past, without the time, or energy perhaps, to pause and mark the date.

The church, and its tiny bell tower, had sagged with the years into the rich peat soil. For more than eighty years the building had limped on as a machine store, estate office, and finally a community centre. A single pool table stood on the altar, a razor-blade slash exposing the chipboard beneath the sun-bleached green baize.

Dryden laughed out loud again, enjoying the atmosphere of ingrained disappointment.

Inspector Andy ‘Last Case’ Newman, arranging papers on a trestle table, looked up. ‘That’s them.’

They heard cars bumping along the drove road. Her Majesty’s Press was on parade. There was plenty of interest. Dryden had filed early morning pars for the late editions of the Fleet Street papers, and a full story for the first editions of the local evening papers in Cambridge, Norwich and Peterborough. He’d left an answerphone message for Charlie Bracken telling him he was at the press conference and would be in the office by ten. Then he’d called Mitch and told him to get some scene of crime pix at the pillbox, if he could get near.

Newman had pinned the cuttings from the nationals to a large board by the church door marked ‘Incident Room: PRESS’.

‘Pillbox Killing Baffles Police’, was Dryden’s favourite, from the Mirror. Although ‘Gruesome Pillbox Killing in Fens’, from the Daily Mail, had more lip-smacking sensationalism.

There was a small room to the left of the church doors where the local branch of Darby and Joan met. Newman’s sergeant, Peter Crabbe, was making tea. Half a dozen uniformed coppers were trooping in having spent the early hours combing the fields for evidence. A woman PC was sticking photos and maps to the main incident room board. Nobody appeared to be in a hurry.

‘You’ll miss all this excitement,’ said Dryden, smiling.

Newman was sitting on a plastic chair, tilted back, examining a swifts’ nest in the roof.

Dryden stood. Even now, as the sun began to rise above the treeline, the cotton of his shirt stuck to his back where it had touched the pew. ‘So why here? Why not use the nick in Ely? It’s a long way for the press to come.’

Newman parked an ample backside on what had been the wooden altar rail. It creaked like a door in the wind. ‘Exactly. Some peace and quiet – once I’ve got rid of you lot.’

Dryden considered this explanation more than sufficient. ‘I’m a key witness. I can haunt the place. I might even have done it.’

‘I wouldn’t push your luck. I’ve managed to get through an entire career without a miscarriage of justice. But I could just fit one in…’

The press arrived. They shuffled in like the extras from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The man from the East Anglian Daily News, Joey Forward, was the best dressed, and he had his flies open. PA’s man, Mike Yarr, appeared to have his pyjamas on under a jumper. The rest headed for the free coffee. They all knew each other, so nobody said hello, a subtle indication that there were no strangers in their sad little world.

Dryden had one more chance for a private question. ‘What about the porno shots? Is it the same pillbox?’

Newman showed his irritation by pulling at the tight collar which had helped turn his face red. ‘Too early, Dryden. Looks the same – but then most of ’em do.’

Dryden knew he was bluffing. The military code-number Newman had spotted on the pictures could be easily matched if it was the same pillbox. He kicked himself for panicking the night before and not checking the walls before he’d rushed back to the cab to phone the police.

‘Are you looking for Bob Sutton?’ He knew Sutton’s search for his daughter’s rapist must make him a leading suspect.

Newman’s patience snapped. ‘For Christ’s sake, just wait, Dryden. Patience. It’s a virtue. Look it up.’

The press pack, fired up by mugs of Nescafé, took their places. In the mid-morning heat there was indeed a whiff of something unwashed, something, Dryden noticed with satisfaction, that liked a drink. He felt a twinge of admiration for his trade.

Newman flicked open a manila folder. Someone farted loudly and the press giggled. Newman adjusted his reading glasses and wished, with an almost religious intensity, that he was in the metaphorical bird-hide of his retirement, removed to a world where communication was not only inessential, but a liability.

‘The body of a white male was found last night in a Second World War pillbox about half a mile from this church. He was manacled to the wall.’

‘We can read the papers. Tell us something we don’t know.’ It was Mike Yarr. The PA needed fresh information to wire to its customers, mainly evening newspapers with first editions which went to press before noon. But for now Yarr was gyrating a pencil in his ear. ‘Like an ID.’

‘Enquiries are continuing into the identity of the victim. We expect a positive ID this afternoon. I can tell you he appears to be between forty and fifty years of age. Now, if I may continue…’ There was some irritable shifting in chairs and some dark looks at Dryden. Most of the press pack suspected he knew more than he’d given away in his copy for the dailies – they feared being scooped again, and this time on a story they’d been sent to cover.

Newman pressed on. ‘I am prepared to release details of this man’s death but one aspect must remain under embargo until you are otherwise directed to print it. Agreed?’

This was standard procedure in murder cases. The police often withheld details in order to weed out cranks who rang up to confess to the killing. Dryden had not been told to keep anything out of his reports except his own name – and the fact that an empty glass had been found at the scene. So whatever Newman had to say it had to be something which the pathologist had found, or the scene of crime team. The rest of the press pack nodded wearily. ‘Bound to be the best bit,’ said Yarr, yawning and revealing a sliver of yellow-green cabbage caught between yellow incisors.

‘Fine,’ said Newman. ‘The cause of death is to be ascertained, but at the moment we are working on the theory that he was poisoned.’

That did it. Silence.

‘With?’ asked Dryden, surprised. The pathologist at the scene had guessed he died of thirst.

Newman flicked through some notes. ‘Samples are at the lab but the stomach contained benomyl, carbendazim, and thiophanate-methyl. Fungicidal weedkiller to you lot. But this wasn’t the garden variety. Industrial strength. Usually sold for crop spraying.’

Mike Yarr, a typical wireman, took a perfect note in 200-wpm Pitman shorthand. He weighed eight stone soaking wet and drank Guinness in buckets. His eyes were marbled like a pickled egg. ‘And he drank it, did he?’ he asked.

‘Yup,’ said Newman, still reading. ‘Which was hardly surprising, given his condition.’

‘Which was?’ asked Dryden, remembering the empty pint glass on the shelf below the pillbox window.

‘Severely dehydrated,’ said Newman. ‘The pathologist who got to him first on site reckoned he hadn’t had any fluid for at least six days. It was eighty-two degrees in the box at two o’clock this morning. In the day – a hundred and twenty, possibly more. In the pathologist’s words, the victim’s body tissue was about as moist as a Jacob’s cracker.’

‘But it didn’t kill him?’ asked Joey Forward. Joey was scratching his beer belly, his fingernails screeching on the white nylon shirt.

‘No. But it would have. I won’t go into the specific details, but let’s say it would have been a race between gagging on his own swollen tongue or drowning in his own stomach juices. His last meal had been taken even longer ago than his last drink. Two sausages with beans: pork.’

Several full english breakfasts rearranged themselves in the room. There was another fart, but this time nobody laughed.

‘When was his last drink – the poison cocktail – taken?’ It was Mike Yarr again.

‘About twenty-four hours before his body was found. Pathologist at the scene believed he would have died within an hour of drinking the poison. But in his case it would have been quite a long hour.’

‘And the body – found by a farmer it says ’ere,’ said Yarr, now ostentatiously reading a copy of the Mail. ‘No name given here.’

‘Those details we are withholding – for the time being – while investigations continue.’

The press corps examined Dryden, and he examined a wine gum he’d found in his pocket.

‘Further points of interest – and you can use all this, gentlemen. The victim was naked above the waist but fragments of clothes were found amongst ashes in the pillbox.’

‘What kinda clothes?’ said Forward.

‘White linen. With traces of animal fat. Tomato ketchup.’

‘Suggesting?’ said Yarr.

‘Anything you like. Now. There was also a lot of loose change on the floor, more than a tenner’s worth in coppers and silver.’

Newman pinned a black and white photograph to the incident room board. It showed a narrow-bladed seven-inch knife sticking horizontally out of a wooden door jamb. The hilt was gilded and decorated with raised, geometrical patterns.

‘And this. No traces of blood and no knife wounds on the victim. The designs are Arabic.’

‘Fingerprints?’ said a voice from the back.

Newman thought for a second. ‘Yes. Partial prints. We’re putting them through the computer now. I’ll keep you up to date on any developments.’ ‘Plus,’ he added, putting up another print. A plastic Tesco bag with its contents, presumably, laid out in military rows on the green baize of the pool table for the picture. Torch, pre-packed sandwich, apple, two motoring magazines, a small cassette player with earphones and two bottles of mineral water. And a cheap metallic picture frame. The quality wasn’t good enough to see the subject of the photo which sat inside, slightly off-centre, with one corner folded down.

Dryden leant forward in his chair. ‘The snap?’

Newman put a third print up on the board – it was the photograph blown up. A dog, a mongrel, with a piece of rope round its neck. There was a cheap plastic water bowl at its feet. In the background was a sluggish river, mulligatawny brown, and some tropical vegetation floating by. It was an astonishingly mundane image. A childhood pet perhaps?

Someone yawned. ‘Well, it ain’t the Thames, is it?’ said a voice at the back.

‘No,’ said Newman. ‘Our guess is tropical Africa, south of the Sahara. Which narrows it down to an area about twice the size of Europe.’

‘So what do we think happened?’ asked Yarr.

Newman shrugged. ‘He was tied to the wall. Left. Tortured? His wrist was broken in the manacle. Skin very badly cut. And the pathologist says his vocal cords were in shreds.’

‘Shouting?’ said Dryden, knowing he was wrong.

‘Possibly, but the pathologist said the damage was violent. Screaming, more like,’ said Newman.

Dryden closed his eyes and tried to imagine what that would have sounded like. A human voice, shredded, echoing across Black Bank Fen. And then he tried to imagine who would have heard it.